Bomb Grade

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘I’m damned glad I’m here, out of it.’

  ‘It’s the best place to be, out of it.’

  ‘Can’t say I envy you your job, though.’

  Charlie hesitated, remembering the back-channel suspicion. ‘It’s going to take a while for me to learn what the job really is.’

  ‘You’re going to get some help on that,’ offered Bowyer at once. ‘There’s been a scientific and military group here for the last fortnight: they’re going home the day after tomorrow. London’s fixed a briefing, before they leave.’

  Charlie frowned, curious Johnson hadn’t warned him in London. ‘That’ll be useful.’

  ‘And anything else more generally you need, just ask.’

  ‘I appreciate the offer,’ said Charlie. More often than not in the past when he’d arrived in a city as an outsider he’d met resentment and even outright hostility from in-country embassy personnel. But he wasn’t going to be an outsider this time, was he? Charlie still found the realization difficult and wondered how long it would take to adjust.

  ‘You certainly seem to have some clout,’ said Bowyer.

  ‘To get what?’

  ‘That sort of apartment on Lesnaya, for a start. The Head of Chancellery got turned down on cost grounds for one only half as grand as what you’ve got.’

  Charlie hoped it wouldn’t cause any jealousy: insular, bundled-together embassies were breeding grounds for all sorts of irrational attitudes and envies. Remembering again his belief that Bowyer was watching and listening for London’s benefit, Charlie said, ‘I didn’t think it would have worked for me to be in the compound.’

  ‘Everything still needs to go through the embassy,’ said Bowyer, at once.

  Heavily, Charlie said, ‘You’re the conduit to London. I know that.’

  ‘We’re not going to fall out over territory,’ said Bowyer, reassuring in return. He looked across the car again and grinned. ‘You’re on your own, Charlie.’

  Which was always how he’d wanted it to be, reflected Charlie, responsible for no one except himself. The self-accusation came at once. An attitude he’d let wash over into his private life and made him lose Natalia. Ahead, the Moscow high-rises were coming into view. Was he really going to live – think of it as home – in a place that all his working life had been the focus of everything he’d had to oppose and undermine? Hard-headed reality at once blewaway the whimsy. Only as long as he didn’t fuck up, he reminded himself.

  Somewhere in this towered city, he thought, Natalia was living. With their baby.

  *

  By coincidence the Russian who headed the Dolgoprudnaya cell in Berlin arrived at Sheremet’yevo just an hour after Charlie Muffin. The man was met in, too, personally by Stanislav Silin, who had decided their meeting could be best, and most discreetly, conducted during a meandering car ride around Moscow. They’d worked that way before, several times, so the man wasn’t suprised by what otherwise might have seemed inexplicable courtesy.

  ‘What was that lake business all about?’ asked Silin.

  ‘The obvious. Some cunt thinking he could get away with a con.’

  ‘Who did it?’

  ‘The word is that it was The Turk.’

  The traffic slowed, near the Skhodnaya turn-off, and Silin looked briefly across at the other man. ‘I thought he was our buyer?’

  ‘He’s anybody’s buyer. He’s Iraq’s main middleman and they want everything they can get.’

  Silin smiled. ‘Good. I’ve got a spectacular deal.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Two hundred and fifty kilos.’

  ‘What? You’ve got to be joking!’

  ‘Guaranteed.’

  ‘We haven’t been able to get hold of more than maybe three and a half, four and a half at the most, in the last three years!’

  Silin picked up the outer ring road, going north. ‘Nearer five. Like I said, this is spectacular.’

  Silin was conscious of the other man shaking his head.

  ‘It can’t be genuine.’

  ‘It is. Can you sell it?’

  ‘Of course I can sell it. There’s a queue.’

  He’d have to trust this man more than he was trusting anyone else apart from Marina, accepted Silin. But he’d done that already, agreeing to the way their own Swiss account was established. ‘I’ve promised the suppliers $25,000,000, with $8,000,000 up front. They want it in Switzerland.’

  ‘What are they selling, uranium or plutonium?’

  ‘I don’t know, not yet.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s authentic, weapons-graded stuff.’

  ‘What could we expect to get ourselves?’

  The man shrugged. ‘I’ve never tried to broker this much. I doubt even The Turk would take it all. Nothing of any size has come from anywhere for a long time; just the shit that got the German killed. So like I said, there’s a queue.’

  The motorway began its gradual curve eastwards. ‘Just an estimate?’ invited Silin.

  ‘Seventy-five million. Could go as high as $100,000,000 if it’s uranium 235.’ The man shook his head again. ‘I just can’t believe it! It’s incredible!’

  ‘And there’s more,’ promised Silin.

  ‘What’s the Commission say?’

  Silin snatched another sideways glance. That was an impertinent question, even from someone with the special relationship they had. So he’d heard something. Maybe even been approached. ‘Sobelov’s making a bid,’ he announced, bluntly.

  There was a movement as the man turned towards him, but he didn’t immediately speak. Then he said, ‘Because of this?’

  Silin shook his head. ‘It’s my negotiation, my contacts, like it always is.’

  To their left the signs to Dolgoprudnaya, where they’d both been born and from which the Family got its name, began to appear; Silin had intentionally gone northwards, as a psychological reminder to the other man of their long-standing loyalty to each other.

  ‘He’s a fool, like he’s always been! No one’s going to follow him.’

  ‘I think Bobin and Frolov are with him.’

  ‘Where’s their edge?’

  ‘They don’t have one. Just muscle. They want a war with the Chechen.’

  The man snorted a laugh. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Nothing, immediately. I don’t want anything to interfere with this. When it’s all sorted out – when you’ve made the deliveries – I’ll make some changes.’ Silin briefly considered taking the Dolgoprudnaya road instead of going in the opposite direction into Moscow but decided against it.

  ‘This will bring a hell of a lot of heat if it works,’ predicted the man. ‘There’s been nothing this big before. Ever. This is a lot of complete bombs.’

  ‘That’s for the physicists,’ shrugged Silin. Bluntly again, he said, ‘You had any contact from here, apart from me?’

  ‘No,’ denied the man at once.

  ‘Would you tell me, if you had?’

  ‘How can you ask me that?’ demanded the man, outraged. ‘Aren’t we real family! Cousins.’

  ‘I can ask when I’m confronting a challenge,’ said Silin. He could have been wrong about the impertinence of the Commission question. They were cousins.

  ‘If I had been approached, I would have told you,’ said the man, positively. ‘I haven’t been.’

  ‘It’s good to have someone I can rely on.’

  ‘You always have been able to. And always will be. You know that.’

  chapter 6

  Never before, not even when she’d faced the official enquiry into Charlie’s return to London, had Natalia needed the diamond-hard control necessary when her current lover announced the Moscow arrival of her previous lover she’d never expected to see or hear of again. But she managed it. Just. And not rigid-faced, which would have betrayed the effort, or with any shake to her hand or quaver in her voice. She even succeeded with the required indignation at their not having been consulted ahead of the Foreign Ministry agreement
and promised to make a formal protest – which she later did, both for the record and because there should have been some discussion – at the discourtesy.

  Paradoxically – in a situation of utter paradox – Natalia was actually helped to cover her inner confusion by the stunning unexpectedness of the announcement. Few of her daydreams had been like this, in the early months and years when she’d had fantasies and daydreams, before she’d locked Charlie Muffin away for ever in her memories. She’d expected a letter or a telephone call, a warning of some sort so she could prepare herself and have ready all the words and feelings and even the recriminations.

  All of which she supposed she could still do.

  Only the fact of Charlie’s assignment was a shock. It hadn’t been a personal, abrupt confrontation. She didn’t think – she knew – she couldn’t have handled that: the self-control was strained to the limit as it was. But now she could prepare herself, take everything at her speed, do everything as and how and when she wanted.

  Did she want to meet him again, let him back into her life again as if all the hurt and pain had never happened? It had always been part of the day-dreaming that she did: that he would reappear and finally commit himself and that everything would have a happy ending, like the bedtime stories she told Sasha. But now the daydream could become a reality Natalia wasn’t sure any more. Charlie Muffin was in the past. She was with Aleksai Semenovich now. He was everything that her drunken husband and then Charlie hadn’t been and couldn’t be. Aleksai wanted to marry her but never pressured her, prepared to wait on her terms and for her decision. In the meantime he was a gentle and exciting lover who’d never failed her, either in or out of bed, and who genuinely did treat Sasha as if she were his own: it seemed quite natural, to him and to the child, that it was Aleksai who often read the bedtime story with the happy ending.

  ‘You should refuse to accept him,’ urged Popov.

  Natalia hesitated, her mind divided by too many considerations. There was not the slightest risk of any personal involvement between herself and Charlie ever being discovered. One of Natalia’s first actions after her elevation to chairmanship of the First Chief Directorate of the now long-defunct KGB – from which she had been transferred to become one of four, department-specializing deputy directors in the re-formed Interior Ministry – had been to use her authority to retrieve and sanitize of every personal detail both her and Charlie’s files. And she probably could successfully protest even at this late stage to Charlie’s Moscow posting. Except that it was a very late stage: any objection now would have to be supported with the sort of reasons she didn’t want to present and which, years ago, she’d even obliterated from the records.

  There was, however, no reason why she ever had to meet him. Inconceivable though it would be, she could simply avoid ever coming face to face with him. Unless, of course, she chose otherwise. She had the power and the position to do what she liked. She was a department head, so much higher above Charlie in stature and rank that if she didn’t want it to happen, they could remain in the same city for the rest of their lives without ever coming into contact.

  Forcing herself at last to answer Popov’s question she said, ‘We need to think carefully about that.’ Not an answer, she told herself, ahead of Popov’s reply. She was letting him make the decision for her instead of deciding for herself. But how could she decide for herself? She needed time to think, like she’d always believed she would have had time to think.

  ‘OK, let’s do just that,’ he pressed. It was another indication of their familiarity that Popov moved freely about the office and didn’t sit or stand respectfully in front of her. He was at the window now, staring out over Ulitza Zhitnaya at the summer-defying grey day cloaking Moscow.

  ‘Where’s our advantage, in arguing against his coming here?’

  ‘He’s a spy! We could make sure his being sent back became public and cause an outcry about our Foreign Ministry accepting him.’

  ‘It’s obviously a political decision, taken at a high level. They could overrule our objections. And would, to avoid embarrassing themselves. All we would have done is alienate the Foreign Ministry.’

  ‘Don’t you think you should protest?’

  ‘Not like that.’

  ‘Our not being consulted wasn’t an oversight,’ erupted Popov angrily, turning away from the window to look directly at Natalia. ‘First America, now Britain. The acceptance of foreign interference is a direct criticism of us – of me, more than you because I’m operationally in charge of nuclear smuggling.’

  Gently, not wanting to antagonize him, Natalia said, ‘The fact is, darling, we haven’t been able to stop it.’

  ‘That’s not our fault! We didn’t create the nuclear shambles of no one knowing how much of anything was made, where it was stored or who’s in charge of it! All we got is the mess.’

  ‘How the shambles came about, and who caused it, is in the past,’ said Natalia, still gently. ‘I know it’s so bad that proper ballistic or warhead counts were never kept, let alone any record of manufacturing materials. And I keep telling anyone who’ll listen, at every meeting I go to. But until we establish where and how big all the stockpiles are, stuff is going to keep disappearing and we’re going to be the butt of every criticism here and in the West.’ Go! she thought. Please leave me alone, in peace, to think! At once she became angry with herself. Aleksai didn’t deserve to be dismissed, even if the dismissal was only in her head.

  ‘So do I do anything about this? The memorandum came to me.’

  ‘Not immediately,’ said Natalia, making a decision at last. ‘It’s as much of a political as a practical operational decision. I don’t want to take a stance until I know if there’s any secondary thinking behind it. My initial feeling is that there is probably more benefit for us to accept him, like we had to accept the American, than to make any objection. Let them learn from their own man the chaos we inherited and are having to try to sort out.’

  ‘I expect he’ll ask for a meeting. The American did.’

  ‘You’re the operational controller,’ reminded Natalia, quickly. ‘You handle it’

  ‘Personally?’

  ‘It would be the right thing, politically. Show the proper level of concern. Which is, after all, our level of concern.’

  ‘It’s still a criticism!’ complained Popov, again. ‘Particularly sending someone like him. They’re sneering at us.’

  Natalia hesitated again, halted by a renewed awareness of the near absurdity of the conversation. It was the sort of situation Charlie would have probably found hysterical, she thought, and wished at once that she hadn’t because what would or wouldn’t have amused Charlie Muffin wasn’t a concern of hers any more. Her first concern, her only concern, was Sasha. And then Aleksai Semenovich. ‘All the offences happened in the old days. That’s all over, like the KGB’s all over.’

  ‘You know him. What’s he like?’

  Had she known him? She’d thought she had but she’d never expected Charlie to abandon her, like he had. So perhaps she hadn’t known him at all. But then he’d always been the chameleon: it had been his strength, to disappear into a background by adopting the colours of his surroundings. So what was he like? Dishevelled, although that had been part of the disguise, like a walking haystack, with hair to match. Invariably walking carefully, on feet that hurt. Very pale blue eyes that saw everything and a mind that missed nothing. And … Abruptly Natalia stopped the mental reverie, discomfited by it. Answering Popov’s question, she said, ‘Difficult for me to remember. He was just one of many and it was a long time ago. Quite small in build. Disarming, in that it was easy to underestimate him …’

  ‘But you beat him!’

  Oh no I didn’t, reflected Natalia. Charlie Muffin had fooled her, totally, like he’d fooled a lot of much higher officials in the KGB. And brought them down with his redefection. At least he hadn’t abandoned her there. She’d actually emerged from the deception with her reputation enhanced sufficiently
for the transfer to her present position to have been virtually automatic. ‘Yes. I beat him.’

  ‘We could put him under surveillance,’ offered Popov.

  Charlie would detect it in a moment, Natalia knew. ‘His being here is a Foreign Ministry decision, not ours. Any embarrassment will be theirs, not ours. Let’s just see how it develops.’

  ‘You sure you don’t want to be involved in seeing him, to give him a very obvious reminder that we know who he is?’

  ‘Absolutely positive.’

  Popov appeared about to continue the discussion, but abruptly said instead, ‘Shall I see you tonight?’

  ‘Not tonight.’ The rejection was too quick as well as being unfair to him again. Like the thought that followed was unfair although bizarrely fitting: instead of refusing to spend any time with him that night Natalia would have liked to have Aleksai with her, her closest friend and confidant, someone with whom she could have talked everything through and let him know – too late though it was ever now going to be for him to know – who or what Charlie Muffin really was, to her. Why, oh why, had the bloody man reappeared?

  ‘I’ve got things to do for the next few nights,’ he warned.

  ‘The weekend, then.’

  ‘If the weather’s good we could take Sasha on a river trip?’ suggested Popov.

  ‘She’d like that.’

  ‘Tell her I love her.’

  ‘Tell her yourself at the weekend.’

  The parting conversation unsettled Natalia even more, piling complication upon complication. She was with Aleksai Semenovich now, in every way and in every respect apart from their not being officially married or actually living together permanently. What had happened with Charlie Muffin had happened way in the past. Which was where it belonged: in the past. He had no right to come back like this, upsetting everything and everyone! Upsetting her, confusing her most of all. No right to … to what? To Sasha? she thought, her reflection ricocheting off at a wild tangent. Sasha was hers. Not Aleksai’s or Charlie’s or anybody else’s. Just hers. Charlie wasn’t even registered as the father: Natalia had used her past KGB influence and importance to pass off Sasha’s father as her loutish, whoring, long-abandoning husband whose cirrhosis-induced death had only just conveniently covered the timing of the pregnancy and the baby’s birth, which was the only useful act the man had ever done for her in their ten years of totally neglectful and sometimes brutalizing marriage. And even then he’d been unaware of doing it.