Red Star Burning
( Charlie Muffin - 15 )
Brian Freemantle
Brian Freemantle
Red Star Burning
Prologue
“It’s coming down to me,” declared Maxim Radtsic.
Elana stopped with her knife and fork suspended before her, gazing at her husband across the dinner table. “You weren’t responsible for it going wrong, Maxim Mickailovich: not for any of it.”
“I’m directly below the Director, held the position the longest: even before Gorbachev or Yeltsin came to power.”
“What about Andrei?”
“Andrei has to come too.”
“There must be some other way.”
“There isn’t.”
“I don’t want to. Andrei won’t want to, either. You can’t do this to him.”
“It’ll save us. Andrei, too.”
“How?”
“Trust me.”
“I’m frightened.”
“Just trust me,” said Radtsic, hating the words as he uttered them.
1
“Kill myself?” echoed Charlie, derision and astonishment combined.
“That’s what I think you’ll end up doing.”
“Bollocks,” rejected Charlie. At the back-too often in the forefront-of his mind had always hovered the expectation of dying. But violently: from a breath-sucking assassin’s bullet or the burn of a back-alley knife or a shattering explosion. But never of killing himself, not even while confronting his now fossilized existence.
“It would be understandable,” sympathized the small, hunched psychiatrist, George Cowley. “You’ve spent almost thirty years at the front end of British intelligence, always on the edge. Now you’re blown, in a Protection Program with a new identity, a retirement salary, a safe house, and a protection regime. All of which you’re refusing to acknowledge or observe. From which the only conclusion is that you’re either inviting Russian assassination or intending to kill yourself.”
“Bollocks,” repeated Charlie. He had to do better than this: convince this asshole of an MI5 psychiatrist that he’d got it all wrong. As he, in turn, had got it all wrong, staging an intentionally deceiving performance for the too easily detected minders during his limited excursions from the safe house. The internal cameras and listening devices would be recording everything of this performance, too, he accepted.
“It would have been easier for you, if maybe not for them, if you’d had a family: a wife, children, to fill the emptiness within you,” Cowley pressed on. “But you haven’t, have you, Charlie? All you’ve ever had is the job and now you don’t have that anymore.”
Wrong again! agonized Charlie. He did have a wife. And a daughter. A family still in Russia that no one knew about. Nor could they ever know, because Natalia Fedova was a senior officer in the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the intelligence agency of the Russian Federation that his own MI5 service believed was determined to assassinate him.
“You expect me to adjust in five minutes to all that’s happened!” demanded Charlie, discomfited at his inadequate reply.
Cowley, who had the highest security clearance, tapped Charlie’s file on the table between them. “I’ve read every word that’s in here: know everything you’ve done. And having read it I’d expect you to understand the very real danger you’re in and accept all the protection that’s being offered.”
What danger was Natalia facing after his most recent Moscow assignment? Charlie asked himself, as he had repeatedly over the past three months. If he was blown, as MI5 believed him to be, the search might stretch back to his phoney Moscow defection, when Natalia Fedova had been his interrogator. Charlie had never been totally satisfied then she’d sanitized their subsequent relationship from what then would have been KGB records. “I’m not convinced the risk is as great as everyone believes it to be.”
“That’s for the Director-General to decide, not you. And that decision’s been made.”
“As yours has been made,” Charlie fought back. “And it’s wrong.”
“You ever kill anyone, Charlie?” demanded the psychiatrist, unexpectedly.
“Never intentionally.” That was debatable, thought Charlie, uneasy at the prescience of the other man. Charlie hoped there was nothing in the bulky personnel dossier with which Cowley could catch him out.
“Didn’t it ever worry you, people getting killed? Assassinated?” persisted the other man.
“It didn’t happen often and when it did-or had to-it was part of the job: I never pulled a trigger.” That reply was a cop-out, Charlie acknowledged, but they’d been talking of death and dying for the past thirty minutes and he was fed up at the verbal ping-pong.
“Could you have pulled a trigger, if you’d had to?”
“I’d been trained to that level, as a last resort: I never got to that resort.” Charlie was surprised at the sudden although easily suppressed anger, an emotion he hadn’t experienced for a long time because it indicated lack of control, which was always dangerous professionally.
“Do you still think you could pull the trigger, if you had to?”
“Not with the barrel against my own head, no,” refused Charlie, guessing the direction in which Cowley was leading.
“You sure about that?” demanded the psychiatrist. “Or are you pissed off that the rest of your life is going to be spent incarcerated in security-covered, audio-and-CCTV-equipped safe houses, forever buried deep within a protection program, never ever able again to meet or speak to anyone you once knew?”
“I’ll get there,” responded Charlie, dismissively.
“You’re not even trying,” accused Cowley, dismissive in return. “You’re supposed to have adopted the new name-the entirely new identity-you’ve been allocated and you haven’t. You’re supposed never to establish patterns-never the same restaurants, never the same pub, never the same cinema, never the same route or transport to the same supermarket-and you haven’t. You’re supposed to alter the way you dress, alter as much of your appearance as possible, and you haven’t: you’re even still wearing those spread-apart Hush Puppies about to fall off your awkward feet. As part of that appearance change-in your particular case, all the more essential because of the target you now are-you’re supposed seriously to consider surgical facial reconstruction and you haven’t bothered to attend three specialist appointments to discuss it.”
“I told you I’d get round to it!” Lame again, Charlie recognized.
“How often, since you’ve been in the program, have you seriously considered suicide?”
“Since entering the protection program I have never, ever, considered suicide,” replied Charlie, enunciating each word for emphasis.
“I don’t believe you,” declared Cowley. “It’s a fucking awful existence. I’ve never had a protected patient who hasn’t thought of taking his or her own life.”
“How many actually did?”
“Six,” Cowley came back at once.
“I’m not going to become your seventh!” assured Charlie.
“I know you’re not,” agreed the psychiatrist. “I’m going to put you on suicide watch to ensure you don’t.”
Fuck it, thought Charlie. He had to hurry to reach Natalia in time.
“Defect to the British!” exclaimed Elana, her voice breaking. “You can’t … we can’t…” She tried to continue but couldn’t, her mind seized by the enormity of what Radtsic had told her, her eyes fixed farther ahead of the embankment road along which they were walking, the river-bordered British embassy in the distance. “We can’t … you’re the virtual head of Russian intelligence … it’s unthinkable.…” She tried again: “What about Andrei?”
“It’ll be easy with
Andrei at the Sorbonne,” insisted Radtsic, whose heavy mustache, gray like his thick hair, and heavy, indulged body had in the past made him the butt of jokes about his physical resemblance to Stalin. “Paris is closer to London than we are here in Moscow. The moment we run he’ll be picked up and brought to us there. We’ll be together and we’ll be safe.”
“It’s too much for me to understand,” protested the woman. In contrast to her husband, who was fifteen years her senior, Elana was a slim, even elegant woman committed to her career as professor of physics at Moscow University. “My work … what about my work … I mean … I don’t know.”
“I can’t go without you. You’d be arrested: dismissed from the university.” Radtsic was agonized by the conversation, his whole body clammy with perspiration.
“I didn’t mean I wouldn’t come with you. I was thinking of everything I would be abandoning … leaving behind. Are you sure, really sure, that you’re being targeted?”
“I found two listening devices in my office today, one actually in the telephone handset, the other in the base of the desk light: that’s why we’re walking-so we can talk-out in the open like this,” disclosed Radtsic. “And today I was told there’s no reason for my attending the quarterly operational review, which I’ve done ever since I was appointed deputy chairman: actually headed more sessions than the chairman himself.”
“Oh my God!” said Elana, who was a devoted churchgoer. “It’s true, isn’t it? You’re going to be purged.”
“No, I’m not,” insisted Radtsic, defiantly. “I’m going to get out.”
2
He’d screwed up big time, Charlie acknowledged. How big he didn’t yet know, nor how to find out: whether, even, if he would. Feigning inferiority to encourage the underestimation of those against whom he was pitted was one of several chameleonlike survival cloaks in which Charlie Muffin so often professionally wrapped himself. But it hadn’t worked with George Cowley. On film and on sound, Charlie knew, he’d looked a lost, vacant-eyed idiot who, in the specialized environment in which, until now, he’d existed, had lost not just the will but the professional ability to live. And become a potential liability.
How, in his eagerness to reassure Natalia that he was still alive-and financially to provide for her and Sasha-could he have failed properly to consider the possible misunderstandings! The core concern of MI5 heirarchy had to be that pissing about as he’d intentionally, stupidly, done-neither properly in nor improperly out of the protection regime-risked his detection by those murderously hunting him. And that however they chose to destroy him would publicly expose how close Russian intelligence had come to insinuating itself into the very heart of the Oval Office in Washington D.C., with an equally gullible, puppy dog Britain led unsuspectingly by the nose to the same disaster.
Charlie stirred from the chair into which he’d slumped after Cowley’s departure fifteen minutes earlier. It would appear on the all-seeing cameras as bad as the confrontation itself, as if exhausted by it he’d collapsed into continuing depression, not what he’d objectively been doing, taking time for self-critical self-examination. Resulting in what? Irritation, predominantly, Charlie answered himself: irritated at having been so obviously beaten in a verbal who-can-shout-loudest contest and at that humiliation being filmed and recorded and at being so completely cut off from everything and everyone and because of that isolation not able to gauge the full extent of his self-created situation.
Charlie started up, determined to identify all the cameras upon which his every waking-and sleeping, through infrared technology-moment was monitored. By the time he reached the kitchen and the cupboard containing the Islay single malt, he was reasonably sure he’d located four before abandoning the pointless exercise. Miniaturized as the lenses were, he’d never pick them all out. And what if he did? He wasn’t on an operational assignment, where he had to protect himself against every eventuality. He was in a permanently recorded goldfish bowl. And there was no recovery advantage from his being able to pose or perform to mislead his constant watchers. Whatever he did would be further misconstrued as proof of his mentally eroding hold on reality.
Which it most certainly wasn’t, Charlie assured himself, as he splashed whiskey into his glass intentionally to be visible to a camera in the window-blind coping. The whiskey and how much of it he drank would scarcely be a revelation to his observers. They actually provided it because of its rarity: known as it inevitably would be to his pursuers, it could have led to his whereabouts if he’d placed a regular order with an outside supplier.
How many pursuers would there be? wondered Charlie, carrying his tumbler back to his accustomed lounge chair overlooking the small, sensor-seeded garden. This soon, only three months after he’d wrecked an espionage operation the Russians had nurtured over practically eighteen years, there’d be a lot: a code-name-designated operation, in fact. Would it be only Russian? Almost certainly not. The Russian target had been the CIA, convincing them-which it had, completely-that a former KGB-cum-FSB officer about to be elected president of the Russian Federation would, once in absolute power, remain their deeply embedded agent through whom America could virtually manipulate the Moscow government, never suspecting that it would have been the misguided occupant of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., who would have been the puppet on the Kremlin’s strings. There would doubtless have been a lot of head rolling at the CIA’s Langley headquarters. Enough, certainly, for the Agency to consider matching, murderous retribution. Was he safe even from his own people? Charlie knew the mass clear-out of those who’d swallowed the Russian bait at MI5’s Thames House headquarters had been only slightly less sweeping at the MI6 building on the other side of the river at Vauxhall Cross, both sufficient to gain him far more enemies than admirers.
He wasn’t simply caught between a rock and a hard place, Charlie accepted. He was trapped beneath a collapsing mountain range: if one avalanche didn’t sweep him away, another one would. Most of which, to some extent, he’d already worked out. Today’s humiliating psychoanalysis had simply concentrated it in its entirety. As much as it had concentrated his mind, which was no longer fogged by the indignation with which he’d rejected the psychiatrist’s accusation. He definitely hadn’t contemplated suicide. But subconsciously he’d allowed himself to sink into an acceptance of his eventually being detected: of his being killed by one or other of the groups committed to his destruction.
Which was preposterous and unthinkable: he’d never capitulated to anything or anyone and he didn’t intend rolling onto his back and spreading his legs in submission now, no matter how different or stultified that life might now be.
Charlie smiled and looked up in the direction of another suspected camera. It was, he determined, a decision that deserved another drink, in celebration this time.
“What the hell does he think he’s got to smile about?” demanded Aubrey Smith, turning away from the safe-house recording that directly followed Charlie Muffin’s psychoanalysis.
“Normally I’d try an answer that would help,” apologized George Cowley. “This time I don’t think I can.”
“You’ve put him on suicide watch, for Christ’s sake!” exploded Jane Ambersom, the androgynously featured, newly appointed deputy director. “You actually think he’s going to top himself!”
“I also find that difficult to accept,” said the mild-mannered, mild-voiced Smith, whose confidence remained undermined by his knowing how dangerously close his overthrow, orchestrated by Ambersom’s predecessor, had been. As it fortunately turned out, Jeffrey Smale had been the highest-profile casualty from Charlie Muffin’s success.
“I think he’s a potential danger to himself and because of that a danger to the service,” insisted Cowley, repeating the warning with which he’d begun the assessment meeting.
“There’s no way, no set of circumstances, in which Charlie Muffin could be suicidal,” persisted the Director-General.
“I’ve just spelt out the circumstanc
es to you. And to him,” reminded Cowley. “He knows just how much of a target he is. And always will be. Just as he knows, simply to survive, what every day of every week of every month is going to be for that survival. I can’t imagine-no one can truthfully imagine-what the constant awareness of that is like. It’s worse than being imprisoned for life, in solitary confinement. In those circumstances a man quite quickly becomes dehumanized, robotlike, because there is no human contact apart from his guards, which isn’t enough. Charlie Muffin doesn’t have anyone with whom to adjust, to make a new life. But he’s not incarcerated. He can go out, to pubs and restaurants and cinemas and theaters, and see other people all around him. But never risk getting involved, never knowing whom he can trust. It’s permanent, unremitting torture.”
“Charlie Muffin’s always been a loner and never trusted anyone,” disputed Ambersom, gesturing to her own copy of Charlie’s personnel file. “What’s new now?”
“How he lived before was by his own choice,” the psychiatrist pointed out. “And before, he had the job. Which I acknowledge from everything I’ve read he did by his own rules and upset a lot of people in the process. But he was doing something: he had a reason to live. He doesn’t have that reason now: any reason whatsoever to go on living now.”
“What are you suggesting?” asked Smith, whose deceptive, quietly spoken demeanor hinted to his post-Oxford career as professor of Middle East studies, one of the core credos of which was that once-suffered harm had always to be avenged, a philosophy he’d quickly recognized in Charlie Muffin.
“I’m not employed here to suggest,” refused Cowley. “I’m here to assess his mental health and that’s what I’ve done.”
“Are you saying he’s mentally ill?” demanded the sharply suited, precisely spoken Ambersom, who’d bitterly opposed and still resented her manipulated transfer to MI5 from the external Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.
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