Bomb Grade cm-11

by Brian Freemantle

Umberto Fiore was adamant the short notice wasn’t an obstacle to dinner that night and was waiting in the bar when Charlie got to the Savoy. The Italian worked from practically the same script as Balg. The disbelief was far more subtle although just as swift and Charlie accepted that since midday Balg would have rehearsed Fiore. Better prepared himself now, Charlie introduced the flippancy much earlier to cut off Fiore’s attempted warnings about continued cooperation. Charlie ended the evening quite convinced he was right and glad he’d arranged the visit to the American embassy the following day.

  Charlie refused to join the much-repeated insistences about how good everything was turning out, unresponsively waiting to see if Kestler would reveal that he’d run a nuclear check in the Kirov region. Which Kestler did, as soon as he’d stopped anticipating their soon-to-occur career benefits.

  ‘So we’re going to shift a satellite into geo-stationary orbit right over the goddamned place: cover all three sites to see what’s going on.’

  ‘You already told Balg that? And Fiore? Like you told them everything that happened at the Interior Ministry!’

  Kestler blinked at the sudden accusation mid-stride through a lap of the FBI office. From behind his desk Lyneham elbowed his bulk into a more upright position.

  ‘What?’ tried Kestler.

  ‘You heard what I said.’

  ‘What’s going on here?’ demanded Lyneham, apprehensively.

  ‘A fuck-up’s what’s going on here,’ said Charlie. ‘And it risks the deal we’ve got with the Russians…’ He paused, looking directly at Kestler. ‘… And all because you want to be every body’s best friend. Instead of which you’re a total, utter prick!’

  Charlie had no proof, although he was sure he was right, and if he’d kept his nerve Kestler could have called the bluff. But he panicked, speaking ahead of thinking, as he had to Popov. ‘I just… I mean I didn’t… there’s no harm…’

  ‘What the fuck’s the idiot done?’ demanded Lyneham.

  Lyneham came fully upright as Charlie told him, elbows on the desk with his face cupped in his hands. When Charlie stopped, Lyneham looked across at the other American and said, ‘Jesus H. Christ!’

  ‘I didn’t tell them everything!’ protested Kestler.

  ‘What, precisely, did you say?’ pressed Charlie, the quietness of his voice belying the anger.

  Kestler paused and Charlie wondered if it was for recall or to prepare an acceptable excuse. ‘That it wasn’t the Ukraine business,’ stumbled the man. ‘I said the Russians thought something might be going on, within Russia itself. And that they’d asked us in to see if we’d heard anything to connect outside.’

  ‘And you told them as well who the Russians were at the meeting!’ pressed Charlie.

  ‘That, too,’ admitted the man.

  ‘That all you told them?’ demanded Lyneham.

  ‘On my life!’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck about your life: it’s mine I’m worried about,’ admitted Lyneham, openly for the first time.

  ‘ Why?’ moaned Charlie. ‘If you weren’t going to tell them everything, why tell them anything?’

  ‘Germany’s important,’ argued the man, desperately. ‘Itaiy, too. We can’t afford to piss them off.’

  ‘So now they know half a story of which we only know half to start with,’ said Lyneham, wearily. ‘So they’ve cabled Bonn and Rome and they’ll have investigators all over their goddamned countries beating down the doors of every snitch, informer and grass there is and knocking shit out of them. And every snitch, informer and grass is going to go running straight to the bad guys to tell them why the heat’s on. And by the end of the week there won’t be a yak herder in Outer Mongolia who won’t know about it. You any idea what you’ve done, you asshole?’

  ‘They said it wouldn’t be like that!’ protested Kestler, weakly.

  ‘What control have either of them got over how it’s going to be?’ pointed out Charlie. ‘They’re just lighting the touch paper.’

  Ignoring the younger man, Lyneham said to Charlie, ‘You think you should warn Popov? And the woman?’

  Charlie was uncomfortable at Natalia being referred to as ‘the woman’. He said, ‘I think I should. But I’m not going to. It would be closing the door on myself.’ The separation of himself from Kestler was intentional.

  Continuing as if Kestler wasn’t in the room, Lyneham said, ‘I know it doesn’t count for a row of beans, but I’m sorry, Charlie. Truly sorry.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Charlie, not wanting to be rude but not wanting to acknowledge an empty apology, either: like Lyneham said, it didn’t count for a row of beans.

  ‘I’d like to say…’ started Kestler but Charlie stopped him. ‘Don’t! I don’t want to hear anything you say. I’m pissed off with everything and anything you say.’

  Back at the embassy Charlie spent more than three hours formulating the protest to London, reminding the Director-General of the concern about Kestler in the summary that he’d sent with the official transcript of the Russian meeting and going into itemizing detail of what the American had done since. He concluded by advising London of Kestler’s family connections.

  In London Peter Johnson silently read each sheet Dean handed him, looking up stone-faced when he’d finished. ‘This is terrible!’

  ‘That’s a conservative judgement.’

  ‘What are we going to do about it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Dean, mildly.

  ‘Nothing!’

  ‘Nothing premature and ill-considered.’

  ‘I think it should go before the committee.’

  ‘I’ll decide what’s to be done.’

  Johnson shifted irritably in his seat. The bloody man treated them like school children. And he knew why: it was Dean’s way of concealing his own inadequacy. ‘This is too important to ignore!’

  The Director-General wondered, unconcerned, which way the committee would split in their support between him and Johnson, if ever they were called upon to do so. ‘I didn’t say I was going to ignore it. I said I wasn’t going to do anything premature or ill-considered.’

  Johnson wished the innovative idiots who’d decided a re-organized agency should have someone like Dean at its head could have heard this conversation. Moscow had been such an opportunity to achieve so much! Fenby had been honest about the problem with his Moscow appointee so why hadn’t he put some minimal curb on the stupid little sod. ‘I really must recommend a committee discussion on this.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  Which was what worried Johnson. If Dean took some arbitrary decision, which he had the power to do, it would be several days before he knew what it was.

  In the solitude of the echoing apartment and the straitjacket embassy cell – leaving neither for any length of time unless it was absolutely necessary – Charlie went over every word and every gesture and tried to find every nuance from his meeting with Natalia, sinking as he had after the initial elation of the Moscow assignment into the swamp of despair at deciding for the second time, and upon stronger evidence now, that she really didn’t have any interest in him any more. She could have made contact if she’d wanted. She’d have known of his posting; had a far easier way of reaching him than before. But she hadn’t. Like she hadn’t shown anything at the meeting. Charlie tried to buoy his hopes by telling himself there was no sign she could have given, in the circumstances and surroundings of the encounter. But then punctured the attempt by convincing himself she could have shown something – he didn’t know what, just something – that would have had a significance only to him. Instead of which the most personally significant gesture had been the contempt with which she’d discarded his pitiful effort with the Lesnaya telephone number. It had, he supposed, epitomized what she’d intended to achieve by hosting the gathering: showing throughout it by her very lack of any sign her utter disdain for him.

  The agonized conclusion greatly altered Charlie’s perception of everything.

  With the chance o
f being with Natalia again he could imagine no better city in the world than Moscow from which to work in a job everyone else in the old firm would have given their eye-teeth to get. Without her, Moscow was a grey, gritty Mafia mecca of the soulless preying on the helpless and the job was one he was being hindered from doing properly by restrictive officialdom and everybody’s-friend amateurism. The recollection abruptly came to him of the knocker’s van disappearing up the Vauxhall Bridge Road with all his worldly possessions. Moscow, without Natalia, was all he had: there was nowhere else to go, nothing else to do.

  Charlie was on his third Macallan and the damp floor of rare self-pity when the telephone jarred in the Lesnaya apartment.

  ‘You have a right to see Sasha,’ announced Natalia.

  ‘I’d like to,’ Charlie managed, dry-throated despite the whisky.

  ‘A moral right. Nothing more. Nothing legal.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘On my terms.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘She’s never to know.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘That’s all it is. The chance to see Sasha.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘There’s a lot you have to understand.’

  Hillary Jamieson wore a skirt Fenby considered far too short, a sweater that was far too tight and wasn’t treating him with the sort of respect an FBI employee should show and he didn’t like it. Or her. He wasn’t happy, either, that for once his likes or dislikes, so important to anyone’s career, couldn’t affect anything: in addition to having the slenderest legs and the pertest breasts he’d ever wanted not to see, Hillary Jamieson had honour and distinction passes in every applied physics and molecular scientific degree it was possible to achieve and an IQ rated at genius level, which meant he was stuck with her to advise him about what was coming out of Moscow.

  ‘So 250 kilos is sufficient to build a bomb?’

  Hillary frowned at the apparent naivety. ‘Lots of bombs: enough to start a full-scale war.’ She agreed with the considered Bureau judgment that Fenby was a prick – the word that came into her mind – and guessed he couldn’t make up his mind whether to look up her skirt or concentrate on her tits. Hillary enjoyed making the silly old fart feel uncomfortable.

  ‘It was a serious question,’ said the Director, stiffly.

  ‘It was a serious answer. But weapons-graded uranium or cassium or plutonium isn’t gunpowder: you just don’t pack it into a cartridge and fire it, bang! It needs a highly technical facility staffed by highly trained scientists to manufacture an atomic device.’

  Fenby was undecided whether to mention the way the girl dressed – as well as his irritation at her lack of respect – to the head of the Bureau’s scientific division. She definitely needed bringing into line but he’d become a joke in the Bureau if word got out that he’d initiated the censure. ‘According to the CIA a lot of displaced Soviet scientists have been employed in the Middle East.’

  ‘If they’ve got facilities then you’ve got trouble.’

  ‘What about fuel rods?’

  ‘Nothing to do with weapon construction, although plutonium is a uranium byproduct. Someone’s trying to jerk someone else off. A con.’

  Jerk off! thought Fenby, agonized. And he was sure she’d shifted in her chair to make her underwear more visible. ‘I want you to get rid of anything you’re currently working on. I want you solely available on this; let the Watch Room know where you’ll be out of office hours. And that includes weekends. I’ll send memoranda this afternoon to everyone who needs to be advised.’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ said Hillary. She hadn’t intended it to be quite as mocking as it had sounded.

  He wouldn’t complain, Fenby determined: it wasn’t important enough to risk being laughed at. He was sure her pants were pink. Maybe with black edging, although that could have been something else.

  It was an hour later that the call came from London. ‘Good to hear from you, Peter!’

  ‘I’m not sure it is,’ said Johnson, from the privacy of his South Audley Street townhouse.

  The skyscraper on the Ulitza Kuybysheva was one of the newest in Moscow, visibly modern as Stanislav Silin had tried – and was determined to make – the Dolgoprudnaya modern like the established Mafias of Italy and America, with which he intended strengthening their already tentative links. Through one of their many registered companies they owned the entire penthouse floor, which was normally over-large for their Commission meetings but necessary today for the final planning meeting to which Silin had additionally summoned the middle echelon and group leaders from every Family involved in the robbery. Everyone listened in total admiring silence to what was going to happen and for several minutes afterwards just looked from one to the other, a lot in disbelief.

  ‘Any questions?’ demanded Silin.

  No one spoke.

  ‘In fact,’ the Dolgoprudnaya chief finished, ‘our part could be considered minor…’ He gestured towards where the Commission sat, separate from the rest, wanting to end on a note for his own continued amusement. ‘Sergei Petrovich Sobelov will ensure everything goes as intended, at the scene…’ He smiled, bleakly. ‘Which is the only way it can go, exactly as we intend it.’

  He was anxious to get home to hear what Marina had decided to do to the Ulitza Razina apartment.

  chapter 15

  C harlie didn’t know what to do. Or say. It would have been wrong to try to kiss her, which was his first impulse. And to offer to shake hands seemed ridiculous. Which it would have been. So he just stood at the apartment door, waiting for Natalia to do or say something.

  Natalia didn’t know what to do or say either and stood on the other side of the threshold, looking to Charlie for the first move. Which didn’t come. Finally, unspeaking, she stood aside. Charlie went in but stopped immediately inside.

  ‘At the very end,’ she said. She wished she hadn’t been thick-voiced.

  He walked down the small corridor but halted again directly outside the door. ‘You’d better go in first,’ he said, like a courteous visitor outside a sick room.

  Natalia did, calling Sasha’s name as she entered. The child squatted rubber-legged by the window, tending her wooden farmyard. She looked up, blank-faced, at Charlie’s entry.

  ‘This was my friend, from a long time ago,’ announced Natalia. Charlie’s Russian was good enough now: Was my friend.

  ‘Hello,’ said Sasha and smiled, looking at the gift-wrapped package in Charlie’s hand.

  Charlie hadn’t known how to prepare for Natalia but he’d imagined he would be ready for Sasha. But he wasn’t, not at all. She was dark, like Natalia, the hair frothing in natural curls to her shoulders, and chubby-cheeked, although she wasn’t fat. The eyes were blue, again like Natalia, but the nose was bobbed, upturned at the tip, which was like neither of them, but she did have Natalia’s freckles. In the photograph she’d been a baby and babies to Charlie all looked the same: now she was a tiny, real thing, a person in miniature. The dress was red-checked, with bows on the bodice, and there were patent shoes with white socks and Charlie thought she was the most perfect, fragile, prettiest creature he’d ever seen. Mine, he thought, his throat clogged. Not a creature! I’m looking at my own daughter, baby, child, girl: someone I made. Mine. Part of me. He coughed to say more clearly: ‘It’s for you.’ He’d relied entirely upon Fiona, who’d recommended the doll and even chosen the paper to wrap it in. She would obviously have told Bowyer, and Charlie was curious what had been relayed to London.

  Sasha hesitated, looking to Natalia for permission. Natalia nodded and said, ‘All right.’ The child stopped smiling as she came up to Charlie, solemnly accepted the gift and said: ‘Why?’

  Charlie blinked, nonplussed. ‘I thought you’d like it.’ Christ, his feet ached. Everything ached: feet, body, head, everything. He felt lost.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I thought you’d like a baby to look after’ This was terrible! He was floundering, about to go under.

&
nbsp; Sasha looked uncertainly back to her mother. Natalia said: ‘Why don’t you open it?’

  Sasha did, with difficulty, because Fiona had been liberal with the tape and the child began by trying to unpick it: eventually, exasperated, she tore at the paper. For several moments she held the doll at arm’s length, seriously examining it, before finally smiling.

  ‘She has dark hair, like you,’ said Charlie. How did you speak – what did you say – to a child! His child. His baby. His daughter. His own daughter. Mine.

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘You give her one.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she’s yours.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I want you to have her. Look after her.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I do.’ Child logic for a child.

  Sasha continued to consider the offer gravely, looking first between the doll and Charlie and then to Natalia, who nodded permission again. ‘Anna,’ the child declared.

  ‘That’s good,’ said Charlie, not quite sure what he was approving. ‘Anna’s yours now. Look after her.’

  ‘Sasha!’ prompted Natalia.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Sasha. She waited, for another nod that the thanks were sufficient, before returning to the window. There she set the doll on the chair so it overlooked the still-life farmyard and said something to it that Charlie didn’t hear.

  Conscious of the child’s early hesitation, Charlie said to Natalia: ‘I hope that was all right. Something from someone she doesn’t know. I didn’t think…’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Natalia, clearer-voiced. She appeared to become aware they were both still standing. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’ Charlie was uncertain, she recognized. It surprised her because she didn’t remember him confused about anything. She wasn’t, Natalia decided, positively. There was a feeling: nothing more – nothing worse – than discomfort, unease at the oddity of something difficult to believe. It would have been unnatural if there hadn’t been something at their meeting as bizarrely as this, neither knowing what to do or what to say with their child – the child he’d never seen, a complete stranger – playing innocently between them. But she was quite sure that was all it was, a perfectly acceptable reaction to the peculiarity of the situation. He was heavier, although not by much, and he’d tried very hard. The sports jacket was new and the trousers had a crease where a crease was supposed to be. Only the footwear was the same and he’d shuffled several times as if he were embarrassed he hadn’t done something about that as well.