“I said I didn’t want to hear any of that. You’re not going back to Moscow. There’s another problem to deal with first.”
First, seized Charlie. So his return was only a postponement, too. “Can I ask what?”
“Richard Cartright was arrested by the Russians: some nonsense about currency-dealing. Diplomatic immunity was invoked to get the bloody fool out, but he’s implicating one of us.”
“Who?” asked Charlie, just for the pleasure of hearing the name.
“Gerald Williams,” said the political officer.
“Incidently,” said Dean, “how much did you pay to get to the intelligence archives?”
“It wasn’t a lump-sum payment,” said Charlie, anticipating what was to come. “I’m keeping the man on a permanent retainer. It’s expensive but proved invaluable in this instance alone.”
On the telephone Natalia sounded as subdued, as desultory, even, as she had that morning. She accepted his remaining in London without asking why and told him not to bother when he asked what she thought he should bring back for Sasha. Natalia added that she didn’t want anything for herself, either. When he said everything had turned out perfectly and that he loved her, she said good but didn’t say she loved him in return.
It took several moments for Charlie to pick through the obscenities when he spoke to Miriam Bell, not immediately understanding what she was telling him.
“Stop off in London,” Charlie said. “And tell your people you’d like to meet Peters in person, to talk about Harry Dunne and Sir Peter Mason.”
“They going to save my life?”
“They just saved mine. What’s the story with Cartright?”
“He kept on that night we met about how I imagined you really got the money to afford the apartment, so I suggested the name of the man at the Arbat. And then anonymously telephoned the local militia post.”
“I’ll buy dinner when you get here,” promised Charlie.
38
It was scheduled as a tribunal hearing into the civilian arrest of Richard Cartright, but within the first hour of the first day Gerald Williams virtually became a coaccused, with Jocelyn Hamilton and SIS case officer Malcolm Covington only just avoiding an indictment.
Desperately Cartright insisted his Arbat approach-which had not been to a money dealer named Arkadi Orgnev but a posing militia currency investigator-had been part of an investigation into the activities of Charlie Muffin officially authorized by SIS case officer Malcolm Covington, and that he had the Moscow cable to prove it. The dollars he had shown the Russian had not been to trade but to pay for the identification, from a photograph he’d been carrying, of Muffin as a client. He had not known his woman companion, an Aeroflot stewardess, was carrying $430 she’d admitted to the militia she’d intended to sell. Cartright produced a diary of every conversation-and what was discussed-with Gerald Williams and called as a witness his department’s financial director to confirm his having checked Williams’s London conversation with the man about expenses claims, from which he’d assumed he was at liberty to talk to Williams on a combined agency investigation.
Miriam Bell arrived in London that afternoon, took a room on the floor below Charlie’s at the Dorchester and was waiting in the foyer when Charlie got back.
She said, “I’m pissed off. Been here half an hour and haven’t got propositioned once.” And smiled.
“This is London, not Moscow.”
“It shouldn’t make any difference!”
Charlie took her to the Rib Room because he thought she’d like the steaks, which she did. She agreed that Cartright sounded like a prick but didn’t deserve to be dismissed but Williams did. Charlie said that if he’d had any pity, which he didn’t, it would have been pitiful to listen to. Her steak covered half her plate, as his did, and she’d eaten it by the time he finished filling in all the details of the Yakutsk murders.
She said, “Jesus H. Christ! That was an operation and a half! Who d’you think got caught and turned first, Peter Mason or Harry Dunne?”
“I don’t know. Whoever it was immediately shopped the other.”
“Great idea, turning them and maintaining them for so long,” she said, admiringly.
“I wonder if it balanced out the damage they did before they got caught.”
“How am I supposed to know about this?”
“I told them we didn’t cooperate-that I didn’t know what you had. No reason why you shouldn’t have found out about Timpson like I did. Or that there’s a grave in Holland. No reason, either, why you can’t have established a paid source at Lubyanka Square.”
“I’d have had to share a source like that with Saul: he’s the Bureau chief. You’ve got a hell of an inside track there.”
“One I’m going to guard with my life.”
“I’d do the same, if I was that lucky.”
“What feedback did you get from Washington?”
“Panic. Demands for a full explanation.”
“What did you say?”
“That I’d give it in person, when I saw Peters. I’m not sure this’ll save me, but it’s going to be better than any lay I’ve ever had to make Kenton Peters kiss my ass. Never thought I’d be able to keep the promise to myself. So thanks a whole lot.”
“You think you’ll come back to Moscow if you survive?”
Miriam shook her head. “I don’t want to. If it goes good, I’m going to ask for a reassignment. Somewhere warm and nice: Australia or Spain, maybe.”
Because it was Miriam’s first time in London and she wanted to, Charlie actually compromised to window-shop past Harvey Nicholsand Harrods-deciding to look in both before going back to Moscow, despite Natalia telling him not to buy presents-but they hailed a taxi after about half an hour. They had a nightcap-two, in fact-at the Dorchester Bar, and during the second Miriam said, “You know something?”
“What?”
“I’ve just decided it would spoil things if you and I went to bed together.”
“Yes,” agreed Charlie. “It would.”
“You want to know something else?”
“What?”
“I’ve never felt like that about a guy before. Not sure if it makes you special or what. Special, I think.”
The tribunal lasted a further two days, extended by the determination of everyone involved completely to exonerate themselves. The Foreign Office cited the expense for refusing to recall Raymond McDowell and Colonel John Gallaway from Moscow to recount Charlie’s disparaging conversation, insisting instead upon signed af-fadavits, and Williams produced his carefully amassed examples of unsupported expense claims, which Charlie said he’d already talked about with the director-general, who at once insisted the explanation was totally satisfactory upon his personal authority and forbade any further discussion. Calling Charlie was nothing more than a token gesture to procedure. He said he couldn’t remember the actual disparagement-which the diligent Cartright had produced verbatim, alongside McDowell’s written recollection-but didn’t deny saying any of it. There had been intentionally introduced operational difficulties-to which the investigation of one department upon another had contributed-and he felt his remarks were as justified now as they had been at the time. He was apprehensive that Malcolm Covington might produce a voiceprint of his Waterloo runaround telephone call-sure it was Covington he’d spoken to-but it didn’t happen.
The hearing was impatiently concluded by the middle of the second day. Richard Cartright was assigned to the travel and communications desk at the Vauxball Cross headquarters. Gerald Williams accepted the invitation for early retirement, with his index-linkedpension adjusted to what it would have been had he not left until he was sixty-five. Jocelyn Hamilton and Malcolm Covington had severe reprimands attached to their personnel files.
“All that was ridiculous,” dismissed Sir Rupert. He’d insisted Charlie accompany him from the hearing to his office.
“Totally,” agreed Charlie.
“One has nothing to do-has no
effect whatsoever-with the other,” warned the director-general. “I will not, ever again, tolerate your affectation to be the lone vigilante. And don’t patronize me by meekly agreeing. Understand that I mean it.”
“I do,” said Charlie.
“It’s right that I thank you, for what Pacey tells me you’ve achieved for the department. I do so, but reluctantly.”
“Thank you, anyway.”
“Now bugger off back to Moscow.”
It was the first time Miriam Bell had been in the presence of the FBI director, Judge Colin (pronounced Cohlin) Hibbert, who was avuncularly fat and prematurely bald and disappointed at being both. He was also disappointed at the confrontation that had just ended-he hoped-between someone as awesomely influential as Kenton Peters and a woman young enough to be not just his daughter but possibly his granddaughter. He knew from Nathaniel Brindsley that Miriam Bell had told Peters to kiss her ass and from ten years’ previous experience on the bench his verdict was that she’d effectively if not physically made him do just that.
“You were told your participation was over,” Peters continued to argue.
“I had initiated inquiries before I was recalled to be told that,” said Miriam. “They obviously had to be concluded. Not to have done so would have aroused suspicion with the Russians and the British.”
“Concluded very successfully,” contributed Brindsley, who’d enjoyed the spectacle.
“Have you anything else to say?” demanded Peters.
“I consider I have been wrongfully dismissed.”
“I wasn’t aware that you had,” said the State Department man to whom no responsibility ever attached.
“That’s my understanding.”
“A mistake, a misunderstanding, I’m sure,” said Peters, talking to the director.
“I’ll look into it,” promised Hibbert.
“Good!” said Peters. “And I’d like personally to congratulate you, for a brilliant investigation. I think that’s it, isn’t it?”
My bended knees, kiss-ass time, not yours, determined Miriam. “And I’d like to be reassigned.”
“Where?” asked Hibbert.
“Spain, perhaps?” She’d decided that Europe was better than Australia.
“You have it,” promised the director.
“Thank you.” Miriam smiled. “That’s definitely it.” She’d send Charlie a card: make him feel jealous.
39
Kenton Peters stood with his back to the room, legs apart, hands linked behind his back, gazing out toward the British Parliament. He’d come straight from the airport, deputing Boyce’s chauffeur to register him into the Connaught. He was vociferously proud not to suffer jet lag. “You know the difference between England and America?”
“What?” asked Boyce, dutifully.
“Permanence. That’s my impression. Everything here’s permanent: been here for a thousand years, will still be here in another thousand years. Too much in America seems to me to be impermanent: a gust of wind and it’ll all blow away.”
“I thought Washington was supposed to be the re-creation of a Greek city,” said Boyce. The antiquity reverie was a familiar one. Peters claimed to have Founding Fathers ancestry.
“That’s what it is,” said the patrician-featured man. “A copy. Not original. And Greece stopped being great about two thousand years ago.” He sat down in one of the armchairs, the leather of which subsided with a sigh under his weight.
Boyce thought the Greek era had ended long before that but didn’t bother to query it. Instead he said openly, “Not quite as clear-cut as we thought it would be.”
“A readjustment,” suggested the American. “The need was for containment. And we achieved that, didn’t we?”
“I think so.”
“How was Sir Matthew?”
“Persuadable, to the argument of the national better good. It was a family interment: advantage of owning half a county is that he has walls and barred gates to keep out unwelcomed intrusion.”
“Permanence. Tradition,” mused Peters. “I suppose I was lucky all Dunne’s family are dead, like him.”
“So your ceremony can go ahead?” Boyce knew it was to be reassured about the Arlington ceremony that the man had flown in from Washington overnight. Personal attention to the smallest detail was the hallmark of their unique profession.
“You know how it is with these sort of things, no unexpected loose ends?”
“Quite.”
“Mason surprised me.”
“Bloody man. I actually think he believes he was a hero who didn’t do any harm and worked out the deception all by himself. I obviously needed to find out precisely what Muffin knew before having the damned man fired or disposed of, but Mason insisted, without any warning, on talking like he did to impress people who didn’t know the full story and didn’t need to. If he’d left it to me, everything would have been all right. He’s only himself to blame for the humiliation in front of the cabinet secretary and the head of SIS.”
“I reread Dunne’s interrogation transcript. He was full of self-justification, too. Managed to make his identification of Mason a patriotic act. You didn’t know about the heritage art Mason had?”
Boyce shook his head. “I should have reread Mason’s debriefing, as well, instead of relying on the precis from my predecessor. It’s there. The Russians targeted Mason and Dunne months before Berlin. Put Raisa Belous beside Mason in Belgium. He was using Norrington’s expertise to treasure-spot for himself even then, although Norrington didn’t know it, of course. Mason was a veritable magpie and Raisa was busy recording everything he stole. He was a goldengoose waiting to be plucked and the Russians recognized it. That would have been the original blackmail, of course: why they couldn’t go to the military authorities after Yakutsk. Never really understood why the Russians went to all that trouble: truss them both up completely, I suppose.”
“We subjected Dunne to a polygraph,” disclosed Peters. “He said the Russians didn’t think their art-thieving was a strong enough pressure-that murder was better and knowing the choice he and Mason would make with a gun to their heads. The art-thieving was enough to keep them from going to their own authorities when they got back to Berlin.”
“Makes some sort of sense, I suppose,” said Boyce.
“Larisa got to Dunne’s looting investigation squad in Poland,” continued Peters. “Ironic that’s where Raisa’s husband died. Wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t involved in some way, although the question wasn’t put to Dunne. Belous and Larisa would have known each other from Tsarskoe Selo, after all. Larisa really did put herself in the way of Dunne’s first bullet, incidentally: they’d had an affair going since Poland. In his statement Dunne seemed more upset by that than being forced to shoot Timpson.”
Boyce shrugged. “Dunne and Mason were real bastards, weren’t they? But useful, in the long run.”
“Wonder where Larisa’s buried,” said Peters.
“God knows; we never will,” said Boyce. “Damned clever of the Russians to have used their Trophy Squads like they did. Already to be looking that far ahead, well beyond the ending of the war. And putting Larisa in Gulag 98, trying to trick Hitler’s bunker squad into disclosing all they knew. It was probably down to Larisa that the Russians still have Hitler’s will today.”
“To get our hands on that really would be a treasure,” said Peters. “But I’m not surprised how far ahead Stalin and Beria were thinking. That’s what Stalin was doing at Yalta and Potsdam, carving up Europe for himself.”
“All very clever,” mused Boyce.
“Muffin really did turn out to be a nuisance,” said Peters. “It was a bad mistake not eliminating him.”
“Not only chopped Mason up into little pieces but coated himself and his department in Teflon. Can’t do anything to any of them now.Too many people know after that damned confrontation.”
“Who’s going to be your scapegoat?”
“Not sure we need one at the moment. The MI6 ma
n in Moscow made a fool of himself, so he’s available. I’ll wait to see which way the media hysteria goes.”
“Muffin back in Moscow?”
Boyce nodded. “Your woman?”
“Spain. It’s only a temporary respite. We’ll transfer her from the foreign division after the normal two-year tour there. Bury her in a home station somewhere like Montana or North Dakota.”
“Bit of a waste, for someone so clever.”
“That’s not the point,” reminded the American. “She was impertinent.”
“Of course not,” apologized Boyce.
“There we are, then!” said Peters, in finality. “All’s well that ends well, as long as the bumps in between don’t derail anything.”
“The club special today is steak and kidney pudding.”
“Tradition!” said Peters. “Excellent.”
Charlie and Natalia sat side by side, watching George Timpson being buried as an unknown hero in Arlington. There was a rifle volley over the grave and the poignant Last Post and the president talked of America’s great and good, and of the hostilities of the past becoming the hope for the future. At one stage he choked to a halt and wiped what appeared to be a tear from his left eye. His rating was to climb five points by the end of the week.
Charlie sighed and said, “That’s it. All over.”
“Until the next time.”
“There’ll never be another one like this.”
“I couldn’t stand it if there were.”
He reached out for her hand and Natalia let him take it. “My internal problems are over, your internal problems are over. Like Sasha’s storybook says, we can live together happily ever after.”
“There were some changes in the Duma while you were in England,” announced Natalia.
He looked at her, unspeaking.
“Viktor Romanovich Viskov got elected deputy of the Communist faction. I think I should still keep the Leninskaya apartment.”
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