Red Star Burning: A Thriller (Charlie Muffin Thrillers)

by Brian Freemantle

  Radtsic was there, for once properly using what cover a tree clump offered. He needn’t stop, Jacobson knew. The militia concentration was sufficient reason for him to abort and revert to another emergency contact meeting. Radtsic was actually looking at him: could see—would see—the circumstances and understand! Although the block was on the other side of the highway, the cars traveling in Jacobson’s direction slowed, to gawk, forcing him to slow, too, and as Jacobson did, Radtsic moved away from his partial concealment, walking now as self-importantly as he always did. There were two motorcycles, previously obscured by militia vans but visible now: he could be chased, easily stopped, if he attracted attention by suddenly accelerating.

  He didn’t. Jacobson was careful to indicate his intention to move out of the slowed, otherwise occupied traffic line, paused rather than stopped at the pavement edge the moment Radtsic reached him, and at once indicated his getting back in line the moment the Russian was inside the car.

  “This was an absurd place to meet!” protested Radtsic, at once.

  “How the hell could I have known there’d be a GIA extortion!” Jacobson was intent on his rearview and wing mirrors, searching for pursuit.

  “I didn’t think you were going to stop.”

  “I almost didn’t.”

  “If this had been a trap, I would have sprung it a long time ago,” said Radtsic, presciently.

  “Am I supposed to be reassured?” Jacobson was unsettled at the other man’s awareness of his fear.

  “You’re supposed to believe me: believe that I’m not tricking you.”

  No militia vehicles were following and the traffic was picking up speed. As soon as he could Jacobson pulled onto minor roads from the inner beltway. “We’re okay.”

  “Of course we’re okay. You’ve told London how it’s got to be done now?”

  “It can’t be according to your timing. They’re planning the separate extraction, Elana and Andrei from Paris, you from here. But it’s got to be at our signal.”

  “This is ridiculous,” said the Russian.

  “It’s practical. And will be safe. The safety of you and your family is the essential, not something concocted as we go along,” said Jacobson, disregarding his earlier doubts. “Direct contact has to be made with Elana and Andrei. You have to tell her that.”

  “I’m thinking of going to the Americans,” abruptly threatened Radtsic.

  Jacobson drove for several moments without responding. “I’ll tell London. Stop them taking anything further in Paris that might interfere with how Washington might devise their extraction. Didn’t it occur to you, though, that after the Lvov episode Washington might not be as receptive as we are?”

  Now it was Radtsic who retreated into silence. Jacobson had completed the rerouting from the inner-ring road before the Russian spoke. “Why did you mention Lvov?”

  “I thought it was relevant, it having occurred so recently,” lied Jacobson, exasperated at what was being demanded of him. But now, suddenly, he was curious.

  “I had no part in that: not the planning, I mean.”

  Radtsic had no need to explain or excuse himself. So why was he? Challengingly, Jacobson said: “You’re the executive deputy of the FSB. You must have been part of it.”

  “It was a long-term strategy: you know that. Going back to KGB.”

  Jacobson drove automatically back onto the ring road, his entire concentration upon the other man. He was in the shit and sinking after the Amsterdam mistake, Jacobson reminded himself. And there was the outside possibility of his being wrong with the Rossiya assessment. This just conceivably might be his recovery. “You’re old-time KGB, Maxim Mikhailovich. You were there when it began.”

  “Not part of it, though!” Radtsic once more denied. “You know when and where the Lvov thing was devised. In 1982 I was in St. Petersburg, not Cairo.”

  Within both British intelligence agencies the Lvov episode had already attained legendary status as the most brilliantly conceived and attempted Russian-intelligence penetration, only defeated by more than brilliant MI5 deduction. But Jacobson didn’t know any details: he couldn’t continue this totally unexpected conversation without almost immediately exposing his ignorance. It had to be ended with the surprise retained. “We’re here to talk about Elana and her exit visa, not things that happened in the past.”

  “I suspected it was another test: that you were doubting me,” said Radtsic.

  “It wasn’t. And I’m not.”

  “Elana’s visa is arranged. Her flight’s booked for noon tomorrow. Her departure will take four days, six maximum, to permeate through the system potentially to become a personal risk to me.”

  “You’re still trying to impose your own time frame,” accused Jacobson.

  “Of course I am!” admitted Radtsic. “And you know why!”

  “London doesn’t want an ultimatum.”

  “I thought they already knew there had to be a strictly timed schedule.”

  The remark fitted the arrogance Jacobson had come to expect. Seeing the possibility of a respite, he said: “You’re ready to move, the moment I give the word?”

  “You know damn well I’m ready.”

  “So we don’t need any more meetings. We can keep in touch by mobile phone, while Paris is set up.”

  Radtsic looked anxiously across the car. “You’re not abandoning me, are you? Elana’s documentation is in the system. I can’t retrieve it now.”

  “Of course I’m not abandoning you, Maxim Mikhailovich,” insisted Jacobson. “I want everything resolved as quickly as you do.”

  “No, you don’t,” contradicted Radtsic. “No one could want it resolved more quickly than I do.”

  * * *

  “I’d hoped for more,” complained Barry Elliott.

  I’m certainly hoping for more, thought Jane Ambsersom, already encouraged by the easy familiarity with which the FBI man had kissed her, although only on both cheeks, when he’d picked her up from her London flat that morning. According to his estimate they’d arrive in perfect time for their already booked lunch. She said: “I warned you there hasn’t been time to collate it all. I don’t even know how much there is, in total.”

  “There will be more, though?” pressed Elliott.

  Jane hoped he did other things as well as he drove the car: the signpost they were passing showed Stratford to be only twenty miles away. “I’ve circulated our archival and records people between whom it’s apparently spread. I haven’t heard back from the Director-General but I can’t see why there should be any difficulty.” She hesitated, her approach prepared. “I’m guessing you’ve approached MI6 for help, as well?”

  “For what it was worth.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “The message we got back was that Lvov wasn’t their baby: that it was all down to you guys and they didn’t think what little they had would contribute anything. We’re switching the unofficial approach to a formal request through the CIA.”

  It was going her way, as she had every hope of this journey going her way, which made it essential that she weigh every word. “There are things we share and some we don’t. What has our Secret Intelligence Service got to hide about a closed case in which, in their own judgment, they were only minimally involved?”

  “You ask me,” replied the American, rhetorically.

  I just did and you didn’t come up with the right answer, thought Jane. “We both understand we’re being straight with each other here, aren’t we?”

  “I hope so.”

  When the fuck, then, was this guy going to prove it by doing something to guide her! Spurred by her own irritation, Jane said: “I don’t think you’re working professionally with me. I think Irena Yakulova Novikov is sending you guys every which way from the right direction and that having been suckered for eighteen years you’re worried that it isn’t over: that the Russians have a fallback that’s still going to leave you swinging in the wind.”

  By a road-sign calculati
on Elliott drove for another eight miles before speaking again. “We’ve lost two guys, one a friend of mine who trained with me at Quantico, following up leads that emerged during what the CIA believed to be Novikov’s truthful debriefing. The other was one of their own guys. Would you think that was a fallback or payback?”

  “Lost how?”

  “A hit-and-run in Cairo and a drowning in the Moscow river. The guy in Moscow was the one I knew at Quantico. He was his college swimming champion at Kent State.”

  “So it’s personal as well as professional?”

  Elliott shook his head. “Strictly professional.”

  Jane hadn’t known what she might learn professionally from this excursion—even if she would learn anything—and still wasn’t sure of this conversation but it was certainly something to be relayed to Aubrey Smith. “I think we’ve got a lot more to talk about.”

  “Which reminds me,” said the man. “There seems to be a misunderstanding about the room reservations.”

  “I’m sure it won’t be a problem,” said Jane. I hope, she thought.

  * * *

  “What emerged at our last session has been fully considered, not just by us but by others,” assured Geoffrey Palmer.

  “It is to continue as a joint operation,” announced Sir Archibald Bland.

  “Which doesn’t cover the absolute resolution should Charlie Muffin proceed independently,” protested Monsford.

  “The decision is that it continues to be jointly shared,” reiterated Bland, with a hint of strained patience. “As such, the question of an absolute resolution doesn’t arise.”

  * * *

  “Getting Andrei to London is being organized by the British.”

  Elana remained looking down at her scarcely touched meal, oblivious of everyone in the restaurant. “It’s really happening, isn’t it? We really are going to defect.”

  “We’re definitely going,” said Radtsic.

  “I wish we weren’t.”

  “The adjustments won’t be easy but you’ll accept it, eventually. All of it.”

  “I don’t think I will: not ever.”

  “Don’t forget everything I’ve told you about the British approach.”

  “How will they make it? Where?”

  “It’ll be their move. They’ll only make it when they’re sure it’s safe.”

  “What about the girl?”

  “Andrei’s got to understand. You’ve got to make him understand.”

  “He’s a grown man, not a child.”

  “Talk to him as a man. And as our son.”

  “You’re asking too much: too much of both of us.”

  “I’m asking you to help save our lives.”

  “I want to go home,” said Elana. “Go home for the last time.”

  17

  Charlie’s brief elation at finding the hoped-for talisman had frozen into ice-hard, questioning reality by the time he uncomfortably awoke in the cold, very early light of the following day, feasted upon by the more regular, multilegged inhabitants of his bed. And it wasn’t because of his fruitless vigil in the botanical garden the night before. It still had to be more, much more, than a 50 percent chance that Natalia had delivered the newspaper signal, in the way only he’d recognize, to their special dead-letter drop.

  But the alternative, the fear that Natalia’s coercion had brutally forced from her their meeting code, remained. And if that had happened, he’d swallowed the FSB bait by going to Moscow’s original herb garden. But why hadn’t they sprung that trap and seized him the day before? The hope that Natalia hadn’t been broken was no more than the merest wisp of straw-clutching reassurance but still something for which he could snatch out to hold.

  Could he safely interpret the Pravda sign that it was safe to go anywhere near Natalia’s Pecatnikov Pereulok apartment, outside of which Monsford’s photographer had pictured her and Sasha just six days ago? Not yet. Not until he was surer the gardens were safe: that it was Natalia’s intended indicator. Maybe not even then. It was inconceivable that Natalia’s home was not under the most concentrated surveillance: the FSB would have wanted Natalia and Sasha to be photographed, seemingly free, to flavor their snare.

  His safer course was to continue with their original, personal tradecraft. And there were other, more immediate self-protections to be established, updated now by an urgent need for medication to ease his red-hot bug bites. The stuttering shower gave some temporary relief until the trouser-chafing walk through the departing congestion of whores and their whoremongers on his way from the hotel. Charlie was abruptly halted on the pavement by the thought of checking the nearby gardens again but decided it was too soon for a visible response to his Pravda deposit. Instead, not abandoning the idea altogether, Charlie used a remembered kiosk conveniently close to the Ulitsa Mira Metro in preference to his pay-as-you-go mobile to dial the number he’d copied from the box in which he’d found the particularly folded newspaper, allowing it to ring unanswered for a full minute before hanging up.

  He got a seat on the circle-line train, lessening his insect discomfort, which flared only when he switched for the Arbat connection, which he intentionally chose for its concealing swamp of similarly dressed Western tourists in which to sink out of detectable sight. A more fortunate, secondary benefit was a pharmacy from which Charlie bought balm and insect repellent. He dialed the unresponding botanical gardens’ phone twice from different telephone kiosks as he moved through the tourist mecca, buying on his way the previous day’s London Times and Telegraph, as well as a selection of that day’s Russian and English-language newspapers. Charlie used them to reserve his seat in an enclosed, office workers’ street buffet while he balmed his overnight wounds in its lavatory.

  The Telegraph reported a Dutch intelligence theory that Malcolm Stoat, whom it described as a man of mystery of whom no official identification records or background existed in England, was a fleeing Russian spy kidnapped by British counterintelligence. That day’s English-language Moscow News also printed the legend name and linked, although without explanation, the Amsterdam disappearance with what it referred to as reorganization within the FSB.

  Charlie sipped his sludgelike coffee and spread soured cheese on his black bread, conscious of the Malcolm Stoat passport in his inside jacket pocket, next to that day’s itinerary promising a free-time afternoon for the Manchester travel group. How free, wondered Charlie, would it remain, which was a question he needed to answer.

  He risked the bar with its panoramic overview of the Rossiya, managing to get a stool and a double measure of properly distilled vodka in a shadowed area between the counter and the rear wall, calculating that his slight loss of outside view was compensated by his being hidden from at least a third of the other customers, closely studying those still visible for professionally telltale attitudes or recognizable London faces. Finding neither, Charlie switched his concentration to the hotel outside, almost at once isolating Neil Preston from the London introductory session, wincing critically at the man occupying the same porch that Patrick Wilkinson had the day before but with even less concealment. There was no one obviously watching from where he’d picked out the man with the straggled mustache.

  Charlie realistically accepted the Malcolm Stoat name would have had far wider disclosure than in the two media references he’d found. The name had already been available from the aircraft passenger manifest for more than forty-eight hours now, and from his previous day’s hotel observation, London had definitely discovered the location of the holiday group among which he’d hidden. But they’d had the name—and known of his vanishing act—from the outset. Moscow hadn’t. Neither had it been on the block-visa documentation submitted by Manchester to the Russian embassy in London, only on the hotel registration here and at Sheremetyevo airport. Certainly not available for as long as forty-eight hours then. But he was still surprised the Rossiya wasn’t swarmed by FSB, which it obviously wasn’t, from Neil Preston being patiently, if amateurishly, on duty.
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  Noon, Charlie saw from the bar clock, as he gestured for another drink. The itinerary scheduled a twelve-forty-five return. He’d wait, he decided. He had no intention of trying to reconnect with the Manchester group but it was important he get some indication of what had happened to them. The FSB knew that he was coming, just not when and how. But they’d have made the connection from his Amsterdam disappearance. What happened—and when—to Muriel Simpson and her band of travelers would trigger the positive start of the FSB’s hunt for him.

  He hadn’t tried the marked telephone in the botanical gardens for more than an hour, Charlie reminded himself. Now, midday, might be a good time. There was a phone on the far side of the bar but it was open fronted and the place was noisily crowded with lunchtime customers. He’d have to speak loudly, shout even, if there was a reply and probably have difficulty hearing himself. It was hardly likely Natalia would be there to pick up the receiver, anyway. His best—probably only—chance was to continue the nighttime vigils, as surreptitiously as he was professionally able.

  Abruptly he saw the tourist coach.

  Charlie was gesturing for a third drink, momentarily looking toward the bartender, and when he looked back to the window Charlie at once recognized the vehicle from the journey from the airport, stopped at that moment by a car emerging through the forecourt-entry gap. The coach impatiently edged forward as the car almost imperceptibly eased out, stopping altogether as it more positively obstructed the skewed coach. At the same time, the car horn blared an obvious signal for three closed, military-style vehicles to tire-scream from both directions down the suddenly emptied, sealed road to form a complete encirclement. At the same time, the scene was flooded by lights, brightly illuminating the arrival of two more slower and bigger military vehicles that disgorged helmeted, body-armored men in camouflage uniforms who at once began herding at jabbing gunpoint the bewildered, stumbling Manchester tourists, four of the women crying hysterically, from their coach into the larger vans. Briefly a white-faced Muriel Simpson appeared to stare directly into the bar at the watching Charlie.