The traffic-clearing military-convoy sirens momentarily overwhelmed the astonished uproar inside the bar, but neither conflicting noises prevented Charlie’s very clearly hearing an English voice say, whisper-close to his ear: “Why aren’t I surprised to find you here, Charlie?”
* * *
The MI6 Director stared up from the transcript James Straughan had protectively printed verbatim of his conversation with their Moscow station chief an hour earlier, Monsford’s mouth forming the words but not able to utter them. Finally he managed: “Cairo! Radtsic very definitely identified Cairo!”
“I specifically took Jacobson over that three times. He’s adamant Radtsic stipulated Cairo because the significance of Cairo didn’t mean anything to him: still doesn’t, because I didn’t explain it.”
“And Radtsic has consistently denied knowing anything but the vaguest circumstances of the Lvov case?” echoed Monsford, going back to the transcript.
“Radtsic claims he wasn’t even in the KGB’s Lubyanka headquarters when it began: that he was a serving officer in St. Petersburg,” confirmed Straughan, irritated at the other man’s repeating his point-by-point memorandum.
“It’s not right,” declared Monsford. “Something’s definitely not right.”
“Let’s not overinterpret it,” cautioned Rebecca Street. “According to what we know of Radtsic’s history he was in St. Petersburg in 1982. But he would have been involved in the inquest after what Charlie did this year: read and heard enough to have picked up Cairo as its starting point.”
“Most of what’s available of Radtsic’s career was provided by Radtsic himself, after he made his approach to us,” reminded Straughan. “We’ve no independent confirmation of anything he’s told us.”
“So what?” dismissed the woman. “He’d still have been involved in the review of the Lvov disaster and learned before then how Cairo figured.”
“Why’s he told Jacobson he knows virtually nothing about it?” persisted Monsford, his mind locked on the inconsistency.
Rebecca shrugged, conscious that Monsford hadn’t activated his personal recording apparatus. “He knows he’s got to sing loud and clear for his supper once he gets here. Jacobson’s the facilitator, not the one he’s got to impress by what he knows. My guess is he let Cairo slip as a taster.”
“I don’t rely on guesses,” rejected Monsford, stiffly.
“Fifty percent of our decisions begin largely from guesswork,” Rebecca argued. “Or intuition, at least. Okay, Radtsic’s provided his own legend. But we know, from our independent identification, that he is Maxim Mikhailovich Radtsic. And that Maxim Radtsic is the executive deputy of the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti who wants to defect to us. What the hell more do we need?”
Instead of answering, Monsford turned to the operations director, fluttering his printout. “Is this everything Jacobson had to say?”
“It’s planned as a front-faced extraction,” set out Straughan, determined to establish his personal safeguards. “We’re providing a genuine Russian passport, with Radtsic’s genuine photograph, describing him as a chemical engineer. The British entry visas are genuine, embassy issued, with all the necessary supporting documentation and accreditations for a trade visit here. It contains all the necessary Russian exit visas. He’ll be accompanied by three of our people I’ve already sent, independently and unknown to each other, to wait in separate Moscow hotels. The Moscow departure of Radtsic’s plane will be signaled to those in place at Heathrow. We’ll disembark him first, holding everyone else onboard, bypass all entry formalities, and take him direct to the safe house for his reunion with his Elana and Andrei.”
Monsford’s frown had deepened during Straughan’s presentation. “Why are you telling me what we’ve already planned?”
“Because I believe there needs to be reexamination and maybe replanning. Currently it’s a failsafe extraction, already set up and rehearsed, except for two exceptions.”
“Which are?” questioned Rebecca, aligning herself with the operations director’s doubts.
“The absence of Radtsic himself from that rehearsal, which nevertheless isn’t the main problem: all the man’s got to do is go through an embarkation procedure. What’s most likely to go wrong is the Charlie Muffin diversion.”
“Your point?” demanded Monsford, angry at being confronted.
“According to Radtsic, Elana’s exit visa will show up in a matter of days. When it does, Radtsic’s extraction isn’t any longer failsafe. It’s too heavily compromised. And we don’t know where the hell Charlie Muffin is, let alone have any idea how to inveigle him. We don’t need the complication.”
“I didn’t ask for your opinion,” rejected Monsford. “I asked what else Jacobson said.”
“I don’t think we should wait, either,” intruded Rebecca, joining the objection. “We couldn’t even guarantee Charlie Muffin reaching Moscow with Jacobson on the same bloody plane! We need Muffin under programmed surveillance, which we don’t have.”
Monsford studiously ignored the woman, focused upon Straughan. Who risked an exasperated sigh at the obduracy of the other man. “Jacobson thinks it’s safer to restrict his contact with Radtsic to cell phone, until we move.”
“I thought Radtsic believed all his telephones to be tapped?” challenged Rebecca.
“Single-use Russian cell phones, discarded directly after one call,” elaborated Straughan. “No way it could be intercepted. Staple tradecraft.”
“I’m not…” started Monsford but stopped at the intrusion of his security-cleared personal telephone. He said: “Yes,” and listened without interruption for no more than seconds. Looking up to the other two, he said: “Moscow’s staged its own theatrical production. They’ve arrested the entire Manchester tour group and televised themselves doing it.”
“But Charlie Muffin wasn’t among them?” anticipated Straughan.
“Of course he wasn’t among them,” snapped Monsford, peevishly.
“As he won’t be around for any diversion,” predicted Rebecca, shaking her head to Straughan in a prearranged signal.
* * *
Charlie didn’t respond and David Halliday didn’t say anything further, instead leading their way out through a side exit to avoid the still eye-squinting television strobes and continuing on foot in the opposite direction to distance themselves from the scene, picking their way through horn-protesting traffic jammed by the line of vehicles from the still-militia-sealed Rossiya Hotel.
It was Charlie who called them to a halt, demanded by permanently protesting hammer-toed feet, indicating the cinema and shop complex on Ulitsa Kirova. “There’s a bar, on the first floor.”
“They’ll serve cat’s piss.”
“It’ll be drinkable cat’s piss. My feet hurt.” Charlie’s mind was way ahead of his painful, step-at-a-time ascent to the bar level. The MI6 officer had maintained an arm’s-length acquaintance during the Lvov affair, tiptoeing at the very edge in the hope of personal advancement without endangering involvement, able to quote to the penny the pension he’d receive at the conclusion of a disaster-spared career. Why then, instead of slinking away, had the man risked approaching as he had? And, even more unexpected, discarded that previously avoided association by coming with him into this cigarette-smogged, body-odored shopping-mall bar into which he would not normally have allowed himself to be dragged by the wildest of wild horses?
Unwittingly connecting to Charlie’s thoughts, Halliday held up the vodka that Charlie handed him and said: “It’s not cat’s piss. It’s horse piss.”
“It’ll have more body,” promised Charlie.
Halliday touched glasses. “Death to our enemies.”
“Whomever and wherever they may be,” responded Charlie, matching the other man’s overly posturing toast.
“I know who they are,” said Halliday, his face clearing in accepting surprise at his drink. “Gerald fucking Monsford and the rest of the conniving bastards in Vauxhall fucking Cross.”
In espionage parlance, a benefit or a human source—usually embedded within an opposition—is known as an asset. And while the Russian FSB was his most obvious opposition there remained in Charlie’s mind those unresolved uncertainties that still nagged from his Buckinghamshire interrogation, the FSB’s knowledge of his London apartment paramount among them. Was it at all possible that while David Halliday did not totally qualify as an asset—and continuing the vodka analogy—he could be looking a gift horse in the mouth? “Sounds like you’ve got an in-house problem?”
“I’m out in the cold, Charlie. And being left there to freeze to death.”
“You want to talk about it?” coaxed Charlie, tentatively.
“I’m offering you the same invitation.”
Shit! thought Charlie. “You’ll have to explain that.”
“So you’re part of the freeze, too!”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” rebuked Charlie, sure he knew enough to lead. “I’m never part of anything. I’m not at the embassy to be part of anything.”
Halliday used the time it took to buy more drinks to consider Charlie’s response. “There’s a big team come in from London—a combined job, both services. I’m totally excluded. And—”
“There’s nothing sinister in that: I was officially told not to include you in the Lvov business,” broke in Charlie. There’d been sufficient embassy gossip for the man to infer that his distancing had, in fact, been self-motivated by Halliday’s own, pension-protecting choosing and that some rapport remained between them.
“You didn’t completely blank me, not like I’m being blanked now,” conceded Halliday, to Charlie’s satisfaction.
“You’re surely not the only one?” tempted Charlie.
“That’s just it,” complained Halliday, petulantly. “Jacobson’s pissing about, too. My own fucking station chief won’t tell me what’s going on! Twenty-five years’ service, unblemished track record, and I’m being treated like the fucking office boy.”
“Jacobson?” queried Charlie, wanting every possible nugget.…
“Harry Jacobson. I just told you he’s MI6 station chief.”
“He wasn’t on station six months ago, when I was here?”
“Monsford went ape shit over the Lvov things, first at not being included from the beginning and then in his desperation not to be linked by all his efforts to be part of it when it all went wrong. I was the only one to survive. By rights I should have been appointed head of station but the bastard sent in Jacobson.”
“I don’t see how that means Jacobson is pissing about.”
“I didn’t mean Jacobson’s appointment,” said Halliday, exasperated. “I meant how Jacobson’s treating me, closing me out from what he’s doing.”
Charlie gestured for more drinks without looking away from the other man. Well aware that it was not the case, he said: “Jacobson’s the Control of this big team that’s been sent in from London?”
“No!” said Halliday, his exasperation worsening. “It’s something quite separate: just MI6 and with Monsford personally involved, which has got to mean it’s big. Which I know it is because everything’s classified Eyes Only, nothing on general traffic, and Jacobson—who’s keeping the entire file in his personal safe—is refusing to talk about it.”
“David!” Charlie smiled, touching his glass to the other man’s to emphasize the I-know-what-you’ve-done mockery. “Are you seriously asking me to believe that having retained that unblemished record for twenty-five years, you haven’t got the slightest clue what’s going on!”
It took a moment for Halliday to smile in return, the exasperation slipping away. “I don’t know what the big team’s here for. Or what that was all about back there at the Rossiya.”
Charlie paused, presented with two ways to go. Choosing to stay on track, he said: “We weren’t talking about the big team or what happened outside the hotel. We were talking about your being closed out of what Jacobson’s doing.”
“I’m sure it’s an extraction,” announced Halliday.
Despite the abrupt chill and as always untroubled by his own hypocrisy, Charlie kept the mocking smile. “David! You’ve asked me to help you and if I’m going to do that you’ve got to be honest. You don’t think. You know. You’ve got your hands on the file, haven’t you?”
Halliday held his smile, too. “Not all of it. Jacobson got suspicious and changed his safe combination. And most of what I saw was encrypted.”
“But you understood what you did read, didn’t you, David?”
“It’s a multiple extraction.”
“How multiple?”
“A man and a woman. And a third, but I couldn’t understand how he fitted in.”
“He,” seized Charlie. “The third person’s male?”
“That’s how it seemed. And I did get the code designation. It’s Janus.”
The physical chill suffusing Charlie began to freeze. “The god with two faces, able to look two ways at the same time.”
“Appropriate for a defector, which it obviously is,” confirmed Halliday. “Monsford’s personal choice, from what I managed to see.”
The code designation for Natalia’s extraction had been Monsford’s personal choice at the Buckinghamshire hunting lodge, remembered Charlie: remembering, too, Monsford’s insistence on subject gender in the code titles along with his then-inexplicable choice of Camese, the wife of Janus. Hopefully Charlie said: “Nothing more?”
Halliday frowned. “I told you it was encrypted.”
“On a scale of ten, extractions score around fifteen for potential disasters. I’m surprised you’re pissed off at being excluded.”
“Being kept out of one is acceptable. Being kept out of both is ominous. Now it’s your turn. What the fuck’s going on?”
“It’s your round,” reminded Charlie, offering his empty glass to gain thinking time. Throughout Halliday’s diatribe Charlie had been calculating how to escape from the man, his mind shifting with each and every unexpected revelation. Now he didn’t want to escape, just free himself from the Sinbad burden of having Halliday on his back.
“I’m waiting,” prompted Halliday, handing Charlie his refill.
“Looks as if you and I are cast adrift in the same boat,” opened Charlie. “I know a team was sent ahead of me. But I wasn’t told the reason. My orders were to come in separately, stay away from the embassy, and wait to be contacted. The only thing missing was the tattoo on my forehead reading ‘Fall Guy.’ I jumped ship in Amsterdam and—”
“It was you!”
Charlie nodded. “I got back to England that same night and latched on to a tourist group from Manchester.…” He gestured vaguely back in the direction from which they’d fled and, sticking to the golden rule of telling as few lies as possible, he said: “They were the group picked up outside the Rossiya.”
“That’s why you were there, waiting to see what happened?”
The alarm bell rang at his oversight. “Why were you there if you’re excluded?”
“I followed Preston from the embassy. He didn’t pick me up.”
It was simple enough to be true, conceded Charlie. But only just. “I saw Preston’s surveillance.”
“So would an FSB trainee, hanging about as Preston did instead of moving around. And the FSB all around the Rossiya were very definitely not trainees.”
“How many did you mark?”
“Three, positively. You?”
“Four,” lied Charlie, who hadn’t searched beyond Preston. As well as failing to locate Halliday from his hideaway corner.
“You think you were sent here to be the fall guy?” demanded Halliday. Self-protective as always, he nervously added: “Me too, possibly?”
“Why’d you think I got off the plane in Amsterdam?”
“But then came here anyway?” challenged Halliday.
Charlie hesitated, annoyed at another slip. “I couldn’t go straight back, could I? I needed to find out if I was right or not.
Which was why I was watching the hotel: my trap for them.”
“They’re bastards!” exclaimed Halliday, his voice too loud, slurred by the vodka.
“That shouldn’t surprise you, either.”
“What are we going to do, Charlie?” It was more a plea than a question, the man’s mind as well as his speech rusting in alcohol.
“Beat them,” said Charlie, making a promise to himself.
“How!” It was still a whimpered plea.
“By you and I working together. Okay, you’re being excluded but you’re still on the inside, within the embassy. I’m on the outside not on their intended leash, so they can’t initiate whatever they intend. We’re beating them so far.”
“You want another drink?”
“No. I don’t think you do, either.”
“What can we do?”
“You stay as you are, trying to find out what’s happening inside. Get Jacobson’s new safe combination. I’ll stay on the outside, watching like today.”
Halliday nodded, in befuddled agreement. “I need to know where you are.”
“No, you don’t,” refused Charlie, who’d anticipated the demand. “Have you got a cell phone?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll call you, twice every day, ten in the morning, six at night.” It had to be four hours, closer to five, since he’d tried the botanical gardens’ number.
“You don’t trust me.”
“I’m not expecting you to trust me.”
“Which I don’t!” declared Halliday, with slurred belligerence.
“Why not?”
“You couldn’t have just walked off the Amsterdam plane.”
“Why not?”
“Jacobson was on it. The flight details to and from London were on the general file.”
“Blond-haired guy, very neat and together apart from the big mustache?”
Red Star Burning: A Thriller (Charlie Muffin Thrillers) Page 18