Red Star Burning: A Thriller (Charlie Muffin Thrillers)

by Brian Freemantle

  “After your first call,” admitted Wilkinson.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Charlie, glad he’d followed his instinct.

  “Our orders are to look after you, now we’ve linked up,” reminded Wilkinson. “You don’t have to worry about cell-phone trackers anymore.”

  There’d been an element of luck, Stephen Briddle congratulated himself as he saw the two get up from the park bench, but he’d worked most of it out himself after learning from Denning and Beckindale’s calls that Wilkinson wasn’t moving from the circle line’s 986 service, positioning them on clockwise platforms to confirm it and already onboard, waiting, when Charlie finally joined it two stations later. He’d managed to keep up with all the line switches, allowing them the longest possible lead. Because of that intentional distancing and the ski-lift height of the escalators, Briddle had still been inside the Dmitrouskaya station when Charlie and Wilkinson found their park bench. The Metro provided complete concealment throughout their encounter and as they came toward him, Briddle recognized he couldn’t be in a better place not just to continue his surveillance but even to stage Monsford’s demanded fatal accident, aware despite his newness to Moscow that there were at least 150 suicides a year on the underground system and that one extra statistic would not arouse any official suspicion.

  Briddle was invisibly within the shadows of the platform food stall by the time the two men rode the escalator down for the simultaneous arrival of a train to board and Wilkinson didn’t pause. Neither did Briddle, joining a noisy group of departing food-stall customers to sit two carriages behind his quarry. Briddle had an unbroken view of the outside platform, which was where, as the train lurched into motion, he saw Charlie not on the train, as he’d imagined, but still standing there. And although there was no obvious recognition, Briddle knew Charlie had seen him, too.

  * * *

  An expectant, serious Jane Ambersom was waiting in the anteroom to Smith’s suite with an equally grave-faced John Passmore when the Director-General flurried in from the Foreign Office, gesturing them to follow him.

  “You could call it a Solomon resolution, I suppose,” announced Aubrey Smith. “Elana and Andrei withdrew their kidnap claims and the French are releasing Elana into the custody of our Paris embassy, along with all our people. Andrei’s refused to go with them. He was released into Russian protection. Monsford’s hailing it as a victory.”

  “Monsford can’t have heard yet,” said Jane.

  “Heard what?” Smith frowned.

  “Why I haven’t been able to reach Straughan,” said the woman. “Security didn’t immediately react when he didn’t arrive at Vauxhall Cross this morning: he was sometimes delayed because of his mother. Her caregiver found them but Straughan’s protective cover legend caused a delay in Vauxhall being told. The mother could have been dead since last night, overdosed. Straughan’s death is apparently more recent, delayed probably because of what he did after killing her. I don’t know precisely what was found: we probably never will. There were some letters, I believe. I’ve no idea what else.”

  “Could they have been killed?”

  “If Monsford wanted them to be,” judged Passmore. “The mother’s dementia left her catatonic. She would have swallowed whatever she was given without knowing who gave it to her. MI6 will have taken over everything by now. There won’t be a public inquest or any pathology details released. James Straughan and his sad mother will simply have ceased ever to have existed.”

  “How did we find out?” asked Smith.

  “Straughan had listed my private number to be contacted in an emergency. It was the police who called me, when the caregiver gave it to them.”

  “He’ll have made some arrangement for you to get whatever he had.”

  “We can only hope,” said Jane. “I was just leaving for Berkhamsted when Rebecca called, saying there’d been a mistake: that she was taking over.”

  “Damn!” exclaimed Smith.

  “Maybe it’ll protect Charlie,” suggested Passmore.

  “Maybe,” said the other man. “What’s come from Moscow?”

  “Nothing yet from Wilkinson, but we know from the others Charlie was using the Moscow Metro,” said Passmore. “Somehow he found out Preston and Warren were support for Wilkinson. He made cell-phone contact, warning that Denning and Beckindale were following. Warren thinks they decoyed them off, but he’s not sure.”

  “If Charlie used our phone the tracker would have been activated.”

  “It was,” confirmed Passmore. “Both here and in Moscow. MI6 would have got his location.”

  “And we haven’t heard from Wilkinson,” repeated Passmore.

  “When the hell am I going to get ahead of this, start calling the shots instead of trailing behind in somebody else’s dirt?” demanded Smith, unusually venting his anger.

  Charlie Muffin was thinking something similar as he replaced the kiosk telephone after being told by Natalia that it was impossible to meet that night. His call before that, to David Halliday, hadn’t been answered, either. And there’d been more luck than tradecraft expertise in his evading Stephan Briddle, one of possibly three men he’d been warned were trying to kill him.

  30

  They’d kissed but perfunctorily, acquaintances rather than husband and wife, and afterward remained standing although not together, Radtsic staying close to where he’d greeted Elana just inside the door, Elana, still wearing the vivid red dress, wandering aimlessly around the conservatory like a disappointed prospective buyer.

  “This isn’t how it was supposed to be,” said Radtsic, breaking the awkwardness.

  “It was my duty to come but I didn’t want to,” said the woman. She stopped close to a corner of the windowed room, frowning up at a roof joint. “They’ll be listening to everything, I suppose?”

  “And filming,” confirmed Radtsic. “What’s happened to Andrei?”

  “There were always three Russians in the room. After Andrei’s outburst they asked him to go with them, so they could protect him. They asked me, too. I refused. The French officials there asked Andrei if he wanted to go with them. He said yes, at once, and left with them. They would have been your people, wouldn’t they: FSB?”

  “Yes,” Radtsic confirmed again. “What did Andrei say to you before he went?”

  “Just repeated that he never wanted to see or hear from us again. That we were dead to him, both of us.”

  “He’s my son: supposed to respect me and do what I tell him!” It was a plea, not an angry demand.

  “He’s a man: a young one but still a man,” corrected Elana, finally slumping into a overpadded, solitary positioned easy chair making it impossible for Radtsic to sit close to her. “He doesn’t respect you anymore, Maxim Mikhailovich. He hates and despises you. And now me, for coming here to you.”

  “Do you hate and despise me?”

  “I’m not sure, not yet,” admitted Elana, with brutal honesty. “I do know I don’t want to be part of any of this. But I know even more than I’ve ever known anything in my life that I never wanted to lose my son, which is what you’ve made happen.”

  “You don’t understand what—”

  “Don’t you dare tell me that I don’t understand!” stopped Elana, giving way to shouted anger. “I understand every fucking thing you’ve made me do and with which I went along because I am your wife! And while I don’t know yet if I despise and hate you, I do know that I despise and hate myself for doing it, for allowing it to happen.…”

  Radtsic began to move toward her but Elana started up, moving away from him. “I don’t want you near me. What will happen to Andrei?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t lie to me!” she erupted into almost screaming frustration. “He’ll be punished for what we’ve done, won’t he? Become a nonperson at the age of nineteen. How do you feel about that, Maxim Mikhailovich? You proud about destroying your only son?”

  “Stop it, Elana!” demanded Radtsic, matching
her anger. “You know why I had to do this. How everything would have worked if Andrei had done what he was told instead of babbling about kidnap, giving the French the legal excuse to hold you—”

  “He didn’t say we’d been kidnapped!” halted Elana.

  “You?” questioned Radtsic, uncertainty lessening his anger. “But you knew…?”

  “I didn’t say it either. Neither of us said we’d been kidnapped.”

  “Stop wandering about!” ordered Radtsic, loudly. “I need to know what happened: how it happened … if there’s a way of getting him back.”

  Elana hesitated, seemingly unsure, but went back to the overstuffed armchair. “I can’t answer your question: don’t have any answers.”

  “Tell me from the beginning, from the time you arrived in Paris.”

  Elana frowned in recollection. “I did everything you told me. I went to Andrei’s apartment direct from the airport. Yvette wasn’t there. Andrei and I ate dinner at a café quite close. Everyone knew him: I was very proud at how popular he was. I didn’t meet Yvette until the second night. I like her. That first night he kept asking why I’d come so unexpectedly, almost without warning. I decided against telling him outright: I wasn’t sure how he’d react. I told him my coming was part of a surprise: that together we were going London to meet you and that you had something very important to tell him.”

  “You didn’t say anything, hint even at a defection?”

  “I’ve just told you I didn’t,” said Elana, irritably. “He seemed so happy, so confident. Even a hint would have been a mistake. I wanted to get Andrei here first.” She smiled, wanly. “I was the one guilty of kidnap. I expected him to be more excited at my arriving and of our coming on here. I thought it might have been to do with Yvette: not wanting to leave her, I mean.”

  “But he agreed to come?” said Radtsic.

  Elana nodded. “But without much enthusiasm.”

  “How did you explain being escorted, by English people?”

  “He only ever met two English people, Jonathan Miller and his partner, whom I only ever knew as Albert. Remember, Andrei never knew precisely what you did: the position you held. Just that it was something important and very high in the government. I told him you were in London with a Russian delegation for an internal conference and that you’d arranged for us to get to London on a plane taking some people from the British embassy. I told Miller and his partner, so they wouldn’t make any mistakes on our way to the airport. Andrei didn’t like either of them. He was rude when he met them.”

  “You think he suspected who they were?”

  Elana shook her head. “Although he didn’t know exactly what you did, he did know how powerful you are.” She hesitated. “How powerful you were. And he was used to your going away, without any explanation.”

  “He didn’t questioning it?”

  “After the awkward restaurant meeting with the British he said he couldn’t understand why we couldn’t travel on a normal flight.”

  “What did you say?”

  “That it was how you wanted it. He never challenges you, does he?”

  “Not until now,” corrected Radtsic.

  Elana looked up to the conservatory corner she’d examined earlier. “I don’t like being listened to.”

  “I’m going to have to cooperate to get Andrei back. I don’t understand how you came to be intercepted or how—or why—the kidnap claim came to be made.”

  Elana stared at her husband for several minutes. At last she said: “Maxim Mikhailovich, you’re not making sense! You were always going to have to cooperate, tell them everything for us to be accepted: protected as we’ll have to be protected for the rest of our lives. And we can never get Andrei back. He’s gone: we’ve lost him forever.”

  “I won’t lose him. I’ll do a deal.”

  “What deal? With whom? You ran away from Russia because you were going to be purged: what do you imagine would happen to you if you changed your mind now and we went back? You’ve got nothing with which to negotiate with the British. To keep us safe you’ve got to tell them everything. Andrei won’t come. Stop fantasizing, accept reality. And that reality is that you’ve made a terrible mistake and wrecked the family.”

  “What if Andrei accepts reality and recognizes he’s made a terrible mistake: changes his mind?”

  “What do you imagine the reaction would be to his going up to the commandant of whatever Siberian gulag he’ll be sent to and saying he doesn’t like it there and wants to come to England after all!” derided Elana.

  “He won’t be sent to a Siberian gulag: things aren’t like they were, in the old days. There’s law and Andrei hasn’t broken any law.”

  There was another long silence before Elana said: “If there’s law that’s got to be followed, how could you have been purged? You didn’t break any law.”

  “What I’ve done, all my life, isn’t governed by any law,” said Radtsic, in subdued reflection. “There has been a terrible mistake. But I didn’t make it: wouldn’t have made it because I knew everything, devised it all, and could still have prevented it being turned into the disaster it became if I’d been brought in when I should have been. But I wasn’t. Others with ambition intervened. But there’s no proof, no paper trail, of their intervention: that was the first, internal purge I didn’t suspect. Which left me the architect who didn’t react quickly enough. I should have left the service honorably, an internally recognized and acknowledged legend. Instead I leave it not just as a failure and a traitor but as a failure and a traitor to you and to Andrei.…” Radtsic stopped, brought out of his reverie by the awareness of Elana silently weeping, hands cupped to her face to hold back any sound. “I’ll make it better: try to stop you hating and despising me.”

  Elana stayed with her hands covering her face, still weeping.

  * * *

  “My deputy director is handling the situation,” declared Monsford. “I’ve no specific details, other than the indications that Straughan killed his mother before killing himself. Nothing will ever become public: a complete blackout has been imposed.”

  “What security implications are there?” demanded Sir Archibald Bland.

  Monsford’s eyes flickered toward Aubrey Smith. “Absolutely none.”

  “What about letters, an explanation?” intruded Smith, savoring the other director’s discomfort.

  “I haven’t had the chance to talk to my deputy,” said Monsford, his voice uneven. “I’ll provide all the details as soon as I have them myself.”

  “Which brings us back to the original point of this gathering,” said Aubrey Smith, turning away from the now-dead screen on which they’d watched the encounter between Radtsic and his wife. “What happened after she recovered?”

  “They walked outside in the grounds,” said Gerald Monsford, inwardly squirming at being questioned by the other director. “Neither wanted to eat when they got back to the house. Elana insisted upon sleeping in a separate room.”

  “What did they talk about walking in the grounds?” Smith continued to press.

  “Surely you don’t imagine—” started Geoffrey Palmer.

  “Nothing that added to what they’d talked about inside,” hurried in Monsford, eager to save Palmer’s embarrassment. “They hardly spoke, as far as we could detect.”

  “So they were heads down?” persisted Smith.

  “Could someone help us here?” demanded Palmer, irritably.

  “They were filmed throughout their walk,” explained the MI6 Director. “The cameras have special enhancing lenses enabling what’s said out of microphone range to be recorded and then lip-read.”

  “Lip-reading that can be defeated by a person walking with their head lowered, avoiding the camera,” added Smith. Directly addressing his counterpart, Smith said: “You didn’t answer my question?”

  “Yes,” confirmed Monsford, tightly.

  “So we don’t have recordings of everything they said to each other?”

  “No,”
Monsford was forced to admit.

  “What’s your point?” protested Sir Archibald Bland.

  “What’s your assessment of the confrontation inside the house, where we did hear every word?” demanded Smith, answering a question with a question.

  Bland hesitated, unaccustomed to the reversal. “Very emotional, which was understandable considering every circumstance: Radtsic defecting after being at the top of his profession for so long, being reunited with his wife after what she’s been through, neither knowing if they would ever be together again, all of it topped by their being reviled by a son who’s abandoned them.”

  “And I’m intrigued by whatever it is Radtsic was talking about at the very end,” added Palmer.

  “All of which you were supposed to be,” warned Smith.

  “What the hell are you suggesting!” demanded Monsford.

  Again Smith confronted question with question: “Do you normally allow encounters like that to be completely unsupervised?”

  “I don’t have a precedent,” Monsford quickly came back. “Neither my service nor yours has had someone from such an echelon of Russian intelligence cross over to us. Nor, after managing such a defection, succeeding in getting released from at least nominal Russian detention a wife with whom to be reunited.”

  “Indeed, neither of us has,” agreed Smith, smiling in return. “You’ve very definitely established the precedent. But how did that unsupervised reunion come about? Did you offer it? Or did Radtsic insist upon meeting his wife alone?”

  Monsford hesitated. “He didn’t insist: he asked. And it was hardly an unsupervised encounter. We’ve just watched and listened to everything that took place.”

  “With no debriefing intermediary to direct or guide it,” Smith pointed out.