Red Star Falling: A Thriller

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘Don’t you think I deserve to know more, after doing what I just did?’

  Jane smiled at the innuendo. ‘You’ll know, before anyone else.’

  Jane lapsed into silence again, accepting the refill Elliott poured. ‘I know I asked you to leak the penetration to MI6, but it hasn’t worked out as I’d hoped it would, not yet anyway.’

  ‘You going to tell me when it does?’

  ‘Of course. And a lot more.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘It’s big: very big. And you’ll be the first to know, outside.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’ve got to get back. Aubrey Smith’s arranged a late conference and I’m not looking forward to it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I fucked up at the enquiry.’

  ‘Badly?’

  ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow. Could we eat in again, here, like tonight?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Despite the conversation, Elliott was sure things were progressing beyond the professional for Jane, as it was for him.

  4

  ‘It was a mistake. I’m sorry,’

  ‘You let yourself get angry: lost perspective as well as control,’ criticized Aubrey Smith. ‘It cost us opportunities. We won’t expose Monsford for what I’m sure he’s done by losing our temper.’

  ‘It won’t happen again,’ promised Jane Ambersom.

  ‘We’re the only people who know—or think we know—what he’s done,’ said the haphazardly dressed Director-General, from the window overlooking the night-lit river. ‘We’ve got to prove it to everyone else.’ He turned to Passmore. ‘Our concentration has initially to be on Charlie and the big question—why did he so positively refuse to work with the MI6 officers in his support group? What did he learn in the lost week before making contact with our people?’

  ‘Specifically made contact with Patrick Wilkinson, our team supervisor,’ reminded Passmore. ‘He wouldn’t deal with anyone else.’

  ‘Are our three on their way back?’ queried Jane.

  Passmore shook his head. ‘I want them back, not picked up on some pretext. I’m waiting for some indication of Moscow’s next move.’

  ‘The greater need is to get Wilkinson back,’ said Smith, moving from the window. ‘He must have some indication of what MI6 were doing.’

  ‘Briddle and his crew didn’t find Charlie: Natalia led them to him,’ Jane pointed out.

  ‘Are you suggesting she intentionally led them?’

  Now it was Jane who shook her head in denial. ‘Just being pedantic. Natalia Fedova remains our biggest professional mystery, but if she were leading him into a trap it would have been an FSB ambush, not one set up by MI6. We mustn’t confuse ourselves by over-interpretation. Let’s not forget Natalia’s extraction began by us all believing it was she and the child we were getting out. During the joint planning Natalia and Sasha were identified. So was their flat at Pecatnikov Pereulok. All Briddle and the other two had to do was doorstep the place and follow Natalia when she made her move.’

  ‘But we know they didn’t sit outside Pecatnikov and wait,’ Passmore pointed out. ‘We know that until the day of Natalia’s extraction they spent all their time running after our guys, hoping to be led to Charlie.’

  ‘So why’d they switch: how did they know that Natalia was getting out on a specific day from a minor airport?’ asked the Director-General.

  ‘We can’t answer with other hypothetical questions,’ Jane warned again. ‘The only thing we can establish is that Charlie was their target. Using Charlie as a diversion to get Radtsic out made professional sense. But Radtsic was already out. They didn’t need a diversion. All they were trying to do was kill Charlie.’

  ‘Killing Charlie makes sense if he found out something Monsford wanted kept secret,’ argued Passmore.

  ‘Which brings us back to where we began,’ accepted Smith. ‘We’ll log the points. But at this moment it’s more important we get Wilkinson here, to appear before the committee.’

  ‘We decoy again,’ declare Jane. ‘We recall one of our other two. If one gets out okay, there’s no watch alert. If he gets picked up, it doesn’t matter—he’s disposable to our needs and neither of them can be accused of anything: eventually they’d be repatriated. We provide Wilkinson with an entirely new identify, with all the Russian entry-and exit stamps our technical people can create here, and ship them to Wilkinson in the diplomatic pouch. All we risk then is CCTV identification. To lessen that danger he comes out of Moscow by train or boat on the same day our remaining decoy tries to get out direct from a Moscow airport.’

  Neither man responded at once, examining the suggestion.

  Passmore said, ‘Overland train is quicker: all Wilkinson will have to do is get over a border; Poland is closest.’

  ‘Give me a feasibility assessment,’ ordered Aubrey Smith. ‘I want Wilkinson on the move, the earlier the better.’

  Passmore stretched his remaining arm across his body to its empty place. ‘Ian Flood’s our star witness, the man who watched almost everything at Vnukovo Airport. I’ve got time to go through it all in detail, create the chronology which appears to be Bland’s preferred procedure.’

  ‘No long-winded presentations,’ cautioned Smith. ‘Tell Flood I want it in bite-sized pieces, all easily digested.’

  ‘We weren’t given a procedural format,’ Passmore pointed out.

  ‘Warn Flood about that,’ Smith continued to coach. ‘Same guidance when it gets to questioning, which it obviously will. Tell all our witnesses that. Specific answers strictly kept to specific questions. No responses to inferences…’ The man hesitated, glancing at Jane Ambersom. ‘And no loss of temper. It’s a ploy Monsford will use if he gets the opportunity.’

  ‘Anyone got an opinion about Rebecca?’ invited Passmore.

  ‘In the absence of anything Jamie Straughan left me—and I’m still sure there’s something, somewhere—Rebecca Street holds the golden key if she’d come across to us,’ said Jane.

  ‘There could be someone else with a lot to offer,’ suggested Aubrey Smith, reflectively. ‘The one thing we do know Charlie did during the lost week was make contact with Natalia Fedova. She could unlock a lot of doors, too.’

  ‘Natalia is refusing to talk about anything,’ reminded Jane.

  ‘I’m thinking of our immediate problem, confronting Monsford as well as doing whatever we can to help Charlie,’ said Smith. ‘Natalia knows he’s been seized but not that he’s injured. Or how it happened. Go down again. Convince her she could show us a way to get Charlie back.’

  ‘Do you truly believe we can get Charlie out?’ challenged Jane, directly.

  ‘Not totally,’ replied the man, just as direct. ‘But Charlie’s the only one with anything to lose.’

  * * *

  The safe house assigned to Natalia and Sasha was in Hampshire, originally a lodge conveniently close to the police college at Bramshill. It formed the centrepiece of an annexe complex in which most of the protection squad was housed. The technical facilities were virtually the same as those at MI6’s Hertfordshire house, including the geographic location restrictions on the London relays. The protection officers were predominantly female, adjusted for those they currently had to guard. The squad supervisor was a greying, comfortably rounded woman named Ethel Jackson, whose appearance belied a twenty-year MI5 career, fifteen of them as a front-line field officer, from which she’d had to be withdrawn after the accident-concealed disposal in Berlin of an FSB counter-intelligence operative on the point of exposing her. Ethel Jackson’s legacy was a permanent limp from the fracture she’d sustained in the staged car crash: her leg ached in cold weather.

  The woman was waiting at the door of the former lodge, forewarned by Jane’s telephone call from London, and led the way into a side study. ‘Natalia’s with Sasha, in the kitchen, while the child eats supper. Natalia saw the BBC’s lunchtime news; demanded to see someone. I’ve let her think that’s why you’re here.’

  ‘It’ll
do,’ said Jane. ‘How is she?’

  ‘All to hell since she saw the news. They showed footage from the airport CCTV.’

  ‘I saw it.’

  ‘Was Charlie killed?’

  ‘Hurt. We don’t know how badly.’

  ‘I knew him. Worked with him in Athens and again in Vienna. Are we going to get him out?’

  ‘If we can.’

  ‘Do the Russians know who he really is?’

  ‘Inevitably.’ Personal relationships within the service, particularly between active field agents, were banned, but from his personnel file Jane knew that Charlie Muffin ignored virtually every regulation and every subclause and Jane suspected a personal concern in Ethel’s interest.

  ‘They’ll sweat all sorts of shit out of him.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Jane.

  ‘He’ll give them a hell of a runaround, though.’

  ‘You know him well enough to be sure of that?’ asked Jane, confronting the professional uncertainty.

  Ethel smiled, acknowledging the point of the question. ‘Yes, I know him well enough to be able to tell you that.’

  ‘How do you feel about Natalia?’

  ‘Are we talking deputy director to senior officer or two women who don’t know each other but understand what we’re talking about?’

  ‘Your choice,’ avoided Jane.

  Ethel hesitated. ‘It was a wonderful affair, apart from not knowing what would happen literally from one minute to the next. I loved him: maybe still do although it could be that I’m sorry for what’s happening to him. And I’m jealous of Natalia for being his wife, which he never asked me to be and which I’m glad he didn’t because it probably wouldn’t have lasted as long as it took to get to the registry door exit. Natalia and Sasha are going to be protected and cared for better and more thoroughly than anyone who’s been in the programme before, because I’ve appointed myself their personal guardian…’ She stopped, needing breath. ‘So there’s your choice. Replace me right now, this minute. Or go on letting me keep them safe until we get Charlie back to them.’

  ‘I’d like to see Natalia right away,’ said Jane, without hesitation.

  ‘Thank you,’ smiled the other woman.

  ‘You’ll watch it all, of course?’ anticipated Jane, nodding to the single, momentarily dead-eyed screen on the study wall.

  ‘That’s my function, to watch to ensure no problems arise.’

  ‘I want you to watch even more closely than normal,’ urged Jane. ‘If you detect anything, anything at all—an unguarded moment, a gesture or a remark to Sasha—that unsettles you, I want to know at once. Being in a protection programme is stressful enough. What’s happened in Moscow is going to double that stress: treble it.’

  Ethel glanced briefly at her watch. ‘Sasha should be bathed and in bed by now. Natalia will be in the small drawing room, where the television is.’

  It was tuned to BBC twenty-four-hour news when Jane entered, although at that moment it was showing a sports segment. Natalia was already half out of her chair, alerted by the door opening. Knowing already about the airport shooting—and having seen the blurred, imperfect Russian CCTV—Jane had expected Natalia to be distraught, hair-straggled, and disarrayed. She wasn’t. She wore a skirt and sweater and her blond hair was neatly brushed. There was no makeup.

  ‘Is Charlie dead?’ Natalia demanded at once, her voice uneven.

  ‘No,’ assured Jane. ‘He’s hurt. We don’t know how badly.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

  ‘I didn’t know before. We need to talk.’

  Natalia hesitated before easing herself back into her chair. Jane sat opposite.

  ‘What’s he being held for—the charges, I mean.’

  ‘Your people are drip feeding everything, forcing us too much upon assumptions,’ said Jane. ‘That’s why I am here. If we’re going to help Charlie, you’ve got to help us.’

  ‘The Sluzhba won’t let him go.’

  ‘Natalia, listen to me! It wasn’t a Sluzhba ambush; if it had been, you wouldn’t have got away from Moscow either.’

  The Russian shook her head, bewildered. ‘Then who … I don’t understand.’

  ‘We don’t properly understand ourselves. When we do—if we do—it could tell us how to help Charlie.’

  ‘They’ll never give him up,’ repeated the woman, dully.

  ‘So you’re giving up?’ challenged Jane, intentionally brusque.

  Natalia smiled, sadly. ‘You’re forgetting what I did, how I’m trained. I won’t be frightened or angered into a shell to be bullied into telling you all you want to know.’

  ‘I’m not trying to compete,’ said Jane.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me what I’m going to find so difficult to understand?’ invited Natalia, settling farther into her chair.

  * * *

  The same BBC news service brought Radtsic and Elena properly together in the same room for the first time in twenty-four hours, Radtsic insisting his wife watch with him. Together, silently, they saw it twice more; on the last occasion, Radtsic stretched close to the screen better to see the CCTV background.

  ‘I’m sure it was Vnukovo,’ identified Radtsic.

  ‘What was happening—has happened?’ asked Elena, in her bewilderment forgetting her antipathy to her husband.

  ‘It looked mafia: a turf war shoot-out.’

  ‘You heard the Russian commentary, underneath the British translation,’ corrected Elena, ‘It was British intelligence: MI6.’

  ‘A diversion from my crossing was talked about, at the very beginning,’ remembered Radtsic. ‘It was before things changed and you went to Paris to bring Andrei out. It was only mentioned once.’

  Elena jerked her head towards the screen, the picture running without sound. ‘Yesterday, they said. It can’t have had anything to do with you—with us. Both of us were already here yesterday.’

  Radtsic shook his head, equally bewildered. ‘MI6 was identified. The two dead officers were named!’

  ‘It’s got to be a coincidence, whatever it was. We’ll probably never know,’ repeated Elena, recovering.

  ‘I want to know,’ said Radtsic, more to himself than to his wife.

  Elena came forward towards the screen, turning up the volume to another repeat. The blurred CCTV footage was the same, as well as the MI6 identification, but the studio report was updated. The UK government continued to refuse to answer the demands made in a series of official diplomatic notes. London’s refusal was understandable in view of that newly obtained information.

  ‘It has to be something to do with me,’ declared Radtsic. ‘Whatever caused the shooting, all those deaths with more to follow, according to the statements. They’re going to twist it: turn it into something to denigrate me.’

  ‘You’ve betrayed Russia!’ agreed Elena. ‘What do you expect them to do?’

  ‘I need you,’ abruptly declared Radtsic, ignoring the television now, his entire concentration upon Elena. ‘I do know what they’ll do, what they’ll make me out to be. I don’t expect things to be the same between us now—know they can’t be, just as I know all that you’ve sacrificed by coming with me. But you’re not with me, are you? You’re locking me out: I don’t mean from the bedroom, from sex. I don’t want sex. I just want you, with me. I need a friend, that’s all. Just a friend.’

  Elena didn’t respond for a long time, looking neither at Radtsic nor at the repetitive television but seemingly unfocussed upon a checkmate-displayed chess set on a game table against a far wall.

  Finally she said, ‘I’d like to know that Andrei isn’t suffering because of all this. He shouldn’t be, should he? It really isn’t like the old days, is it? He proved his loyalty by not defecting.’

  ‘I want to know what’s happened to Andrei, too.’

  ‘If I knew he was all right, wasn’t being punished, I wouldn’t want him to come here to join us: for him to have to live as we’re going to have to live. I’d want him to stay in Russia
, with Russians.’

  Now it was Radtsic who didn’t quickly respond. At last, quiet-voiced, he said, ‘That would be best. And it’s not automatic that he’ll be punished. Some things have changed.’

  ‘I’ll try to adjust: not lock you out.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I said I’ll try. That’s all I can promise, that I’ll try.’

  * * *

  ‘That’s all you can tell me?’ anticipated Natalia, professionally.

  ‘You know a lot more anyway,’ confirmed Jane, who’d edited her account strictly to MI5’s immediate needs.

  ‘Internecine warfare between same-country intelligence agencies isn’t unusual,’ offered Natalia. ‘It’s happened between my service—both KGB and FSB—and the Glavnoye Razvedyatelnoye Upravlenlye, our military intelligence.’

  ‘Extending as far as attempted sabotage of supposedly joint operations and murder, which is what this was—or attempted to be?’

  ‘I don’t know of a situation that’s gone to that extreme,’ conceded Natalia.

  ‘We lost Charlie for a week—eight days to be precise—before he made contact with his support group at the embassy,’ said Jane. ‘The first thing he told our officer was that MI6 was to be totally cut out: that he was refusing any contact whatsoever.’

  ‘You told me you were having doubts in London that MI6 weren’t being straight with you,’ reminded Natalia.

  ‘Which we weren’t able to pass on to Charlie during that lost week,’ reminded Jane, in turn. ‘And it was Charlie who told his embassy linkman first, not the other way round. We know, from the tourist flight, that he actually got to Moscow on the Monday. When did he first contact you?’

  ‘Tuesday,’ said Natalia, covering her caution with the quickness with which she replied. Charlie was injured but alive and she had to do everything conceivably possible to get him out of Russia. She didn’t know in sufficient detail what Charlie had told them to justify the extraction of herself and Sasha.

  ‘Tuesday morning or Tuesday evening?’