Red Star Falling: A Thriller

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘So he preferred to die instead.’ The Russian sighed, still dismissive.

  ‘I don’t think he really imagined you’d go as far as murder.’ It always had to be at Guzov’s pace, the man imagining he was leading.

  ‘We didn’t,’ denied Guzov, the impatience growing. ‘We didn’t need to kill Pavel: we could have transferred him off the case or fed you information through him he didn’t know to be wrong. That was why he was assigned in the first place—to prove to you the sort of man he was and for us to use that honesty. What we didn’t anticipate was that he’d be as straight as he turned out to be. Killing Pavel created entirely the opposite from what we wanted.’

  Where could this lead? wondered Charlie, increasingly curious. ‘You already told me it was the Americans.’

  ‘Ordered—approved at least—by Ed Bundy. He told Lvov it was his idea, after it happened. If he’d told us in advance we could have stopped the idiot.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ Charlie openly demanded, trying to pick his way through the contradictions, which he suspected were intentional.

  ‘Why not? It’s not as if I’m giving you anything you can use in the future: you haven’t got a future, have you?’

  That would have been a clever reminder of his helplessness if he hadn’t taken his walks in the woods, reflected Charlie. ‘I never had Bundy down as someone who couldn’t make up his mind.’

  ‘I don’t understand that,’ frowned the Russian.

  ‘Something else you’ve told me is that Bundy was furious at the first murder: that the Lvov infiltration would have worked if Oskin’s body had been dumped anywhere else but in the embassy grounds. Why attract more attention by killing Pavel?’

  Guzov’s frown remained. ‘You’re missing the entire point, Charlie: all of it! You’re thinking from our point of view, the ultimate Russian intention. Bundy thought Lvov was his creation, his masterstroke: his entire CIA career was built around it. He was already landed with a sensation he didn’t want, with the dumping of Oskin’s body. He was thinking of his damage limitation by having Pavel killed. His stupidly ill-thought-out reasoning was that by killing Pavel he’d warn you off. That’s what he told Lvov: that London would withdraw you and turn the whole affair over to us when we invented the story of Oskin’s murder being a mafia crime. How about a trade?’

  The Russian had taken long enough getting round to it, Charlie thought, caught by the abruptness: he hoped his wait was worthwhile. ‘What’s to trade?’

  ‘Pavel was talking to you from a public phone when he was shot,’ Guzov reminded. ‘You never told me what he was telling you and there was nothing on the embassy tapes you made available to me when I officially took over.’

  An uncertainty solved! Charlie at once recognized. Guzov knew he’d so far told the truth because the FSB would have recorded his every exchange with everyone over whom they had control and most definitely those with Irena Novikov when the FSB imagined they were setting him up with the false story to save Lvov. But Guzov didn’t have that comparison with Pavel. Here was his first, absolutely unchallengeable opportunity to lie. But properly: professionally. Guzov had to convince himself that he was still being told the truth. ‘I already told you, he didn’t want to be made the scapegoat.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like a good beginning, Charlie.’

  That reaction sounded very good to Charlie. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I asked a very specific question.’

  Keep stumbling forward towards me, thought Charlie. ‘About the night he was killed?’

  ‘You know that’s what I was asking.’

  Not good enough that time. ‘It was the first of the intended covert calls. Bundy would have told Lvov that: there would have needed to be a lot of American surveillance.’

  Guzov failed by the merest fraction to hold back the agreeing head movement. Charlie’s hopes ratcheted up. ‘He’d heard something, something he wasn’t supposed to hear. I don’t know what. I’m guessing at a conversation or part of a conversation. It wasn’t clear whether it was between people in the headquarters building or on the telephone.…’ Charlie was inventing as he talked and, as the thought came, went on, ‘I don’t know why, I might be completely wrong because it was never actually said, but my impression was that Pavel had overheard a conversation into which he had been wrongly plugged: an ongoing exchange he wasn’t supposed to be part of. Would that have been possible with all that extra telephone equipment brought into the building for the communications centre after we appealed for public response to help identify Ivan Oskin?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The uncertainty in the Russian’s voice told Charlie that the man very definitely believed it was possible, as well as there having been calls that Pavel hadn’t been intended to hear. ‘And with Pavel dead, we never will.’

  ‘There must have been something more positive—actual words—that gave an indication!’ Guzov’s voice was tightly controlled, each word spaced.

  ‘Pavel wanted to meet, to work it out between us: he talked about a recovery—of the Lvov operation, maybe—but there was something wrong with dates. There was a mistake that shouldn’t have been made.…’ Why did he invent that out of nowhere? Charlie asked himself and for the second time resolved his own uncertainty. It hadn’t come from nowhere. He was sure Natalia had talked about a mistake being made: of something being wrong. But what?

  * * *

  ‘You’re sure you’re clear?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harry Jacobson.

  ‘We’re not anywhere near any voice sensors?’ persisted Monsford.

  ‘I’m on the far side of the coppice covering the command centre. It’s clear of sensors.’ Jacobson shivered, discomfited by the cold as well as this sudden summons.

  ‘She’s on her way back. Made me look ridiculous in front of everyone and now has the other bitch, Jane Ambersom, as a direct liaison to the committee. We’ve been sidelined!’

  We’ve, picked out Jacobson, nervously. ‘There’s surely no way they can do anything without your being aware?’

  ‘Of course there is,’ rejected Monsford, irritably. ‘They’ve got to be monitored.’

  ‘We can’t additionally monitor our own safe house!’ exclaimed Jacobson, incredulously. ‘Any unofficial electronic equipment will immediately sound an alarm. It’s technically impossible.’

  ‘I want to know how many times they meet. How friendly they appear. Try to get close, to hear something, maybe an aside they don’t imagine will be picked up on a recording. Do whatever it takes to ensure we stay ahead of this.’

  Gerald Monsford was becoming increasingly irrational, Jacobson decided: more serious, maybe, than irrational. Maybe, even, he’d tied himself to someone who was genuinely mentally ill.

  * * *

  ‘Monsford made an absolute mess of it,’ judged John Passmore. ‘He even forgot to try to close down the safe-house relay!’

  ‘And knows he screwed up,’ agreed Smith. ‘We just stand back, let him go on deepening that grave we set out to help him dig.’

  ‘Where’s that leave me with Rebecca?’ questioned Jane, anxious to get away from the Thames House analysis. She’d already warned Barry Elliott of a development, without telling him what it was on an open line.

  ‘The big question,’ accepted Smith. ‘On the face of it, it’s to our advantage, but I want us to move carefully. It goes beyond the unpredictability of Gerald Monsford. He is coming out badly at the moment, making Rebecca a potential successor. Which is how she might calculate it. I want to use her, not have her use us.’

  ‘I wonder how frightened she is at the opportunity,’ reflected Jane. ‘I think I’d be scared to death.’

  ‘She’d be stupid not to be,’ agreed Passmore.

  All of which, as she drove carefully back to Hertfordshire, was exactly what Rebecca Street was thinking as all the delayed doubts and hopes closed around her. She had a lot to think about, Rebecca accepted: a lot to work out.
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  The drinks tray was at hand but untouched, and Maxim Radtsic greeted Rebecca smiling broadly, an expression she couldn’t recall from any previous film relay involving Monsford or Jacobson. Elena had moved her chair closer to her husband’s accustomed place in the conservatory. She was smiling, too, and as always immaculate: today’s dress was a Paris-purchased blue cashmere.

  ‘The letter’s on its way?’ demanded the man.

  ‘I personally took it to London last night,’ assured Rebecca. ‘By now it should be on its way to Moscow, if indeed it’s not already there. It will be delivered to your Foreign Ministry by a senior diplomat from our embassy.’

  ‘Why not by the ambassador himself?’ Radtsic frowned. The aggression had gone but the arrogance was still there.

  ‘He’s on standby for whatever negotiation might arise from your letter,’ replied Rebecca, smoothly. ‘It’s all being very carefully, properly, handled.’

  ‘That’s good,’ accepted Radtsic, nodding an invitation for Elena to agree. He looked towards the drinks but didn’t reach out towards then.

  ‘Very good,’ echoed the woman, dutifully.

  ‘I’m pleased you’re satisfied we’ve kept our side of our agreement,’ prompted Rebecca.

  ‘So today we properly begin,’ accepted the Russian. ‘It’s going to take a very long time.’

  Conscious of the preceding night’s insistence upon maximizing Radtsic’s disclosures in anticipation of Moscow obstruction, Rebecca risked the directness: ‘You were telling me how you evolved the Lvov scheme: let’s go on talking about that.’

  In what Rebecca inferred to be the man’s final awareness of his professional betrayal, Radtsic looked very obviously towards where he’d located a camera, holding the gaze for several moments. Elena broke her husband’s concentration, tentatively half reaching out towards him: Radtsic shifted the look towards the hand still too far away for him to touch, physically shaking himself like a water-soaked animal discarding its burden.

  ‘It was so good, so brilliant in every way. Oriental in its concept and execution: none of the do-this-day hurry of you or the CIA. It was cultivated, allowed to grow at its own pace.’

  This wasn’t boastfulness, an exaggerated beginning to enhance his value, Rebecca determined. Radtsic was stating a fact beyond challenge or qualification. But more to himself than to her or to unknowns beyond the watchful camera lens. Radtsic had lapsed into a reverie, in retreat maybe from his betrayal: she shouldn’t try to bring him out from it, not unless the reminiscence stalled altogether. She feared it had when he didn’t resume but instead remained, slumped now, seeming oblivious to his surroundings, and this time there was no outstretched hand from Elena, who stayed motionless. Rebecca did, too, deciding it was too soon to intervene. Moments stretched to positive, countable minutes. Way beyond the conservatory, at the edge of one of the far-away coppices, she got the impression of the movement of outside guards, although not a definite sighting. Rebecca hoped, anxiously, that Harry Jacobson, with whom there had been no contact since the day before, wouldn’t be tempted by the frozen scene relayed on the monitor to intrude, ruining the mood. She’d give it a little longer: a minute or two.

  ‘It was to have made me a legend.’ Radtsic’s oddly cracked voice suddenly came into the conservatory, close to startling the two women despite their expectation. ‘There would have been medals: a commemorative plaque in the Lubyanka close to Feliks Djerzhinsky, our founder.’

  She’d done the right thing remaining silent, Rebecca congratulated herself. That had to be her strategy, letting the man talk: the omissions could be memorized or picked up from the transcript to be queried later.

  The coming to power of Gorbachev and Yeltsin had been a genuine revolution that no-one within the KGB had anticipated, Radtsic disclosed, head sunk in memory. The entrenched politburo waged its internecine wars and musical-chair coups, which occasionally brought about one of the familiar cosmetic name changes to the intelligence structures but in reality the government within a government apparatus had been the Soviet Union, the fabric holding it together: it was unimaginable that a political change could result in anything more unsettling than another renaming, which within the Lubyanka scarcely amounted to more than reprinting official stationery.

  Ironically, it was the shattering reality of the Gorbachov upheaval that saved the Lvov scheme: that and its already having been sanctioned, protecting it from review because of its low-profile planning as a long-term, slow-maturing operation. And the carefully selected participants required the training that had brought them so close to such outstanding success.

  Stepan Lvov had been Radtsic’s personal choice, as he’d personally selected Irena Yakulova Novikov to be Lvov’s permanent Control and case officer. He’d identified the potential of both from the moment of their KGB induction: he’d been the regional KGB chairman in St Petersburg, able to groom them from the beginning and bring both with him to Moscow within a month of his own executive-directorship promotion.

  Rebecca was relaxed now, intent on every word but able at the same time to study Radtsic: Elena, too. Radtsic wasn’t any longer worrying about the camera, seemingly still unaware of anyone else in the room. He needed frequent pauses, sometimes groping for a word and other times correcting his choice. Elena was actually leaning forward in her seat, listening so intently that Rebecca guessed that this was probably the first time in their married life that the woman had heard any details of her husband’s work.

  He’d considered the Lvov proposal constantly endangered throughout Gorbachev’s era, continued Radtsic, particularly when the dismantling of the Soviet Union began. From the beginning, he’d shielded his operation and his protégés from postings to republics in which the KGB and later the FSB were disbanded and their officers reassigned or dismissed altogether. He’d further protected them by assigning them away from Moscow’s immediate political focus or interest.

  Abruptly, unexpectedly, Radtsic openly laughed but still to himself and remained smiling when he talked again of the irony that his idea had never required Lvov to emerge a star within the KGB or the FSB. It was America’s CIA that Lvov had to convince that he was the most valuable intelligence asset they had ever turned into a double agent.

  ‘It really was the greatest irony of all,’ insisted the still-smiling Radtsic. ‘Imagine it if you can. The Russian intelligence service, literally trawling the world through all its rezidentura for the suitable CIA victim gradually to be convinced that in Stepan Lvov he had the career opportunity of a lifetime. And you wouldn’t believe how long it took us finally to settle upon Ed Bundy.’

  Their first potential candidate was Steve Brogan, who was the CIA bureau chief in Santiago but who became more useful as a sacrifice when Brogan began trading in Chilean cocaine. His exposure seriously destabilized the Chilean government of the time through Brogan’s trafficking links with two ministers as well as deeply embarrassing Washington when it became public. There were encouraging meetings and the bait of at least two genuine intelligence leaks to Luke Morpeth, the CIA deputy at Canberra, before he was medevaced back to Washington after a heart attack. A permanent assignment at Langley after his recovery ruled him out of Lvov involvement, although obviously contact had been maintained. It had been ridiculously easy sexually entrapping Josh Atkins soon after his secondment to the U.S. embassy in Helsinki and just as easy to tempt the man, again with genuine although low-level intelligence, but he was too eager to boast of CIA as well as FSB connections to his Russian seductress: his premature detection would have been inevitable. Atkins, too, had been kept on an FSB leash. There’d been more money and effort—and hope—expended on Harvey Flaxman than on any of his predecessors after the Harvard graduate’s appointment as CIA station head at the London embassy and what was judged to be his perfect suitability for the role the FSB sought: Lvov was on the point of being transferred from his wait-until-called post at Russia’s Rome embassy to coincide with Flaxman’s arrival in London.<
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  ‘And then I made a mistake,’ admitted Radtsic, the smile apologetic now. ‘Finding our CIA dupe was taking too long and I was frustrated by the failures. I allowed the leaking of an FSB-manipulated political change in the French government, the repercussions of which hadn’t fully been analyzed. The government fell as the result of Russian intelligence infiltration and Flaxman was moved to Brussels specifically to head the CIA’s intelligence apparatus within the European Union, with no other function or purpose.’

  Radtsic coughed, clearing his throat with difficulty, and Elena crossed to the drinks tray to pour mineral water, which the man took with smiled thanks.

  ‘And at last we found Ed Bundy,’ resumed Radtsic, out of his reverie now, occasionally glancing towards the identified camera. ‘He had been suggested as a possibility when he was serving at the Ankara embassy but left to one side because the profile was that of a man of almost robot-like, unmotivated predictability. But after so many false starts—and a lot of fresh profile analysis—it came to me that an automaton was precisely the sort of man we were looking for. Bundy doesn’t drink. He doesn’t smoke. In all the years he’s been virtually under our control and manipulation—which he’s never once suspected—he’s never so much as once looked at a woman: to test him we even put the temptation in front of him and he didn’t appear to recognize what he was being offered. He’s a notebook keeper, a clock watcher and timekeeper. One of the freely available jokes on the intelligence circuit in Ankara was that he consulted the CIA manual before taking a shit, to ensure he wiped his ass the correct way. The search that finally ended with Bundy took exactly eleven months, from the time it began. At one time, after we moved in on him, I thought it was going to take twice as long to make him ours, so regulations-constipated was the man.’

  Radtsic cleared his throat again and for several moments remained frowning as if he’d forgotten the point he’d reached. Abruptly, with another animal-like shake, Radtsic went on that by the time it was decided to target Bundy, the American had been moved to Cairo. Stepan Lvov was posted there within three months of Bundy’s arrival. Irena Novikov followed a month after that.