Red Star Falling: A Thriller

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘Monsford’s another fool, the biggest. How was he ever appointed?’

  She was being outmanoeuvred—perhaps as she’d been outmanoeuvred by Jane Ambersom—too clearly reduced to the puppet role she’d assigned herself. ‘We’re talking co-operation, Maxim Mikhailovich. This isn’t co-operation. This is playing games. Have you penetrated us?’

  ‘Isn’t that a question from a previous era, an automatic assumption that every hostile act has to emanate from Russia, the West’s only adversary. You want me to make you a complete list of alternatives?’

  ‘I want you to answer my direct question with a direct answer,’ persisted Rebecca. ‘Has MI6 been penetrated, either by the KGB, their FSB successors, or any other intelligence organization that would feature on the list you’ve just offered me?’

  ‘I told your ineffectual director that I knew nothing whatsoever about any penetration.’ Radtsic smiled.

  ‘What are you telling me?’

  ‘That I, personally, know nothing about a penetration of your service. Which I would have done, had there been a KGB or FSB success,’ replied Radtsic, pedantically. ‘But that is not to say there hasn’t been one by another intelligence service. And if there has, I wouldn’t expect your current director to have a chance in hell of uncovering it.’

  * * *

  Edwin Birkitt was the best at what he did because he had a regimented, train-line-straight mind and what he’d been ordered to do now was a derailment he didn’t like. It should have been someone else’s job, a more senior responsibility, which meant it was shit-dodging time and he didn’t know from which direction to duck. Birkitt politely stood, as he always did, at Irena Novikov’s entry, waiting until she was settled before he resumed his seat and said, again part of their ritual, ‘How are you today?’

  ‘It’s more important you tell me how you and your English brothers are today,’ Irena threw back. ‘You all must be feeling pretty damned pleased with yourselves at the entire world knowing who you’ve bagged. Who ever would have thought the executive chairman of the FSB would cross the great divide? And to such worldwide acclaim!’

  He’d been overruled, ordered to allow Irena Novikov unfettered access to television, just as his protests against that day’s instructions had been dismissed, and Birkitt hoped that the later analysis would show both to be bad decisions without associating him with the mistakes. ‘Some of the assessments are that it will wreck your entire organization: that it’ll have to be restructured from top to bottom.’

  ‘Never underestimate the Russian resilience.’

  ‘I never have. Nor ever will,’ assured Birkitt.

  ‘Makes what I’ve offered irrelevant against what he’s likely to disclose.’

  ‘It doesn’t make you—or what you can tell me—irrelevant at all,’ contradicted Birkitt, immediately alert to the tense in which she’d phrased her remark. ‘And I know that you know it, too.’

  Irena shrugged, stretched back in her chair. ‘You’re going to have to beg and plead with the Brits to give you the crumbs, aren’t you? And that’s all they will give you, the stalest of crumbs.’

  There was no point in any longer postponing what he had to do, giving her more opportunity for the filmed mockery. ‘There’s been a request from Moscow, for diplomatic access.’

  Irena straightened, actually coming forward. ‘Request to whom?’

  Bitch! thought Birkitt, disconcerted by her prescience. ‘Passed on to us from England. It’s part of the diplomatic procedure that you have to be advised, which is what I’m now doing. And for you to tell us if you wish that access to be granted.’ He sounded like a message-delivering clerk, he thought, miserably.

  ‘Whoa!’ smirked the woman. ‘It’s not part of any diplomatic process that I tell you anything. I wasn’t asked whether I wanted to come here to America. I was thrown on a CIA plane by a bunch of assholes that I’d made look stupid and who are probably now stacking shelves in a 7/11. And after that, threatened by you with a lifetime of solitary confinement if I didn’t co-operate. You know what I think? I think when I tell that to people from my embassy here—who I very definitely want to meet, as soon as possible—that they’ll say I was kidnapped and questioned under duress, with which I’ll agree and testify to. And the great U.S. of A. will be looking at a diplomatic incident that’ll risk making public how very, very easy it was for me to make the CIA look a total bunch of amateurs over a very, very long period. How do you think that’ll play in Des Moines, Ed?’

  Birkitt hoped the diatribe had given him the time to devise a response. ‘You’re a self-admitted espionage agent and architect of an operation to infiltrate the very heart of the American administration. Under American law we’ve got every right to hold you and subject you to whatever interrogation we consider necessary.’

  Irena shrugged again, the smirk still in place. ‘I didn’t admit to you being the architect of anything, Ed. What positive legal justification do you have for holding me as you’re doing? That’s something I’ll need to talk about in very close detail to the embassy lawyers, too. But I don’t think there’s anything more for you and me to talk about, do you? I think we’re through, Ed. All done.’

  He’d known it wasn’t going to be easy but he hadn’t imagined it was going to be as bad as this, reflected Birkitt.

  * * *

  Charlie hadn’t been aware of the changeover, which he thought he should have been—there would have been at least one vehicle, coming and going—and was unsettled at not being prepared. His new guard was a squat, swarthy man, Georgian maybe. The housekeeper was equally short and Charlie guessed she was heavier than the man by at least fourteen pounds.

  ‘Good to see new faces,’ lied Charlie, at the surprise breakfast encounter.

  The man looked at him, unsmiling, not bothering to reply as he turned back towards the kitchen.

  ‘You going to take as good care of me as my last guardian angel?’ persisted Charlie.

  The man halted at the door. ‘I wouldn’t have stopped the dogs getting to you. And won’t if you try any more shit like that with me. So don’t.’

  The FSB variation on good cop, bad cop, gauged Charlie. ‘What time’s General Guzov getting here today?’

  The guard continued on, again not replying. Charlie knew that Guzov’s unexplained absence the day before, like the silent guard changeover, was all part of an intended disorientation process and because he recognized it he shouldn’t have been as affected as he was, which was irritating. Because he’d had time to assess it, he further recognized that being incarcerated in the silent dacha deep in the middle of the silent forest—isolated from any certainty, almost from reality—was another part of the process. The technique was to make him psychologically dependent upon Guzov, anxious for the man’s visits, even more anxious to ingratiate himself by telling the man whatever he wanted to know. They’d believe it was working, from his question a few minutes earlier. He’d have to be careful that it wasn’t.

  19

  To prevent his presence in Downing Street being photographed by the permanent media posse, Aubrey Smith reached Sir Archibald Bland’s Cabinet Office in its rear annexe along the smallest of subterranean corridors from the Foreign Office. There was an instant impression of déjà vu as he entered the suite at the unexpected disorder of Bland’s desk, overflowed bookshelves all around it and an aged and scuffed leather desk chair in which the shirtsleeved, collar-loosened man sat. Geoffrey Palmer, also in shirtsleeves, was in a matching ancient armchair that threatened to engulf him, completing Smith’s nostalgic recollection of the rarefied gentility of his former university existence abandoned for the opposite extreme of government-sanctioned criminality up to and including assassination.

  ‘I’m still concerned this contravenes the remit under which the committee was convened,’ at once protested Bland. ‘We hope whatever it is you’re going to tell us is as sensitive as you indicated on the telephone.’

  Deniable responsibility for any mistaken decision,
Smith recognized: it was a credo with which he had to replace appreciation of after-dinner port at High Table and esoteric disagreements about the wisdom of Plato and Pliny. ‘If you’re unsatisfied that it is, I’ll repeat it all before the full committee later,’ replied Smith. There’d be no recording devices here, he was sure.

  ‘Which we’ve postponed, as you requested,’ said Palmer, struggling forward from the depths in which he was submerged.

  Smith took his time extracting the disk player from his overfilled briefcase, glad he’d anticipated Palmer’s presence and brought sufficiently marked copies of the Monsford transcripts. He didn’t hurry, either, handing them to both civil-servant mandarins or, after that, locating a power source, remaining by it as he turned back to the two men.

  ‘What you’ve got in front of you are specifically marked extracts from what Gerald Monsford claims to be accurate and complete copies from the recording apparatus installed in his office by James Straughan. Those facilities automatically register the time and date of every conversation. At today’s full-committee session will be produced the audio examination of those office disks. That examination will identify gaps where the manually operated system was stopped and restarted exactly where I’ve indicated on what you’re now looking at.…’

  Both men were bent forward now, their concentration divided between what Smith was saying and the documentation in front of them.

  Gesturing to the disk player, Smith went on, ‘What I’m going to play to you fills in those gaps. They irrefutably show that Gerald Monsford ordered the assassination of Charlie Muffin after the successful Moscow extraction of Maxim Radtsic. That murder, fortunately, failed. But the attempt brought about the carnage at Vnukovo Airport and the international catastrophe we’re now trying to minimize. It also indicates the supposed hostile infiltration of MI6 to be a fabrication made easy by the deaths of their two officers in Moscow and that of James Straughan here in England to conceal Gerald Monsford’s culpability in attempted murder. Gerald Monsford is dangerously, mentally unstable, someone who should be restrained as a risk to national security. Legal but closed court provisions for such restraint exist under the provisions of the Official Secrets Act.’

  Both mandarins sat momentarily speechless, Palmer actually with his mouth slightly open, at the equivalent of a megaton charge imploding in the middle of their bombproof lives. Before either recovered sufficiently for words, Smith activated the machine beside him and said, ‘We start with the marked blank on the first of your pages. It’s timed and dated three days before Radtsic’s successful extraction. Monsford is responding to Straughan’s warning from Harry Jacobson in Moscow that Radtsic is arrogant and talking of telephoning Elena, in Paris, about his intended defection.’

  MONSFORD: Tell him he’s got to spell out to Radtsic the risk to which he’s putting himself: putting everyone, his wife and son most of all.

  STRAUGHAN: There’s something else. I’ve made it very clear to Jacobson that Charlie Muffin’s assassination, as a diversion, is aborted: that everything’s cancelled.

  MONSFORD: We intended using Charlie Muffin’s killing as a diversion for Radtsic’s extraction. Muffin was never going to leave Moscow and neither were his wife and child.

  Smith paused the disk. ‘The next marked section, on your second selected page, comes at the point when Monsford is insisting that there had to have been a leak to enable the French to intercept Elena and Andrei on their way here from Paris. You’ll note it’s timed and dated the day Radtsic arrived in London.’

  MONSFORD: What about Charlie Muffin?

  STRAUGHAN: He was always the unknown decoy, the diversion. He didn’t know anything.

  MONSFORD: He’s a double: tricked us all. He’s gone over to the Russians!

  STRAUGHAN: Charlie Muffin didn’t know anything about Radtsic: if he had—and has gone over—the first thing he’d surely have done was stop Radtsic defecting.

  MONSFORD: Charlie Muffin has to have had something to do with this!’

  ‘Your third marked section follows Charlie Muffin’s contact with the British embassy in Moscow with the refusal to deal with the three MI6 officers—the dead Stephan Briddle, and Robert Denning and Jeremy Beckindale, both currently in custody,’ guided Smith, pressing the Restart button.

  STRAUGHAN: What do we do about our three in Moscow?

  MONSFORD: They stay. Now Muffin’s crawled out from beneath the stone he’s been under, I want to be his shadow: every time he farts, I want to hear it. I’m not having the Radtsic coup taken away from me by Charlie Muffin.…

  ‘I’m pausing the disk intentionally here, although it’s a continuing narrative,’ said Smith. ‘I want you to take particular note of it because of remarks I’m going to make later.’

  STRAUGHAN: I’ve nominally appointed Briddle our field supervisor of our three. Do you have any specific instructions?

  MONSFORD: Tell him to call me at ten promptly tomorrow, his time. I’ll take the call personally.

  ‘These are the relevant sections I consider most important today,’ concluded the Director-General. ‘There is a much wider selection of conversations and discussion between both men on these and other disks. We’ve subjected all these deleted extracts to extensive voice-print tests. The two speakers are unquestionably James Straughan and Gerald Monsford.’

  He’d crossed the Rubicon from which he had for too long held back, accepted Smith, until now acknowledging the lies and deceits of others but wrongly, stupidly, clinging to what he’d considered some personal integrity by not lying and deceiving and cheating himself. And by so doing come so very close to being destroyed first by his overly ambitious deputy Jeffrey Smale and this time by a mentally deranged Gerald Monsford. Disappointingly, still hoping some integrity remained, Smith didn’t feel any guilt: there was no satisfaction, either.

  Geoffrey Palmer finally recovered, pulling himself fully out of the armchair for a more upright seat closer to Bland’s desk, seemingly discomfited at finding himself without a jacket. Prompting a response from his partner, Palmer said, ‘We need Sir Peter Pickering’s legal advice.’

  ‘And further, independent proof, damning though this is,’ obliged Bland.

  ‘We’ll have to suspend the committee until it’s resolved,’ proposed Palmer.

  ‘Unquestionably, but we won’t make it official, not yet,’ agreed the Cabinet Secretary.

  Tweedledum and Tweedledee, undecided what to do about the Mad Hatter, thought Smith, bemused by the two men who appeared to have forgotten his presence in their back-protecting double act. ‘I’d like to pick up my earlier remark about believing there’s some importance in the last section I played to you, which might, in fact, go some way towards finding further, independent evidence of what I believe to be Monsford’s guilt. Throughout the whole selection, Harry Jacobson features heavily. He certainly knew about the planned assassination of Charlie Muffin, which he denied before the committee. I believe the final extract to which I drew attention indicates that Stephan Briddle, with whom Monsford insisted upon dealing personally, had been ordered to take over the killing of Charlie Muffin from Harry Jacobson, which would explain Briddle’s inexplicable Vnukovo attack.’

  ‘He should certainly be re-examined,’ said Bland, blinking as he brought his attention back to the MI5 Director-General.

  ‘Without warning,’ cautioned Smith. ‘He’d inevitably query a recall with Monsford.’

  ‘There’s surely no grounds yet for arresting him?’ questioned Palmer.

  ‘Timpson’s investigators have the authority to bring him back to London,’ said Smith, glad of the midnight preparations after the copy of James Straughan’s bugging had been analyzed and all trace of Rebecca Street erased. ‘It doesn’t officially constitute arrest but Jacobson won’t know that: it might encourage the man into telling the truth. And there’s something else he could help us with. He was MI6 station chief in Moscow. According to my deputy, who as you know was recently transferred from there, MI6 do not hold
Russian weapons in their Moscow rezidentura. Which begs the question of where Stephan Briddle got the Makarov pistol clearly visible in his hand in the Russian CCTV footage. Again according to my deputy, any weapon shipped in a diplomatic bag needs the counter-signed authority of the director. It’s not accepted for shipment without it. There isn’t, apparently, a back-up register upon which proof of authority would be listed.’

  ‘But a shipment log is maintained at the Foreign Office,’ insisted Palmer, making the first positive contribution.

  ‘Which would constitute further independent evidence if there was such an authorization in Monsford’s name, wouldn’t it,’ suggested Smith.

  ‘There’s something you haven’t told us,’ suddenly challenged Bland, quizzically. ‘How did you come to be in possession of this material?’

  His most vulnerable point, Smith conceded. ‘Straughan became a friend as well as a colleague of my deputy, Jane Ambersom, during her tenure at MI6. She lives in a mansion block which has in its lobby individual letter boxes for each occupant. She found the memory thumb, holding everything you’ve heard—obviously copied from the original disk recording—in her box yesterday. It had been hand delivered, not posted. We’ve forensically examined the packaging, of course. There are no fingerprints or evidence of source. The address was composed of letters cut from the previous day’s copy of The Times.’

  Both men stared steadily at him for several moments. Aubrey Smith stared steadily back, believing neither would question further for fear of an answer making them complicit, unable to deny their knowledge of the unknowable, the function for which they’d been appointed by their contentedly innocent political superiors.

  Finally, Bland said, ‘We’ll expect you on standby throughout today. And your deputy, as well.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And we thank you for bringing this to our attention,’ said Palmer.