Red Star Rising

by Brian Freemantle

  “His wife wasn’t in Cairo with him, was she? She was kept back here, in Moscow. And again when he was in Afghanistan.” Unless husband and wife were both KGB, it had been standard KGB operational procedure to hold spouses hostage in Russia against overseas defection. In the case of husband and wife, their children were detained under the guise of receiving a better education than would have normally been available.

  “No. She was always here.”

  “Which was why you couldn’t visit him, when he was repatriated from Afghanistan, wasn’t it? It was his wife who was able to visit and his wife to whom he went home when he was finally and fully recovered?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know if she’s been hurt, killed even, after Ivan was murdered?” Whoever killed him would have torn apart the house or apartment in which they’d lived.

  The hoarse-voiced woman sniggered. “The first mistake in your grand deduction! She died, two months ago. She’d had cancer for years. That’s why Ivan wouldn’t divorce her . . . abandon her, even though we’d been together in every other way for so long. He was a good man: intended to make sure she was comfortable from the money he was going to get.”

  Could a potential blackmailer be a good man? If Ivan had stayed with a terminally ill wife and undergone all the misfortune than he and his mistress had suffered? “But officially, on all the records and registers, Ivan’s address is where his wife lived?”

  Irena nodded, not speaking.

  “So you must have it, Irena! Whatever it was that Ivan found among the raw files and smuggled out of the Lubyanka, knowing its significance. Yours was the obvious—the only—place where it could be hidden.”

  Irena began to cry at last but soundlessly, without any sobs, tears just coursing down her face, oddly spreading out to wash completely over her scarred left cheek.

  “You know more, Irena,” directly challenged Charlie. “And I need more, properly to understand. If I don’t, everything else you’ve told me is meaningless.”

  28

  Charlie believed he now understood a lot of Irena’s topsy-turvy behavior but just as quickly—and positively—decided it would be a bad mistake openly to challenge her further. If he was right—as he was sure he was—the prize, incomplete though it might be, was very close now.

  “I think we are beginning to understand each other?” he started out, cautiously.

  Irena shrugged, not replying.

  Not a good start. “You do trust me, don’t you?”

  With another shrug she said: “Having got this far I don’t think I’ve got any other option.”

  Minimally encouraging, but only just, Charlie thought: but he hoped she realized how accurate she was. “Certainly there’s no one else who guarantees your safety as I do. But is that all you set out to achieve, Irena, apart from getting those who killed Ivan? Or is there something more?”

  She had finally begun looking fully at him but now she turned away. It was difficult to tell, because of her skin discoloration, but Charlie thought she was blushing. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “It’s not a criticism,” Charlie said, taking a chance.

  “I still don’t know what you mean.”

  The advantage was slipping away from him. “Ivan was good, wasn’t he? Apart from his expertise in languages he was a very good, very competent, intelligence officer?”

  “Everything would have been different, better, if he hadn’t been hurt as he was in Afghanistan: losing his arm and having to undergo so many operations.”

  “I know that,” sympathized Charlie. “You—and Ivan—had more bad luck than most people suffer. But as good as he was, Ivan misjudged things at the end, didn’t he?”

  “Do you think I don’t realize that now!” she flared.

  It wasn’t the best opening but he had to take it. “Of course I understand that you recognize it now. And I’m glad you have. Ivan couldn’t by himself do what he thought he could, no matter how good he was. You most certainly couldn’t, not all alone as you are. You’ve done the right thing—the safest thing—coming to me. And I really do understand.”

  “I’m embarrassed,” she said, suddenly. “Embarrassed and ashamed.”

  “Why should you feel either?” said Charlie, soothingly. She was definitely flushed. It wouldn’t—or needn’t—be long now.

  “It was the people who killed Ivan who should have to pay, no one else.”

  He had to steer everything the way he wanted: in her reluctance, Irena was making things more awkward than they needed to be. “How much was Ivan going to ask for?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Irena. “A lot, I think, because of how sensational he thought it was. He had the key: knew the full story.”

  “How much were you going to ask, if you’d got to them instead of coming to me?”

  She looked away again. “Do you despise me—think I’m a fool—for imagining I could take over: get the money that Ivan believed he could to set us up, as he thought he could?”

  “I’m not going to risk the trust I hope I’ve now got with you by lying,” said Charlie. “I don’t despise you, for imagining you could still do a deal for enough money to get you out of where and how you are here, now. Particularly having lost Ivan. But I do think you were foolish, believing that you could succeed where Ivan failed. And you don’t have to feel embarrassed or ashamed in hoping that I’ll pay for whatever information it is that you’re hiding. There! You didn’t even have to ask me.”

  “Could you . . . can you . . . I mean—”

  “I know what you mean,” cut off Charlie. “And I won’t lie to you about that, either. I don’t know if—or how much—money I might be able to arrange for you because I don’t know what you’ve got to sell. But I will make you a promise—and you know I keep my promises—that if it is as sensational as Ivan insisted it to be, I will do my best to get you as much as I can.”

  “Thank you,” she said, clearly uncomfortable despite Charlie’s insistence that she had no reasons to be. “Thank you very much.”

  So far so good, thought Charlie: correct analysis all the way. He had to ensure it went on. “Now I’ve got to see what it was Ivan found and hid with you, haven’t I?”

  It was yet another of the Brezhnev-era apartments that still disfigure Moscow like the last decaying teeth in an old man’s mouth, yellowed and black-stained by neglect. The vestibule stank of piss and shit and the graffiti-daubed elevator was out of order, doubtless rusted and clogged by more of both. The graffiti, and lavatory use continued up the stairs and apart from the normal protest from his feet Charlie was glad he only had to climb three flights. The inside of Irena’s apartment was in total contrast to its exterior. The entrance hall gleamed from its obvious constant polishing, as did the living room table and chairs and glass cabinet that displayed its prized foreign travel collection of wine and cocktail glasses.

  The shrine to the man Irena had loved was directly alongside, a table festooned by photographs and memorabilia of Ivan Nikolaevich Oskin. He had been an extremely handsome man, blond and blue eyed in the color prints, with high Slavic cheekbones and very even, almost cosmetically sculpted teeth. Irena, who was featured with the man in all the photographs, had also been attractive to the point of being beautiful before the Cairo accident, her hair very dark before the now fading grayness, slim but heavy breasted. There were pictures of them both in swimming costumes on unidentifiable beaches and others, obviously dating from their Egyptian assignments, beside pyramids and of Ivan on a camel. At the very front of the exhibition were three medals, their citations set out before each. The presentation was completed by three obviously recent photographs in which it was virtually impossible to see Irena’s burned face or Ivan’s missing arm from the way each had posed, the dark, nighttime backgrounds showing white-clothed tables with wine bottles and glasses.

  “That was our hobby,” said Irena beside him, pointing to the formal pictures. “We loved dancing. Ivan was good at it, even after he lost hi
s arm: it’s difficult to balance without an arm but he learned how it was possible. We could dance so well, my holding him, not he holding me, that people never realised his deformity. In the darkness, people often didn’t see that I’d been burned, either.”

  Irena gestured him towards the couch that ran the length of the main window and Charlie hesitated before it, able easily to see the telephone box he’d used for their contact, understanding how she’d been able so safely to see him and know he was alone.

  “Would you like a drink?” she asked, indicating the decanter on the open-fronted cabinet.

  The vodka was the yellow of home distillation, as it had been in the café. “I’d prefer to see what you were keeping for Ivan.”

  She was back very quickly from what Charlie assumed to be the only bedroom, carrying a large manila envelope, inside of which were four separate, smaller envelopes in which Charlie guessed Oskin had divided what he’d discovered in the archives more easily to smuggled from the Lubyanka headquarters of the FSB. Each was marked by a symbol Charlie didn’t understand until he’d taken out the A4-sized contents and realized the markings indicated a sequence, glad he’d kept the packages separate and was able at once to restore each batch to its original envelope.

  The material was photocopies of raw but code-deciphered traffic, the majority cable transmissions interspersed by handwritten telephone or radio communication. The cabled messages were both timed and dated, enabling continuity, but some of the handwritten notes on them were not and Charlie was even more relieved that he had not mixed up the order. If he had compiled it all together, with no way of knowing how Oskin had established his sequence, it might have actually been impossible ever to work out what the Russian believed to be his sensational discovery.

  Every printed cable and every handwritten note or memorandum was stamped with the highest security restriction, with its access and readership strictly limited to specifically code-named individuals, both inside the Lubyanka and the sending and receiving field stations. Each code-hidden individual had personally signed their code designation for receipt and dispatch and each inscription had additionally been time stamped. Every document was heavily annotated, and every annotation and comment again personally marked.

  There were, in total, thirty-two A4-sized sheets but Oskin had sometimes arranged as many as six original cable slips or handwritten notes on one sheet, both to create some further chronological continuity and to minimize the bulk of what he took from the headquarters building at the end of each smuggling day.

  It took Charlie only minutes to locate from the cable dates the first envelope in the series and put the following three into sequential order and from those dates to realize that the material was not confined to a strict period of time but covered, in total, a possible range of eighteen years, beginning with a cable sent on December 15, 1991. The date of the final cable was July 24, 2006. At once Charlie was swamped by several realizations, the excitement moving through him. Although at that moment he hadn’t the slightest idea of its importance, he was physically holding material, albeit once removed from its finger-touched original, not just of a well established and entrenched Russian intelligence operation of the highest, your Eyes Only secrecy, but one that could conceivably be currently ongoing: two entire pages in the last batch were crowded with a total of fourteen undated and momentarily incomprehensible telephone and internal memorandum slips.

  Throughout Charlie’s initial examination, Irena sat motionless and unspeaking on the nearest chair, her entire concentration upon him. As he looked up, she said: “Well?”

  “I’ve got a lot of copied documents the significance of which mean absolutely nothing to me,” began Charlie. So secret were the transmissions that every dispatching rezidentura was encoded, in addition to everyone mentioned in every exchange.

  “No higher security designation has ever been used before, not by the KGB or any of its predecessors,” declared Irena. “That’s what Ivan told me.”

  “I haven’t properly read—and even less understood—a single thing I’ve looked at yet. But if I had the slightest idea even after a dozen readings—no matter how many dozens of times and how many readings—it would still and will always remain meaningless without the identifying code key to those involved and of the various overseas stations, over what seems to be a period of more than fifteen years.”

  “You telling me it’s useless?” demanded Irena, anguished.

  “I’m telling you nothing of the sort,” denied Charlie. “I’m not telling you anything, in fact, that you haven’t already told me—without the code key it’s useless: impossible to understand. And probably always will be. At this level of security, it’ll be a code known to half a dozen people, probably electronically changed during transmission from the code grid in which it was sent to that by which it was received.”

  “Your people have got computer as well as human code breakers.”

  “I’ll need to take it all, even for them to try.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll keep my promises. All of them.”

  “You talked earlier about our understanding each other?”

  “Yes?” agreed Charlie.

  “I want you to understand totally everything I want.”

  “Yes?” repeated Charlie, the curiosity deepening at another topsy-turvy change.

  “What is going to happen to Ivan’s body?”

  Charlie, who was rarely rendered speechless, was stunned by the question. “I’ve no idea,” he finally groped.

  “The Russians—the FSB—have it? Along with their bullshit story of drug smuggling gangs?”

  “Yes,” stumbled Charlie, for the third time.

  “They’ll toss Ivan’s body into an unmarked grave. Or maybe not even bother, just incinerate it without even a proper crematorium. I want Ivan properly laid to rest.”

  “What are you asking me to do, Irena?” demanded Charlie, striving for control. “You can’t take custody of the body, even though Ivan’s wife is dead. You’re not legally next of kin. And by trying, you’d identify yourself.”

  “His body was found in the British embassy,” set out Irena, her argument clearly prepared. “At your press conference you twice, maybe even more than twice, explained British participation resulted from the embassy technically being British not Russian territory. I’ve done research. A body found on British territory is, again technically, the responsibility of Britain, whatever its nationality. I want Ivan’s body given back to the embassy and repatriated to England, for a proper, civilized burial. In return for what I am letting you have I want enough money to live well, if not in luxury, which Ivan promised. I want to live in London or wherever Ivan is buried, so that I can mourn at his grave every day for the rest of my life.”

  “That is . . .” started Charlie.

  “. . . what I want,” finished Irena. “Make it happen for me.”

  Charlie ignored the waiting messages and contact-insistences waiting for him, descending at once to his communications cell in which he remained for more than three hours recounting the approach and final encounter with Irena Novikov, up to and including her concluding asylum demands. He also attached scanned copies of the thirty-two pages of the stolen KGB and FSB material, designating Director-General Aubrey Smith the sole your Eyes Only recipient. He did so with increasing reluctance, pridefully, even conceitedly, wishing he could have kept everything to himself until he was able to deliver a complete and comprehending solution to the murder investigation and the eighteen-year-plus Russian intelligence operation. But with professional objectivity, he accepted that he couldn’t without the essential code key.

  It was not until the end of those three exhaustively concentrated hours that Charlie allowed himself to think beyond the topmost secret Russian intelligence material and its potential significance, to his physical possession and the overwhelming need for it to be totally safeguarded. In normal circumstances that would not have been a consideration, let alone a problem
, but with an apparent spy still deeply embedded within the embassy, circumstances were far from normal. There was no one that he could trust. Except, as always, himself. But that would require his permanently carrying everything with him at all times, as he’d briefly carried it from Irena’s apartment, by taxi to avoid the constant danger of Metro pickpockets if not physical attack and robbery as the assassinated Sergei Pavel had been searched, if not actually robbed.

  To pad himself like that again would not only attract the attention of Mikhail Guzov and his watchers outside the embassy but the quizzical curiosity of everyone, including the undetected mole, inside it. To carry constantly the thirty-two sheets in a never-surrendered briefcase, an encumbrance with which he rarely bothered anyway, would create the same Russian interest and conceivably FSB robbery, either in a street or far more likely from his Savoy suite.

  Could he chance the complete opposite from permanently keeping the material with him by creating his own dead letter drop, an unguarded, insecure hiding place known only to himself? Dead letter boxes, contact caches between spy and controller, were tried and trusted tradecraft facilities which Charlie had utilized but never trusted, but from which, in objective honesty, he had never once lost an exchange.

  Not a decision he had immediately to make, Charlie reminded himself. Tonight and tomorrow, every available minute of which was going to be devoted to Ivan Oskin’s hoard, a briefcase would go unnoticed. As anxious as he was to start his examination, Charlie hoped that any waiting calls wouldn’t take much time or throw any surprises.

  It didn’t take long to be disappointed.

  “It will probably go beyond postponement,” announced Mikhail Guzov when Charlie asked the obvious question. “Everything’s resolved, after all. The thought now is to let the court hearing provide all the answers.”

  Charlie’s instant thought was of the disposal of Ivan Oskin’s body and Irena’s determination that the murdered man should be buried in England. His next and almost as quick awareness was that it would spare him the Russian’s intended humiliation. “There are still a lot of questions to which I don’t have answers.”