“I got you called back the first time and as far as I can remember you called me a bastard for doing so,” recalled Charlie. “Why are you warning me like this?”
Paula-Jane smiled, extending her wineglass to be filled. “I still think you’re a bastard and I wouldn’t trust you if the Pope gave you a personal reference. But you were being professional, putting me back in front of Robertson’s people. I accept that now although I didn’t at the time. What I don’t accept is a colleague, even a bastard of a colleague, being set up as Robertson is trying to set you up to cover the fact he can’t do the job he’s been sent here to do.”
“That’s very altruistic.”
“I’d like to think it’s me being professional.”
“Can’t Robertson do his job?”
“He hasn’t caught our spy, has he?”
“I don’t know. Hasn’t he?”
She frowned, pained. “We’d know, believe me!”
“Thank you, for the warning.”
“You are a bastard, aren’t you? I’m not trying to make you into a friend, just to get a free lunch,” said the woman, retreating into her more usual shell.
“I didn’t mean to sound as I just did.”
“Don’t you think you’re treading a fine line, doing whatever it is you are with Svetlana Modin?” she demanded.
“Every end justifies its means.”
“If that end’s successful,” she qualified. “You think it is being successful?”
“I’m still not yet sure what the end is going to be.”
She came forward across the table, her glass cupped between both hands. “Don’t you believe your dead man was a gangster, as the Russians are saying he was?”
“I’m still trying to work through their evidence.”
“But you’re not going back to London yet?”
“I haven’t been recalled yet.”
“You think you are a decoy—me, too, I guess—for a covert operation between the Americas and people we don’t know about?”
“What’s your godfather say about that?”
“I told you, we don’t talk shop.”
“You want me to believe you haven’t asked him?”
“I mean he reminded me we don’t talk shop when I did ask him. He’s as ornery a bastard as you are.”
“I’ve been used as a decoy before,” accepted Charlie. “I didn’t know it then, any more than I know if it’s happening now.”
“Maybe I should be thanking you after all, for keeping me at arm’s length.”
“I thought you already have,” said Charlie.
“So now I’m thanking you again.”
“Which makes us equally grateful, one to the other.”
“What are you going to do about Robertson?”
“Watch my back, which as you know I always do,” shrugged Charlie, gesturing for the bill.
Paula-Jane grimaced rather than smiled. “I can’t tell you how much you remind me of Bill! And lunch was exceptional.”
“I thought so, too,” said Charlie, wondering if Paula-Jane meant it for the same reasons as he did.
The fuller smile came when Charlie picked up the briefcase as he straightened from the table. “Now that’s one way you didn’t remind me of Bill, until now. I never had you pegged as a briefcase man.”
“It’s the militia material I told you I was working through. I need to keep it secure and I don’t have a proper office or an available safe.”
“We’ve got an office safe that’s as secure as Fort Knox, for Christ’s sake!”
“Maybe I could use it when I’ve finished what I have to do,” said Charlie.
“It’s not looking hopeful,” announced Aubrey Smith. “The Americans seem to be using at least three different ciphers, with no obvious linking connection even when they switch between them. Some code-breakers even likened it to ENIGMA, unbreakable without the key.”
“I’d hoped we’d moved forward a long way since the Second World War!” criticized Charlie, disappointed.
“It was the best example they could think of to illustrate their difficulty without possessing the key,” dismissed the Director-General. “The one advance is that we think AJAX is the CIA director.”
“Which would explain the involvement of the KGB chairman,” suggested Charlie, thinking back to his earlier uncertainty. “Like for like.”
“Exactly, if we’re right,” agreed Smith. “Anything more from your end?”
Charlie shifted in the claustrophobic cubicle, unsure how far he could stretch his response. He still hadn’t properly thought through the conversation with Paula-Jane, nor had he completely read Mikhail Guzov’s invented murder case file. He said, “I’ve got to finish what the Russians claim to be their murder solution—the medical stuff particularly—to see if there’s anything I can use to get Ivan’s body.”
“Copy it all to me here,” ordered Smith. “You really think they’ll surrender Oskin’s body, even if you find enough to challenge them? And agree to it coming back here, for whatever supposed reason?”
“No,” admitted Charlie, flatly. “Neither do I think Irena will cooperate anymore if we don’t have some hope to offer her.”
“She’s already given us what Ivan stole from the archive.”
“But that . . .” started Charlie, but was stopped by a sudden thought.
“What?” demanded the Director-General, when Charlie didn’t continue.
“I wasn’t thinking properly . . . it wasn’t going to make sense,” hurriedly improvised Charlie. “There doesn’t seem to be much progress in the mole hunt here?”
“That’s not your priority. Or your remit.”
“Nor’s it Robertson’s to question how and with whom I’m trying to fulfil my function here,” said Charlie. It wouldn’t be an easy contention to defend if push came to shove. Quickly, to implant the innuendo in Aubrey Smith’s mind, he added, “Unless Robertson was acting to your instructions.”
“He certainly isn’t following my instructions.”
Which meant they were from Jeffrey Smale. Charlie decided he’d got everything he wanted out of the exchange and was anxious now to pursue the thought that had belatedly occurred to him. He made an additional copy of the Russian dossier on the murder he scanned in full to London and spent the rest of the afternoon toothcombing through it himself, impressed by how well the Russians had fictitiously woven the murder and dumping of Ivan Oskin’s body into the drug-trafficking gang’s arrest and claimed retribution killing of Sergei Pavel. Charlie believed he found four discrepancies in the Oskin medical evidence, but judged none sufficient to mount an effective, body-disposing challenge, particularly keeping in mind his conviction that the Russians could—and undoubtedly would—confront him in return with the blood fabrication.
He divided his growing bulk of material between his briefcase and the fortunately concertina-sided folder in which the murder files had been delivered, and after filling the briefcase, carefully rearranged its combination lock numerals, getting to Paula-Jane Venables’s office just after five.
“I decided to use your safe for my briefcase,” he told her.
“Cleared an entire shelf for you,” said the woman, her back to him as she opened it. Over her shoulder, she said: “The combination is 61617E.”
“I won’t open it without your being present,” promised Charlie.
“What about the folder?” she asked, nodding to what Charlie still had under his arm.
“Stuff I’ve still got to go through,” said Charlie.
Irena answered on the second ring, the uncertainty obvious despite her usual hoarseness. He said, “I need to see you.”
“I’ve just got in from work. Where are you?”
“In a call box. I’ve just left the embassy.” He hadn’t anticipated a Metro madrigal today, he remembered.
“Is everything arranged?”
“No.”
“What is it then?”
“I have to see you,” he repe
ated. A means justifying an end, Charlie thought again, reminded of his need to talk to Svetlana Modin.
“Where?”
“Your apartment.”
“What if . . .”
“I’ll be clear.”
“I’m frightened.”
“I’ll be there in an hour,” said Charlie, knowing that wasn’t the reassurance she’d wanted. Knowing, too, that he should feel a shit, which he didn’t.
31
Irena Novikov perched on the very edge of the window-fronting couch like a frightened bird about to burst into flight, both hands gripped tightly in her lap but unable to stop the fear twitching through her, a nervous tic pulling at the corner of her mouth on the unmarked side of her face. Her eyes were fixed on the folder that Charlie left very visibly on his lap. “There is a problem?”
“A big one.” Charlie was wedged on the straight-backed chair, its discomfort matching the ache from his protesting feet at the pursuit-dodging underground train ritual. He was sure he’d identified two people—a man and a woman, working separately—who’d kept up with him for four route switches before he’d managed to lose them, convincing him that the surveillance manpower had been at least doubled to defeat his evasion.
“What?”
“We can’t break the code. There’s more than one, each of which needs separate unconnected ciphers. And there’s obviously a further cipher—again, maybe even more than one—necessary to identify the participants. Without all the keys, we can’t open any doors.”
“Which proves how important it is: sensational, like Ivan said,” insisted the woman. She lighted a cigarette.
“It isn’t anything unless we can read it: understand it all.”
“What about your code-breakers? They must have decoded something!”
“Ivan must have told you more?” coaxed Charlie, avoiding her question.
She hesitated, the nerve in her cheek tugging her mouth into an unintended smirk. “He said Cairo was involved.”
“So he must also have told you a lot of the stuff was CIA traffic? That’s where a lot of it came from, the CIA station in Cairo.”
“He told me some of the early stuff was.” She lit another cigarette from the butt of that she’d almost finished, coughing.
“Told you? Or showed you?”
“Told me . . . showed me some things.” Her voice was almost inaudible now.
“He also told you it was sensational?”
“Yes.”
“Why was it sensational?” pressed Charlie. “He must have told you why!”
Irena shook her head. “I told you. He said it was too dangerous for me to know.”
“Irena, I don’t think you’re telling me the whole truth.” Charlie very carefully kept his voice flat, hinting no irritation or annoyance.
She sat, avoiding his eyes, for several moments before her lips moved, as if forming words, but there was no sound.
“I didn’t hear what you said, Irena?”
“People,” she managed, in a hoarse whisper.
“What about people?”
“That’s why it is sensational. Because of the people it is about.”
“Who are they, these people it is all about? What are their names?”
The woman shook her head, the first forcefulness since she’d let him into the apartment. “No! He wouldn’t tell me any names. That’s what I couldn’t know, to keep me safe. Any names.”
“You read it all, didn’t you?” Charlie openly accused. “Ivan didn’t show you some; he showed you all of it, didn’t he? And you looked at it all again, after he was murdered and you’d recognized he was the victim from the description at the press conference from which you got my number?”
The silence lasted much longer this time. At one point, Irena’s shoulders started to heave and Charlie was frightened she was going to collapse, but she didn’t, although when she looked up her eyes were red from the nearness of tears. “He showed me everything and I looked at it all again, when I knew it was Ivan who’d been killed. But I couldn’t read it because I didn’t have the ciphers to understand it!”
Charlie didn’t speak immediately, either, knowing the importance of every word in every phrase from now on. “Then there’s no way forward. We’re beaten.”
“No!” Irena protested. “Your code-breakers and analysts haven’t had it long enough! They’ve got computer systems that can do things, calculate things, in seconds. They’ll break it, in time! They’ve got to!”
“In time, maybe,” agreed Charlie, stressing the doubt.
“What have your people said in London? About me; about what I asked in return for giving you what I had?”
“Everything’s possible, once they know what they’re rewarding you for. Which brings us back to time. You know how the Russians are trying to close everything down. Officially there’s no reason for me to stay any longer in Moscow, if we publicly accept their story. And I’ve got nothing with which to challenge their nonsense. And if I’m recalled, with me goes your contact . . . your only chance”—Charlie hesitated, in brief reluctance, before offering the folder across the narrow space between them—“which is why I’ve brought Ivan’s material back to you.”
For a moment Irena remained staring in astonishment. “You’re not going to do anything? But—”
“London has a copy of everything, of course. And they’ll go on trying but I don’t know for how long . . . if they’ll ever break it.”
Irena hesitantly accepted the package, gazing disbelievingly down at it. “I thought your experts would work it out . . . that it was the way . . .”
“So did I,” said Charlie, moving to get up from the uncomfortable chair.
Irena finally burst into tears, hunched forward over the folder, rocking back and forth.
“I’m sorry,” said Charlie, moving toward the door.
“Don’t go,” she pleaded, and stood up.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Charlie demanded, when he finished reading what she had brought from the bedroom two hours earlier.
Irena shrugged. “I thought you’d just take it. I don’t want to be abandoned. I want to be helped.”
There was nothing to be achieved by scolding her. He had it now. Everything. Not everything, he immediately corrected himself. “I’ll buy you a ticket: a return, as if you’re coming back. And get you a new passport, with a visa we can attach in London. I don’t want you coming into the embassy. It’s under media siege.”
“No. I don’t think I could do that.”
“I’ll need a photograph.”
She began gnawing at her lip. “I don’t have one.”
“You must have something! We can enhance it in London if it’s not very good.”
She shook her head.
“There’s photographs of you there,” reminded Charlie, pointing to the shrine and its selection of pictures of her and Ivan together. “We’d have to cut Ivan out.”
Irena hesitated. “All right. Then what?”
“I’ll call. Give you flight numbers and tell you what to do.”
“You won’t abandon me, will you? Leave me here now that I’ve given you all I’ve got?”
“No, Irena. I promise I won’t abandon you.”
It was past midnight before Charlie finally got back to the Savoy, unencumbered any longer by the folder he had left with Irena, what little he now carried making no curious bulge inside his jacket pocket, glad in his initial moments of euphoria back at Irena’s flat that he’d resisted the impulse to alert London instantly by going directly to the embassy. There was the customary hand-holding couple in the hotel lobby and Charlie was sure others watching the embassy would have inferred from such a late return that he had something so vital it had to be reported to London at once. To prevent such an assumption, Charlie sidestepped into the bar and ordered vodka that—unusually—he didn’t want. Nothing could have improved his total exhilaration.
Which, unplanned though it was, made the bar stop a good idea: his
first place and opportunity to sit and think beyond his almost unbelievable awareness. Ivan Oskin had been right—close to being terrifyingly right—in assessing as sensational what he’d found in KGB archives: could it, Charlie wondered, be too sensational? Not his question to consider. Or answer. His remit, the remit he’d insisted upon the Director-General acknowledging not that many hours earlier, was to solve the murder of Ivan Nikolaevich Oskin. Which, Charlie accepted, he hadn’t done. Nor would he ever be able to solve it. What he had discovered was the reason for the poor, overconfident, desperate man’s savage killing and doubtless prior, although unsuccessful, torture. Had Irena come close to guessing the unspeakable agonies Ivan Oskin must have endured without disclosing the whereabouts of what his captors would have been so frantically determined to recover?
Charlie resolved to make her understand: not the horror which would have been so bad that even Charlie didn’t think himself capable of fully imagining it. What he’d try to make her understand was how much Ivan must have loved her to have resisted until he’d died rather than tell them where their secret was hidden.
And where it remained hidden, with Irena, because her unknown apartment was still the most secure place until he got her safely hidden away, beyond their reach and vengeance.
Charlie wished he was more confident of doing that. He’d studied her existing Russian passport and was sure that what he had, snug in his inside pocket, was sufficient for what he immediately had to do. His uncertainty was whether Irena could hang on as long as she had to for him to get her safely away from Moscow. His greatest uncertainty was whether he could satisfy everything she wanted, even after that.
The false lovers were still in the lobby when Charlie left the bar after the second vodka. It wasn’t until he got to his suite that Charlie abruptly remembered something else that Irena would insist upon, prompted, he supposed, by their charade. His painfully arduous and increasingly dangerous train hopping wasn’t over after all. The familiar warning throb from his left instep told him that he’d overlooked something. And it was essential that he didn’t overlook anything.
Red Star Rising Page 33