“The majority decision was that we couldn’t let an opportunity like this pass. It got to prime minister–to–president level. We’ve been cut in on the deal.”
“We’re going to handle Lvov jointly?” asked Charlie, wanting, as always, to know it all.
“That’s the undertaking.”
“The Americans wouldn’t share anything of this magnitude,” insisted Charlie. “They’ll cheat and lie: give us just enough to make us think we’re included and possibly use us for misinformation, to provide Lvov with extra cover.”
“I agree and said so, at every meeting of the Cabinet and the Joint Intelligence Committee,” said Smith. “I told you it was a majority decision. Mine was the minority, dissenting opinion.”
“Who led the majority argument?”
“Jeffrey Smale, no longer the deputy Director-General. In a fortnight his promotion to director will be confirmed, after his return from Washington to sign and seal the deal.”
“What about the embassy murder?” asked Charlie, resigned to the answer but building in time to think.
“We accept the Russian version, and let the frenzy die down and for everything to be forgotten.”
“It’s still an unsolved murder!” protested Charlie.
“He’s a small-time, unimportant KGB clerk, whose mistress is going to live in luxury and safety for the rest of her life,” corrected the soon-to-be former Director-General, unusually harsh.
“There’s still a mole inside the Moscow embassy,” reminded Charlie.
“To find who it is, Robertson will remain in Moscow and keep searching. And while he does, personnel replacement will be accelerated: a year from now those in any sensitive position will have been moved if Robertson fails.”
“This isn’t right,” declared Charlie. “None of this is right.”
“Too many things too often aren’t,” agreed Smith, with no way of properly understanding Charlie’s outburst. Charlie didn’t understand it himself at that moment: it was an involuntary remark to himself—a warning—he had to work out.
He needed a break; time to sift the uncertainties flooding in upon him. He wasn’t uncertain about one thing Smith was telling him, though. “What are you going to do?”
“Grow roses in Sussex,” said the man, smiling wanly. “And you will definitely get the commendation, I promise you. It automatically guarantees your promotion to Grade IV, with an additional £5,000 a year pension entitlement.”
“Thank you,” said Charlie. It was hardly a devastating end, he accepted philosophically. With Natalia and Sasha soon to be here with him, it was, rather, a decision made for him instead of having finally to make it for himself. This way he would leave the organization and finish up £5,000 a year better off. So why didn’t he take the easy way out and let the inconsistencies go? Because it wasn’t right. Believing America would keep its promise wasn’t right and a lot of what had happened in Moscow wasn’t right, and how he’d thought he’d worked everything out wasn’t right, and because he now didn’t understand any of it anymore and he didn’t know what to do to make it right.
“I’m sorry, Charlie,” apologized Smith. “It’ll look bad, publicly, because of all your exposure. But that same publicity would have made things operationally limiting for you, from now on.”
“What about Irena?” Charlie asked, anxious to get some order into his confusion. “Does everything I agreed stay, as far as Irena is concerned?”
“Absolutely,” guaranteed Smith. “That stuff you shipped back under the diplomatic seal is in the vault, by the way. Under your name and release authority.”
“And Jack Hopkins?”
The Director-General looked blankly across his desk.
“The driver who was crippled instead of me, being driven off the embankment road?” prompted Charlie.
The other man’s face cleared. “Full pension and medical support, for life. An ex gratia payment of £25,000.”
“I’m glad about that,” said Charlie.
One of the several working condition improvements Charlie had enjoyed under Aubrey Smith’s patronage was a single-occupancy, senior grade office, and Charlie had been there for only fifteen minutes, running all the thoughts and half thoughts through his mind when a call on the dedicated line from Aubrey Smith’s office broke into his reflections.
“Seems there’s a bit of a problem,” announced Smith. “Irena seems satisfied enough with her safe house but she’s refusing to undergo any debriefing until she’s talked to you about what she gave you.”
“That’s not right,” said Charlie, a man reciting a litany.
“I don’t want anything to go wrong with the handover to Smale; give an impression of sour grapes,” said Smith, ignoring Charlie’s insistent interjection. “You’re still officially her Control. Can you sort it out?”
“I intend to,” said Charlie.
“Never expected—or wanted—to hear from you again,” greeted Jack Smethwick, when Charlie identified himself on the telephone. “I submitted a disassociation report, like I told you I would after all that bullshit you had me set up.”
“This is much easier,” Charlie assured the forensic scientist.
“I’ll protest again if it’s not; I’m definitely not falsifying anything else.”
“I’m not asking you to,” said Charlie. “It shouldn’t take you longer than an hour.”
It didn’t. Neither did the next telephone call Charlie made.
34
“I expected you yesterday!” complained Irena, the moment Charlie entered the room.
“I sent you a message that there were some things I had to sort out,” reminded Charlie, aware how cautious he had to be. “I’m here now.”
“I don’t understand why I had to wait until tonight, either. Or why I have been brought here,” she continued, waving her hand toward the obvious recording apparatus on the table separating them. “This is a debriefing room, with the exception of that television, which I also don’t understand. I’ve told you everything I know; given you all I had.”
“You know the bureaucracy of these things,” said Charlie, soothingly, spreading out his hands in apparent helplessness. “You wanted to see me?”
“Ivan’s things; all my memories and mementos. You said you’d get them here for me but they weren’t here when I arrived. I want them with me, as I had them in Moscow.”
“I’ve got them,” promised Charlie.
Irena smiled, unexpectedly, her familiar tension lessening. “I was frightened something might have happened to them when they weren’t here.”
“They’re all safe.”
“I’m sorry I was rude, just then. But they’re all I have . . . they’re my life, what life I’ve got left, I suppose. Can I have them? I’d like to set everything up, as I had it all in Moscow.”
“I first want you to see something that’s very important,” said Charlie, picking up the television control box. He estimated that he had an hour—ninety minutes tops—and the recording ran for ten minutes. Could he get it all, in that time? If he didn’t he could, quite easily, be a dead man: he’d never gambled as desperately as this in his entire life and hoped it wasn’t showing.
The room was filled with the familiar theme tune introducing ORT’s nightly news, backing a montage of Svetlana Modin’s recent exclusives before dissolving into a wide, outside broadcast shot of the anchorwoman with the British Houses of Parliament in her background, tightening down into a close-up of Svetlana’s face.
“As you can see from the buildings behind me, I am broadcasting by satellite tonight from London, England, a country so recently the subject of so much mystery, intrigue, and speculation from Moscow, following the unexplained murder in its embassy grounds there. Tonight I can solve that mystery, identify the victim, and disclose the most sensational story in the history of modern—or even premodern—Russia. It is that Stepan Grigorevich Lvov, until tonight and until this revelation so confidently predicted to become the next president of
the Russian Federation, is and has for almost two decades been an agent of America’s Central Intelligence Agency. A spy against the very country he wanted to lead . . .”
Irena broke away from the hypnotism of the TV screen to look at Charlie, bulging eyed, the nervous tic pulling at her open mouth, which moved but from which no words came.
“Had Lvov attained that presidency then he—and the Russian Federation—would have become puppets performing in whatever way the strings were pulled by the president of the United States of America, reducing our great country to a vassal, jump-to-order client state . . .” Svetlana was saying.
The British picture dissolved into a compilation of library footage, dominated by film of Lvov at crowded rallies, at the hijacked Russian press conference giving his undertaking of openness and cooperation with America, and at the funeral of Sergei Pavel, all the time with Svetlana’s voice relayed over. She identified Ivan Oskin as a long-serving Russian intelligence agent and Afghan war hero, who discovered evidence of Lvov’s treachery in KGB and FSB records but of his having been detected and murdered by an American assassination team as he tried to reach the sanctuary of the British embassy, believing as he had that it was impossible for Lvov to be working alone but supported by a major but unidentified cabal of suborned Russian spies deep within the Lubyanka. The outside broadcast returned to Svetlana, holding up to the camera a sheet of paper she claimed to be the evidence of secret CIA cables identifying Lvov’s code name as ICON. Svetlana concluded that she was broadcasting from London because she’d feared the Lubyanka cabal would have prevented her transmitting from Moscow.
“She was right about that,” remarked Charlie, conversationally, inwardly in turmoil at twenty-five minutes having passed since his entry into the room. “That was the full transcript. What was being shown in Moscow was blacked out after about four minutes, just enough time to identify Lvov as a CIA agent and to name Oskin. But the satellite feed came from London and went out worldwide, translated and uncensored to all the TV stations who’d bought the transmission—blind, before its broadcast—on the reputation of her previous exclusives. . . .”
“Do you realize . . . have any conception . . . the destruction . . .” Irena groped, no coherent thought held in her mind.
My destruction uppermost, thought Charlie, completing the woman’s thought. “I think I do. I was close to missing it because like everyone else I missed the little things and as an actress you were phenomenal. If you hadn’t been so anxious to get your phony shrine back, so that you could destroy it, you would probably have gotten away with it. The message I got was that you wanted the things you’d given me, meaning what I shipped here for you. But then I remembered you gave me the ciphers for the transmitted CIA cables. Which wouldn’t have been in the KGB archives, so conveniently close to the cables themselves, would they? It would be unthinkable for them to be together even in an ongoing operation, precisely because it would make it all so easy to understand, as it was easy for me virtually to understand. . . .”
“You’re talking in riddles . . . not making sense.”
“I think I am making sense, Irena, although that isn’t your real name, is it? That phony shrine, which totally fooled me, was your only danger, wasn’t it? I’d missed your having the ciphers ready to convince me further and I really did think your shrine was genuine. . . .” Come on, Charlie thought, for Christ’s sake, break! Forty minutes had already gone by.
“You’re mad . . . gone mad,” accused Irena, shaking her head.
“Our forensic people thought all the memorabilia was put together brilliantly,” continued Charlie, as if she had not spoken. “Those superimposed photographs of you and Ivan together were fantastic. They really did look as if you and he were a genuine couple. Did you ever really know him? You weren’t ever in Cairo together—that camel-skin case was a clever prop, by the way—because we named everyone who was there and they were all men. An oversight but again, one that would have been easily missed.”
“Stop it!” demanded the woman.
“None of it would have amounted to a row of beans without your shrine, though. You totally convinced me it was your altar to the man you loved. But then I thought back to the picture I had to have for your passport. That wasn’t your real apartment—I realize now it was an FSB operational nest—and you wouldn’t have had any individual photographs of yourself there. But instead of promising to find one the following day, you let me cut up one supposedly of you and Ivan together, in happy times. That was your one mistake, although again I didn’t realize it at the time, only when other things didn’t knit together. Loving him as you convinced me you did, you’d never have let me destroy a picture of you and him together, but you were thinking more of how cutting it up would destroy the evidence of it having been doctored photographically to join you and him together. Which it did. It wasn’t until all the other stuff was looked at scientifically that I worked it out.” When the hell was she going to crack and fill in all the missing bits!
“I want help . . . someone to get me away from you.”
“We’ll send you back to Moscow, of course. We’ve got everything we can possibly get from you. There’re no more flights tonight—I’ve checked—but there’s plenty tomorrow.”
“No!” she said, her tone audibly different.
He was getting there! Shouldn’t rush. “Irena—it’s easier to go on calling you that—now it’s you who isn’t making sense. Why should we keep you here . . . look after you here . . . knowing what we know now?”
“They’ll think I told you, not that you worked it out; had the sense to have that fucking shrine forensically examined,” blurted the woman.
He’d got her! “Not my problem. You’ve got nothing more to give me.”
“Yes, I have. You haven’t got the half of it. I’ve got all of it.”
It took her thirty minutes, running right up to his longest time estimate, and throughout it Charlie remained coiled spring–tight, tensed for the interruption that might still have ruined everything but never came.
When she finished he got as far as, “You’ll get everything I promised you. What I—” before the door burst open and the room was suddenly crowded with men.
To Charlie, the leading arresting officer said, “We’ve got you, you bastard!”
One of Charlie’s many fears was that he’d be interrogated at the American embassy where he would probably have been denied any opportunity to speak. He wasn’t, although there was little comfort in his being taken to an anonymous hut complex at the security-restricted RAF base at Northolt, on the outskirts of London, with the obvious threat of his being put aboard an always-denied CIA rendition flight to the United States or, worse, with Islamic terror suspects to one of the torture destination flights to Romania or Albania.
But at least it appeared that Jeffrey Smale was chairing the panel of eight unidentified men confronting him. The deputy director was the only man Charlie recognized apart from the Director-General himself. Aubrey Smith was not part of the examining group but ostracized to one side, like a fellow defendant. From the way they were dressed, at least three of the men facing him were American. Charlie’s reassurance came from the operator hunched at the recording apparatus on its separate table and that in their urgency to get him before a kangaroo court, his arresting officers had not searched him to discover the video he had extracted from its debriefing-room recording machine seconds before they had swept into the room in which he’d been with Irena.
“Normal formalities are being dispensed with,” announced Smale, his usually red, blood-pressured face purple with unsuppressed fury. “You have knowingly wrecked an intelligence operation twenty years in its planning and execution, and caused incalculable harm and damage to the United States of America and to this country. Any recovery or salvation of that operation is impossible but you will provide, immediately, the names of all others with whom you are in contact for them to be detained as soon as possible. Is that clear to you?”
There was at least a full minute of total silence before the man next to Smale exploded in an accent confirming Charlie’s American recognition: “For Christ’s sake, what’s happening here?”
Aware of at least six of the arresting officers grouped in a semicircle behind him Charlie extended his arms fully in front of him and said, “In my right, inside jacket pocket is the recording of my debriefing of the woman known as Irena Novikov. If you will not allow me to take it out, to be played to you, I ask that someone does it for me.”
“Stay as you are!” came the command behind him and a hand was thrust roughly into his jacket. The man who’d called Charlie a bastard came into view, examining the disc. To Smale, the security officer said, “It’s a recording, not a weapon.”
“Start it as eighty-four on the use register,” Charlie told the recording technician, at Smale’s nod of agreement.
Into the room came Charlie’s voice: You’ve got nothing more to give me.
Then Irena’s: Yes I have. You haven’t got the half of it. I’ve got it all.
Charlie: That’s what it’s got to be. All of it.
Irena: It’s my only operation, ever. A lifetime’s work, all gone.
Charlie: I’m waiting.
There was no hint of the anxiousness he’d been feeling, decided Charlie, satisfied.
Irena: The Americans were wrong, as they so often are, about my not having been in Cairo. They simply didn’t identify me. Valeri Voznoy wasn’t the KGB station chief. I was. My cover was a typist. It was my idea, all of it, after Vladimir Putin left the KGB and became the Russian president. Why can’t we become president of the United States of America? I thought. That was my concept. And I chose Lvov, too. We were lovers even then. Bundy was the CIA’s Cairo station chief—a laugh—That was our first success, making Bundy into the supposed Russian expert, feeding him whatever we wanted. It was genuine stuff, of course, but low level. Everywhere Lvov went, Bundy was transferred with him: the CIA was convinced Lvov was theirs and Bundy was his Control. Lvov fed him the idea of going into politics, using Putin as an example and the stupid bastards fell over themselves: over maybe ten years they’ve paid us over $20,000,000, all of which has gone into other operations against them—another laugh—Christ, they’re so gullible and stupid.
Red Star Rising Page 36