Red Star Rising
Authors: Brian Freemantle
RED STAR RISING
ALSO IN BRIAN FREEMANTLE’S CHARLIE MUFFIN SERIES
Kings of Many Castles
Dead Men Living
Bomb Grade
Charlie’s Apprentice
Comrade Charlie
The Run Around
See Charlie Run
The Blind Run
Madrigal for Charlie Muffin
Charlie Muffin’s Uncle Sam
The Inscrutable Charlie Muffin
Here Comes Charlie M
Charlie M
BRIAN FREEMANTLE
RED STAR RISINGTHOMAS DUNNE BOOKS
ST. MARTIN’S PRESS 
NEW YORK
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS
.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
RED STAR RISING
. Copyright © 2010 by Innslodged Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Freemantle, Brian.
Red star rising / Brian Freemantle.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-31553-5 (alk. paper)
1. Muffin, Charlie (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Intelligence service—Fiction. 3. British—Russia—Fiction. 4. Moscow (Russia)—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6056.R43R43 2010
823'.914—dc22
2009047573
First Edition: August 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For the real Paula-Jane.
And for DV, for whom there was no named part but in thanks for his generosity to Naomi House Children’s Hospice.
You cannot have people assassinated on British soil and then discover that we wish to arrest someone who is in another country and not be in a position to do so.
—British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, commenting on July 23, 2007, upon the refusal of then Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin to extradite former KGB agent, Andrei Lugovoy, for trial for the murder in London by radioactive polonium-210 poisoning of former KGB colleague, Alexander Litvinenko, November 23, 2006
They [Britain] are making proposals to change our constitution that are insulting for our nation and our people. It’s their brains, not our constitution, which needs to be changed . . . they forget that Britain is no longer a colonial power and that Russia was never their colony.
—Then Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin’s rejection of the British extradition request for Andrei Lugovoy, July 25, 2007
The cynical murder of my son was a calculated act of intimidation. I have no doubt that he was killed by the FSB [successor to the KGB] and that the orders came from the former KGB spy, President Vladimir Putin. He was the only person who could have given that order. I haven’t a shadow of doubt that this was done by Putin’s men.
—Walter Litvinenko, December 16, 2006
I will not rest until justice has been done.
—Marina Litvinenko, widow of Alexander Litvinenko, May 23, 2007
RED STAR RISING
Charlie Muffin decided it was a toss-up between the British embassy’s third secretary or the Russian Foreign Ministry official who’d be the first to throw up or simply faint. Or messily do both, not necessarily in any order. Charlie didn’t feel that good himself. It had been a busy, largely sleepless forty-eight hours since his emergency London assigning, and he’d never liked mortuaries anyway. The unease wasn’t helped by a mortuary assistant four autopsy tables away, munching a meat-overflowing sandwich. The grayness of the sandwich filling matched the color of the surrounding corpses, including that of the man around whom they were grouped.
From the size of the entry wound in the base of the skull, Charlie calculated the bullet was from a Russian-manufactured 9mm Makarov, its tip cut into a dum-dum cross to flatten on initial impact in order to take away on exit the entire face, including both jawbones. The fingertips on the right hand had individually been burned away, either by acid or heat. The pathologist, a fat, dough-faced man who hadn’t been introduced by name, declared the amputation of the left arm to have been a surgical operation, carried out several years earlier. “But not particularly well,” he added, professionally critical. “A hurried job.”
“It’s obviously a gangland execution,” announced the only Russian whose name Charlie knew so far. Sergei Romanovich Pavel
had been identified as a senior investigator from Moscow’s Organized Crime Bureau.
Charlie looked around the group, waiting for the question. When no one asked he said, “Why’s it obvious?”
“It’s a trademark killing, the way they always do it. Bullet in the back of the head, after the torture punishment for whatever he did wrong,” lectured Pavel. “You are. . . . ?”
“London-based embassy security,” said Charlie, wondering which of the men facing him across the metal slab was from the
Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti,
or FSB, which replaced the internal directorate of the former KGB. The presence of the internal intelligence agency was inevitable after the finding of a murdered man in the garden of the British embassy; Charlie guessed it to be the thin, balding man holding back from any part in the stilted discussion.