Read Red Star Rising Online

Authors: Brian Freemantle

Red Star Rising

BOOK: Red Star Rising
8.56Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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 RISING

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS
ST. MARTIN’S PRESS  
  NEW YORK

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

 

 

 

 

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.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.stmartins.com

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

1

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.

BOOK: Red Star Rising
8.56Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

In the Garden of Iden by Kage Baker
Snow Angel by Chantilly White
The Night Before Christmas by Scarlett Bailey
Theodoric by Ross Laidlaw
My Boyfriends' Dogs by Dandi Daley Mackall
Rattled by Kris Bock
When the Heavens Fall by Gilbert Morris
Too Many Clients by Stout, Rex
Mutated - 04 by Joe McKinney