Red Star Rising (12 page)

“No one
but
you,” said Perrit, a vaguely mannered, seemingly distracted man whom Charlie knew to be anything but vague or distracted.

“What about you?”

Perrit sighed, although not offended. “I didn’t give it to you, remember? You used your London password when you logged on from here and it was from London that you got your operational code. I don’t know what it is.”

“So no one here in this embassy, not even you, can read my traffic?”

“You got something specific, something
very
specific, you really want to ask me?” pointedly asked the no longer vague or distracted man, abandoning whatever it was he had been doing at another computer terminal to walk over to Charlie’s station.

He had, accepted Charlie, betrayed his knowledge of a so far undisclosed double-agent situation in exactly the same way as he’d feared Harry Fish or Paul Robertson might have let slip anything he told them about the chicanery he was orchestrating. “I was just trying to resolve a question that suddenly came to me.”

“And now that you’ve got my undivided attention, why don’t you ask me the question and let me help you answer it?” challenged the man.

“You just have,” avoided Charlie.

“I know the meaning of security,” belligerently reminded Perrit. “It’s what I’m here for.”

“My misunderstanding,” retreated Charlie. “Let’s not let things get out of proportion.”

“You’re right,” said Perrit. “Let’s not!”

Charlie was neither intimidated nor embarrassed by the confrontation—rather, he was encouraged at the confirmation of remaining out of danger—and his spirits lifted further when he finally opened his personal, Eyes Only file from the London scientist. All the false enhancement and manipulation he’d asked for, particularly on the CCTV loops, was both technically possible and technically undetectable. It did, though, require the personal authority of the Director-General.

Charlie looked up at the unexpected return of Ross Perrit, who said without any explanation or preamble, apart from indicating the single strut suspended, doubly secure box within the communications room: “You’ve got Booth Two.”

“Who’s in Booth One?” asked Charlie, instinctively.

Perrit walked away, pointedly not replying.

“I’ve spoken to Robertson,” announced the Director-General, answering Charlie’s question that Perrit had just refused. “What the hell’s happening over there!”

“Too many things, all of them too quickly one after the other.”

“Meaning?” demanded Aubrey Smith. He usually had a soft, never-surprised voice, which Charlie guessed was being stretched to the extreme.

“The embassy’s being manipulated, for a reason or reasons I don’t at the moment understand,” replied Charlie, honestly.

“You in any way compromised or endangered?”

“No,” assured Charlie at once, glad of the review time.

“Do you need backup?”

“No,” said Charlie again, the refusal more professional than self-protective. “More people would mean more confusion, which might well be one of the several intentions.” He hesitated. “On the subject of backup, David Halliday, the MI6 man here, is anxious to get involved. He told me his director was approaching you directly, to talk about it.”

“I don’t like Gerald Monsford and certainly don’t respect his judgement,” said Smith. “He did approach me. I told him no.”

“Thank you,” said Charlie. “I appreciate that.”

“But with so much dependent upon your total success, I’m unsure if you can any longer operate alone.”

“I can!” insisted Charlie.

“I’m keeping open the option of sending in a team.”

“Would I be in charge of it?” asked Charlie, desperately.

“No,” refused the other man, without any hesitation. “What’s the point of all this you’ve asked the technical division to create?”

“To avoid being excluded by the Russians claiming it’s their investigation in which we have no right of participation.”

“No,” agreed the soft-voiced man at once. “We most definitely don’t want that with everything else that’s happening there.”

“Technical say it’s got to have your personal approval.”

“It’ll be authorized the moment we conclude this conversation. I don’t like so much appearing to happen beyond our control. You any idea, the faintest suspicion, who the traitor might be?”

Charlie was caught by the pedantically correct word. “Finding whoever it is isn’t my remit.”

“Neither was it the point of my question.”

“Not yet,” prevaricated Charlie, on this occasion more for self-protection than strict professionalism. “How do I deal with it, if I become suspicious?”

“The way you’re being told right now, only and directly through me. I don’t want another quiet exchange between you, Fish, and Robertson.”

Smith was invoking the most inviolable rule of double-agent penetration, Charlie recognized: slam shut every water-tight door and not answer anyone’s knock. “I understand.”

“I hope you do. I sent you there to do a job, not to become a puppet.”

The self-directed anger at allowing himself to be sidetracked physically burned through Charlie. Robertson had occupied the adjoining compartment ahead of his, Charlie acknowledged, able to get his explanation and story in first. But to whom? Charlie opened his mouth but stopped himself, knowing to attempt a
defense would be a further mistake. “I’ll call, if there’s something positive from what I’m doing.”

“I’m expecting you to,” said the other man.

Charlie had subjugated his irritation at having made the cooperation mistake by the time he reached his rabbit-hutch office, more curious at the first than at the second of the two voice-mail messages awaiting him, although choosing to respond to the second.

“I’ve pressed the pathologist for more,” announced Pavel.

Liar, thought Charlie at once. Pavel was offering everything that had been originally available instead of the scraps the man had imagined he could get away with. But it was looking promising. “And?”

“He’s talking about some additional medical findings. And there’s a lot more photographs.”

“I’ll stop by the mortuary first thing tomorrow,” tempted Charlie.

“We could go together,” said Pavel, as Charlie had expected. “We might as well go through it all together.”

Once again bullshit had proved to be the magic fertilizer. “How about my meeting you there at ten?”

“Perfect timing for me,” agreed Pavel.

“What about the others who were there the first time?” pressed Charlie, wanting as much forewarning as possible.

“I’ll let them all know the arrangement,” promised Pavel. “I understand there’s been contact between Nikita Kashev and your embassy?”

“I haven’t heard,” said Charlie, honestly. And wouldn’t have confirmed it if I had, he thought. It had been an unthinking question, even from someone as anxious as the organized crime investigator.

“How about your scientific people in London?” Pavel pressed.

“I haven’t heard anything from them, either,” lied Charlie. Deciding, though, that he should make a gesture, he added, “I’ll
drop by the embassy before I come to the mortuary to check if anything comes in overnight.”

“It would be good to hear something that takes the investigation forward.”

It very definitely would, thought Charlie. It would be premature to become overconfident from this very preliminary conversation, but it looked as if he’d kept himself on the inside of the investigation. But in terms of practicality, the inquiry hadn’t moved a stumbling step from the finding of the body.

“Surprised to hear from you so soon after our dinner,” opened Charlie, finally responding to the other voice mail from Bundy.

“I’d welcome talking to someone whose experience and opinions I respect,” said Bundy.

Bollocks, dismissed Charlie. “Been away too long myself to get up to speed yet.”

“You certainly hit the ground at a busy time.”

“Maybe one that talking about on an open-line telephone isn’t such a good idea, unless you’re equipped with an intercept white noise cutout at your end.”

Bundy laughed. “You’re not trying to tell me you’re calling on a phone that hasn’t been swept clean enough to shine in the dark?”

I’m not but someone else already has, decided Charlie. And it was all too easy to decide who that person was. “I’m still uncomfortable after an episode like this.”

“You wouldn’t be on top of your job, which you always have been, if you weren’t more than uncomfortable,” overflattered the American. “We talked the other night about lunch. How about it?”

Charlie’s instinctive inclination was to make an excuse, just as quickly discarded. Charlie was as much a learn-everything Russophile as Bill Bundy and wanted very much to discover the reason for Bundy’s inexplicable interest in him. He was also anxious to get off the telephone and out of the embassy to make contact with Natalia. “Lunch would be good.”

“How about tomorrow? The Pekin on the ring road?”

He now had Bundy’s direct line to cancel if the mortuary visit
went on longer than he expected. “One o’clock unless I have to cry off.”

“I hope you don’t cry off,” said the American.

To make what he judged the far more important call Charlie used the same telephone kiosk farther along Smolenskaya from which he’d rearranged his dinner date with Paula-Jane, with whom he guessed he was going to have a confrontation the following day.

“How about the Botanical Gardens?” he suggested, when she answered.

He heard—or hoped he heard—her faint laugh at the venue: the gardens, with their huge cultivation greenhouses, had been one of their tryst locations when he’d first maneuverd the posting to Moscow after learning of Sasha’s existence. “How long will you need to be sure?”

“Two hours should be more than enough,” said Charlie, knowing Natalia wouldn’t require the same amount of time to ensure she wasn’t under surveillance. He also knew that she would still take every precaution.

“Eight then,” accepted Natalia. “The tropical plant greenhouse, as always.”

She’d even remembered the specific meeting spot, Charlie recognized, encouraged.

Natalia was waiting on the seat he’d expected, partially hidden beneath an overshadowing cedar but with an unobstructed view of his approach to establish for herself that he was not under any surveillance. This was where—and how—she’d expertly waited in those initial days that now seemed so long ago: it had been summer then, too, and although it would have been impossible for it to have been the same one, she was even wearing a matching light coat that Charlie remembered her wearing then.

She would have seen him enter, of course, but she didn’t look up from her book and Charlie made no acknowledgement as he continued past to a seat closer to their chosen glassed exhibition hall where he sat and opened that day’s
Pravda
. His position gave Natalia an even more extensive view from which surveillance could have been established if any pursuers entered through other gates; Charlie was sure there was no one after the precautions he’d taken over the preceding two hours. The Moscow Metro, with its eight separate but interlinked, people-jammed underground lines, was an espionage Olympics training ground for trail clearing, and that evening Charlie had used it like the gold medalist he was.

He’d been alert to everything and everyone around him when he’d left the embassy, deep within as big a departing group as he could find among which to hide himself from the remaining
although slightly smaller media melee, knowing there would still be FSB cameramen among the photographers. He kept that danger in mind while making for the already identified telephone kiosk on Smolenskaya. Although not suspicious of any suddenly slowing pedestrian or vehicle during his brief conversation with Natalia, he held back from descending immediately underground at a convenient Smolenskaya Metro station. Forcing himself onto Kievskaya with growing protest from unexpectedly challenged feet, he changed at Barrikadnaya onto the inner-city sixth Tapansko line, disembarking at Tverskaya to change lines again, allowing himself two stops until transferring to the Kaluzsko-Rizskaja route to go north. He became uncomfortable with a bespectacled, mustached man who stayed with him as far as Turgenevskaya, remaining on the train after the man disembarked, and only got off himself at the warning of the doors closing to trap on the departing train anyone who might have worked an obligatory observation switch. Charlie went back and forth between two alternative lines, once coming up to ground level—before going back down again after five lingering minutes—at Poljanka. He’d finally emerged at Botanicheskiy Sad with fifteen minutes to spare before his rendezvous with Natalia, sore-footed but confident he was alone.