Red Star Rising (17 page)

He only had to wait thirty minutes for his escorted recall—two men this time, the first indication of what was to come—from his tiny office, knowing the reception to expect the moment he crossed the threshold of the inquiry room. The panel sat with what had to be individual printouts of the polygraph before them.
There were separate sheets of paper with what Charlie hoped to be copies of the questions to which he’d responded. There were matching sets of paper before the questioner and his associate. The escort who had accompanied him to the communications room actually took Charlie by the arm to put him very firmly into the waiting chair. He and his companion stationed themselves directly behind Charlie, one on either side.

Charlie turned to them, smiling, and said, “Don’t worry, guys. I can’t do a runner, with the flat feet I suffer from.” He wasn’t suffering any discomfort at that moment, which was a good omen.

“So the cabaret continues!” commented Robertson.

“I’m sorry?” questioned Charlie.

“Have you the slightest idea what you’re doing, behaving like this? The slightest idea what’s going to happen to you?”

“I’d appreciate your telling me.”

“You are being taken, under escort, immediately back to London,” announced Robertson. “Disciplinary proceedings are already being formulated, upon the basis of your ridiculous polygraph performance, each and every aspect of which has already been communicated personally to the Director-General, together with my recommendation that it be treated with the utmost severity. Recorded on that recommendation is my personal assessment that you can no longer be considered for any employment within the service, from which you should be dismissed after the most intensive investigation to discover the damage you have caused in the past. You are a disgrace to be treated as such!”

“Gosh!” said Charlie, not believing it possible for the furious man’s face to get any redder, which it did.

“That completely absurd, contemptuous remark confirms every assessment this panel and the polygraph team has already arrived at: that you are suffering some mental illness making it necessary for you to be put into protective care,” declared Robertson.

“Have you sent that assessment to the Director-General, along with everything else?” asked Charlie, coming forward in his chair, conscious as he did so of the two guards behind him coming restrainingly forward.

“This examination is over,” said Robertson. “There is no need or purpose for any further conversation. Someone has already gone to the Savoy Hotel to pay your bill and collect your belongings. You are booked, together with the two escorts who will accompany you, on a plane leaving for London in three hours. We would like you now to leave for the transport that has already been arranged for you.”

He was a whisker too close to leaving it too late, Charlie recognized. “Wait—and listen—for a moment longer! If I am taken back to London today, the careers of each and every one of you”—he turned, to include the polygraph duo—“will be over. I am astonished at your collective ineptitude, which might still end your careers, which it should”—he included the polygraph operators again—“the most inept of which has been your analysis of my examination.’

“This is madness!” said Robertson.

“Yours is the madness if you don’t hear me out,” retorted Charlie, relieved at the shifts and sideways exchanges among some of the panel confronting him, culminating in another whispered conversation between Robertson and the messenger next to him.

Robertson said: “All of this is being recorded.”

“Which saves me asking the question to ensure that it is,” said Charlie. “And guarantees that I have a complete, untouched copy of every word that has so far been spoken and everything that follows, upon which I am insisting.”

“What do you want to say?” demanded Robertson.

“You each have the question-by-question analysis of the polygraph examination together, I hope, with the transcript of the voice recording. I do not, because I don’t believe I shall need it but if I omit anything, please question me about it when I finish saying what I have to say, okay?”

Robertson nodded, refusing a spoken acknowledgment.

Charlie inhaled a deep breath, knowing he was going to need it. “I denied being a serving officer in MI5 because denial is the inviolable rule, never to be broken under the severest pressure, even torture. I
do
tell lies. It is an essential necessity in my professional
life, as it is now if I am to succeed in remaining part of the investigation with which I am entrusted. And which I did, in answer to the question of whether I lie to my superiors. You, Paul Robertson, are my superior, both by seniority and grade. I am under the strictest orders from our Director-General not to discuss anything involving my separate investigation. If there was not this ridiculous insistence upon yes or no answers, I would not have replied yes to that question. I would have replied that I lie to my superiors when necessary. If I lie I am not, by definition, an honest man. But my answer to that specific question
was
honest if you examine it properly. And yes, I am proud of what I do, lying and deceitful and deceptive though it is and how I have to be, because I believe that ultimately—although perhaps not always—it is for the common good, not bad. . . .”

Charlie had to stop, both breathless and dry mouthed, wishing he’d asked for water before he’d started to talk. There was no offer of any from anyone in the room. “Have I come into contact with foreign intelligence agents? Of course I have. I had dinner with American CIA personnel this week. I believe one of the Russians with whom I am now in contact belongs to the Russian FSB. By a strict definition of a yes or no answer I am cooperating with him and have cooperated with others many times in the past, but always dishonestly on my part, to achieve whatever my objective has been in doing so. Yes, if I have to answer yes or no, I received money and accommodation and rewards from the former KGB. I was a supposed defector who escaped from Wormwood Scrubs with a known and legally convicted British traitor, to discover his secrets. Which I did. But because the sentence that got me into prison was phony, I never got pardoned. I was aware of listening devices being planted in this embassy because you, Mr. Robertson,
told
me when we agreed it indicated an inside source. I do not know who that source is: I thought I did, which was why I appeared before all of you earlier today. But when I spoke to the Director-General, he assured me that Paula-Jane Venables has been exonerated from any culpability. . . .” Drawing to the end of his uninterrupted diatribe, Charlie once again turned to the now
tight-faced technicians. “And no, I do not regard a polygraph examination as a joke, although I might wonder about today’s particular operation of it and the complete misconception that has been drawn from it. The yes or no restrictions allow grossly misleading readings to be drawn, as they were in this case.”

No one spoke when Charlie fell silent but there was a lot of head-turning looks back and forth among the panel as each sought someone who would spare Robertson’s very obvious discomfort. When no one else volunteered, Robertson said: “I think we need time to consider our responses so I must ask you to withdraw again.”

“Before I do leave the room I need to have my own copy of everything that has been said during this session, to submit in its entirety to the Director-General in London while you reconsider.”

“We resent the inference of that demand,” said Robertson.

“As I resent, much more deeply, what I have been subjected to,” said Charlie. “And while you’re discussing things, it might be an idea to have my things returned to the hotel and for another room to be reserved for me.”
That
had been too smart-ass, acknowledged Charlie, in immediate regret.

While Charlie didn’t go as far as conceding it to be a Pyrrhic victory, he didn’t expect a Christmas card from anyone on Paul Robertson’s investigation team. And even less from the Director-General. Aubrey Smith’s acceptance of Charlie’s defense had been begrudging in the extreme, tempered with accusations of arrogance, insubordination, and camera posturing, with a repeated warning that Charlie’s future employment depended on results that had been too long in coming. Apart from all of which, Charlie consoled himself, he’d survived.

Charlie encountered David Halliday on his way from Smith’s tirade to check his voice mail, his mind equally split between doing something as quickly as possible to impress the distinctly unimpressed Director-General and making the promised contact with Natalia.

“You looked outside?” greeted the MI6 officer.

“I’ve been so long underground I’m not sure if it’s day or night,” said Charlie.

“Then you’re in need of a reviver, even though it’s not yet midday,” said the man, jerking his head back toward his own quarters. “I duplicated your Islay single malt order and I’m glad I did.”

Charlie gratefully followed, welcoming the drink and the familiar “death to our enemies” toast.

Halliday said, “We’re virtually under siege since the London
announcement of Sotley and Dawkins’s recall. Reg Stout says his outside guards estimate the media mob at more than fifty.”

“Stout’s still on duty?” queried Charlie, surprised.

“Apparently he took the Nazi defense of strictly obeying orders.”

“That’s neither a defense nor an excuse.”

“Which I’ve been telling London for months.”

“Was it you that finally got things moving?” asked Charlie, openly.

“I’d like to think so but for anyone in London finally to admit it would be to concede that they’d been hibernating, wouldn’t it?”

“You going to argue against Stout remaining on station?” pressed Charlie, accepting a top up from the offered bottle.

“Specifying names could risk a libel or slander accusation,” said Halliday.

Charlie didn’t believe it could but he was more interested in pursuing the conversation than in challenging it. “You been before Robertson’s inquisition?”

“P-J got a mauling, apparently. Seems to be pissed off with me for not telling her I was ringing alarm bells.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Halliday smiled at Charlie’s persistence. “Underwent the whole yes or no shebang, survived without losing a single fingernail or crushed testicle.”

“So who’s whispering all the secrets?”

Halliday shrugged. “How do I know? All I do know is that this embassy has been wide open to any sort of infiltration for months. Against which, how about the finding of the listening devices where they were being a complete coincidence? The FSB gets a chance they can’t believe and are doubly lucky when their guys hit all the right places entirely by accident?”

“You believe in that sort of coincidence?”

“No,” admitted Halliday. “I’m just pointing out that lucky coincidences sometimes happen, like miracles.”

“What about Paula-Jane?” said Charlie, consciously ignoring every London edict.

“What about her?”

“She have any bother?”

Halliday smiled, knowingly. “What have you heard?”

“I haven’t heard anything,” denied Charlie. “You told me you came out smelling of roses but she was pissed off. Just wondered if things went badly for her. This is her first posting, after all.”

Halliday shrugged again. “She didn’t go back on the same plane as Sotley and Dawkins, so I guess she’s okay. She didn’t tell me anything specific apart from getting a bollocking about lack of earlier warning but let’s face it, that’s not her function here.” The man offered the bottle again.

Charlie, who disagreed with that assessment, shook his head in refusal. “Still got things to do.”

“How’s it going?”

“Slowly.”

“My offer still stands. I’m not exactly overstretched and you know my director is more than willing to get me involved.”

Which was what Bundy had said, remembered Charlie: he could set up a sideline business selling tickets. “London’s orders are to keep everything strictly compartmented, certainly until Robertson’s inquiry is resolved.”

“The bastards in London expect too much from ground soldiers like you and me,” sympathized Halliday, the slightest of slurs to his words. “Things go right, they get the glory; things go wrong, we get the shit.”

Why was it, Charlie asked himself as he made his way along the corridor, that he still didn’t like Halliday, even though he was now serving Islay single malt?

Charlie wasn’t surprised to find his roughly packed suitcases tossed carelessly into his office, nor to be told when he called the Savoy Hotel that no new reservation had been made for him. Charlie took the offered suite, all that was available, when he was told his original room was no longer vacant. His initial amusement at wondering what innocent conversations the FSB was going to
hear from its new occupant became serious at the realization that until Guzov learned of the change he’d probably have an untapped telephone line. There was one call on his voice-mail register but when he accessed it there was no message, just the click of a telephone being replaced. It wouldn’t, he knew, be Natalia. He called Sergei Pavel’s personal number at Petrovka but got no reply and matched his unknown caller by deciding not to leave a message.