Red Star Rising (42 page)

“No. She was always here.”

“Which was why you couldn’t visit him, when he was repatriated from Afghanistan, wasn’t it? It was his wife who was able to visit and his wife to whom he went home when he was finally and fully recovered?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know if she’s been hurt, killed even, after Ivan was murdered?” Whoever killed him would have torn apart the house or apartment in which they’d lived.

The hoarse-voiced woman sniggered. “The first mistake in your grand deduction! She died, two months ago. She’d had cancer for years. That’s why Ivan wouldn’t divorce her . . . abandon her, even though we’d been together in every other way for so long. He was a good man: intended to make sure she was comfortable from the money he was going to get.”

Could a potential blackmailer be a good man? If Ivan had stayed with a terminally ill wife and undergone all the misfortune than he and his mistress had suffered? “But officially, on all the records and registers, Ivan’s address is where his wife lived?”

Irena nodded, not speaking.

“So you must have it, Irena! Whatever it was that Ivan found among the raw files and smuggled out of the Lubyanka, knowing its significance. Yours was the obvious—the
only
—place where it could be hidden.”

Irena began to cry at last but soundlessly, without any sobs,
tears just coursing down her face, oddly spreading out to wash completely over her scarred left cheek.

“You know more, Irena,” directly challenged Charlie. “And I need more, properly to understand. If I don’t, everything else you’ve told me is meaningless.”

Charlie believed he now understood a lot of Irena’s topsy-turvy behavior but just as quickly—and positively—decided it would be a bad mistake openly to challenge her further. If he was right—as he was sure he was—the prize, incomplete though it might be, was very close now.

“I think we are beginning to understand each other?” he started out, cautiously.

Irena shrugged, not replying.

Not a good start. “You do trust me, don’t you?”

With another shrug she said: “Having got this far I don’t think I’ve got any other option.”

Minimally encouraging, but only just, Charlie thought: but he hoped she realized how accurate she was. “Certainly there’s no one else who guarantees your safety as I do. But is that all you set out to achieve, Irena, apart from getting those who killed Ivan? Or is there something more?”

She had finally begun looking fully at him but now she turned away. It was difficult to tell, because of her skin discoloration, but Charlie thought she was blushing. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“It’s not a criticism,” Charlie said, taking a chance.

“I still don’t know what you mean.”

The advantage was slipping away from him. “Ivan was good,
wasn’t he? Apart from his expertise in languages he was a very good, very competent, intelligence officer?”

“Everything would have been different, better, if he hadn’t been hurt as he was in Afghanistan: losing his arm and having to undergo so many operations.”

“I know that,” sympathized Charlie. “You—and Ivan—had more bad luck than most people suffer. But as good as he was, Ivan misjudged things at the end, didn’t he?”

“Do you think I don’t realize that now!” she flared.

It wasn’t the best opening but he had to take it. “Of course I understand that you recognize it now. And I’m glad you have. Ivan couldn’t by himself do what he thought he could, no matter how good he was. You most certainly couldn’t, not all alone as you are. You’ve done the right thing—the safest thing—coming to me. And I really do understand.”

“I’m embarrassed,” she said, suddenly. “Embarrassed and ashamed.”

“Why should you feel either?” said Charlie, soothingly. She was definitely flushed. It wouldn’t—or needn’t—be long now.

“It was the people who killed Ivan who should have to pay, no one else.”

He had to steer everything the way he wanted: in her reluctance, Irena was making things more awkward than they needed to be. “How much was Ivan going to ask for?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Irena. “A lot, I think, because of how sensational he thought it was. He had the key: knew the full story.”

“How much were you going to ask, if you’d got to them instead of coming to me?”

She looked away again. “Do you despise me—think I’m a fool—for imagining I could take over: get the money that Ivan believed he could to set us up, as he thought he could?”

“I’m not going to risk the trust I hope I’ve now got with you by lying,” said Charlie. “I don’t despise you, for imagining you could still do a deal for enough money to get you out of where and how you are here, now. Particularly having lost Ivan. But I do think you were foolish, believing that you could succeed where
Ivan failed. And you don’t have to feel embarrassed or ashamed in hoping that I’ll pay for whatever information it is that you’re hiding. There! You didn’t even have to ask me.”

“Could you . . . can you . . . I mean—”

“I know what you mean,” cut off Charlie. “And I won’t lie to you about that, either. I don’t know if—or how much—money I might be able to arrange for you because I don’t know what you’ve got to sell. But I will make you a promise—and you know I keep my promises—that if it is as sensational as Ivan insisted it to be, I will do my best to get you as much as I can.”

“Thank you,” she said, clearly uncomfortable despite Charlie’s insistence that she had no reasons to be. “Thank you very much.”

So far so good, thought Charlie: correct analysis all the way. He had to ensure it went on. “Now I’ve got to see what it was Ivan found and hid with you, haven’t I?”

It was yet another of the Brezhnev-era apartments that still disfigure Moscow like the last decaying teeth in an old man’s mouth, yellowed and black-stained by neglect. The vestibule stank of piss and shit and the graffiti-daubed elevator was out of order, doubtless rusted and clogged by more of both. The graffiti, and lavatory use continued up the stairs and apart from the normal protest from his feet Charlie was glad he only had to climb three flights. The inside of Irena’s apartment was in total contrast to its exterior. The entrance hall gleamed from its obvious constant polishing, as did the living room table and chairs and glass cabinet that displayed its prized foreign travel collection of wine and cocktail glasses.

The shrine to the man Irena had loved was directly alongside, a table festooned by photographs and memorabilia of Ivan Nikolaevich Oskin. He had been an extremely handsome man, blond and blue eyed in the color prints, with high Slavic cheekbones and very even, almost cosmetically sculpted teeth. Irena, who was featured with the man in all the photographs, had also been attractive to the point of being beautiful before the Cairo accident,
her hair very dark before the now fading grayness, slim but heavy breasted. There were pictures of them both in swimming costumes on unidentifiable beaches and others, obviously dating from their Egyptian assignments, beside pyramids and of Ivan on a camel. At the very front of the exhibition were three medals, their citations set out before each. The presentation was completed by three obviously recent photographs in which it was virtually impossible to see Irena’s burned face or Ivan’s missing arm from the way each had posed, the dark, nighttime backgrounds showing white-clothed tables with wine bottles and glasses.

“That was our hobby,” said Irena beside him, pointing to the formal pictures. “We loved dancing. Ivan was good at it, even after he lost his arm: it’s difficult to balance without an arm but he learned how it was possible. We could dance so well, my holding him, not he holding me, that people never realised his deformity. In the darkness, people often didn’t see that I’d been burned, either.”

Irena gestured him towards the couch that ran the length of the main window and Charlie hesitated before it, able easily to see the telephone box he’d used for their contact, understanding how she’d been able so safely to see him and know he was alone.

“Would you like a drink?” she asked, indicating the decanter on the open-fronted cabinet.

The vodka was the yellow of home distillation, as it had been in the café. “I’d prefer to see what you were keeping for Ivan.”

She was back very quickly from what Charlie assumed to be the only bedroom, carrying a large manila envelope, inside of which were four separate, smaller envelopes in which Charlie guessed Oskin had divided what he’d discovered in the archives more easily to smuggled from the Lubyanka headquarters of the FSB. Each was marked by a symbol Charlie didn’t understand until he’d taken out the A4-sized contents and realized the markings indicated a sequence, glad he’d kept the packages separate and was able at once to restore each batch to its original envelope.

The material was photocopies of raw but code-deciphered
traffic, the majority cable transmissions interspersed by handwritten telephone or radio communication. The cabled messages were both timed and dated, enabling continuity, but some of the handwritten notes on them were not and Charlie was even more relieved that he had not mixed up the order. If he had compiled it all together, with no way of knowing how Oskin had established his sequence, it might have actually been impossible ever to work out what the Russian believed to be his sensational discovery.

Every printed cable and every handwritten note or memorandum was stamped with the highest security restriction, with its access and readership strictly limited to specifically code-named individuals, both inside the Lubyanka and the sending and receiving field stations. Each code-hidden individual had personally signed their code designation for receipt and dispatch and each inscription had additionally been time stamped. Every document was heavily annotated, and every annotation and comment again personally marked.

There were, in total, thirty-two A4-sized sheets but Oskin had sometimes arranged as many as six original cable slips or handwritten notes on one sheet, both to create some further chronological continuity and to minimize the bulk of what he took from the headquarters building at the end of each smuggling day.

It took Charlie only minutes to locate from the cable dates the first envelope in the series and put the following three into sequential order and from those dates to realize that the material was not confined to a strict period of time but covered, in total, a possible range of eighteen years, beginning with a cable sent on December 15, 1991. The date of the final cable was July 24, 2006. At once Charlie was swamped by several realizations, the excitement moving through him. Although at that moment he hadn’t the slightest idea of its importance, he was physically holding material, albeit once removed from its finger-touched original, not just of a well established and entrenched Russian intelligence operation of the highest, your Eyes Only secrecy, but one that could conceivably be currently ongoing: two entire pages in the
last batch were crowded with a total of fourteen undated and momentarily incomprehensible telephone and internal memorandum slips.

Throughout Charlie’s initial examination, Irena sat motionless and unspeaking on the nearest chair, her entire concentration upon him. As he looked up, she said: “Well?”

“I’ve got a lot of copied documents the significance of which mean absolutely nothing to me,” began Charlie. So secret were the transmissions that every dispatching
rezidentura
was encoded, in addition to everyone mentioned in every exchange.

“No higher security designation has ever been used before, not by the KGB or any of its predecessors,” declared Irena. “That’s what Ivan told me.”

“I haven’t properly read—and even less understood—a single thing I’ve looked at yet. But if I had the slightest idea even after a dozen readings—no matter how many dozens of times and how many readings—it would still and will always remain meaningless without the identifying code key to those involved and of the various overseas stations, over what seems to be a period of more than fifteen years.”

“You telling me it’s useless?” demanded Irena, anguished.

“I’m telling you nothing of the sort,” denied Charlie. “I’m not telling you anything, in fact, that you haven’t already told me—without the code key it’s useless: impossible to understand. And probably always will be. At this level of security, it’ll be a code known to half a dozen people, probably electronically changed during transmission from the code grid in which it was sent to that by which it was received.”

“Your people have got computer as well as human code breakers.”

“I’ll need to take it all, even for them to try.”

“I know.”

“I’ll keep my promises. All of them.”

“You talked earlier about our understanding each other?”

“Yes?” agreed Charlie.

“I want you to understand totally everything I want.”

“Yes?” repeated Charlie, the curiosity deepening at another topsy-turvy change.

“What is going to happen to Ivan’s body?”

Charlie, who was rarely rendered speechless, was stunned by the question. “I’ve no idea,” he finally groped.

“The Russians—the FSB—have it? Along with their bullshit story of drug smuggling gangs?”