Red Star Rising (8 page)

“I just told you, my telephone logs—the logs they are going to want to examine and question me about—aren’t complete.”

“How much—how many—can you remember of what you haven’t logged?”

“Most of it, I’m pretty sure.”

“So verbally include from memory whatever’s missing from the log when you’re questioned in detail about your telephone records.”

“Considering the way I greeted you when you arrived, you’re being very kind,” said Paula-Jane, smiling.

“Who told you I was anything otherwise?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” said the woman, her initial uptightness easing. “I want to make amends!”

“I’m not sure you’ve got any amends to make,” coaxed Charlie, curious to know who’d been digging the mantraps ahead of him.

“I am,” she insisted. “I’ve been invited to a dinner party tonight by the current CIA guy at the American embassy. And I don’t have a partner. Would you have a problem filling the vacancy?”

Charlie found an immediate response difficult, the uncertainty of Natalia’s reaction to his letter in the forefront of his mind. If she missed him on her first call, she’d phone again, came the quick reassurance. It was unlikely there’d be any professional benefit socializing with the Americans, but there was always the possibility of the unexpected. Which was all Charlie ever asked for, a simple possibility. “That could be fun.”

“Let’s try to make sure it is.”

“Don’t tell me it’s a nightmare: I’ve been told that already.”

Halliday gestured Charlie farther into the unexpectedly littered MI6
rezidentura,
files, dossiers, and newspapers—English language as well as Russian—overflowing from benches and side desks onto a floor shadowed by unclosed cabinets and open desk drawers. Halliday said, “Not as bad as it looks.”

“Which looks bad enough,” commiserated Charlie, needing to move some of the records to take the offered seat. The headline in that day’s unfiled
Moscow News
on top of the heap read:
MYSTERY DEEPENS IN BRITISH EMBASSY MURDER
.

Halliday shook his head, smiling. “On open, possibly intercepted transmission, little more than embarrassment. A lot of analyses about Stepan Lvov’s presidential chances, which is occupying every Western embassy in Moscow and shouldn’t surprise anyone in the FSB. My judgement is that Lvov’s a shoo-in, so if I’m right, it’s not even embarrassing that we’ve been monitoring him. If he loses, I’m a bad analyst they don’t have to worry about keeping too close an eye on.”

“Very pragmatic,” complimented Charlie. “I’ve never seen so many worried people running around so many corridors. Or quite so many journalists, cameramen, and TV crews outside this embassy.”

“The inquisitors are due any time, thumbscrews and all.

There’s bound to be a lot of other transgressions swept up in the spring cleaning. And Reg Stout, who’s rightly shitting himself, says he’s called the militia to clear the media away.”

“He told me he hardly speaks Russian.”

Halliday shrugged. “He’s always talking through the hole in his ass.”

“How worried are you about the internal inquiry?”

Halliday smiled again. “I certainly didn’t let the FSB bug-masters in.”

“You must have recognized how fucked up the security was here, before the shit hit the fan?”

Halliday patted the closest folder to him on his desk. “I did, long before the shit hit any fan. And here’s the log, with attached
copies of every warning message I’ve sent to London over the last six months. London’s going to have a lot of self-explaining to do, as well as the idiots here . . .” The man patted his special folder again. “With this already on my record, I’m going to come out of this inquiry smelling like a rose.”

“Always better than smelling of shit,” agreed Charlie.

“I told Monsford, my director, you’d declined my offer of help, by the way. He said he might take it up with your boss. Thought you should know in advance.”

“I appreciate your telling me that,” said Charlie, deciding at that moment that although admiring Halliday’s apparent professionalism, he didn’t personally like the man. But then, Charlie asked himself, when had liking someone have anything to do with anything?

Charlie had wondered if in five years the official interior design preponderance of desk and countertop Bakelite with matching linoleum floor covering would have disappeared but, of course, it hadn’t—it just became more scratched and scuffed. The insolent, blank-faced disinterest of the counter clerk at Ulitsa Petrovka was the same as Charlie remembered, too: Charlie’s guess at four minutes before the man would bother to look up from the curled-edged, unturned page of what he was reading was short by an additional full minute.

“Important to keep up to date with all the regulations,” sympathized Charlie, sure the man was looking at the latest office-circulating porn magazine: the clerk was two pages short of the photographic offerings.

There was grunted surprise at Charlie’s mockery being in Russian. “You the Englishman to see Sergei Romanovich Pavel?”

“That’s me,” agreed Charlie, equally surprised at the expectation.

“It’s the top floor, second door on the right when you get there,” dismissed the man, nodding toward the linoleum-clad stairs as he went back to his magazine.

Charlie took his time and was glad he did. The top floor was six flights up, and by the time he got there his feet were burning and he was panting, even though he’d paced himself. He’d passed seven people on the way up two of them women, and been ignored by them all, despite being an unauthorized, foreign stranger. It wasn’t casual security, Charlie decided, but stage management to indicate his unimportance. Charlie waited until he’d fully recovered his breath before knocking on the identified door. He had to knock twice more before there was an unintelligible shout beyond, which he took to be an invitation to enter. The outside office was empty, but Pavel was visible through the open door of the next room, behind a cluttered desk. The man’s jacket was looped around the back of his chair, crushed by his leaning back against it. Pavel’s tie was loosened and his shirt collar open. The shirt and tie, as well as the suit, were what the man had worn at the mortuary: at least, Charlie thought, he’d changed his own shirt. And socks. It reminded him he needed to get some laundry done at the hotel. He supposed he’d have to change again, into the better of his two suits, for that evening’s dinner with Paula-Jane’s American friends.

“At last!” greeted Pavel.

“There’s been time for things to develop.”

“I’m looking forward to hearing what they are,” encouraged Pavel.

“As I am from you,” parried Charlie, anxious to get the exchange on his terms.

Pavel pushed two folders through an already cleared space on his desk. “The photographs and the pathology findings of Dr. Ivanov.”

The meeting was obviously being recorded, Charlie accepted, disbelieving the apparent casualness with which he had been allowed to walk unescorted around the building. He couldn’t isolate a lens but he had to assume the encounter was being filmed, too, so he had to be careful even with facial reactions. There were twelve images in the album, which Charlie instantly decided were inadequate without needing any closer examination. The only two pictures of the flower-bed hole, dug to retrieve blood
samples and perhaps the bullet, gave no indication of its depth from which to assess the amount of soil removed. Charlie merely flicked through the pathologist’s report, without trying to read anything, judging it equally inadequate simply from its thinness, allowing the frown for the benefit of the undetected camera. He said; “This is only a preliminary medical report, of course? And I’m disappointed there aren’t more photographs.”

“I understood from Dr. Ivanov that it was complete,” equivocated Pavel, giving himself an escape from the challenge.

“It’ll obviously be necessary to talk it all through with the pathologist after I’ve read it in detail,” said Charlie. “Might have to send it to London, to be checked through there.”

“You said there had been developments?” pressed the Russian.

“Most of which I don’t fully understand and others of which are very awkward,” said Charlie. “I’m particularly concerned that our working relations and arrangements could be affected.”

“I need you to explain precisely what you’re telling me,” protested Pavel. There was no longer any bland condescension.

“I’ll set out everything as clearly as I can,” said Charlie, without the slightest intention of doing anything of the sort. “On the phone, you said you were certain that the man wasn’t murdered in the embassy grounds?”

Pavel shifted at the onus being put upon him. “We recovered a lot of earth, where the shattered head lay. There was remarkably little blood residue, scarcely more than a liter. Very little bone or skin debris, either. And most certainly no bullet, which there obviously would have been if he’d been shot where and how he was found.”

Far, far too complacent and far too obviously rehearsed, recognized Charlie: if it hadn’t been so overwhelmingly to his own benefit he might even have been offended at the contemptuous dismissal. “
If
he had been already lying face down,” agreed Charlie. “Not if he’d been standing up . . .” He let the pause in, enjoying his own performance. “Or kneeling, to be executed, which is what our forensic pathologist believes to have been the position in which he was shot and which there is some evidence to support.
There’s a substantial grooved mark close to the base of the wall of the conference hall, and a lot of blood and possibly debris at least half a yard from where the body fell and was found.”

“I didn’t see anything like that,” broke in Pavel, forward in his chair now, no longer lounged back, creasing his jacket.

“From what I’ve been told everything was rushed, confused,” said Charlie. “We’ve obviously collected a lot of the other blood-soaked earth quite a way away from where you dug. . . .” He lifted what the Russians had bothered to include in the photographic selection. “Very much more than your scientist appears to have done. It’s being sifted as well as electronically searched, to find the bullet. The forensic scientist calculated the most likely trajectory from the mark on the wall.”

“Where is it, all this other forensic material?” demanded the Russian.

Charlie hesitated, as if discomfited by a too difficult question. “In London. It’s all been shipped back for further and more detailed examination.” He knew the size of the untouchable diplomatic shipment, including everything Harry Fish had helped him assemble, would have been logged by the FSB staff at Sheremetyevo Airport as a matter of course.

“There are more than adequate forensic facilities here,” said Pavel, tightly.

Charlie remained silent for several moments, looking down as if either in contemplation or unwillingness even to look directly at Sergei Pavel. Eventually he said, “There is a problem. I know—accept—that it is not of your creation: that you don’t know anything about it. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what you and I have been assigned to do, but it has obviously affected the thinking in London.”

The bewilderment was mirrored on Pavel’s face. “Something else I don’t understand?”

“What I am going to tell you, I do as an indication of how much I value our further and continued cooperation,” said Charlie. “I ask you, at the same time, to treat it in the strictest confidence. I do not yet know what my government intends publicly to
do about it but I certainly don’t wish either of us to be accused of initiating a diplomatic incident.”

“What’s going on? What’s happened?”

Charlie’s assessment of Pavel’s reaction was that the Russian had no knowledge of the embassy bugging. “I have your assurance that what I am going to tell you remains strictly between the two of us?”

“Upon the honor of my mother,” pledged the man.

Who must have been a 50-kopeck whore if Pavel were to be believed, gauged Charlie. “The embassy sought the help of local electricians—recommended by your Foreign Ministry—to rectify some faults in its security system, particularly the CCTV cameras. Some spying apparatus was installed while Russian electricians were within the embassy.”