Kings of Many Castles (25 page)

Read Kings of Many Castles Online

Authors: Brian Freemantle

BOOK: Kings of Many Castles
4.8Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“How?” demanded Trishin, forehead creased in his effort to keep up.
“If we accept the arrogance of First Chief Deputy Gennardi Mittel—and all those who are going to recite the same denials after him—then we destroy ourselves on our first day,” insisted Natalia.
“I suppose we do,” allowed Trishin, uncertainly.
Filitov nodded agreement, but didn’t speak.
“So let’s play the hand,” urged Natalia. “Let’s confront their confrontation now, only harder. Let’s face the arrogance down, at least for today. That allows you, Yuri Fedorovich, all the time you need to consult and discuss with the acting president …” She nodded to the secretariat. “ … with the advantage of every word that’s been exchanged. If we haven’t responded as we should then tomorrow we back down under the bullying of the FSB, which effectively ends any purpose in our being empanelled. The only humiliation will be ours, which it will be anyway if we collapse now under FSB pressure.”
“Not quite,” contradicted Trishin. “The humiliation will be that of acting President Okulov, as well.”
“Which it will be if we cave in now.”
Filitov said, “It’s a convincing argument.”
“I’d welcome a better one,” admitted Natalia.
“I don’t have one,” said the federal prosecutor.
“Neither do I,” said Trishin.
The spring had gone out of Gennardi Mittel’s step when he was recalled and there was no languid crossing of legs.
Natalia said, “We do not think you or your chairman fully understand the importance of what this commission is charged and authorized to inquire into. Which is unfortunate. We will not accept your deputizing for Viktor Ivanovich Karelin. You will return to the Lubyanka, with a copy of our terms of reference and with the request from us to chairman Karelin to make himself available, before this commission, tomorrow. We will continue today to examine the other FSB officials in the very sincere hope that they will not repeat the explanation that you seemed to think adequate. But as you indicated that would be their response, we would have you advise chairman Karelin that it is unacceptable and have him bring with him tomorrow people better able to answer our questions. Do
you
have any questions, First Chief Deputy Mittel?”
The man’s throat was working, in his astonishment, but no words came at once. When they did, they were strained in disbelief. “I would respectfully ask this commission to reconsider.”
“This commission does not believe there is anything to reconsider,” said Natalia. “We look forward to seeing chairman Karelin before us at the scheduled time tomorrow.” She’d imposed her will, Natalia accepted. But at what cost or purpose?
 
They used the satellite transmission installed for Walter Anandale visually to conduct the Washington cabinet meeting when he’d been in Moscow, although this time the exchange was far more restricted in numbers although not in emotion, which went through the whole gamut from implacable fury to benign unconcern. There were three, in each capital. In the specially adapted embassy room on Novinskij Bul’var James Scamell sat between John Kayley and the ambassador, Cornell Burton. In Washington the president was flanked by Wendall North and the FBI director, Paul Smith. The guilt-apportioning, one-to-one encounters had been conducted behind closed doors before the link-up but the recriminations still simmered, like summer heat off a tarred road. Paul Smith’s humiliating inclusion was a continuing part of the man’s punishment.
“We were roasted alive,” complained the secretary of state, voice still tight with the memory of their summons to the Russian Foreign Ministry. “Petrin actually used the word ‘arrogance’ and ‘cowboy’. And we didn’t have a position to come back from. How the hell did it happen!”
“A mistake that shouldn’t have occurred,” said Anandale, still gripped by the anger with which he’d flayed the FBI director, towards whom he intentionally looked sideways as he spoke. “What’s the proper story of this damned injection?”
“We categorically denied knowing anything about it, which we don’t,” quickly came in Kayley, outwardly grave-faced like the rest of them but inwardly the happiest man involved, knowing that from now on he was absolutely fireproof, double-coated in Teflon. Whatever went wrong could be squarely—irrefutably—blamed on the director’s stupid instructions even more stupidly wrongly directed, for everyone to read. “None of us touched the guy; it’s absurd imagining that we would.”
“Except for the e-mail,” said Scamell, who two hours earlier, standing in the Russian ministry being treated like a miscreant schoolboy, had finally seen disappear any publicly acknowledged diplomatic credit for almost a year’s commuting between Washington and Moscow. “We can swear on a stack of bibles a mile high that it wasn’t us and they’ll laugh in our face just like Boris Petrin laughed in my face. There’s no purpose in my staying here anymore but for the fact that by coming home I’d be inferring we
did
do it. We’re screwed here, Mr. President. We couldn’t be in a worse position if we tried to invent one.”
“What about the practical, on-the-ground operation?” asked Wendall North.
“There isn’t one,” dismissed Kayley. “The Russians have withdrawn from our combined incident room. Switched the timing of an exhumation that might be important, so I wasn’t able to be there. It’s the autopsy that’s important and I’ve no way now of getting that …” He hesitated, wanting to build his self-protecting barricade as strong as he could. “We were told, at the Foreign Ministry, that we wouldn’t in future be allowed any access whatsoever to Bendall. Effectively, we’ve been closed down.”
“Jesus!” said Anandale, stretching the word in his exasperation.
“We didn’t do it …” started Wendall North.
It was a rhetorical remark but Kayley’s day had begun facing Scamell’s suspicion. The dishevelled man said, “Can we get this straight, the first and last time! We-did-not-drug-the-goddamned-man!”
“Appreciate you making that so clear to us,” continued the chief of staff. “So who did?”
Kayley shook his head, discomfited by his over-reaction. “God only knows!”
“What about the British?” persisted North.
Kayley shook his head again. “Too long an interval, from the time they saw him.”
“Which only leaves the Russians,” isolated Smith, desperate to make some sort of recovery. “How about it being a set-up? Injecting the guy and pointing the finger at us, to break up the cooperation?”
“What’s the point of their going to all the effort?” demanded Scamell.
“Resentment, at our leadership,” answered Smith.
Everyone waited for someone else to make the point. It was Anandale who did. “We made a pretty good job of screwing that up for ourselves.” The president let the repeated criticism settle before he said, “OK, what can we do to restore the situation?”
“It’ll need a substantial gesture,” advised the secretary of state. “Something like getting the treaty back on track.”
“I agree,” said the ambassador. “Diplomatically we’re looking pretty bad here. I can’t remember so bad.”
“I don’t want to go that route,” rejected the president. “OK, we’ve got to play pull-back. But as it wasn’t us and it couldn’t have been the British, the Russians did it themselves and are using it to force us into treaty concessions. I’m not going to do that.”
“That’s my only idea,” said the secretary of state.
“What about my talking to Okulov direct?” suggested Anandale.
“That’s the one thing I don’t think you should do, get
directly
involved,” warned Scamell. “I think you’ve got to remain above the actual recrimination.”
“So do I,” said Wendall North, at once.
“I want to get the damned thing back on course. Find the son-of-a-bitch who did what he did to Ruth,” insisted Anandale.
“It’s got to be right, first time,” said Scamell. “Thought out, from every which way.”
“So let’s do just that,” agreed Anandale. “Let’s you and I think about it from every which way over the next hour or two, Jamie. Call me at four, your time. I want a recovery idea by then.”
 
Olga Melnick pushed herself back in her chair, waiting for Zenin’s lead. She didn’t feel dependent; inadequate. The feeling was of being comfortable, able for the first time to rely on someone. She wasn’t ready yet to start thinking of love, because she wasn’t sure she knew how to recognize the emotion, but it was something she had to confront soon.
The militia commandant said, “There’s just no way of telling how big this conspiracy is, is there?”
“It doesn’t look like it,” she agreed. She picked up the autopsy report on the exhumed remains of Vasili Isakov. “For this much pentobarbitone still to be tissue traceable in the body he would at least have been too deeply unconscious to have felt anything when the train hit him.”
“I read the opinion,” reminded Zenin. “He couldn’t have been forced to take it all orally. It would have been injected. Probably mixed with alcohol, too.”
“And that couldn’t have been the Americans!” said Olga.
“So we’re back to the FSB.” Now Zenin took up and let drop the official security log of everyone admitted to George Bendall’s ward. It lay among the other reports on the table between them in Zenin’s top floor Moscow Militia headquarter office, a starkly functional, bakelite-tiled Brezhnev era memorial to personal, bribebolstering aggrandisement and boxed awfulness. There were already cracks fissuring from the dried-out, water-and-dust glued bricks of the outer rooms into the man’s inner suite in one corner of which the floor was already too uneven to support anything heavier than a triangular stand for Zenin’s exchanged mementoes—mostly unhung plaques-of foreign police visits. “So how did they do it! Not Isakov, on the level crossing. They could have managed that a dozen
different ways, particularly if he had been drinking the night it happened and was already incapably drunk. I mean at Burdenko. I’ve personally questioned every squad leader: each one is adamant no one who isn’t recorded on that log entered Bendall’s room. And apart from the British, us and the Americans, it’s just doctors and nurses.”
“One of whom has to be an FSB plant,” declared Olga.
“Obviously,” agreed Zenin. “I want every member of the hospital staff on that list investigated, until we find out who it is.”
“I’ll personally organize it,” Olga promised. She hesitated, unsure whether to make the suggestion, remembering Zenin’s annoyance at what he considered his being overlooked. Their relationship allowed her to do it, she decided. “Don’t you think we should pass this on to the presidential commission?”
“It’s negative, at the moment,” said Zenin. There was no irritation in his voice.
“There’ll be a lot of FSB people altogether in one place at the same time, people who could be questioned to shorten the time it’ll take us to find the FSB operative at the hospital; if, indeed, we ever do find who it is.”
“That’s a constructive point,” agreed Zenin. “We’ll pass it on, ahead of my seeing Natalia Fedova at our next group assessment.” He tapped the third folder on the table, the finally arrived and complete military medical record on George Bendall, listed however as Georgi Gugin. “There’s nothing constructive about this. Liver enlargement, through excessive drinking. A stomach ulcer, probably from the same cause …”
“ … But no psychiatric evaluation,” broke in Olga.
Zenin wearily shook his head. “He might have been selected as a sharpshooter but he was still only an ordinary soldier, like one of the twenty million sacrificed during the Great Patriotic War. Which is what men like George Bendall are. Sacrifices, to be offered up whenever the need arises. There’s no concern about their
mental
health; the less they can think-rationalize-the better.”
“That’s exactly what George Bendall is, isn’t it!” seized Olga. “A sacrifice, selected when a need arose.”
“He’s all we’ve probably got,” said Zenin. “My fear is that we’re
not going to be able to get beyond him, to discover the rest, to understand the true story.”
Olga was surprised at the unexpected depression. “We’re making progress.”
“No we’re not, Olga Ivanova!” refused the man. “We’re being directed further and further into a maze. And I don’t know how to avoid our going deeper into it or how to get out, from where we are now.”
Reluctantly-for the first time making herself face the total reality of it—Olga acknowledged that Zenin was right. “We can’t let it happen. Fail, I mean.”
“What’s the way to stop it happening?”
Olga didn’t have an answer.
 
The Botanic Gardens on Moscow’s Glavnyy Botanicheskiy Sad, with their enormous, tunnel-shaped glassed exhibition halls, had been the secret tryst for Charlie and Natalia after he’d been sure enough of her love—which he wasn’t any longer-to admit his supposed defection to the then Soviet Union was phoney but that because of that love he was refusing to trigger his KGB-wrecking return to London until he’d guaranteed her safety from suspicion or recrimination.
There was a twitch of recognition when he was ushered into the presence of the psychiatrist who’d analyzed the tapes and the transcripts of the George Bendall encounters. A slipper-shuffling housekeeper—or maybe even the man’s elderly and totally disinterested wife-led Charlie through an echoing mausoleum of a Hampstead house directly into a carbuncle of a glass greenhouse, abandoning him at its tropically-heated entrance. From there he found his own, sweaty way through giant fronded plants and ferns and sharp quilled, brilliantly technicolored cacti to locate, along the third path he followed, the shoulder-stooped, cardiganed professor. Arnold Nolan was in conversation with himself, narrow-spouted watering can in one hand, snipping secateurs in the other, his canopy of white hair more tangled than the foliage he was tending. His patchwork-patterned slippers matched those of the elderly woman and Charlie
envied their obvious trodden-into-comfort shapelessness.

Other books

Death of Kings by Philip Gooden
Jumping Puddles by Rachael Brownell
The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr
Deadlocked 5 by Wise, A.R.
The Waterworks by E. L. Doctorow
Loving a Lawman by Amy Lillard
1,000-Year Voyage by John Russell Fearn
They Had Goat Heads by Wilson, D. Harlan