Red Star Burning (17 page)

How much he would have savored using Jacobson instead of Charlie as the about-to-die decoy, mused Monsford. “You seriously believe we could lose Radtsic?”

“I’d put that possibility as high as seventy-five percent if we don’t get him out soon.”

“Then we can’t change course: all our preparation is irrevocably interlinked.”

“We don’t have Charlie Muffin
to
interlink him!” risked Jacobson.

“He’s
got
to reestablish contact,” declared Monsford, clinging to the earlier insistence of James Straughan. “Once he does, everything slots back into place.”

“We won’t know what Charlie’s been doing,” Jacobson pointed out. “From what Straughan told me yesterday in London there was suspicion from Charlie’s interrogation, after his return from Jersey, that he’d been a long-embedded Russian sleeper. What if he
was
turned: the trip to Jersey was to meet an FSB Control to fulfill an assignment we haven’t any idea about? That would slot in even more perfectly with Natalia’s pleading telephone calls, so soon after Charlie’s Jersey return, wouldn’t it?”

“It couldn’t be,” groped Monsford, anguished: he’d done everything he could—and more—to promote himself as the architect of it all. “Did you tell Radtsic the use to which we were putting Charlie?”

He couldn’t better have managed the exchange if he’d personally scripted and rehearsed it, thought Jacobson. “I told him there was to be a diversion, without telling him what it was to be. And I didn’t mention Charlie Muffin by name.”

“You get the slightest suspicion that Radtsic knows what’s happening to Natalia?”

“None,” replied Jacobson. “But he’d have to know if Charlie’s disappearance and the sudden emergence of Natalia is part of a Russian operation?” He’d have to hold back from taking this improvisation too far: he’d completely escaped censure.

“When’s your next meeting?”

Jacobson hesitated, unsure if he needed the protection of an indeterminate answer. Deciding that he didn’t, he said, simply: “Tomorrow.”

“Don’t say anything more about a diversion,” ordered Monsford. “But listen hard to everything he says, for anything that doesn’t sound right.”

He’d risen like a Phoenix not just unsinged but smelling of roses, Jacobson decided: sweeter than roses, even.

*   *   *

“What?” demanded Monsford, as the operational director came into his suite for the second time that day.

From the oddly cowed way the Director was slumped behind his desk, Straughan thought Monsford looked like a bull mastiff that had lost its nerve. “The media fanfare is in full tune. It started in Amsterdam, obviously. It was picked up in Moscow—running on the news wires—and the
Evening Standard
has jumped on it here. Their front-page headline is: ‘Moscow-bound Briton in Airport Disappearance.’ The story covers the whole spectrum from assassination to kidnap to spy plot, in no particular order.”

“They using Charlie’s cover name?” demanded Monsford, straightening slightly from his withdrawn shell.

“Of course they are,” confirmed Straughan. “It’s my guess that Charlie intended the publicity, which will build up when there are no answers to all the questions that are being asked. Our concern has to be that it concentrates attention on Moscow.”

“Jacobson doesn’t think we can run the operation as we planned, now that we’ve lost Charlie,” said the Director.

“We can’t, not until we find him,” agreed Straughan, close to impatience at the statement of the obvious. Curious what the man’s reaction would be, he added: “There’s something else.”

“What?” repeated Monsford, slumping back into his defeatist posture.

“The son, Andrei. He’s living with another student, a French girl named Yvette Paruch: they’re on the same course.”

“What’s your point?”

“Getting him here, without Yvette screaming kidnap.”

“Telling him what’s happening: giving him the chance to prepare himself, you mean?”

“I’d prefer that to trying an unexpected snatch.”

“What if he doesn’t want to come: would he regard his father as a traitor?”

“That
is
my point,” said Straughan, once more close to impatience. “Too many things are going wrong. We don’t want a difficulty with Andrei becoming another one.”

“It can only come from Radtsic. Jacobson’s seeing him tomorrow.”

“Do I tell Jacobson to fix it?” pressed Straughan, determined it should be the Director’s decision.

“Give me a choice of proposals,” ordered Monsford.

*   *   *

As he wiped his mother’s mouth after feeding her that night Straughan said: “He’s looking for a way to avoid direct personal responsibility but I’m not going to let him. I’m not going to carry the can anymore: you mark my words,” and the old lady who didn’t any longer know how to mark or even say words stared unseeingly into a world in which only she lived.

14

Charlie’s dreamless sleep didn’t last the entire flight, just sufficiently for the aching finally to disappear, despite the seat limitations. He straightened, with antenna-prompted awareness, at the first change in the engine pitch, the initial priority to study the rest of the tourist group with whom he’d had no proper contact in Manchester. Charlie didn’t foresee any practical use from being part of it, apart from the initial, prebooked hotel accommodation, but in the entirely unplanned, thin-iced circumstances he’d created for himself it was impossible to anticipate anything he might need.

There were sixteen other people in the party, predominantly couples apart from three teenage girls in addition to Muriel, whose surname he discovered to be Simpson and whom he guessed to be in her early twenties. She was sitting next to him when he awoke.

“You really did need to sleep, didn’t you?” she greeted. She was an auburn-haired, small-featured woman who clearly believed her bust was her most attractive feature, judging from the upthrusting bra in which it was encased beneath a company-advertising T-shirt.

“I’ve been working flat out to get a project almost to closure,” said Charlie, deciding to introduce an already determined insurance for what was soon to follow.

“What sort of project?” she asked, predictably.

“One that means a lot to me,” said Charlie. “I can trust your discretion, can’t I?”

“I’d hope so,” said the woman, smiling at being taken into a confidence.

“You’ve heard of Russian oligarch billionaires settling in England?”

“Of course.” The expectant smile broadened.

“I’ve made a particular study of Russian architecture: got this commission to build a pavilion completely in the prerevolutionary style in the grounds of his Sussex estate for one of the best-known … I can’t, of course, tell you his name.…”

“Of course not,” she agreed, dropping the smile to indicate her seriousness.

“If I get this right, it’ll open every door. I’ve studied all the photographs and all the pictured art work, spent some time in St. Petersburg. I’ve snatched at this trip to confirm the styles that I’ve followed.”

“I can understand the importance of that.”

“I’m telling you now to warn you that I’m going to skip most of your trips.”

For the first time there was a frown. “The firm’s responsible for the people in this group.”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” soothed Charlie, with open-faced sincerity.

“How are you going to get around by yourself?”

Charlie hesitated, anxious to keep the invention as unquestionable as possible. “I studied Russian at university: speak it pretty well.”

The smile came back, broader than before. “Which university?”

The eagerness warned Charlie. “Was Russian your university module?”

“It’s why I’m doing this job, postgraduate. I want to speak it perfectly, eventually to get a diplomatic job.”

“Which university?” asked Charlie, turning her question back upon the girl.

“Manchester, obviously.”

“Bristol,” escaped Charlie.

On their overhead panel the fasten-seat-belt sign came on, the signal for the copilot’s landing announcement.

“I hope you get what you want in Moscow,” said Muriel.

“I’m determined I will,” Charlie promised himself.

*   *   *

Charlie rehearsed for the contradictions of a night arrival, the time of the fewest incoming flights carrying the fewest number of passengers among whom to hide from the fewest number of airport immigration officers and hopefully from the constantly open-eyed CCTV, which in the case of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo, while far less than the Orwellian intrusion of England, still had to be guarded against.

He scanned as much of the cabin as it was possible to see beyond his own tourist party and concluded his luck was holding with three of them—two men, one big enough to be Monsford’s twin, and a woman—remaining the tallest and the heaviest. He got close behind them as they got onto the disembarkation pier and Muriel unwittingly helped by shifting back and forth, a shepherdess keeping her easily strayed flock tight together. Charlie switched his attention between the tall-statured three and one of the smallest women in the group, maneuvering her unevenly wheeled suitcase to give him the excuse to bend away from the easily spotted cameras. His most exposed moment came at the passport booth, which he guarded against as best he could by fumbling through his cabin baggage hold-all close to his face for his tourist-group documentation, aware of the watchful Muriel on the far side as he was passed through unchallenged. Charlie judged his other danger point the camera-monitored registration desk at the Rossiya Hotel on the Ulitsa Razina and again used the burly trio, the Monsford look-alike predominantly, as well as his face-obscuring hold-all.

The prebooked accommodation put Muriel in the next room to his and she paused directly in front of him, handing over the key. “I’m responsible for everyone in the party: to make sure no one breaks the rules. Don’t get me into trouble, okay?”

“I’ve never got a girl into trouble,” said Charlie, acknowledging as he spoke that it was yet another lie. Would he be able to make contact with Natalia later today, when Moscow woke up? he wondered.

*   *   *

“Heathrow, four hours after the departure of Charlie’s Moscow flight,” declared John Passmore.

“Positively confirmed?” Aubrey Smith demanded.

The MI5 operations director shook his head. “Assessed at the moment at seventy-five percent: if it’s Charlie, he’s bloody good. It was the last KLM flight of the day. We’ve got two possible CCTV shots, in each of which he’s shielded, even at the passport check. Technical are doing their best to enhance and work out height and weight.”

“Charlie
is
bloody good,” acknowledged the MI5 Director-General. “No help from passport recognition?”

Passmore shook his head again. “If we get enough to harden up the Heathrow images I’ll circulate Charlie’s picture to airport-based Special Branch. It’s a shotgun effort to shoot down a sparrow but it might tell us when Charlie goes out of the country again.”

“If he hasn’t already left,” qualified Smith.

“If he’s already left it’ll give us a potential arrival to warn Moscow.”

“I’ve had three buck-passing calls from Monsford, stressing that Charlie’s our responsibility,” disclosed Smith.

“Straughan bought me lunch,” capped Passmore. “The supposedly finest Aberdeen Angus at the Reform, which unfortunately was overcooked.”

Smith smiled. “And?”

“At one stage I thought he was inferring that we’d colluded: had some foreknowledge, even, of Charlie’s vanishing act.”

“What’s your reading from that?”

“Panic, above and beyond any sensible concern,” assessed Passmore. “Straughan’s focus was mostly upon whether Charlie really had been turned all those years ago. I had to agree the sequence of events from Charlie’s disappearance supported that doubt.”

“What’s the doubt I’m hearing in your voice right now?” picked out Smith.

“I don’t believe this is the combined operation it’s supposed to be,” openly admitted Passmore.

“You suspect I’m keeping something more from you?” demanded Smith, matching the openness.

“Are you?”

“That’s an insubordinate, presumptuous inference!” declared Smith, the habitual quietness of his voice reducing the intended indignation.

“And that’s an avoiding answer. I lost an arm and a career because my superiors didn’t tell me the whole truth,” rejected Passmore, feeling across to his empty, left side. “I don’t want to lose whatever career I’m trying to establish in this shadow-shifting environment, to which I still obviously haven’t adjusted, through the same default. To prevent which I’d prefer to resign.”

Aubrey Smith sat with his head bowed, contemplating the totally unexpected turn in the conversation. Finally looking up, he said: “I’d hoped my apology for not being completely honest was sufficient. I respect and admire your integrity and want to convince you of mine. I have kept nothing more of this operation from you. If there is a hidden aspect, I am as unaware of it as you are.”

Now it was Passmore who lapsed into silence for a moment, good arm once more crossed to where his other had once been. “I’m convinced there’s something else. I haven’t the slightest evidence for the suspicion beyond instinct, but from some of the things Straughan said I believe there’s a something being kept from us. If it is, we’re being set up to be scapegoats.”

“Which I won’t let us be,” refused Smith, emptied by what he saw as the confirmation of what he’d feared since this current episode had begun.

“How, then, do we prevent it?” wondered the operations director

“Managing independent contact with Charlie could help.”

“Who could be following the same instinct by doing what he’s done, as well as asking for those separate passports,” suggested Passmore.

*   *   *

Harry Jacobson nervously lengthened his reconnaissance at the ferry terminal, the knot in the very pit of his already hollowed stomach tightening further in his despair of ever properly ensuring there wasn’t a snatch squad in the ebb and flow of people he was scouring for the first glimpse of Maxim Radtsic, hoping against hope that once more the man wouldn’t appear and that the operation would be aborted before it even began. It wasn’t just the apprehension of becoming the victim of an FSB counterplot that convinced Jacobson the Russian’s extraction was doomed. He was equally worried by the accumulated recognition that in the questionably professional planning there were far too many unforeseeable, abyss-deep pitfalls—the unexpected discovery of Andrei Radtsic’s live-in girlfriend the latest—in what had been conceived more like a tin-soldiered, make-believe war game commanded by incompetents safe in their London riverside bunkers. Now the game could be over before it even began because the most undisciplined tin soldier hadn’t obeyed orders, leaving him, if the analogy was continued, the first of the other tin soldiers likely to fall if it was all an FSB entrapment.