Red Star Burning (2 page)

Which it most certainly wasn’t, Charlie assured himself, as he splashed whiskey into his glass intentionally to be visible to a camera in the window-blind coping. The whiskey and how much of it he drank would scarcely be a revelation to his observers. They actually provided it because of its rarity: known as it inevitably would be to his pursuers, it could have led to his whereabouts if he’d placed a regular order with an outside supplier.

How many pursuers would there be? wondered Charlie, carrying his tumbler back to his accustomed lounge chair overlooking the small, sensor-seeded garden. This soon, only three months after he’d wrecked an espionage operation the Russians had nurtured over practically eighteen years, there’d be a lot: a code-name-designated operation, in fact. Would it be only Russian? Almost certainly not. The Russian target had been the CIA, convincing them—which it had, completely—that a former KGB-cum-FSB officer about to be elected president of the Russian Federation would, once in absolute power, remain their deeply embedded agent through whom America could virtually manipulate the Moscow government, never suspecting that it would have been the misguided occupant of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., who would have been the puppet on the Kremlin’s strings. There would doubtless have been a lot of head rolling at the CIA’s Langley headquarters. Enough, certainly, for the Agency to consider matching, murderous retribution. Was he safe even from his own people? Charlie knew the mass clear-out of those who’d swallowed the Russian bait at MI5’s Thames House headquarters had been only slightly less sweeping at the MI6 building on the other side of the river at Vauxhall Cross, both sufficient to gain him far more enemies than admirers.

He wasn’t simply caught between a rock and a hard place, Charlie accepted. He was trapped beneath a collapsing mountain range: if one avalanche didn’t sweep him away, another one would. Most of which, to some extent, he’d already worked out. Today’s humiliating psychoanalysis had simply concentrated it in its entirety. As much as it had concentrated his mind, which was no longer fogged by the indignation with which he’d rejected the psychiatrist’s accusation. He definitely hadn’t contemplated suicide. But subconsciously he’d allowed himself to sink into an acceptance of his eventually being detected: of his being killed by one or other of the groups committed to his destruction.

Which was preposterous and unthinkable: he’d never capitulated to anything or anyone and he didn’t intend rolling onto his back and spreading his legs in submission now, no matter how different or stultified that life might now be.

Charlie smiled and looked up in the direction of another suspected camera. It was, he determined, a decision that deserved another drink, in celebration this time.

*   *   *

“What the hell does he think he’s got to smile about?” demanded Aubrey Smith, turning away from the safe-house recording that directly followed Charlie Muffin’s psychoanalysis.

“Normally I’d try an answer that would help,” apologized George Cowley. “This time I don’t think I can.”

“You’ve put him on suicide watch, for Christ’s sake!” exploded Jane Ambersom, the androgynously featured, newly appointed deputy director. “You actually think he’s going to top himself!”

“I also find that difficult to accept,” said the mild-mannered, mild-voiced Smith, whose confidence remained undermined by his knowing how dangerously close his overthrow, orchestrated by Ambersom’s predecessor, had been. As it fortunately turned out, Jeffrey Smale had been the highest-profile casualty from Charlie Muffin’s success.

“I think he’s a potential danger to himself and because of that a danger to the service,” insisted Cowley, repeating the warning with which he’d begun the assessment meeting.

“There’s no way, no set of circumstances, in which Charlie Muffin could be suicidal,” persisted the Director-General.

“I’ve just spelt out the circumstances to you. And to him,” reminded Cowley. “He knows just how much of a target he is. And always will be. Just as he knows, simply to survive, what every day of every week of every month is going to be for that survival. I can’t imagine—no one can truthfully imagine—what the constant awareness of that is like. It’s worse than being imprisoned for life, in solitary confinement. In those circumstances a man quite quickly becomes dehumanized, robotlike, because there is no human contact apart from his guards, which isn’t enough. Charlie Muffin doesn’t have anyone with whom to adjust, to make a new life. But he’s not incarcerated. He can go out, to pubs and restaurants and cinemas and theaters, and see other people all around him. But never risk getting involved, never knowing whom he can trust. It’s permanent, unremitting torture.”

“Charlie Muffin’s always been a loner and never trusted anyone,” disputed Ambersom, gesturing to her own copy of Charlie’s personnel file. “What’s new now?”

“How he lived before was by his own choice,” the psychiatrist pointed out. “And before, he had the job. Which I acknowledge from everything I’ve read he did by his own rules and upset a lot of people in the process. But he was doing
something:
he had a reason to live. He doesn’t have that reason now: any reason whatsoever to go on living now.”

“What are you suggesting?” asked Smith, whose deceptive, quietly spoken demeanor hinted to his post-Oxford career as professor of Middle East studies, one of the core credos of which was that once-suffered harm had always to be avenged, a philosophy he’d quickly recognized in Charlie Muffin.

“I’m not employed here to suggest,” refused Cowley. “I’m here to assess his mental health and that’s what I’ve done.”

“Are you saying he’s mentally ill?” demanded the sharply suited, precisely spoken Ambersom, who’d bitterly opposed and still resented her manipulated transfer to MI5 from the external Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.

“Not yet,” qualified Cowley, forcefully. “I think in time, a comparatively short period of time, he could begin to develop a psychosis. I also think that he would be intelligent enough to realize himself what was happening to him and that with the emptiness of his existence, an emptiness that’s never going to be filled, he’d prefer to kill himself than gradually, knowingly, degenerate into mental decline.” The psychiatrist shifted his own copy of Charlie’s personnel file. “It might be difficult for most people to decipher from all that’s in here, but from what I’ve read and from the sessions I’ve had with him, I’ve got Charlie Muffin marked as an extremely proud, even arrogant man. He’d rather kill himself than end up mentally confused, wearing an incontinence pad.”

“Charlie Muffin has been an active intelligence officer for twenty years,” reminded Ambersom. “Quite irrespective of his most recent operation, we cannot risk the slightest mental uncertainty in someone who knows as much as he does about British intelligence activities over such a period. A lame workhorse that can no longer serve its purpose is put out of its misery, as an act of kindness.”

“I don’t want this conversation taken in that direction,” said Smith, who resented the woman’s appointment even more than she did, believing it the most positive indication that his attempted overthrow by Jeffrey Smale had only been postponed.

“If we accept the opinion of Dr. Cowley, which I certainly do, I don’t believe there is any alternative for us to consider,” argued the deputy director, eager to establish herself.

“There will be no discussion or consideration of physically disposing of anyone while I am Director-General,” declared Smith.

“The Americans have formally asked to debrief Charlie themselves,” disclosed Ambersom, one of whose new responsibilities was to liaise with U.S intelligence.

“Are you proposing they do your dirty work for us?” demanded Smith.

“I am bringing to your attention a formal request from Washington,” qualified Ambersom. “Their request comes with a number of questions not answered in our official debriefing of Charlie Muffin, an abbreviated version of which was made available to them.”

“Tell both the FBI and CIA to provide a full list of what more they want from the debriefing, with the understanding that we’ll answer what we can,” ordered Smith. “And in doing so remind them how many of their executive staff, including the CIA’s deputy director of operations, were present here in England, with every opportunity to debrief him, at the moment he exposed their naïveté in believing that Stepan Lvov was their double-agent coup of the century when he was elected president of the Russian Federation.”

“The request was specifically for personal access to Charlie.”

“Which I’m not allowing.”

“They won’t consider that the sort of cooperation that’s supposed to exist between our services.”

“I don’t give a damn how they’ll consider it,” rejected the Director-General. “The last time Charlie Muffin was in a room with CIA and FBI people—which was the occasion he saved them all from making the biggest mistake in their combined histories—there was a U.S. plane at Northolt air base fueled and ready to take him God knows where on a rendition flight from which he would not have returned after whatever interrogation techniques they’d perfected at Guantanamo. You have any problem with CIA or FBI, pass it on to me to resolve.”

“Which leaves unanswered the question of what to do with a mentally declining Charlie Muffin,” Ambersom said, trying to fight back, flushed at the man’s rejection.

“Not quite. We’ve decided against letting him be put down like a workhorse for which there’s no further use, haven’t we?” said Aubrey Smith, very aware that there was no answering agreement from the woman.

*   *   *

“It could too easily be a trap, after the way we so recently humiliated them.” Gerald Monsford knew he’d come perilously close to being the highest-ranking victim of the Lvov debacle, surviving only by switching onto Jane Ambersom the responsibility for his own ill-timed and insufficiently considered attempts at self-promoting involvement, which he’d further concealed by decimating MI6’s Moscow embassy staffing. He was terrified now of another near disaster so soon afterward.

“Maxim Radtsic, whose identity has been confirmed by photographs in our own files, is the specifically designated executive deputy to the FSB,” replied Harry Jacobson, MI6’s newly replaced station chief. “He personally approached me at a diplomatic reception at the French embassy. Unless he was as desperate as he certainly appeared, he would not have identified his son as a potential kidnap victim by volunteering that Andrei was studying at the Sorbonne, would he?”

“You talked to Straughan about this?” Monsford protectively demanded. James Straughan was the service’s operational field director.

“It was Straughan who provided the photographic confirmation from the files, as well as establishing through our Paris
rezidentura
that Andrei definitely is a student at the Sorbonne.”

“Why didn’t Radtsic approach the French?”

Jacobson sighed in frustration at the Director’s unanswerable questions, despite the warning from Straughan before the Moscow call had been transferred that Monsford was a worryingly unpredictable, frequently erratic man. “I don’t know why he didn’t! It didn’t occur to me to ask. What occurred to me was that it was the opportunity of a lifetime.”

“It could be a trap,” repeated the other man, nervously.

“Radtsic couldn’t have acted out the nervousness. He was practically breaking apart. No attempted entrapment would be personally baited by the FSB’s deputy director!”

“What’s he offering to prove it’s genuine?”

“Himself! What more could we expect? Or hope for?”

“Something to prove himself, first.”

“Isn’t the fact that he isn’t, which could be fabricated any way the FSB chose, further and better proof that this is kosher?”

“He’ll give us everything we want when we get him and his wife—and the boy—here?”

“He told me that once he was here, safe, he’d cooperate in whatever way we asked.”

After the near disaster with Lvov, this coup could secure his MI6 directorship for life and conceivably secure him the directorship-in-chief of MI5, calculated Monsford. “Be very, very careful. Tell him yes. We’ll set everything up, get them all out, new identity, house, pension, everything. And keep it tight. Don’t tell anyone in the
rezidentura
: certainly not anyone attached to MI5. Put nothing on the general traffic channels. Everything under Eyes Only, limited to you, me, and Straughan.”

“Radtsic wants to get out right away.”

“Tell him we’ll get him out as soon as we can set it all up. And stress he’s not to tell his son until we tell him it’s okay to do so. A nineteen-year-old might not like the idea of being born again, which is what’s going to happen when we give them their new life.”

3

The self-admission wasn’t easy for Charlie Muffin but he acknowledged that his mistake had been reverting to tradecraft. Establishing a predictable daily routine and unexpectedly breaking it was an operational ploy Charlie had frequently used to lose lulled-into-complacency observers. And precisely what he’d set out to achieve to continue his financial support for Natalia and Sasha.

Now there wouldn’t be any lulled complacency. Now, because of a Middle Earth hobbit psychiatrist’s belief that he was suicidal, his observers would be on a higher than normal alert. With their number increased, which was a compounding setback because Charlie was sure he’d identified his five regular walkabout watchers. Which was scarcely surprising. Under strict supervision—and budgetary restraints—it was standard practice to train surveillance teams in protection situations like this, where those within a program were expected to cooperate by protecting themselves in the first place. But George Cowley’s ridiculous diagnosis would change all standard practice.

If the concern were as great as Cowley intimated, the improved surveillance would be fully qualified professionals, conceivably some who guarded defectors and at-risk foreign royalty and dignitaries.

But not yet, not today. Today the changeover wouldn’t be complete.