Red Star Rising (32 page)

“We’ve got more meetings scheduled today,” disclosed the Director-General. “I’ll raise your points.”

“I’d like to be told at once of the final decision.”

“
If
any final decision is reached,” heavily qualified Aubrey Smith.

It was still only 8:45 when Charlie reached his compound apartment but Harry Fish was already there with his two monitoring technicians. The man said at once, “I’m glad you’re early. Knowing about the bugs in your hotel suite I held back from ringing you there.”

“Is it the accident?” anticipated Charlie, who’d put the reason for his being so early out of his mind during the confrontation with the Director-General.

“No,” said Fish, frowning.

“What?” Keep everything separately compartmented, Charlie told himself: he had to stay on top of whatever confronted him.

“Something I think could be important,” said the electronics expert, pressing the replay button on a recording machine. “This is before enhancement but with the volume at its highest. . . .”

There was intermittent sound but Charlie couldn’t decided what it was or represented, although twice he thought he heard what could have been a human voice. He looked between the three other men, shaking his head.

“Now the enhancement,” announced Fish, in his conjuror’s voice.

There was still a lot of indistinguishable sound but the human voice was identifiable now. So were two outbursts of crying. Charlie positively translated from Russian “please, oh please,” followed by weeping, then “do it.” There was a burst of recognizable words—“please . . . have to . . . make . . .”—more sobbing, noise that meant nothing, and finally the repeated click of a lost connection.

Charlie again looked questioningly to Fish. “So what is it?”

“A compilation of three calls, the first within two hours of the press conference and initially dismissed as a crank approach, someone ringing the number for no reason: there’ve been at least twelve and I’ve had every one reexamined. Which is how we picked up the other two, over following days. The noise is traffic sound, so it’s a public street telephone, always put down before we can get number traces. The timing is always the same, though: precisely ten minutes past noon and always on the first of our listed numbers. It’s a woman’s voice: I haven’t had it voice-printed, not yet, but I’m going out on a limb to say it’s the same voice. I’m also suggesting it’s a Russian woman brought to tears trying to force herself to make the call but not being strong enough when the connection is made . . .” He paused. “I’m suggesting a pattern.”

Charlie considered what the other man had said. “The last call on the compilation? That was yesterday, right?”

Fish nodded. “Her lunch hour, I’d say. I thought it might be an
idea to have a human voice—your voice—answer the first number on our list at precisely ten minutes past noon today.”

“So do I,” agreed Charlie, looking at his watch. There was just over three hours to fill, before the possibility of her calling again. Coming back up to Fish, he said, “Now tell me about the accident.”

Fish had just begun when Halliday came into the apartment, instantly picking up the conversation and nodding for the electronics sweeper to continue. It only took minutes. It had been the second of the decoy cars Charlie had dispatched ahead of his own hidden departure. The vehicle had got less than two hundred yards in the direction opposite from that in which Charlie was traveling when an overtaking car cut in too sharply. At that point the camber of the embankment road dipped toward the Moskva, close to where the argument had been staged to distract the gate guards the night the body of the one-armed man had been dumped at the embassy. It had been instinctive for the driver to swerve in the direction of the river. He’d clipped the low embankment rail but the force of the collision had tipped the embassy car over. It had rolled four times before coming to a halt, at the water’s barrier.

“What about the other car?” demanded Charlie.

“Hit and run,” said Halliday.

“Traced yet?”

Halliday shook his head. “The only description was that it was big, something like a four-by-four.”

“Registration?” persisted Charlie.

“Too dirty to be read,” said Halliday.

“What about the driver of the embassy car?”

“He’s got a fractured spine. Already on his way back to London in a hospital plane that came in overnight,” said Halliday. “The prognosis is that he’ll certainly be paraplegic . . . possibly quadriplegic.”

“Who is he?” asked Charlie, expectantly.

Halliday hesitated. “Jack Hopkins. That’s why I came up here when I heard you were in the embassy. He was . . .”

“. . . my regular driver,” finished Charlie. “It had to be, didn’t it?” The man had only talked of just failing to qualify for the Tottenham Hotspur junior soccer squad, Charlie remembered, but of being determined to coach his son to succeed where he hadn’t when his Moscow tour ended.

“I’m here, to talk to you: the Englishman you saw on television. Read about in newspapers. You can talk to me. Just to me.” Charlie spoke in Russian, very consciously keeping any urgency from his voice, anxious that she didn’t detect the other emotion surging through him, even after the hour there’d been for him to rationalize the only possible interpretation from the car ramming. The reception volume was tuned to its highest without risking an ear-splitting playback and Charlie could clearly hear heavy breathing: quick, jerky, gulping snatches. Magnified as the receiver was he could very definitely detect traffic noise, the sticky tire sound against the street, an occasional impatient horn burst. “Don’t be frightened. You mustn’t be frightened. I promise nothing bad will happen. I’ll look after you.” Better that time: proper, comprehensible sentences. Her breathing sounded heavier, positively panting. “Talk to me. Tell me you understand what I’m telling you.”

From his equipment bank, Harry Fish hand signaled that the connection had been kept for two minutes.

“Not safe . . .” The words hissed out, scarcely above a whisper. It was a hoarse voice, a smoker’s voice.

“I’ll make it safe. Keep you safe.”

“Can’t.”

“I can. And I will.”

“Ivan said . . .” she began, before stumbling into a coughing fit. It was definitely a smoker’s cough, a discernible wheezing.

“What did Ivan say . . . ? Tell me what Ivan said.” He’d spoken too loudly, too demanding, Stop thinking about the car crash!

“. . . safe . . .”

“That he’d be safe?” groped Charlie, hopefully. Concentrate on one thing; only one thing, he told himself.

“. . . killed him . . .”

“Help me catch who killed him . . .”

“Can’t.”

“I can!” insisted Charlie, wanting the forcefulness in his voice now. “If you help me I can catch them.”

“No!” refused the voice just as forcefully, and the line went dead.

“Hello? Hello?” repeated Charlie.

“She’s gone,” announced Fish, unnecessarily. “You did well, holding her as long as you did.”

“Did you get a number?” demanded Charlie. “We know the time she’s going to phone, if she phones again. If we could find the kiosk we could stake it out; identify her!”

“I told you that was what I was going to try to do!”

“Did you
do
it?”

Fish shook his head. “I think the Russians are trying to monitor the line.”

“Can they?” asked Charlie, even more demanding.

There was another head shake. “I’ve ‘washed’ all the lines, to stop them being able to do that. But their device blocks me in return. Electronically it’s a standoff.”

After a pause, Charlie said: “I think she was genuine . . . not a crank.”

“I’ll need a translation of the actual words,” said Fish, guardedly. “The tone—the fear—certainly sounded genuine. Unless . . .”

“Unless what?”

“While you were talking, it suddenly occurred to me that it could be an FSB trick, testing you out.”

“You just told me they can’t monitor the line, hear what’s said.”
It was a reasonable suggestion from the other man. From the accident report on Hopkins they’d know they’d failed. If it was a ploy, they could plan it better the next time.

“They’d know the call was made,” Fish pointed out. “They can count them, quite easily, now that the calls are trailing off. And just as easily know how long they last.” So far that day there’d only been eight incoming contacts—four from journalists, two cranks, and two seeking money in advance of imparting promised information—in addition to that which Charlie had just finished.

Now Charlie shook his head. “If Guzov challenges me I’ll dismiss it as a crank: a hysterical woman I didn’t believe. But I think she’s our most likely . . .” He hesitated. “Our
only
possibility, in fact, apart from the silent ones who didn’t call back.”

“Twenty-eight who didn’t call back,” itemized Fish, pedantically.

“Will this one?” asked Charlie, in self-reflection.

“I think so. You kept her on far longer than I expected: that’s what made me wonder if she might be a plant. If she isn’t, she’s someone who wants to talk but is too frightened.”

“And our one-armed man was named Ivan,” Charlie remembered. Would he ever know the name of his attempted murderer? At once, irritation overwhelmed the thought. He wouldn’t be able to protect himself—survive even—if he allowed himself to think nonsense like that.

“What about her voice? You’ve got the language, I haven’t. Well educated, high born, low born, what?”

“Difficult, from what little she actually said, the hoarseness with which she said it. My impression is well educated.”

“You intend telling anyone?”

“There’s nothing
to
tell.” Which wouldn’t stop Harry Fish navigating his back channels to London, Charlie accepted. And probably Halliday, who’d fortunately left the apartment before the call, would have already told his MI6 case officer in London of the car crash, just as Charlie was sure that Fish would already have done.

“All we can do now is sit and wait, hopefully no longer than just after noon tomorrow.”

Maybe all
you’ve
got to do, thought Charlie. He had a hell of a lot more than that to do and at that moment wasn’t at all sure where to start.

Paul Robertson’s returning inquiry team arrived during the course of the afternoon, each traveling separately, routing themselves through Paris, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt. Only Robertson came direct from London, getting to the embassy ahead of the rest.

“It was the Director-General’s idea, hoping to avoid the sort of identification debacle we had going out,” explained Robertson. “That was an absolute bloody nightmare.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t send a different team,” said Charlie. Harry Fish had already been with the other man when Charlie arrived in the retained inquiry room and he was curious if the man had already told Robertson of that morning’s telephone call. Or of the embankment crash.

“You all right?” Robertson asked Charlie, answering Charlie’s uncertainty.

“They failed,” said Charlie.

“This time,” said Robertson. “What’s the Director-General say?”

“We haven’t talked about it yet.”

“You’ll be going back to London, of course.”

“No,” said Charlie.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said the man.

“What’s ridiculous?” demanded Charlie. “I’m reading it that I am close to something or someone: they’re frightened that I’m too close. This isn’t the time to run: that’s what they’ll be hoping, having missed with the crash.”

“You think the Director-General will risk another killing?”

“We’ll see,” said Charlie.

“He’s under a lot of pressure in London,” said Robertson. “He
considered sending in an entirely new inquiry team to find this inside leak. I argued against risking different people. My group and I are already blown.”

Robertson was desperate to recover from his mistake, recognized Charlie. “And you’ve limited the number of people who’ve been told in advance, so if the rest of your people get in unspotted and your return leaks, you’ve got your list of suspects?”

Robertson smiled, humorlessly. “And I know he only told you he was
thinking
of sending us back.”