Red Star Rising (40 page)

She hadn’t appeared to look for him as she’d entered and continued to concentrate, head bent forward, over her cup as she came farther into the café, not bringing her head up until she sat at the table directly beside him, nodding then as if in permission for him to join her. As close as she now was, Charlie could see nervousness was trembling through her, the cup she’d carried from the counter puddled in a moat of spilled coffee.

Charlie said: “Relax. Nothing can happen to you.”

“I’ll be all right in a minute.” It didn’t seem possible for her to look directly at him. She coughed, clearing her throat.

“You know who I am. Can I know your name?” It was going to take a long time, Charlie guessed. He would have to be very gentle, not rush anything.

The woman hesitated. “Irena.”

“Irena . . . ?” encouraged Charlie.

There was another hesitation. “Irena Yakulova Novikov.”

“And Ivan . . . ?”

Her hands were clenched, to control the shaking. “Ivan Nikolaevich Oskin.”

She wasn’t wearing a wedding band, Charlie saw. “Tell me about Ivan Nikolaevich.”

She jumped at the sudden roar from people watching television. A man’s voice from the crowd said, “Giving the fucking game away!”

Irena coughed again and said, “We were together. Had been, for a long time. Before Afghanistan even.”

“He fought in the Afghanistan war?” The missing arm, Charlie thought at once.

“He was there.” She fumbled for cigarettes from her bag, the cheapest that minimized the tobacco with a hollow tube half its length, and had to steady the match with both hands.

“Is that where he was hurt?”

She nodded, not speaking. There was another roar from the ice hockey watchers. This time she didn’t jump.

“What was he doing there?” asked Charlie, registering her qualified reply.

The hesitation was the longest yet. “KGB.”

“He was a KGB field officer?”

“He was Georgian, as I am. He had the complexion . . .” Her hand came up to her own face as she spoke, quicker now, her confidence growing. “He was very good at language. He had Pamini as well as Pashto; a lot of Middle East languages. He was highly regarded, because of his ability.”

“He had to infiltrate the mujahideen?” guessed Charlie. The most difficult and dangerous of all field assignments was trying to adopt the disguise and culture of an enemy in a war or hostile situation.

She nodded again, looking directly at him at last. “He was attached to the military headquarters in Kabul, even though he was
KGB, not the military
Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie
. He wasn’t popular, because he wasn’t one of them, either: considered an outsider. And he was too honest, insisting that Russia couldn’t win the war. Something happened. He never knew how. He was betrayed. There was an ambush, near the compound in Kabul. Three generals, air force as well as army, were killed. Ivan lost his arm.”

“Were you in Afghanistan with him?” asked Charlie, aware now that the skin on the left side of her face was puckered, as well as mottled brown.

“Does my face distress you?” she asked abruptly, her hand up to her cheek again.

“Not at all,” insisted Charlie, unhappy at the sideways drift of the conversation. Her pace, he reminded himself.

“It does some people,” she said, accepting his denial. “Ivan and I met on station in Cairo. That was where this happened . . .” She laughed, without humor. “The lobster was being flambéed, at the table. The chef poured on too much brandy and somehow the flame blew into my face . . .” There was another humorless laugh as she gazed around. “It’s safer here. They don’t go for flambé cooking.”

They were straying even further sideways. He had to get things back on track without appearing impatient. Groping, he said, “Did Ivan go to Afghanistan direct from Cairo?”

“He’d fixed it—Ivan was a good fixer—that we’d get married in Cairo and go to Kabul together: the KGB liked husband-and-wife teams. But I got medevaced back here to Moscow: the concern was not my face but that I’d lose the sight of my eye. They managed to prevent that and did the best they could for the burn scars but it took a long time. The marriage was rearranged here, during Ivan’s leave from Afghanistan, once I got better. Then Ivan was caught in the ambush and he was brought back and was in the hospital for even longer. . . .” Irena came to a gulping halt, her throat working, and Charlie realized she was close to breaking down. He held back from filling in the silence between them. She fumbled another cigarette alight, wincing at the sound of a goal being scored on television.

“I’m sorry. It’s just that . . .” She had to stop again. “Sorry. The wedding was finally planned for the Saturday after he was found dead, in the embassy. . . .” Irena began to shake again.

“Can I get you something?” offered Charlie, not knowing what.

“Sometimes they have brandy here.”

They did and Charlie bought two glasses. It was gritty and probably home distilled and caught Charlie’s throat, almost making him cough. It didn’t seem to cause the hoarse-voiced woman any difficulty.

“Things haven’t been good for you,” Charlie sympathized.

“No,” she agreed. The shaking was subsiding.

Everything still had to be at her pace, Charlie warned himself again, nervous of another near collapse. “What about the KGB? Were you and Ivan kept on after the change to FSB?”

Irena shook her head. “I wasn’t, because of the circumstances in which I was hurt. It was bourgeois; criminal, even—enjoying myself at KGB expense. I was dismissed, on reduced pension.”

“What about Ivan Nikolaevich?”

“He was kept on, of course. He’d been injured on assignment: he was even awarded a distinguished service medal.”

He was getting closer, thought Charlie, more apprehensive than encouraged but deciding to take the risk. “When he was fully recovered, was Ivan Nikolaevich kept in the First Chief Directorate?”

Irena looked at him wide-eyed, open-mouthed. “You know . . . the structure . . . Directorates and Departments!”

Shit! thought Charlie. “It’s all right! You’re not betraying anything . . . anyone. All I want to know, to find out, is who killed Ivan Nikolaevich . . .”

“No!” she refused. “If they find out—”

“They won’t find out,” insisted Charlie, desperately. “No one will find out.”

She’d had both hands cupped around her brandy tumbler, but the renewed shaking made it rattle against the tabletop, so she released it. “Ivan Nikolaevich wouldn’t want me to talk to someone like you . . . he was loyal . . .”

“He was killed, murdered,” argued Charlie, his desperation growing. “And nothing’s being done to find out who did it. Why they did it. Officially they’re lying: you know they’re lying, with stories of Ivan belonging to a gang. Pimping whores. And you know Mikhail Alekandrovivh Guzov is FSB.”

“I know why they did it,” declared the woman, suddenly calm and under control.

“Why, Irena?” pressed Charlie, quietly and controlled. “Why was he murdered?”

“He found out something that he shouldn’t have; shouldn’t have known about. Tried to do a deal.”

“What was it he found out?”

Irena remained silent for a long time, both hands back around her glass, sipping from it once, seemingly unaware of the continued noise from the ice hockey fans. She straightened, suddenly and said, “I’m tired. I don’t want to talk anymore.”

“You’ve got this far. Been this brave,” pleaded Charlie. “I won’t betray you, like Ivan was betrayed.” He reached across the table, taking one of her hands away from the glass to hold it to reinforce what he was saying. “I will find out who killed Ivan. And make sure they’re punished. But I can’t do it without your help. Things went bad for you, both of you, all the time. Don’t let this go bad like all the rest, now that you don’t have Ivan anymore.”

“I need to think. Will think,” she said, defiantly.

If he pressed her any harder he’d lose her, Charlie knew. “Promise me we’ll talk again.” When she didn’t reply he repeated, “Promise me!”

“I promise. I’ll call the embassy.”

“No,” refused Charlie. “No more telephoning. Give me a place: somewhere we can meet like this.”

There was another long pause. “Here.”

“Tomorrow,” insisted Charlie. “Give me a time to be here tomorrow.”

“I have to work on Sundays.”

From the coarseness of the hand he’d briefly held, it could
even be close to manual labor, a machinist in a factory perhaps. “You have a lunch break: you always telephoned at ten past twelve. Let’s meet here during your lunch break.”

“Twenty past. But maybe not tomorrow. Monday.”

“Tomorrow, Irena,” insisted Charlie. “Don’t run away. If you run away you’ll be betraying Ivan Nikolaevich.”

“Tomorrow,” she finally capitulated.

Charlie acknowledged the difference—only four or five first-to-arrive-last-to-leave journalists and one television cameraman—the moment he approached the embassy. There were fifteen press approaches logged in the set-aside apartment, none of them from Svetlana Modin. And Mikhail Guzov had not returned his early-morning call, although waiting for him was a torn-off TASS news agency release, topped by Halliday’s name and six exclamation marks, of an official Interior Ministry statement expanding its earlier claim that the British embassy murder had been solved with the arrest of a Chechen drug-smuggling gang. It concluded with the further announcement that the planned press conference had been postponed to a date yet to be decided. There were no messages awaiting him from London when he reached the communications room.

He hadn’t been forgotten, Charlie reluctantly accepted: just momentarily ignored, put aside because of other more important pressures. He should, he supposed, be grateful for the respite, which to a degree he was, very grateful indeed. The reservation was prompted by his uncertainty about how successful his overcrowded day had been, by comparison.

Charlie objectively scored himself 60 percent out of a hundred from the meeting with Natalia, largely based—despite Natalia’s warning not to overinterpret it—upon Sasha’s childishly innocent remark about being taken somewhere far away from Moscow. The 40 percent reduction came from Natalia’s continued reluctance to step out into the unknown and Sasha’s apparent closeness—or accustomed acceptance—to Igor Karakov. There
was nothing he could do, no tweak he could attempt, to improve his self-assessed ratings, until their next contact. But it
had
been right to keep the personal meeting. Sasha had been wonderful and despite her warning, he’d been encouraged at how concerned Natalia had been about him.

Charlie forced his mind back to Irena Yakulova Novikov. Charlie acknowledged that he still had little more than instinct to trust her disjointed story. But instinct had rarely—and never completely—failed him in the past. And the very disjointedness of their conversation rang truer in his mind than a coherently timed and dated account could or would have done. Apart from his own physical safety the most pressing professional problem was finding the slightest corroboration of anything she’d told him. Neither the name Irena Yakulova Novikov nor Ivan Nikolaevich Oskin came up on Charlie’s KGB or FSB search of MI5 records, which didn’t surprise him because he knew intelligence officers in both organizations always operated under pseudonyms, as did every other espionage and counterespionage body throughout the world: despite publicly identifiable headquarter buildings and publicly named and identified Directors and Directors-General and Chairmen, intelligence organizations did not officially exist to spy and murder and suborn and infiltrate and manipulate. So how could nonexistent entities be staffed by real, flesh and blood people?

Russia’s war in Afghanistan! The possibility burst upon him, not the possibility of obtaining a name—Ivan would have operated in Kabul under an identity different even from his pseudonym at Lubyanka headquarters—but the disastrous Russian incursion gave Charlie one dated marker, and Irena’s account of the ambush in which Ivan lost his arm further refined it. Charlie concentrated his Internet search among publicly available and openly provided strategic study groups in America—knowing no such facility existed in the Russian Federation nor the Soviet Union that preceded it—and located the incident in two hours. It was in a newspaper cutting from
The New York Times,
dated March 15, 1989. It was a very short, two-paragraph report, still
with no names, but with the identifying fact that three generals—one air force, two army—had been killed at the same time, the only occasion of such a simultaneous loss of three senior officers. A Russian driver also died in the ambush. Ivan was described as a Pashto-speaking Russian interpreter. In a much longer op-ed commentary feature, again in
The New York Times,
the incident was referred to as a turning point in the Russian disillusionment with the war and Ivan more positively identified by his injury being described as the loss of an arm.

Charlie was warmed by the feeling of satisfaction at his instinct proving right, although realistically acknowledging that it barely took him half a step forward. He needed Irena to keep their meeting the following day—and be prepared to talk far more fully—to do better than this. And he wasn’t at all sure that she would. He did, though, know that she worked—and possibly lived—within an area very close to the café, with which she was obviously familiar, by getting her to agree to meet him there during a lunch hour. Charlie hoped that she didn’t realize how he’d tricked her into disclosing it and giving him the minimal advantage.