Bomb Grade (5 page)

‘Lucky,' she said, looking around the room. ‘There's got to be at least forty people here who've been told to go or moved elsewhere.' She came back to Charlie. ‘How about you?'

‘Moving on,' said Charlie, which wasn't, after all, a lie.

‘Sorry, Charlie.'

Would he be? wondered Charlie. ‘It'll work out.'

‘Charlie the Survivor,' she declared, gin spoiling the coquettish smile. ‘That's what they always said about you, Charlie. Even the Director-General.'

Now she decides to tell me! thought Charlie. How much more would he have learned if she had admitted him to her bed? Too late to be of any use now: the Director-General she was talking about had died at least six years ago. ‘Is that what they all said?'

She nodded. ‘That. And a lot more. How are things otherwise?‘

‘Otherwise?' said Charlie, playing the game. It wasn't much but it was better than sobbing into their drinks like everyone else.

‘You happy?'

‘Happy enough.'

‘With anyone?'

‘On and off.'

‘Nothing permanent then?'

‘Nothing permanent.'

‘Me neither.'

Why couldn't it have been like this when he'd tried to know her better? ‘That won't last, someone as pretty as you,' he said, gallantly. She didn't try to refasten the top button of her shirt that suddenly gave way under the strain.

‘Do you want to stay here much longer?' she invited.

‘I wasn't going to, anyway,' said Charlie. ‘Got something fixed up.' It had been a depressing mistake to come at all.

‘Oh,' she said, crushed.

‘I'm sorry,' apologized Charlie, still gallant. ‘I didn't know you'd be here. Can't cancel it now.'

‘Some other time maybe,' she suggested, without offering a telephone number.

‘Sure,' agreed Charlie, without asking for one.

There was another wet embrace and the insistence they keep in touch from Billy Baker and a shrill giggle from the Chinese girl and a lot of damp handshakes as he made his way out of the room and down the tilting stairs into Westminster Bridge Road. The death of the dinosaurs, he thought, breathing deeply in the darkness: or rather, their funeral. He looked sideways towards the old headquarters building, expecting it to be in darkness, but it wasn't. It was bright with the permanent office lights of whatever ministerial department had taken it over. Gerald Williams would shit himself at the thought of the electricity bill, thought Charlie.

‘Seems you've covered all that's necessary,' encouraged the Director-General.

‘There's a scientific and military mission in Moscow at the moment. I've asked them to give him the technical briefing before they leave.'

‘That's a good idea.'

‘Williams is complaining we've made too many financial concessions.'

‘He's memoed me direct, covering his back against any Treasury enquiry.' Dean was unaccustomed to bureaucratic politics. He'd started out finding it amusing, but not any more. If half his students had behaved in the back-biting, self-serving way of virtually all the people he worked with now, he'd have suspended them from their courses until they grew up. He wished he felt more comfortable with Johnson.

The deputy Director smiled. ‘Muffin's certainly pushed it to the very edge.'

Dean made a vague gesture over his desk, somewhere in the disorder of which Johnson presumed Charlie Muffin's file was buried. ‘He's always pushed everything to the edge.'

‘I can monitor that closely enough.'

‘It seems to have been difficult in the past.'

‘I wasn't the person controlling him in the past.'

‘Are you now? I thought the committee had been established to do that?' The other man's arrogance was irritating.

Johnson bristled. ‘I meant on a day-to-day basis.'

‘There's been a Director to Director note, from Fenby: he's making a personal visit to London to meet me,' disclosed Dean.

‘You'll like him,' predicted Johnson, who already knew of the visit but wanted to remind the other man of his longer experience of the department. ‘He sees the grand picture: the sort of man who knows that politics is the art of the possible.'

At the beginning of their relationship Dean had suspected Johnson's frequent invocation of Bismarck aphorisms to be a mockery of his previous academic career but he'd learned since that the German genuinely was Johnson's hero, which was perhaps understandable in view of Johnson's Foreign Office association. Dean twirled his spectacles prayer-bead fashion and said, ‘I hope Muffin really understands just how much politics is involved.'

‘I can monitor that, too,' insisted Johnson.

John Fenby thought being the Director of FBI was like being the maker of the best Swiss clock whose wheels and cogs meshed together without ever going wrong by a single second. It seemed to Fenby that virtually every FBI Director since Hoover quit or retired complaining at the impossibility of working with the President or the Congress or the Attorney General or of being the victim of staff incompetence, their only ambition from their moment of appointment to get away from Pennsylvania Avenue as fast as possible.

John Fenby didn't want to get away from Pennsylvania Avenue. If he had his way – which he was determined always to do – Fenby was going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming from Hoover's original seventh-floor suite from which, under two successive Presidents, he had moulded the Bureau into a personal fiefdom unmatched since the Bureau's creator.

Fenby, who was a small, rotund man not unlike Hoover in both looks and stature, coveted the Director's role for exactly the same reasons as its founder. He adored the Bureau jet. And the chauffeured stretch limousine. And being part of an inner circle at the White House and up on the Hill. And of personally controlling an empire of thousands spread around the globe, anxious to respond to every command he uttered. Had Fenby not been, primarily for public awareness rather than religious conviction, a twice-on-Sunday churchgoer he would have believed himself God. He contented himself with Boss, which was a Hoover word. It was, in fact, a secret regret that he couldn't go out on arrests and be photographed with a Tommy Gun cradled in his arms, like Hoover had been. But that had been in another age. He couldn't have everything. What he had was good enough. And what he had most of all was an awareness of how things operated in the capital of the world.

Like today.

The corner table at the Four Seasons was reserved permanently for him, whether he used it or not, the other tables moved out of hearing. Although he was the favour-purveyor, Fenby was also today's host and therefore solicitously early, already seated when the Speaker arrived. Fenby enjoyed being included in the
frisson
of recognition that went through the restaurant as Milton Fitzjohn strode across the room, the political glad-hand outstretched. The required my-you're-looking-fine-and-so-are-you recital concluded with Fitzjohn ordering bourbon. The abstemious Fenby, who never risked alcohol during working hours, already had his mineral water.

‘So how's my boy doing, sir?' Fitzjohn, whose iron-fist control and manipulation of Congress exceeded even that of Lyndon Johnson, occupied an original colonial mansion in South Carolina and assiduously cultivated a Southern gentleman mien to go with it. He didn't consider anyone, certainly not any White House incumbent from whom he was only two heart beats away, his superior, but ‘sir' was one of several insincere courtesies.

‘A rising star,' assured the FBI Director. ‘Someone of whom you can be rightfully proud.'

‘I am, sir, I am. Mrs Fitzjohn will be particularly gratified to hear it.' Referring to his wife in the third person and never in public by her christian name was another affectation. ‘Natural that she should be worried, though.'

‘Quite natural,' agreed Fenby. He'd had reservations posting Kestler to somewhere like Moscow and certainly with the specific nuclear brief, but Fitzjohn had insisted his wife's nephew get a high-profile assignment.

Fitzjohn demanded a T-bone bleeding from exposure. Fenby ordered his customary salad and a second bottle of water.

‘Mrs Fitzjohn is a little worried, I have to say, about some of the things she's hearing about Moscow. Lot of crime there: people getting killed.'

Only someone with Fenby's committed dedication to remaining in power could have greeted that statement with a straight face. ‘I think you can tell Mrs Fitzjohn that I am taking every precaution to ensure James's safety. Not only that: to ensure his career in the Bureau, too.' The British approach had been very fortuitous, although Fenby knew very few directors, perhaps only Hoover himself, would have realized every advantage as quickly as he had.

‘I'm extremely grateful to hear that, sir. Extremely grateful.'

Which is what Fenby wanted everyone in positions of power or influence in Washington to be, extremely grateful to him. Like the CIA would be grateful to him if he had to sacrifice the Englishman who had caused them so much embarrassment, all those years ago.

That afternoon he memoed the Bureau's Scientific Division at Quantico to ensure they had a sufficiently qualified nuclear physicist, if the need for one arose. He didn't expect there to be, but John Fenby left nothing to chance. Which was why he called Peter Johnson, in London, too.

‘How were lessons?'

‘All right.'

‘What did you learn?'

‘Numbers.'

‘How many?'

‘Can't remember.'

‘You're supposed to remember.'

‘Why?'

‘You go to school to make you clever.'

‘Are you clever?'

‘Sometimes.'

‘Why not all the time?'

‘People make mistakes.'

‘Do you make mistakes?'

‘I try not to.'

‘Why?'

‘Because it's important not to make mistakes.'

‘Do people get angry?'

‘If I make bad mistakes, yes.'

‘Why?'

‘Because it upsets them.'

‘Do you get angry if people make mistakes?'

‘Sometimes.'

‘I'll try not to make mistakes.'

‘So will I,' said Natalia, a promise to herself as much as to Sasha.

chapter 5

T
he nuclear weaponry leakage from Russia and its former satellites worried Barry Lyneham far more than it worried most other people involved in its attempted prevention and for entirely different reasons.

Lyneham had had a good and fortunate career, virtually unblemished by any serious errors and certainly none he hadn't been able to disguise or dump on someone else, and he'd seen his Moscow appointment as the FBI section head as the smooth glide to contented, well-pensioned retirement for which the Florida condo with the boat slip at the back had already been bought, with the game-rigged cruiser ready for delivery when he gave the word.

He'd worked out way ahead of anyone else that Moscow was a snip, the best thing that could have happened to him. All right, it was a shitty, bad-weather, nothing-works place to live, somewhere he wouldn't have even settled his mother-in-law, but that wasn't the point. The point was that in the eyes and ears and opinion of Washington, Moscow was still the Cold War, high-profile posting that carried with it an automatic Grade 18 – with the fancy title of senior executive officer – with none of the Cold War embarrassment risks now there wasn't a Cold War any more.

Until the organized crime motherfuckers emerged from the woodwork, that is. And realized the profit trading nuclear shit to every Middle East towel head with ambitions to replace Gary Cooper with a mushroom cloud in their remake of
High Noon
. Then it had become a whole new ball game altogether, top of the agenda, Director-to-President breakfast-table stuff and there wasn't anything higher profile than that.

James Kestler's appointment was another worry for Lyneham, which would have surprised a lot of people if he'd admitted it, which of course he didn't. On the face of it, the specific, named assignment removed the personal career danger to Lyneham from any foul-up.

Or would have done, if Kestler hadn't had the pull of being related to the wife of one of the most powerful men, maybe even
the
most powerful man, in Washington. Which was a bigger bastard than nuclear smuggling as far as Lyneham was concerned. There'd been the predictable crap from Fenby that Kestler was just another FBI agent, like everybody else, and shouldn't get any special favours. But Lyneham didn't believe that any more than he believed in virgin birth or that there was good in every man.

And Kestler was just the sort of prematurely promoted smart-assed son-of-a-bitch to screw up. He was only thirty years old, five years out of the academy, and rode so gung-ho into every situation it was inevitable he was going to shoot himself in not just one but both feet. And sooner rather than later, thought Lyneham, only half-listening to the younger man so full of pent-up energy he strode about the office when he talked. Lyneham would have thought the five miles the silly bastard jogged every morning, beside that part of the inner Moscow peripherique close to the US embassy, would have been enough.

‘Sit down, for Christ's sake. My neck aches following you about' Being the Speaker's relation didn't spare Kestler from being bawled out: Lyneham sometimes got relief from it.

Kestler sat, reluctantly. His left leg kept jigging up and down, as if he were keeping in time with something. ‘So what do you think?'

‘I think the Brits decided it was serious and important enough to appoint their own man, like we did.'

‘But this guy!' exclaimed Kestler, who glowed with the health he strove so hard to achieve, pink faced and hard bodied. He kept his fair hair in a tight crew cut and wore jeans in the office, like he was doing now, which Lyneham allowed although he knew Edgar J. Hoover, in whose reign he'd joined the Bureau, would have gone apoplectic at the thought. But then Hoover had his own strange way of dressing out of office hours.