Kings of Many Castles (9 page)

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Authors: Brian Freemantle

BOOK: Kings of Many Castles
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“Will you be here, with them?”
“No.”
The woman looked down at her sagging bosoms. “Can I have my
underwear back, when they come? And the laces for my shoes?”
“Yes. But you will go on thinking, remembering, won’t you?”
“I’ll try.”
Olga hurried from the prison warning herself that it scarcely provided a lead but it certainly justified going through the statements of the people and acquaintances with whom George Bendall had worked at NTV. And if there was no reference to something—anything—the man regularly did on Tuesday and Thursday nights, they’d all have to be re-interviewed and specifically asked.
 
“You had no right—no authority—to arrange access to the mother without reference to me!” protested Richard Brooking. “It should have been done diplomatically, through channels. You were specifically warned by Sir Michael himself!”
“Dick,” said Charlie, intentionally using the name abbreviation for its ambiguity. “That’s debatable and I’m not interested in debating it. I’m interested in finding out why a British national apparently tried to kill two presidents and when an opportunity presents itself, like it did today, then I’m going to take it without first asking your permission. You want to protest that to London, then go ahead. And while you’re doing it, ask them how they feel about another British national—albeit one who’s lived here for years—being banged up in a Stalin-era prison without charge.”
“That’s certainly questionable,” agreed Anne Abbott.
“I thought you told me it was for her own protection.”
“Bollocks,” rejected Charlie.
Brooking looked embarrassedly to Anne, who smiled and said, “That’s what I think, too.”
“I’m not sure it would be proper for me to accompany you to a prison,” said the diplomat.
“Don’t then,” accepted Charlie, relieved.
“It probably would be better left to us at this preliminary stage,” agreed Anne.
“Thanks for the support,” said Charlie, as they made their way along the corridor towards his office.
“Things are difficult enough without dicks like Richard Brooking,” said the lawyer.
Charlie thought that it just might be that he and Anne Abbott were birds of a feather, which would be a welcome change from being surrounded by either vultures or cuckoos.
 
The information-starved international media thronged Petr Tikunov’s press conference at the Duma. The Communist Party presidential candidate, a burly, beetle-browed man whose campaign managers tried to avoid facial comparison with Brezhnev, said that irrespective of any current investigation the new government he would be leading after the forthcoming elections would institute the most searching and thorough enquiry into the outrage.
It took the authority—and intervention—of Aleksandr Okulov’s office for Natalia to reach the FSB counter-intelligence chief and by the time she did it was to announce the exasperated acting president had ordered her personally to the Lubyanka, which made her as uneasy as it clearly did General Dimitri Spassky.
The only delay when she entered the Russian intelligence headquarters from which she herself had operated for fifteen years was for the security formality of photographing, identification and official authorization. As she followed the required but unnecessary escort across the marbled and pillared hall to the elevator bank Natalia thought that Charlie was probably right that the sole difference between old and new was the name change. Not true, she corrected herself at once. She’d been transferred outside the service, a change she was certainly glad about. Or had been, until now. She’d recognized quickly enough the professional hazards of being appointed the crisis committee’s coordinator but she hadn’t expected to be sucked quite so quickly—and potentially deeply—into such obvious in-fighting. But she
was
here as the coordinator—the emissary of the acting president, in fact—not as a deputy director of the Interior
Ministry. It put her into a stronger position, despite Spassky’s seniority. It had also been regulations when she worked there that visitors were searched, irrespective of their outside security clearance or whoever’s emissary they were. So things weren’t the same. She hoped her apparent advantage continued.
Natalia smiled at the care the escort took selecting the elevator bank, away from the lifts that went to the twelve basement levels—a subterranean township for the intelligence elite, with shops, roads and even a railway connection to the Kremlin on which Stalin once travelled by special carriage personally to witness the interrogations of purged Central Committee colleagues.
Spassky’s smoke-fumed office overlooked one of the inner prison courtyards in which such victims were finally put out of their agony and Natalia wondered if there was an element of nostalgia in the old-time KGB general’s choice.
He didn’t rise at Natalia’s entry, occupying himself lighting a fresh cigarette and having done so said, “It was unnecessary involving Aleksandr Mikhailevich.”
“You weren’t accepting my calls—as you didn’t yesterday—or returning the messages I left.” There was a recording being made: every Lubyanka office had been equipped within the first week of the invention of audio tape. She was glad—maybe fortunate—that this was such an old office. She still had to be alert to responses that could be edited to Spassky’s advantage and her detriment.
“You mustn’t question my authority here, Natalia Fedova.”
“I am not questioning your authority. I am trying to fulfill the function I was given at yesterday’s meeting.” She’d probably cocooned herself in more protection than she imagined by protesting to Okulov’s secretariat about Spassky’s awkwardness.
“A meeting would have been arranged today.” The man was perspiring as visibly as he had been at the previous meeting but Natalia didn’t think that was the smell competing with the cigarettes. There was the sourness of alcohol, although she’d believed vodka to be odorless. Perhaps the old man was mixing his drinks.
“You promised the Bendall file in twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours has elapsed. Aleksandr Mikhailevich has to address the Duma this afternoon.”
“There are considerations.”
“What considerations?”
“To whom it is going to be made available.”
“Are you suggesting that the acting president of the Russian Federation—and a former regional director of the KGB!—has insufficient security clearance!”
Spassky’s hands were shaking as he lighted another cigarette. “Of course I’m not!”
“Then I don’t understand the objection you’re making.”
“It’s not an objection.”
“Have you found the Peter Bendall file!”
“Yes.”
Too quick, gauged Natalia. What was she missing! “The
complete
file, covering everything he did after arriving here from the United Kingdom up to the time he died, to include his family?”
The hesitation of the bloated general was indicative. “That is what I am trying to establish.”
“How!”
“Having the names of Bendall’s case officers cross-referenced.”
Spassky was an anachronism, the last stumbling dinosaur of an otherwise extinct species to whom it was instinctive to lie and evade. She supposed she should be grateful but she was abruptly determined not to be crushed when he finally fell. “Dimitri Ivanovich! Cross-referencing case officers on a Control that spread over thirty years could take
another
thirty years! You have three hours in which to provide our acting president with each and every recorded detail of George Bendall!”
“There is very little,” finally conceded Spassky.
She had to guard against hurrying, Natalia recognized, in growing understanding. “The son is mentioned in the father’s records?”
“Occasionally.”
“Over what period?”
“Early.”
“What do you mean by early?”
“When the family were first reunited here.”
“How regularly?” There was a forgotten satisfaction at conducting
an interrogation—being so sure of herself in an interrogation—after so long.
Spassky spilled butts on to his already burn-scarred desk stubbing out the existing cigarette. For once he did not attempt instantly to light another. “Every month or two I suppose.”
“What sort of details?”
“Progress at school … assessments at assimilation …”
“Is it a complete stop or just interruptions?”
“Interr …” began Spassky before jerking to a stop, too late realizing he’d fallen into the easiest of interrogation traps, a question asked with the inference of the answer already known.
“They have been tampered with,” accused Natalia, openly.
“They are incomplete,” tried Spassky. “They were in disarray. The missing sections will be found.”
“Not in time.”
“I can let you have everything we have, up until the time the boy was maybe fifteen or sixteen.”
“Not let
me
have,” corrected Natalia, at once. “They are to be sent under FSB seal, by FSB courier, direct to Aleksandr Mikhailevich Okulov in the Kremlin.” It was fitting, she supposed, that she should exercise such paranoid self-protection in the Lubyanka. “Please do it now, to avoid wasting any more time.”
While Spassky made a flurry of telephone calls, culminating in his personally signing the dispatch note, Natalia sat comparatively relaxed reflecting how glad she was that there was now a sensible exchange between herself and Charlie. Refusing an over-interpretation, she supposed Charlie could have been right the previous night at omissions being caused by the chaos of reorganization. But just as quickly she remembered what he’d also said, about the Bendall family file being actively maintained until the defector’s death, only two years earlier.
“It’s the fault of Archives!” insisted Spassky, as the door closed behind the courier.
“You are ultimately responsible for internal security.” Which she had, without too much difficulty, evaded long before Spassky’s appointment, by cleansing the records of any reference to herself and Charlie Muffin.
“The missing sections could be found,” suggested Spassky, more in hope than conviction.
“Or they could not.” The man was introducing his own doubts now.
“It’s the primary responsibility of Archives,” persisted the man, his mind blocked by one defense.
There was no purpose in her staying any longer. “Has this meeting been recorded, Dimitri Ivanovich?”
“No,” denied the man at once, concentrating upon another cigarette. “Why should you imagine it would be.”
“It was once regular procedure.”
“It isn’t any longer.” He smiled, in recollection. “A lot of memories, at being back?”
“None,” insisted Natalia. She was, in fact, very eager to leave.
 
There was the ritual exchange of supposed information—together with the ritual offer and refusal of English—and another mutual appraisal.
Physically John Kayley was quite different from Charlie Muffin—much heavier, darker-skinned and with surprisingly long and thick jet-black hair—but Olga Melnik felt a similarity beyond the carelessness of the sagged suit and crumpled, yesterday’s shirt. She was determined against letting this meeting get away from her, as it had done that morning with the Englishman, and felt more confident after the second encounter with Vera Bendall. The brief initial search of the statements of those who’d known George Bendall—or Georgi Gugin—at NTV had failed to discover any significance from his mother’s Tuesday and Thursday recollection.
Kayley was as caught as Charlie had been by the woman’s comparative youthfulness against the seniority of her rank and for the same reason. His first impression was that it wasn’t going to be as easy maneuvring himself into the command role the president was insisting upon and which he’d initially chauvinistically hoped possible when he’d learned the Russian side of the investigation was being headed by a woman. He made a mental note to avoid hinting the sexism, although he wondered in passing if the cleavage valley was being offered for exploration.
“I’d welcome a brief run down in advance of reading what you’ve given me,” he said.
“Bendall himself isn’t yet recovered sufficiently to be interviewed,” responded Olga, much better rehearsed the second time. “There are the two interviews I’ve so far conducted with the mother, who’s in protective custody. She was evasive in the first. She began to break in the second, this morning. I don’t believe Bendall could have done this alone. I think there’s something significant in what you’ll see about his regularly doing something on Tuesday and Thursday …”
“Meetings, do you think?”
“The mother made a point of mentioning it.”
“You think she’s involved?” He took out a packet of his scented cigars. “You mind?”
Olga did, but shook her head. “Perhaps not directly involved. But I think she knows more than she’s telling me at the moment.” Olga now had a very definite intention not just how to control this interview but how, from now on, to handle this bizarre troika. She was actually gratefu—just—that the fortunately separate encounter with the Englishman had gone against her. She was alert now to what she might be up against and had had time completely to evaluate her situation. She had, she acknowledged, become arrogant, judging everyone by the inferior, graft-eroded standards all around her in the Militia. Into which, she decided, neither Charles Edward Muffin nor John Deke Kayley fitted. She didn’t have the slightest doubt that both considered themselves superior—better able, better experienced, better resourced—to supervise the investigation. She wasn’t frightened to compete with either in a one-to-one contest. With the Kremlin insistence upon total transparency, her undermining difficulties would come if the two Westerners combined to take side against her. Her answer—her protection as well as hopefully her advantage—was to play one off against the other to prevent such a combination.
“There would have been archives, on the father.”
“Being assembled.”
Kayley frowned, openly. “Still?”
“I’m expecting them later today.”
“What about all the witnesses?”
Olga nodded towards the mini-barrier of stacked files between them. “All there. Nothing that connects with anything the mother said.” The smell of the strange cigars made her feel vaguely nauseous.
“We’d also like the rifle, for forensic examination.”
“It’s still under tests here. You’ll obviously get the full report.”
“We’d still like physically to see the weapon. And there are the extracted bullets?”
“We’d also like to see the bullets that you have,” countered Olga. Time to get a little harder, judged Kayley. “With our Secret Serviceman’s death, we’ve got an American murdered within Russian jurisdiction by someone who appears still to be British?”
She couldn’t see the point of stating the obvious but she could turn it back upon the man. “Complicated,” she encouraged.
“Objectively—and quite obviously we always have to remain objective—the greater crime, the actual killing, is of an American.” It was going far better than he’d imagined it might.
She shouldn’t make it too easy. “It’s good our three governments have agreed such total cooperation.”
“But we have to decide upon a working structure,” seized Kayley.
“The purpose of this meeting,” announced Olga.
Was she jerking his chain? “How do you see us working operationally?”
She had to be extremely careful of the recording. “Together, I suppose.”
“Charlie Muffin isn’t here.”
Charlie, not Charles, she noted. It was understandable that they’d know each other, but how well, how friendly? “Things still have to be organized, established.”

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