Red Star Burning (4 page)

Charlie’s telephone rang at eight thirty on the morning of his return, slightly earlier than he’d expected although he was already shaved and showered, waiting. By the time he completed the answering ritual he had the impression of the walls closing claustrophobically around him, coupled with a flicker of nostalgia for the brief freedom of his Jersey escape. He sloughed off the memory by looking at continuous TV news programs, particularly for any coverage of the impending Russian presidential elections, about which there had been intense international speculation in the assassination’s aftermath, of which his incarceration was a living-death outcome. There was nothing, as it had been for weeks now.

There were security CCTV monitors relaying into three rooms of the safe house. Charlie watched the arrival of his case officer from the one in the kitchen. Brian Cooper was a balding, rotund testimony to the more flamboyant style of Savile Row tailoring, to which Charlie took as much attention-attracting exception as Cooper did of his shambling, trouser-shone charity-shop preference.

Charlie opened the door at the first ring, matching the other man’s critical head-to-toe appraisal. Standing aside for Cooper to enter, Charlie said: “I wasn’t sure if it would be you who’d come.”

“You ready?” Cooper demanded, not moving. The voice was brittle-toned public school.

“Ready for what?”

“It’s not going to be here.” The suit was a muted gray and Charlie guessed he could have achieved a closer shave from the sharpness of the trouser crease than he’d got earlier from his razor.

“What isn’t?”

“What do you think? I asked if you were ready.”

“We going far?” asked Charlie, stumbling awkwardly into step behind the other man, vaguely disconcerted that he hadn’t anticipated the inevitable inquest being elsewhere. It indicated greater irritation than he’d imagined.

Cooper didn’t reply, jerking his head toward the back of the anonymous, unwashed Ford. All the glass was smoked, even the fully raised screen between the driver and his rear-seat passengers.

“I asked if we were going far,” Charlie repeated.

“I don’t know,” said the man, not bothering to look across the car.

It was possible Cooper didn’t, Charlie accepted. The Ford made a full, pursuit-testing circle around Sloane Square and two sharp, unsignaled diversions before resuming a gradually emerging northern route.

“Maybe I should have packed an overnight bag?” Charlie tried again.

“I’m not interested in small-talk shit,” announced Cooper, abruptly. “You’re one great big pain in the ass. You want to go on being stupid enough to do what you’re doing, whatever the fuck that is, that’s fine by me. You want to commit suicide, for Christ’s sake hurry up and do it so we can start looking after people who deserve to be looked after!”

“I’m sorry if I’ve made your life difficult,” apologized Charlie, meaning it. They were clearing London but veering westward: Buckinghamshire, perhaps, maybe even farther, guessed Charlie. Aubrey Smith lived in Buckinghamshire. Whatever the irritation, it surely wouldn’t have got to Director-General level!

Cooper was looking fixedly out his side window, his body partially, oddly, turned to show his back, which Charlie thought childish. Taking operational difficulties personally would explain why the man was limited to adult baby-minding. From a briefly glimpsed signpost Charlie saw that they were definitely in Buckinghamshire, although well off any major roads. He could see sufficiently through the separating glass to gauge the driver’s divided concentration between the road and the dashboard-mounted GPS, from which Charlie guessed they were nearing their destination. Beside him, the back-turned case officer was showing no recognition, from which Charlie assumed that the man genuinely didn’t know where they were going, which was confirmed when Cooper had to snatch for an armrest support when the driver unexpectedly turned into an unmarked driveway. The gate was set at least twenty meters back from its original supporting pillars, the centerpiece of a secondary, razor-wire-topped wall. The wire hedge was broken close to the gate head to accommodate the camera that swiveled at their approach to record the car’s registration, to which the driver added by manually directing an electronic fob to a sensor that Charlie couldn’t detect. The admission precautions were completed by the man lowering the driver’s window to announce their presence into a door-level entry phone.

Almost directly beyond the gate, the Ford turned off the main driveway and onto a smaller but still paved road that ran between totally concealing, close-together trees and low shrubbery that unexpectedly ballooned out into a clearing in the center of which was a half-timbered building Charlie guessed originally to have been a hunting lodge. There were four cars, all anonymous Fords, regimented to the left of its heavy oak door. Charlie’s driver went to its right. A dark-suited woman emerged before the car stopped. She came to Cooper’s door, gesturing.

“Stay where you are,” ordered the case officer, as he got out.

Charlie was uneasy. His disappearing required a reprimand but this was at a far higher level. Why? The only logical answer was that he hadn’t been as professional as he’d imagined: that they’d followed him every shuffling step of the way to Jersey, knew about the bank arrangements to fund Natalia, and were about to strap him onto the rack and start twirling the bone-cracking wheel until he confessed all.

When he was told to get out, Charlie followed the woman to the lodge, but unhurriedly, hesitating at the sudden darkness beyond the heavy oak door. Predictably there was a display of antlered heads along both wood-paneled walls. The woman stood at the end of the hall, shifting impatiently. When he reached her, Charlie said: “You were too fast for me.”

“I imagine most people are,” she came back, thrusting open a side door for him to enter.

A quick shot or confirmation that they had been with him in Jersey? wondered Charlie, as he saw the assembled group behind a long table at the end of another paneled room lined with a wildlife massacre of glass-eyed trophies, here interspersed with the heads of a tiger and two bears. Aubrey Smith was at the center of four men, with Deputy Director Jane Ambersom to his left. The Director-General was dwarfed by the man next to him, appearing almost a foot taller, even though he was sitting, and with his jacket spread to release a bulging belly couching a bull-like chest. The other two were on Smith’s right. There would, Charlie knew, be audio- and visual-recording equipment, which made him curious about the small, unmanned replay machine on a separate table.

“Where were you?” demanded Smith, without any preamble.

A clever question, Charlie acknowledged, allowing him little verbal room to maneuver, with the wrong response catching him out in a lie from the outset. “Making a point,” he tried.

“Explain,” demanded the Director-General. The man was stone faced, no inflection breaking the soft, measured tone. The light reflected off his rimless spectacles made the man appear sightless.

“To prove a nonsense.”

Ambersom matched the frown of the unidentified man next to Smith, who remained the sole interrogator. “Explain.”

There was sufficient space on the menagerie wall for his head to be mounted alongside, Charlie saw. He had to say something to get a clearer indication of why this confrontation had been escalated. “The nonsense of my being a suicide risk. If I’d wanted to kill myself I could have done so. I didn’t.”

Smith moved to speak but stopped at the sound of the door opening. From the quickness of the footsteps, Charlie knew it was the woman escort before she came into view from behind him. The examining panel pulled close together as she leaned forward over the table toward them. It was impossible for Charlie to hear anything of the exchange, from which Smith retreated, looking left and right as if seeking comment from those on either side. No one responded, but without any apparent invitation Ambersom said: “Nonsense is a good description of what you’re saying. Now answer properly. Where have you been?”

Charlie was tempted by the fixed-face woman’s intrusion, more confident of directing the questioning the way he wanted. But he still didn’t have a good enough map of the minefield in which he believed himself to be. The lesser the lies the better, he determined. “Jersey. I took a trip to Jersey, ate some good food, enjoyed the sunshine.”

“We’ve comb-searched your safe house for four hours,” announced the deputy director, triumphantly. “There wasn’t the slightest trace of your having been to Jersey. Or anywhere else.”

They hadn’t known about Jersey! The satisfaction warmed Charlie. “Of course there wasn’t. I tossed it all into the Channel. The tradecraft designation is clearing your trail, remember?”

“What would you say if I told you we don’t believe you?” demanded Ambersom. Her voice had the vaguest blur of a northern accent.

“I’d say you should check at the Longueville House Hotel in St. Helier: room forty-two, second floor. You can see the harbor.” If they hadn’t known where he’d been they could discover his reason for going there, so he wasn’t giving anything away describing his room.

There was the slightest tightening of the woman’s angular, makeup-spared face at Charlie’s dismissal. “What would you say if I told you we still don’t believe you?”

What the hell was this all about! “I’m not sure I’d know what to say.”

“Tell us about this then,” said Aubrey Smith, nodding to the man nearest the replay machine.

Into the silent room came the click of an answer phone connection and then a voice that Charlie instantly recognized as Natalia’s. She said: “I think we need help, Charlie. Call me, please. Tell me what’s happening.” The line momentarily went dead before the click of a second connection. This time Natalia said: “I think they know. I’m sure we’re under surveillance.” The third, final segment was: “Help us, Charlie. Please help us.”

The Director-General said: “We’ve kept on your old Vauxhall apartment, as a precaution. With the telephone still connected. We traced all three calls to separate pay phones in Moscow.”

The deputy director said: “Who is she?”

*   *   *

The silence lasted for a very long time after Charlie finished speaking, the panel confronting him statued in apparent disbelief, none looking at the other. Before she did speak, eager to maintain her questioning dominance, Ambersom physically shook her head, like someone awakening from a coma.

“This woman is a serving officer in the FSB.”

“Yes,” confirmed Charlie, who’d been completely honest, omitting nothing in his explanation of Natalia’s three calls, instantly aware that he would need every conceivable help from his own service and that one lie, even an inadvertent omission, would close the door against him. He didn’t like to hear Natalia being referred to as “this woman.”

“And before the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti she served in the KGB?”

“Before the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti was renamed, yes.”

“You are officially, properly, married?”

“A Russian ceremony, in the Hall of Weddings.”

“And there is a child?”

“I’ve already explained all this!”

“Your child?”

“Sasha is my child, yes.”

“And you have run this woman, as an asset, for how long, six, seven years?”

“The relationship began a little over eight years ago. Natalia serves in the specialized section of the analysis division. She was appointed my official debriefer after my supposed defection, all the details of which are in the personnel archives. She has never been an asset, other than that of being my wife. And she is my wife, not ‘this woman.’” He shouldn’t have finished like that, showing his irritation.

“So your supposed defection becomes a genuine one? This woman turned you?”

Bitch, thought Charlie. “I am not, nor ever have been, an agent of either the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation,” he replied, formally. “I never, ever, discussed with my wife any operation in which I was involved. And I repeat, neither, ever, has she. We lived together as man and wife after I was seconded to the embassy in Moscow—which is again officially in my file—but it became impossible for me. Just as she found it impossible then to follow me back to London. I obviously made contact during the most recent Moscow assignment concerning the death of a man in the grounds of the British embassy and the uncovering of an attempted FSB coup involving Stepan Lvov, the outcome of which has resulted in my having to enter the protection program.…” Charlie hesitated, briefly. “I had finally persuaded her to come to live with me in England with our daughter. But the retribution began, beginning with Lvov’s assassination, before I could get her out. She’s trapped.”

The incredulity had spread to the four unidentified men. One turned and said something to the Director-General, which Charlie thought he heard as “preposterous.”

“This—all of this—is beyond imagination!” dismissed the woman.

“Everything I am telling you is the God’s honest truth!”

“I don’t think you know the meaning of truth. Or of God.”

“I need help,” pleaded Charlie desperately.

“You need a miracle and there’s no such thing as miracles,” she said.

*   *   *

“I’ve heard the recording of the Radtsic meeting. You did well: bloody well,” congratulated James Straughan.

“What about the Director?” demanded Jacobson.

“He’s heard it too: says the same.”

“So I’ve got official approval to go ahead?”

“Absolutely.”

“Shouldn’t that approval be official?”

“I’ll send it today.”

“Do you want me to come back for the planning?”

“We’ll do all that here: you just give us the input when we ask for it.”

“We mustn’t lose sight of Radtsic’s flakiness.”

“We won’t. It’s scheduled highest priority now.”

“The approval will be in the Director’s name, won’t it?”

“Everything will be done by the book. Don’t worry.”

The problem was that Jacobson did worry about fulfilling his station-chief responsibilities: he worried a lot.