Red Star Falling: A Thriller (17 page)

‘It was a personal attack upon me: a positive decision by Aubrey Smith to nominate her as Jacobson’s questioner. Bastards, both of them! And Palmer, too. He was definitely against me.’

She had to make contact with the woman to thank her for the particular questioning that took her out of the direct firing line, acknowledged Rebecca. ‘It didn’t go well, did it?’

‘Jacobson fucked up. He definitely isn’t getting Paris after today’s performance.’

So that was the promised reward,
accepted Rebecca: the original assassination order had to have been given to Jacobson. ‘Do you want me to tell Timpson that all the voice recordings between Jacobson and here have to be handed over to the enquiry?’

‘No!’ said Monsford, at once. ‘I want you to concentrate on Radtsic. I’m appointing you his interrogator. I want everything he knows about Lvov and the penetration here. I’ll notify Timpson: I’ve given notice that I’m calling him tomorrow. I’m expecting him to be good.’

At that moment Monsford had no way of knowing just how good.

*   *   *

‘Sounds like you won,’ congratulated Barry Elliott.

‘Aubrey Smith seemed to think so: told me afterwards there was no need for either him or Passmore to have taken over the questioning.’ She was in the kitchen, preparing the spaghetti sauce.

‘Congratulations.’

‘I didn’t mean to tell you in so much detail.’

‘I’m glad you trust me enough to do so.’

‘You know why I did?’

‘Why?’

Everything at a snail’s pace,
she warned herself. ‘You kept your word, about Radtsic’s defection. Neither your people nor the CIA could have held back if there’d been the slightest hint.’

‘I’ve got a dilemma about the way things are going between us. If they knew, Washington would accuse me of losing professional objectivity.’ That night he’d made closet space for some clothes with which Jane arrived.

‘I don’t think there’s going to be a conflict,’ said Jane, coming into the room to accept the offered wine.

‘I hope you’re right.’

‘Trust me,’ said Jane. She hoped she didn’t have to make the choice between professional and personal, either. Despite the perfection of it all—being in a personal relationship that until now she’d only ever dreamt of, never imagining it ever happening—she was unsure what that choice would be. She had to be very careful not to appear too eager and spoil everything, certainly not until she was positive that Barry’s professional dependence had become personal.

10

Gerald Monsford stage-managed his entrance into the enquiry chamber to the maximum effect, arriving last and remaining standing to direct attendants where to place additional chairs and a minuscule table for the two support staff—one the matronly, grey-haired woman—whom Matthew Timpson insisted upon accompanying him: it would have been physically difficult to accommodate all three if Rebecca Street had that day been part of the MI6 group.

‘Looks like another virtuoso performance,’ remarked John Passmore, dryly.

‘Where’s Rebecca?’ wondered Jane Ambersom, rhetorically, at the double-act entry of Sir Archibald Bland and Geoffrey Palmer.

Monsford didn’t hurry recounting Timpson’s official function or the unit’s highest security clearance, pleased at the obvious, heads-together M15 curiosity from across the table. Beside Monsford, as he spoke, Timpson prepared himself with bank-manager efficiency, meticulously placing a jotting ledger in the very centre of his blotter, two capped fountain pens alongside, and poured water in readiness. Rehearsed, the woman aide, unasked, handed forward two loose-leaf folders when Timpson half turned.

‘The discoveries to date of the internal investigation into MI6 will be presented in the preferred chronological order, upon which my witness has already been briefed,’ assured Monsford.

The note Aubrey Smith passed to Passmore read,
too confident.

The discovery of the eavesdropping bug on the Director’s recording system had been remarkably quick, on their second day at Vauxhall Cross, commenced Timpson. Technically, the illegal device was known as a tie-line and ran parallel to the legitimate system supervised by James Straughan. The assumption had to be that the bugging had been in place from the time of the official system’s installation, which covered a period of three and a half months and involved the detailed examination of forty-three hundred registered calls to be assessed for potential security damage. Some had been with Downing Street, at least six directly with the prime minister.

The tie-line had been operated from James Straughan’s private office, adjacent to the permanent Watch Room. The office was always locked in Straughan’s absence by a combination code, randomly chosen and changed daily, which would not function without secondary eye-retina recognition: it had taken an entire afternoon to override the security and gain access to the man’s office. All inward and outward traffic on the tie-line would have been digitally preserved.

The receiving chip in the apparatus at the time of its discovery had been blank. The assumption had therefore to be that Straughan transferred each recording at the end of each day onto an electronic thumb or memory stick. Despite the most extensive, technically assisted search of Straughan’s office, safe, personal locker and closet, and the man’s Berkhamsted home, no digital thumbs had been located. The man had no safe deposit facilities at his bank. Nothing had been stored in the vaults of either the man’s solicitor or his accountant. No documentation or indication had been found in any search so far to lead the investigators to a hiding place for what Straughan had copied. Searches were, of course, continuing. The Berkhamsted house was in the process of demolition, literally brick by brick, and all pipe work opened. The garden and the basement were being excavated to a depth of two feet.

‘Were there fingerprints upon the listening apparatus and wiring?’ asked Monsford.

‘A substantial amount,’ confirmed Timpson. ‘All were those of James Straughan. From the most recent it was possible forensically to lift perspiration residue and in a total of six places in the office human hair was recovered. From the hair and perspiration, DNA was established. The DNA and the fingerprints were those of James Straughan.’

‘Were there fingerprints or DNA traces of anyone other than James Straughan?’ pressed Monsford.

‘None whatsoever,’ replied Timpson.

‘So the reasonable, circumstantial evidence is that no-one other than James Straughan had any access to, or use of, the illegal listening apparatus.’

‘Not to the apparatus itself. It would have been a simple computer process to replicate any recording made.’

‘Were such computers available to Straughan?’

Timpson frowned at the question. ‘Every computer in the Watch Room, as well as that in Straughan’s office, has the capability.’

‘Is there any technical way to establish if copies were made on any of the computers?’

‘Not if it were a simple duplicating process. We are examining the hard drive of every computer conveniently available to Straughan,’ assured Timpson. ‘So far we have found nothing.’

Monsford stopped, shuffling for affect through his own, so-far-unused briefcase papers, coming up empty-handed. After a further pause, he said, ‘You have made an additional, extremely important discovery?’

Timpson turned to the attentive woman already waiting to pass him a further loose-leaf file. Turning back into the room, Timpson said, ‘Following upon the finding of the eavesdropping installation, our investigation has quite obviously been concentrated upon James Straughan. A particular focus has been upon the records of his own known electronic and verbal communications traffic. On November twelfth last year a telephone call was logged from MI6’s Vauxhall headquarters to Rome. By “logged” I mean a written record, not a verbatim transcript of a conversation. The automatic telephone register timed the call as lasting fourteen minutes—’

‘A written log would have recorded the recipient’s identity and the subject discussion,’ abruptly interrupted Jane, at once regretting the interjection from the smirk of satisfaction that instantly registered on Monsford’s face.

‘We’re coming to that in good time,’ he patronized, nodding to Timpson to continue.

‘The recipient of Straughan’s call is listed on the log as Vasili Okulov, although that is obviously an operational name,’ disclosed the investigator, opening the new folder. ‘The call was to a private, unlisted number, which we have on our files. Publicly, Okulov is regarded as a vehement opponent of the current Russian regime, particularly critical of Vladimir Putin. Okulov was involved in a hit-and-run accident last year he claimed to have been a Russian assassination attempt. All of which, according to an MI6 investigation, was a cover for his true function, which is to locate through his anti-Russian reputation genuine Russian opponents to be identified to the FSB. He’s considered an active double through whom MI6 have dealt in the past to leak misinformation to the FSB. Our contact with him is always by phone, through a Berlin cut-out connection: Okulov believes the MI6 approaches are through an anti-Russian organization—’

‘I am aware of this history,’ Jane risked again. ‘What’s its relevance here?’

‘The relevance is the subject matter to which you’ve already referred and which, as you’ve so correctly told us, would have been recorded,’ said Timpson, taking a single piece of paper from his file. ‘It reads:
CM location
. The entry has been subjected to graphology analysis: the handwriting is unquestionably that of James Straughan.’

Monsford said, ‘The off-duty residence of an agent is one of the most sacrosanct of all security precautions. On November twentieth, three Russians, later identified as FSB officers, were arrested breaking into Charlie Muffin’s London flat: it had been fitted with intrusion detectors after the man’s entry into a witness protection programme following his destruction of the Lvov penetration.’

The victory is twice itself when the achiever brings home full numbers,
mentally recited Monsford, looking across the separating table at the MI5 group: Shakespeare had an appropriate expression for every situation.

*   *   *

‘It wasn’t a debriefing—it wasn’t intended as a debriefing,’ declared Natalia Fedova. The television upon which, over and over, stopping and starting the Freeze button, she’d studied Charlie’s confrontation with Irena Novikov, was blank now, although the DVD was still in its slot. Her separately provided transcript of the encounter, now heavily annotated and symbol marked, lay on the table separating her from Ethel Jackson.

‘Is that significant?’ asked Ethel, cautiously

Natalia smiled, apologetic in advance. ‘To a certain degree, yes. To another degree, not at all. From the background you’ve given me, Charlie needed confirmation, a confession, from Irena that her shrine to the man found in the British-embassy grounds was a fake, even though he’d scientifically proved that the photographs of her and Ivan Oskin were superimposed.…’

‘Based solely on that evidence, he’d had a Moscow TV anchorwoman, later assassinated, claim on air that Lvov was a CIA spy,’ agreed Ethel. ‘The Agency actually had a plane on standby at an RAF base here to take Charlie on a rendition-interrogation flight to God knows where! He was in the biggest hurry you can imagine!’

‘Charlie was frightened he wasn’t going to get that admission.’ assessed Natalia, bluntly. ‘From her demeanour, her responses, I don’t believe Irena picked it up, which was fortunate for Charlie.…’ She paused. ‘But I’m not totally convinced about that.’

‘You’re still losing me,’ complained Ethel.

‘I don’t believe Irena was frightened,’ declared Natalia. ‘Not as frightened as she should have been, threatened with return to Russia after failing to salvage the biggest operation in Russian-intelligence history.’

Ethel jerked her head towards the dead TV. ‘I sat through all your replays! Irena was terrified of being returned!’

‘My job’s fear: recognizing it, using it. Irena Novikov was nervous, maybe frightened to a point but just that, only up to a point, no further.…’ One by one, in front of the security supervisor, Natalia laid out copies of the still photographs from Irena’s shrine. ‘What’s odd, strikes you as unusual, about any of these phoney, superimposed prints?’

Ethel studied the display with the concentration with which Natalia had earlier watched the video, twice rearranging the pictures in different sequences before finally looking up, shrugging. ‘Nothing. I know they’re superimposed but I can’t see anything odd or unusual apart from that in any of them.’

‘According to what Irena originally told Charlie, she was on station in Cairo with both Oskin
and
Lvov, although it was Lvov who was her lover and with whom she was totally involved, setting up her White House infiltration. Why aren’t there photographs—okay, superimposed photographs—of her and Oskin in those days: the obligatory camel pose with a pyramid in the background; on the Nile in a felucca? Certainly one of her before her face was marked? That’s not a pictorial record stretching over more than eighteen years. I don’t think any of those pictures span more than a four-year period.’

‘You’ve answered your own doubts,’ argued Ethel, forcefully. ‘She wasn’t ever
with
Oskin: couldn’t have given a damn about him until he tried to sell what he believed he knew and she didn’t know that until he was found dead in the embassy grounds. They had what, a month, five weeks, to put all the phoney stuff together from what was available from Oskin’s belongings to match as best they could with what Irena could produce to create a half-credible story. And don’t forget that’s all they wanted, a passable match: it was never intended the shrine should be brought to England, risking exposure. It was theatre, for a one-shot performance when Charlie was taken to a flat he believed to be the one she’d shared with Oskin. It was your soft-hearted, romantic husband who scooped it all up and shipped it here in the diplomatic bag for her to have the memorabilia. That’s the only reason Irena
came
here, to destroy the one thing that could expose her as a phoney and with that exposure wreck the whole Lvov concept.’