Red Star Falling: A Thriller (3 page)

Bland hesitated again, for more water. Rebecca saw there was far less note-taking now but more head-together exchanges within the individual groups. It was particularly obvious among MI5. As well as whispered exchanges, Passmore was one of the few also writing, pushing slips of paper sideways to Aubrey Smith: twice, as Rebecca watched, the Director-General wrote a reply on the offered paper. She became aware of Gerald Monsford scribbling beside her, too, but was too far away to decipher the scrawl and Monsford didn’t offer it to her.

‘Muffin did not contact his support for over a week…’ Bland was saying. ‘When he did, it was to refuse any dealings or association with its MI6 contingent. We do not know the reason for that refusal, nor anything of what Muffin was doing in Moscow during that period. There was disagreement between the agency directors here, as well as between MI6 and MI5 in Moscow. As a result, a second MI5 squad was sent to bring Natalia Fedova and the child out. That extraction was arranged for yesterday, Muffin joining it at the airport.…’

During Bland’s second throat-easing break, Monsford finally passed Rebecca a single-line note that read,
The opening is weighted in our favour,
followed by three exclamation marks. Rebecca slid it back without comment. Her impression was that while appearing impartial, the civil-service-liaison duo were very adroitly sewing a self-incriminating minefield for both MI6 and MI5 to negotiate. And if she obeyed Monsford’s instructions, she’d be taking the first exploratory step.

Bland coughed. ‘On their way to the airport the new MI5 team leader suspected they were being followed. He warned Muffin, who decided upon a different flight to decoy the then unknown pursuers.…’ He allowed another preparing pause. ‘We have limited information of what followed. According to the MI5 team leader, the three MI6 support groups separated upon entering the airport terminal. One, Stephan Briddle, made directly for Muffin, who turned at a shout from David Halliday, an MI6 officer resident in Moscow. The MI5 witness heard shots before identifying the gunman, but he is definite he saw Briddle with a Russian-manufactured Makarov pistol in his hand. Briddle and Halliday were among the four initially killed, to which we now have to add the two who died subsequently. We know Muffin was injured, but not how badly.…’

Bland emptied his glass. ‘We’ve kept this narrative consecutive as well as chronological. Throughout most of what we’ve outlined, however, there runs a further sequence. Simultaneously—but independently, with no foreknowledge of either MI5 or ourselves, the government liaison—MI6 was organizing an extraction of the deputy chairman of the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti. They succeeded in doing that but the man’s wife, who’d gone to Paris to persuade their son to defect with them, was seized with the young man by French authorities as they were being brought here. So were MI6 officers and an aircrew. The wife was allowed to continue. The son refused. All our officers are still in French custody. We believe there is some relevance in linking these two events.’

The Cabinet Secretary looked invitingly to Palmer, who surveyed the room and said, ‘That, in outline, is the emergency we confront and have to resolve.…’ Palmer’s survey stopped at Gerald Monsford. ‘And I think, Director, that you should be the first contributor.’

Rebecca was aware of Monsford’s attention but refused to meet the demanding look, saying nothing.

*   *   *

‘Let’s finish unpacking your things.’

‘I don’t want to unpack my things. I want to go home. I don’t like it here.’ Sasha was still wearing her pyjama suit, sitting on the side of her bed. Her curl-bubbled hair, naturally blond like her mother’s, was dishevelled from her restless night following their arrival.

‘You’re going to meet your new teacher today,’ promised Natalia, bent over the child’s case.

‘I’m going to school?’

‘Just meeting her today, to say hello. You’re going to learn a new language. We’re in England.’

‘I don’t want to be in England! Go to a new school.’

‘It won’t be a new school exactly. It’ll be just you and your new teacher.’

‘What’s happening, Mama? I don’t understand what’s happening.’

‘We’ve come to live here for a while.’

‘Why?’
wailed the child.

‘We came to be with someone but he’s not here.’

‘Can’t we go home then?’

‘Not yet. We have to wait.’

*   *   *

‘It feels tight,’ complained Irena Yakulova Novikov.

‘It will,’ accepted the cosmetic specialist, holding the mirror for the Russian to study the result of the corrective surgery. ‘What do you think?’

Irena intently examined the left side of her face, for years burn-mottled not by a restaurant accident with Stepan Lvov, which she’d told Charlie, but in a Moscow car accident. She was attractive again, Irena decided: beautiful even. ‘There’s no discoloration at all.’

‘We’re very good at what we do.’

As she was good at what she did, Irena thought, facing the prospect of finally having to do what she’d so far managed to postpone since her transfer from Britain to Washington. ‘Will it ever come back?’

‘Not if you’re careful. We’ll prescribe some medication: creams, emollients, stuff like that. But your sunbathing days are over.’

‘Thank you very much. I’m grateful.’ It was going to be a long time before she said anything else even vaguely honest, reflected Irena. She’d expected to work in London—somewhere in England—not here. It made everything twice as difficult. She was frightened, Irena admitted to herself.

3

The security facilities for the Hertfordshire safe house accommodating Maxim Mikhailovich Radtsic, the deputy chairman of the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, and his wife were supervised from a building constructed to appear part of its garage block, more than half of which was further concealed by a stand of mature, heavy-leafed oaks. It had no outside windows or doors. Entry was through the garage itself to an inner, steel-lined door operated by a double-lock system. The largest wall area was completely filled by twenty closely placed but separately focused and operated TV screens monitoring every space within the house. It was possible to zoom each camera from within the security-control cabin. The volume of each could be adjusted. Both film and audio transmissions were recorded as well as being simultaneously relayed into the control centre. From there the simultaneous relay could be transmitted to London receiving facilities within MI6, MI5, and selected government sites. It did not, however, disclose the geographic location of the MI6 property.

A separate side section was similarly filled with TV and audio coverage of every outside access to the house. Always visible on these cameras were the permanent, twenty-four-hour foot patrols which were divided into squads of four, ensuring a permanent armed presence around the entire interior perimeter. Also monitored from this section was a minefield of buried ground sensors, the sensitivity of which precluded any animals larger than rabbits in the extensively wooded grounds.

The control room worked on an overlapping round-the-clock shift system. Harry Jacobson, the MI6 Moscow station chief who’d brought Radtsic out, entered with the mid-morning changeover, standing aside as the interchanging groups, two men and two women, went through the required signing-on and -off formalities.

‘Anything?’ asked Jacobson, when it was finished.

The night-duty officer, a woman, shook her head. ‘Elena’s still got her bedroom door locked. Maxim tried to get in at about eleven. He was stumbling drunk by then. She told him to fuck off: her words, not mine. Hers again this morning when he asked her to come to breakfast. She’s still locked in there.…’ The officer gestured to the television picture showing a gently rising and falling bedclothed hump. ‘Anything new from Moscow?’

‘The body count’s gone up to six,’ said Jacobson. ‘There’s uproar everywhere. Our Lord and master and his Mary Magdalene are going to a crisis meeting sometime this morning.’

‘What about Andrei?’ asked one of the night men.

‘I wish there were something about the kid.’ As he wished a lot of other things, thought Jacobson. It was still too early to reach any sensible conclusion but he guessed the fallout from the Moscow shooting would in the short term bury the benefits he’d expected from organizing Radtsic’s extraction, despite Andrei’s refusal, for which he couldn’t be blamed. As it was now, Jacobson wasn’t sure how much there was to regret anyway: whether, in fact, it wasn’t better to keep his head as far down as possible to avoid unfounded blame or recrimination. His worry was not knowing if Monsford’s order to assassinate Charlie Muffin, a mission he’d escaped by personally supervising Radtsic’s defection, had been officially registered in MI6’s operational logs. It should have been, according to regulations. But Monsford made—and too frequently changed—his own regulations to suit the prevailing wind of the moment.

‘What are you going to tell Maxim?’ asked the day-shift supervisor, also a woman.

‘There’s nothing to tell him but I’ve got to generate some co-operation from the awkward bastard.’

‘Best of luck. We’ll try to film your best side,’ said the woman and at once wished she hadn’t. Jacobson was a trouser-creased, polished-shoes man whose short-haired neatness was marred by the unclipped walrus moustache cultivated to conceal a harelip, about which he was sensitive.

Radtsic was in the large, glassed conservatory he’d established as his favourite since arriving three days earlier. It was built to the rear of the house, overlooking expansively barbered lawns sloping to an open-air swimming pool and a faraway tributary of the Thames. The summer house was furnished predominantly in chintz fabric, loosely covered armchairs and couches, and scented by flowers cut daily from the garden. The patrolling guards were always intentionally out of sight.

Radtsic was dressed as he’d invariably been from the moment of his defection approach to Jacobson at a French embassy reception. The heavy serge three-piece suit was complete with a collar and tie. Today, for the first time since that initial Moscow encounter, Radtsic was smoking a pipe instead of the chain-lighted cigarettes he’d favoured during their Moscow meetings and which now, with the thick, greying hair and moustache almost as fulsome as Jacobson’s, heightened the Russian’s uncanny resemblance to Stalin. Radtsic was slumped in a solitary easy chair carefully positioned to prevent anyone sitting close to him. Within reach from his chair was a substantial side table upon which were full bottles of whisky and vodka, with ice, water, and tumblers. One glass was separated from the others, near enough for Radtsic to reach without stretching. It was empty, with no obvious residue from it already having been used.

‘Good morning, Maxim Mikhailovich,’ greeted Jacobson. ‘Are you well?’

‘As well as I was yesterday and the day before that,’ awkwardly responded the Russian. The pipe’s pungency was overwhelming the scent from the flowers.

Jacobson decided his association with the other man was sufficiently established for him not to suffer the shit the Russian was dumping on everyone else. It would also be satisfying to appear on sound-tracked film giving a better performance than Gerald Monsford. ‘We can provide anything Elena wants to eat, you know.’

‘What?’ Radtsic frowned, confused by the opening.

‘She hasn’t eaten breakfast.’

‘She doesn’t want breakfast: she wants Andrei,’ recovered the other man.

‘We’re making every diplomatic effort to get him here with you,’ insisted Jacobson, who had no idea what efforts were being made. ‘It’s Andrei who’s refusing to come: we can’t do anything about that.’

‘Arrange another two-way television conference so that I can persuade him.’

‘Persuade him or rant at him as you did the first time, so uncontrolled that the French cut the link? Which they now won’t restore.’ Jacobson tensed for an outburst to his bullying.

‘Why am I dealing with you, an underling? Where’s Monsford? I was promised I’d be dealing personally with the Director.’

‘No you weren’t,’ rejected Jacobson, surprised Radtsic had deferred to him. ‘You were promised you’d be personally
welcomed
by the Director. Which you were. Now you’re dealing with me, the underling who saved you from being purged by a country who’d decided you’d failed them. That failure wasn’t a factor then; getting you out was. But we can talk about it now, now that you’re safe. Why were you going to be purged as people were in the old days, Maxim Mikhailovich?’

‘I’ll co-operate, tell you all you want to know, when you get Andrei here. But not until then,’ avoided Radtsic, no longer dismissive.

‘You know what I’m really curious about, Maxim Mikhailovich?’ continued Jacobson, conversationally, satisfied with how the encounter was going. ‘I’m curious about that day on the Moskva River cruise when we were making your escape preparations: the time you told me you’d had nothing whatsoever to do with the FSB plan to get Stepan Lvov elected president and make a plaything of America, imagining he was the best spy they’d ever cultivated. How much did the Lvov affair have to do with your being purged?’

‘It’s exactly what I told you then,’ refused Radtsic, loudly. ‘I had no active part in the Lvov operation.’

‘That’s my point. All we’d ever talked about, up to that point, was getting you, Elena, and Andrei here. We hadn’t spoken about anything operational. Why, after a lifetime at the very top of Russian intelligence, did you suddenly deny involvement in an operation that had never been discussed between us?’

‘I didn’t—don’t—want to waste time upon things I don’t know about when I start co-operating.’

‘I want you to think very seriously indeed about co-operation. And I’d like us to start that co-operation as early as tomorrow,’ said Jacobson, on his way to the door, wondering how it looked on the television monitor.

*   *   *

Rebecca sensed the tension in Gerald Monsford, turning when she knew he was no longer looking at her. His head was bowed over the table, both hands outstretched before him but flat, not clenched. He withdrew them as he came up to stare directly across the table at Aubrey Smith.