Red Star Falling: A Thriller (35 page)

The memo from Matthew Timpson guaranteed that the office and all its ancillary rooms, including the directly adjoining apartment, was completely free from illicit listening devices. The manually operated recording facility James Straughan had installed had been removed, along with the illegal secondary system Straughan had attached. All Monsford’s personal affects, including clothes from the apartment, had been removed. Timpson did not foresee any further need for contact between them but assumed Jane knew the procedure if she had any outstanding queries. Beside the envelope were labelled keys to every drawer, cabinet, and cupboard in the suite.

Monsford’s personally designed wingback chair had been comfortably big for him, making it physically impossible for Jane to occupy: she couldn’t reach either arm if she sat in its centre, and if she leaned against the back the seat was too big for her to bend her legs, which protruded uncomfortably straight out in front of her. Despite Timpson’s assurances, Jane filled the time waiting for its replacement by a standard office chair by carefully working her way through every key on the itemized list, seeking one overlooked snippet left by its former occupant. There was nothing: no drawers or closets had so much as lining paper, and the blotter and jotting pads and pens and even toilet rolls were still sealed in their wrappers. The refrigerator was empty, its freezer ice trays unfilled.

There was no trace of Gerald Monsford ever having existed.

Jane’s search was broken by the electronic entry request from the chief of staff, who came echoing the earlier welcome-back greeting of the vestibule security.

‘Temporary,’ contradicted Jane. ‘Only very temporary.’

*   *   *

Aubrey Smith intentionally let his concentration switch between the relayed confrontation with Irena Novikov and the two FBI men with him in the purpose-built control barracks set apart from the main house, which was on the edge of the Sussex Downs, close to Petworth. Mort Bering was the most visibly perplexed, constantly frowning sideways for guidance from Barry Elliott, who answered the bewilderment with matching disbelief. It was Elliott who asked the expected question before the end of Joe Goody’s initial session.

‘Is this guy for real!’

‘Very real.’ Smith smiled back. ‘He’s the best I’ve got.’

‘He’s like a…’ groped the deputy FBI director, ‘like an English butler. No! An under-servant from a bad movie.’

‘Would you believe he was once seconded, at
their
request, to your Green Berets from our SAS?’

‘No,’ refused Mort Bering. ‘I don’t believe it. And I won’t believe it.’

‘He didn’t learn diddly-squat: got nothing,’ judged Elliott.

‘Wouldn’t that be a little too much to expect from a first debriefing?’ rhetorically asked Smith. He’d never before met Elliott and was more intently studying the younger American than his older superior, curious at the relationship with Jane Ambersom, hoping that it was genuine, not professionally motivated.

The entry demand took them to the TV monitor showing Joe Goody waiting tentatively outside, not looking directly at the camera he knew to be upon him. He entered hesitantly and addressed both Americans as sir when he was introduced.

‘Well?’ demanded Smith.

‘Something’s not right,’ declared the psychologist, at once. ‘I don’t know what it is yet. She’s frightened, but not in the way she should be. For someone who did what she did—created the Lvov infiltration but then destroyed it when Charlie confronted her—she’s too anxious to see people from her embassy.’ He smiled, shyly, towards Bering and Elliott. ‘And she thinks I’m stupid but she’s not sure. It won’t take long to convince her she’s right: that she can take advantage of me.’

Just over a hundred miles to the north, Natalia Fedova finished watching all the American filmed recordings of Irena Novikov’s questioning in one single, uninterrupted session, just in time to read a bedtime story to Sasha, whom she’d left for the first time for an entire day in Ethel Jackson’s care. Ethel had wine poured by the time Natalia returned from the child’s bedroom.

‘Was it a good idea to do it all in one go?’ asked Ethel.

‘It was exactly what I needed to do,’ said Natalia.

‘And?’

‘It confirmed what I thought from the flat transcripts. It’s wrong.’

‘How?’

‘That’s what I can’t work out.’

22

Jane Ambersom did not fully appreciate that although it was only a temporary secondment she was now officially responsible for Maxim Radtsic. And that without Straughan, whose function it would have been, that responsibility extended beyond the already organized medical examination to the half-prepared Russian-embassy encounter in Belmarsh Prison. She summoned the formal Foreign Office contingent and while she waited for their arrival went through the travel arrangements with the logistics director, whose authority she formally extended to cover what would have been Straughan’s function. She repeated the rehearsal when the diplomats arrived, omitting the complete details of the television and audio monitoring that would operate throughout and the total surveillance to be placed upon the Russian group. Finally she introduced, under their covert operational names, the two MI6 officers who were to make up the British presence.

It was only then that Jane Ambersom called Rebecca Street in Hertfordshire.

‘How’d the medical go?’ asked Jane.

‘Routine,’ replied the other woman, dismissively. ‘His blood pressure was about five above what they’d like for a man of Radtsic’s age but the feeling is that’s most likely caused by the understandable stress he’s under. All the other immediate checks are fine. We’ll get the cholesterol and all the other blood-test results in two or three days. The Russian reference to poor health was obviously a lie.’

‘So he’s ready for this afternoon?’

‘Has been for the last hour, refusing lunch and demanding to know when the transport’s arriving.’

‘The helicopter is leaving Northolt at noon, ETA with you 1320, arrival at the helipad at 1420. The Foreign Office group, with our two officers, will already be there. They’ll get to the prison, with Radtsic and Elena, using the underground access. You’re not involved, obviously: we’re guessing the FSB with the Russian group will have miniaturized cameras. Radtsic will be brought out the same way. The helicopter will wait, to take you back to Hertfordshire. I’ll copy all—’

‘How do you know the safe house is in Hertfordshire?’ broke in Rebecca.

‘You know I’m operating out of Vauxhall Cross,’ said Jane.

‘No, I don’t know,’ said Rebecca, flatly.

Shit!
thought Jane, awareness settling. ‘You’re totally committed with Radtsic. Monsford’s gone. There needed to be someone at the top here. My being that person is temporary. I refused to accept the secondment without that being completely understood and accepted by Bland and Palmer. You should have been told yesterday by one or the other of them.’

There was no response from the other end.

‘Rebecca?’

‘I wasn’t told.’

‘They gave Aubrey Smith and myself separate undertakings that they’d explain everything to you: Bland told us you’d already spoken to him.’

‘It must have been quite an extensive conversation in my absence.’

Jane ground her teeth in exasperation. ‘Harry Jacobson is being dismissed, under restrictions, so you’ll need a supervisor replacement up there.’

‘Immediately.’

‘I’ll organize it today.’

‘Try not to forget, like Bland and Palmer.’

‘Rebecca, I’m genuinely sorry you weren’t told, as it was arranged that you should have been. But I don’t want your job, which you obviously consider automatically to be yours. It
will
automatically be if you drain Radtsic of everything he’s got to tell us. So let’s get professional, shall we?’

‘You’ll copy me on everything that comes out of the Belmarsh meeting, of course?’

‘Of course.’ She was right not to like this woman, Jane decided. ‘We’ll speak when you get back from Belmarsh.’

‘Perhaps by then you’ll be able to tell me who Jacobson’s replacement will be.’

Jane put down the telephone without responding.

*   *   *

The military helicopter took a circuitous route, touching down at Mildenhall air base to justify the filed flight plan before going farther east out over the North Sea to approach London from that direction, finally to land precisely at 1420. Throughout, Radtsic and Elena were linked to the communal voice channel but neither spoke. Nor did Rebecca, churning with impotent, wordless fury at how amateurishly easy she had been out-manoeuvred. It was now so blatantly obvious that the bitch had all along worked not just to get back to Vauxhall Cross but into the Director’s chair. Rebecca had only just regained her composure when they landed, thinking rationally, objectively, and totally without any self-confusing anger. So resolved was she, in fact, that Rebecca was actually smiling when she followed the two Russians from the droop-rotored machine.

The British party were already waiting, as Jane had promised. There were no named introductions. At the indication to move off through the underground labyrinth designed to protect the anonymity and safety of those entering and leaving Britain’s s highest-security prison, Radtsic turned to the unmoving Rebecca and said, ‘You are not coming?’

‘I’ll be waiting here when you come out.’

‘Of course. Stupid of me.’

The corridor was sufficiently wide for four people easily to move abreast, although Radtsic and his wife were an isolated two within the group, walking hand in hand. The bright lighting reflected harshly off the white-tiled floor and walls, forcing them to squint. Telephones were spaced at six-metre intervals. Monitoring cameras tracked their entire journey, warning the waiting uniformed security officers of their approach to a barred control room to which they were admitted only after the head of the Foreign Office delegation produced photographic identification of everyone as well as signed authority for their entry. Two of the security officers led them through more unexpectedly quiet, white-tiled corridors to a lift large enough for them all. It rose two floors to ground level and a distantly noisy area of undesignated, metal-door rooms and barred external windows. There were bars on all the windows in the comparatively small room into which they were finally taken. It was bisected, wall to wall, by a wide, light-coloured wooden-leg table, which in turn was divided up to the ceiling by a thickened glass screen into which, at intervals, microphones were inset. CCTV was installed on all four walls, at the same intervals as along the corridor. A precise number of chairs were set out for the British group. Showing their familiarity with such encounters, the Foreign Office officials put Radtsic and his wife in the very centre, arranging themselves and the two MI6 men at either side. Beneath the bench, the two Russians remained hand in hand.

An abruptly lit red light above the large central door on the opposite side of the glass shield signalled the arrival of the Russian contingent, which included one greying, matronly woman, and for all of whom an exact number of chairs were arranged. The delegation deferred to a squat, obese man tightly corseted in a waistcoated suit, no-one else attempting to sit until he’d settled himself with some chair-shifting difficulty. The woman at once followed, sitting directly alongside and assembling a complicated digital recorder in front of the nearest microphone outlet, towards which she closely erected an aerial. As soon as she settled, the rest of the group arranged themselves at either side and from briefcases unpacked more recorders, notebooks, and folders. One opened a small computer. Two Russians least attentive to the seating process betrayed the likelihood of their being FSB by the intensity with which they studied the wall-mounted CCTV.

‘I register an immediate protest,’ announced the Russian head. ‘According to the understood arrangements, there should be no British presence.’ He had the hoarse voice of a persistently heavy smoker. There was a sheen of perspiration on his upper lip and he shifted constantly in his unease.

‘The insistence of Maxim Mikhailovich Radtsic upon a British presence, as well as the location of this meeting, was made quite clear and agreed to in the diplomatic exchanges between our two countries,’ responded the Foreign Office head, who’d put himself to Radtsic’s right. In contrast to the Russian, the diplomat was a tall, thin, impeccably dressed man who remained calm and unmoving.

‘I demanded that they be here, as witnesses,’ declared Radtsic, authoritatively loud-voiced. He and Elena were no longer hand in hand. She was matching her husband’s defiance in the way she sat, arms folded. He had both irritably twitching hands outstretched upon the wide ledge in front of him.

‘And I demand that my protest be officially noted,’ said the fat man.

‘It is noted,’ dutifully accepted the British diplomat.

Directly addressing Radtsic, the corpulent Russian said, ‘I have come specially from Moscow for this meeting and will remain here in London until this matter is satisfactorily resolved by your being freed. You have the full consular and diplomatic support of the Russian Federation.’ The declaration concluded with a gesture of finality, not at Radtsic but at those on either side of the man.

‘I do not want the support of the Russian Federation,’ rejected Radtsic, his voice clearly controlled. ‘I want my son.’

‘You were forced, pressured, to come to Britain against your will, weren’t you?’ insisted the Russian.

‘The pressure under which we are being put is by our being deprived of our son,’ replied Radtsic. ‘I want access to him: a reply to my letter. I want to know that he is being treated properly: that he’s not in jail.’

‘Your son was rescued before he could be blackmailed by your being held here in England.’

‘He was intercepted and prevented from joining me here.’

‘How badly have you been treated?’

‘I have not been treated badly: subjected to torture.’