Red Star Falling: A Thriller (41 page)

‘I’m having difficulty following this,’ complained Rebecca. It was a professionally objective remark.

‘As we are,’ smiled the man. ‘The code is composed of what I can only describe as several different linguistic or communicative elements. There’s deaf-and-dumb sign woven into what we’ve identified as apparently randomly introduced Middle Eastern picture and some identifiable Asian picture languages: the code depends predominantly on straight-line imagery, with adjustments for slightly bent digits using the human hand. There are differences, in phonetically based sign, between word languages: we’ve isolated some, but not all. There are, obviously, complete differences between Middle East and Asian picture scripts. Again, we think we’ve identified some. What we don’t have—nor any way of discovering—is whether in addition to the various picture-and-sign languages there’s been introduced a mathematical manipulation, remembering that mathematics is the core base of most codes: whether to subtract, add, or multiply by a specific number sequence or amount the letter or symbol represented in the recognizable exchange.’

‘How the hell can we work that out?’ demanded Barry Elliott.

‘We can’t, just as Bletchley Park couldn’t have broken the Enigma code without actually having a captured machine to reverse engineer,’ said the linguistic scientist. ‘With the cipher, children of ten could communicate as easily as they’re doing now on the Internet. Without it, we’ll never be sure that our translation, which we’ll eventually get in full and which will probably read quite coherently, is actually what was communicated between the two Russians in that prison interview room.’

‘Would it be a static cipher, relevant to every exchange?’ asked Rebecca, another objective query.

The man smiled. ‘A clever question. That’s the value of ambiguous meanings. The positive definitions, if they are mathematically governed, are probably fixed by the particular day of the exchange: let’s say Monday is numbered one, Tuesday is two, Wednesday is three, and so on. Each number would dictate the definition for its appropriate day. Radtsic’s prison meeting was on a Wednesday. That day’s definitions could—and probably would—be different from those of Thursday.’

‘What you’re telling us is that without the day-by-day cipher—if one even exists—we’re beaten,’ said Aubrey Smith.

‘Not completely,’ qualified the expert. ‘Eventually we’ll get a virtually complete translation of what passed between Radtsic and those who confronted him in Belmarsh for that Wednesday, but every word—and more importantly every picture symbol, all of which have a number of variations—will have to be considered: we’ll eventually be able to provide you with possibly four different versions of the same code.’

‘Which is a roundabout way of saying that we’re beaten,’ repeated Smith.

‘Not necessarily,’ contradicted Goody. ‘Can you take us through what you are so far able to read?’

It took a long time, the marker beam almost permanently alight, stop-starting the television recordings between the actual Belmarsh encounter and the separated, itemized code examples, switching at every break to the wall-chart illustrations of each individual symbol, word, gesture, and sign. A reliance emerged upon single-, two-, or three-finger improvisations, sometimes topped by single or double finger positioning to create Mandarin Chinese or Japanese symbols (‘Chinese is the root of the Japanese language’), and some Hebrew straight-line characters re-created with finger representation—even one ancient Sumerian triangular symbol—to support an arm-brushing sign gesture designating a road, a route, or a distance. There was easily decipherable disability sign for water, river, sea, or lake, and a combination of Cantonese and Japanese to designate a person, people, or a number of people, conceivably sufficient to constitute a crowd. None of the hybrid mishmash had grammatical prefix, preposition, or suffix to identify plural or singular.

There was a protracted silence at the end of the dissertation, broken only when Goody looked up, smiling, from his note scribbling. ‘I’m surprised and impressed, sir. You got a lot, accepting all the caveats: far more than I expected from your earlier presentation. I wouldn’t normally ask such a favour, but I wonder, sir, if you couldn’t save me valuable time by suggesting what minimal interpretation you’ve so far reached?’

The linguist’s smile of appreciation remained throughout Goody’s remarks. ‘Accepting all the caveats?’ he qualified.

‘Absolutely.’

The marker beam came on again, now with only one television operating. ‘Two, maybe connected, possibilities: and I want you to understand that we’re not working from the obvious supposition of what a defector—or supposed defector—would want to convey,’ embarked the man, pink face flushed from the interrogator’s praise. ‘One of the simplest translations of that mixture of Mandarin script and lower-class Japanese that the leader of the Russian delegation is using is
success
or
progress.
There’s the immediate deaf-and-dumb response,’ identified the man, switching the beam upon Radtsic’s hands. ‘It’s
yes
or
agreement
: certainly an affirmative.’ The beam jumped. ‘I have a question here but I’ll delay it, to avoid a pre-judgement. Here’s the Chinese–Japanese combination I pointed out earlier that could indicate people or a single person. We’ve only been asked to assess the encounter of a single person, Maxim Radtsic.’ The beam danced through several freeze-frames. ‘The repetition makes us believe the reference is to more than one person: maybe two or three. There’s no grammar or tense, as I’ve explained, but we’re surmising from Radtsic’s responses here.…’ The beam jabbed to a series of deaf-and-dumb sign. ‘Here’s the marking for
water
or
river
or
lake
and here’s Radtsic’s reply,
no.
Here’s
forest
or
trees
or
woods
and here’s Radtsic replying in the affirmative. And look here, at the repeated sign for
distance
or
road
or
route
. Our initial assessment is that the Russian delegation was trying to establish location: where Radtsic was being held. Now you help us, as far as tense is concern. The code for
people
or
a single person
: what is it, plural or singular?’

‘Plural,’ replied Jane. ‘It could be as many as four but more like three—Radtsic, his supposed wife, and Irena.’

‘That’ll help us,’ thanked the GCHQ expert.

‘I still don’t understand the significance of it all,’ said Jane.

‘Radtsic was telling the delegation that he—maybe even the others—were succeeding in their mission or assignment but wasn’t able to identify where he or the others were being housed,’ elaborated the man.

‘That’s more than enough for me,’ said Goody.

‘It would have been more than enough for Natalia, too,’ Jane remarked sideways to Aubrey Smith.

*   *   *

‘You lied: tried to trick me,’ accused Mikhail Guzov. ‘You pretended not to recognize five of the photographs I showed you of people we’d definitely identified to be MI5 operatives: your colleagues.’ The man was hunched aggressively forward in his rustic chair, the door behind him still swinging back and forth from the force with which he’d burst into the dacha.

‘I didn’t lie or trick you,’ refused Charlie, unmoved by the performance. ‘I told you from the beginning that MI5 field officers don’t mix or fraternize,
precisely
to prevent one being able to identify another in a hostile situation. I picked out those I thought I could recognize. If you’d already identified others the trickery was yours, trying to trap me.’ Acting out the feigned anger—anger becoming genuine at the rejection—Guzov wasn’t bothering with his grotesque impression of a smile: Charlie was grateful. He decided against mocking the man further by getting up to close the unsecured door.

‘You’re good at lying, aren’t you?’ persisted the Russian.

‘Isn’t it essential to our trade, until it’s pointless, as it now is?’ said Charlie, cautiously.

‘I mean particularly good.’

This was prepared, maybe even rehearsed from someone else’s script. ‘I don’t know what you expect me to say to that: I don’t understand it.’

‘Tell me about Edwin Sampson.’

The immediate chill, an actual sensation, rose like nausea throughout Charlie’s body, physically numbing him, but his mind remained clear but racing. Edwin Sampson was the British traitor with whom he’d faked defection to Moscow and succeeded in discrediting during those initial, first-day debriefings with Natalia. ‘It was a professional assignment.’

‘Sampson wasn’t the phoney you convinced us he was. It was you who were the phoney, cheating us so well we didn’t believe anything Sampson told us.’

They had Natalia: Sasha, too! Why had they waited this long: there wasn’t any logic.
Don’t panic,
Charlie warned himself. He had to stick to the story they’d rehearsed over and over again: the story to which she’d be clinging to save herself and their daughter. And she was clinging to it: if she weren’t, they wouldn’t be bothering with this charade, waiting for him to make a slip. ‘It was a professional assignment. I beat your man who interrogated me. He was old, past it.’

‘Man?’ seized Guzov, accusingly.

Guzov wouldn’t outwit him, determined Charlie. He was better, quicker, than the Russian, whom he was sure was following someone else’s psychology. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—fail Natalia. Or Sasha. ‘A colonel, according to the uniform epaulettes. I never knew his name, of course, although the debriefing went on for a long time, daily for what must have been more than a month in the very beginning.’

‘That wasn’t how it was at the beginning, was it, Charlie?’ challenged Guzov. ‘Your initial debriefer was a woman, not a man.’

Charlie shook his head, frowning. ‘It’s vague now, so long ago. There was a woman, though. Very briefly, no more than one or two sessions. My impression was that she was very new, probably only just qualified. I assumed that’s why someone more senior took over.’

‘Was that really how it was, Charlie?’

This was goading, not how a professional interrogator would have asked the question. ‘You hold all the records.’ Records that Natalia had assured him she’d so very carefully manufactured to prove that after her opening session his questioning had been transferred to a senior colonel who’d died within a year of their affair beginning.

‘I’ve read all the records,’ said Guzov, his tone thick with doubt. ‘I’ve read everything we could find.’

It had to be the official Hall of Weddings documentation of his marriage to Natalia, when he’d hoped to persuade her to come back with him to England. Charlie was tensed, although not showing it, waiting for the triumphant coup de grace.
Admit nothing, offer nothing,
he reminded himself. ‘Then you have the advantage over me, after such a long time.’

‘That’s exactly what I’ve got, Charlie—the total advantage over you. That’s what I told you that first day in the hospital, remember?’

‘Your special hospital,’ snatched Charlie, trying to deflect the man from his script.

‘Where there’s still a place permanently available for you.’

This wasn’t right, decided Charlie. Where was the denouement to which Guzov had so carefully, so obediently to his instructions, built up; to the declaration of Natalia and Sasha’s seizure, at which they expected him to collapse! They couldn’t have detained them after all! They’d tried a bluff, which Guzov had enacted quite well, in the hope that he
would
collapse: her escape to London would have automatically led to her entire KGB and FSB career being scrutinized, and the coincidence of his edited early encounter and his seizure at the same time as her disappearance would be more than sufficient to justify this confrontation. And perhaps, interpreting that last remark, his pulling himself back from his near psychological decline had been detected by the permanently recording cameras and there was a determination to reduce him back into a mentally malleable state of career confession that he’d refused with the photographic recognition. Choosing that for a response, Charlie said, ‘That’s a pointless threat. I’ve told you why I couldn’t identify more of those pictures.’

‘The hospital specialists there tell me they have treatments that can help memory and recollection but I don’t really want to descend to that sort of help,’ said Guzov, grimacing his smile at last.

‘It would be pointless as I’m trying to co-operate as much as I can,’ said Charlie. He walked back to one of the inner door supports he’d established not to be covered by any camera lens to scratch his back, more irritated than concerned by the episode, hoping yet again that the nonsense didn’t go on for much longer.

*   *   *

Mort Bering’s presence in London disrupted their established routine and it was past ten that night before Elliott got back to his apartment and Jane Ambersom waiting expectantly in bed. ‘Didn’t mean to be so late,’ apologized the American. ‘But the Bureau and Langley are in a mutual state of chaos at the thought of being tricked a second time by Russian intelligence. Everyone, that is, except Mort, who’s switched everything around to make it appear he’s the guy who’s caught out Irena and Radtsic.’

‘Excluding you?’ asked Jane, protectively, briefly pulling her head away from his naked shoulder.

‘Oh no,’ reassured Elliott. ‘I’m very much Robin to his Batman. I know who’s really sorting fact from fiction, don’t I?’

‘The last we heard from Joe Goody was that he’s going to let Irena and Radtsic sweat until tomorrow,’ said Jane, knowing Elliott was anxious to hear what had transpired at meetings to which he and Bering had not been included.

‘Goody suddenly doesn’t seem to be in any great hurry,’ complained the American.