Red Star Falling: A Thriller (45 page)

‘Do you think champagne’s in order?’ suggested Ethel.

‘Absolutely,’ agreed Jane.

‘Where’s he being taken?’ asked Natalia.

‘Into London,’ generalized Jane.

‘Has anyone spoken properly to him yet?’

‘Not yet. Not like you mean.’

Ethel handed glasses around and said, ‘Congratulations. You’ve got him back, Natalia. And it’s largely as a result of all that you did.’

‘Yes,’ said the woman, the last to sip her wine. ‘Will he be brought here?’

‘Not immediately. He has to be debriefed. We’ve no idea what’s been happening to him since Vnukovo.’

‘Of course.’

‘His first question was about you and Sasha,’ said Jane, who’d read Warren’s account from Moscow before flying down to Hampshire.

Natalia smiled, faintly. ‘That’s good to hear.’

‘You haven’t drunk your champagne,’ complained Ethel, hovering over the Russian after topping up the two other glasses and waiting while Natalia made room for more wine.

‘You don’t seem very excited,’ finally accused Jane.

‘I’m frightened,’ Natalia admitted, openly. ‘I never really thought it would work, that they’d let him go. I still can’t properly understand it and I’m frightened.’

‘I think anyone would be frightened, after what you’ve both been through,’ encouraged Ethel. ‘And that’s up to now. There’s still the adjustments you’ve got to make.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Natalia. ‘There’ll need to be a lot of adjustments.’

*   *   *

‘Why aren’t I being allowed television anymore? Or radio or newspapers?’ demanded Irena.

‘You should be grateful you’re being allowed to stay here, ma’am,’ said Joe Goody, registering the similarity of the protest with that of Radtsic and Elena, earlier.

‘I want to know what’s going on!’

‘I’ve told you what’s going on,’ said Goody, patiently. ‘You’ve been exposed as a Russian intelligence agent working against the interests of this country, for which you’re going to face trial on charges still being formulated. They will automatically carry a custodial sentence the length of which could be mitigated by the degree of assistance you continue to give us.’

‘I’m not telling you any more, don’t want to see you again, until I’m allowed access to diplomats from my embassy.’

‘I’ve also told you that arrest warrants have been issued against the Russian intelligence agents who saw Radtsic in prison and who have taken refuge in your London embassy,’ politely continued Goody. ‘There is no question of consular access to you, Radtsic, or Elena while that situation exists. There’s also the matter of your safety that has to be considered.’

‘What safety?’ demanded the woman, the belligerence slightly lessening.

‘We have reason to believe that if your service discovered your whereabouts you’d be in considerable physical danger.’

‘Elimination!’ exclaimed the woman derisively. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. We’ll go home heroes.’

‘We don’t believe we are being ridiculous, ma’am,’ said Goody, forever mild, also noting the similarity with Radtsic’s earlier rejection. ‘We believe your service consider all three of you a severe political embarrassment that they’re anxious to eradicate to prevent your publicly appearing in a British court of law.’

‘You’re bluffing,’ accused Irena, unable to keep the uncertainty from her voice.

‘What I want you very carefully to consider is properly, genuinely, defecting to us and telling us precisely what the disinformation was in everything you told the Americans.’

‘Go fuck yourself!’

‘I’ll see you tomorrow, ma’am. And don’t worry. As long as you’re here, protected as completely are you are, you’ll remain quite safe.’

*   *   *

‘You’re right!’ declared the security-cleared surgeon, squinting at the X-ray pictures on the viewing screen. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before. And as minuscule as that is, I’m not sure a radiologist would have spotted it if the precise location hadn’t been pointed out in advance.’

‘Another Russian miracle of miniaturization technology,’ dismissed Charlie. ‘Is it going to be difficult to get out?’

‘Piece of cake,’ assured the man, turning away from the screen to where Charlie sat on the edge of the operating table, naked to the waist, which he wished didn’t bulge so much over the ill-fitting trousers. ‘They didn’t actually put it in the wound socket. That would have risked an infection. They created a skin pocket, next to it, using scar tissue as concealment. I can get it out with a local anaesthetic but I’d want you to stay in overnight.’

‘I already reserved a private room before knowing what you thought had been planted in your body,’ said John Passmore. ‘You sure it’s limited to being a tracker?’

‘I tested it where they kept me,’ said Charlie. ‘Worked every time I disappeared into the woods: there was someone—once a troop—with me in minutes. But every one of those times and on ordinary exercise in view of their cameras I kept repeating, aloud, that I knew I had a bug embedded in my shoulder. It was never picked up.’

‘How did you know?’ asked the surgeon. ‘I wouldn’t have imagined there’d be much pain.’

‘There wasn’t,’ agreed Charlie. ‘But it itched like hell.’

It took less than fifteen minutes from the time the local anaesthetic was administered for the tracker device to be taken from Charlie’s shoulder and soundlessly laid, at Charlie’s urging, on a waiting gauze pad.

‘Why so much care?’ asked Passmore.

‘I don’t want any indication that it’s been taken out. How many people have you got with you?’

‘Enough to make sure you’re totally protected.’ Passmore frowned.

‘Where do buses go from here?’ Charlie asked the surgeon.

The man shrugged. ‘All over.’

‘What’s the longest route?’

The man shrugged again. ‘The 211 to Waterloo, right over to the other side of London.’

‘Get someone to take the tracker, catch the 211, and stash it down the back of a seat,’ Charlie told Passmore. ‘Maybe have him get off after a couple of stops. You’ll have enough time to get an arrest squad in place at Waterloo station to pick up everyone in the car that will be following, as well as whoever’s still on the bus.’

‘To charge them with what?’ demanded Passmore.

‘Nothing,’ said Charlie, simply. ‘I want them delivered back to the embassy to go with the others who are trapped inside. I want Moscow to know that in the end I beat them, the bastards.’

30

Extra ambulances were the following morning drafted to Hammersmith hospital to create the diversion and as they departed en masse, some sounding their alarm bells, Charlie walked quietly and unaccompanied to the unwashed Ford waiting in the car park. The driver took a surveillance-checking route down Fulham Palace Road and crossed Putney Bridge before the surrounding escort vehicles declared them to be undetected. They recrossed the river at Wandsworth but stayed parallel with it into Chelsea to the safe house originally allocated to Charlie after his initial Moscow investigation into the death of the one-armed man. The MI5 triumvirate was already inside, waiting.

‘How’s the shoulder?’ greeted Aubrey Smith.

‘Stiff, which is a lot better than the constant irritation.’

‘Have you seen any television or newspapers?’ asked Jane.

‘No.’

She pressed the Start button on the already set up recorder and at once the TV screen was filled by a melee of television and still cameramen and journalists jostling around a closed van from which six men, all trying to cover their faces with their coats or hands, were abruptly released outside the Russian embassy. Its outer gates were closed, trapping the scrambling men against the railings: their intercom pleas to be admitted, in Russian and clearly identifying themselves by name, were distinctly audible and obviously enabled the still photographs from routine intelligence surveillance to have been provided for the collage strip across the top of the screen. The live footage below continued with the gates finally swinging back for the frantic men to scramble towards the tentatively opened embassy door; halfway there, two of the Russians stumbled into each other and fell, one punching the other in the face in frustrated fury. The voice-over commentary described the six as spies seized during part of the already exposed Russian espionage debacle who were to be declared persona non grata by the British government, who were summoning the Russian ambassador to receive yet another official protest note against Moscow’s unacceptable spying activities.

‘We tweaked your idea.’ Smith smiled. ‘And we kept that pinhead bug they put in your shoulder. It’s much more advanced than anything our technical division has got. We’re going to reverse engineer it to produce our own version.’

‘Any movement on the rest of our people held in Moscow?’ asked Charlie, anxious to reach his own conclusions about possible FSB reactions.

‘It’s too soon,’ judged the Director-General. ‘But as well as today’s new protest the ambassador’s going to be given new demands for access and their immediate release. We’re also giving Moscow a court-appearance date for the three who burgled your flat.’

‘Prichard and Blackwater,’ abruptly announced Charlie, realizing the tit-for-tat potential from his naming the two MI5 officers from the photographs Mikhail Guzov had produced at the dacha. ‘I had to identify them from eight photographs of our people to convince them I was co-operating and for them to believe all the misinformation I was sowing.’

‘Prichard got back from Rome last week: his rotation was up,’ said Passmore, already moving towards the telephone. ‘Blackwater’s in Canberra.’ From where he stood, telephone in hand, he called to Charlie, ‘You got the names of the other six?’

Charlie crossed to the operations director to avoid shouting the identifications. As Charlie returned to where he’d been sitting, Aubrey Smith said, ‘We should have been told that last night.’

‘Last night I didn’t know about the Russian-embassy siege,’ apologized Charlie. ‘Or what you were going to do with those who followed me from the airport.’

‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ refused the Director-General.

‘I know,’ Charlie conceded. ‘I made a mistake.’ He didn’t make professional mistakes like that, thought Charlie, anguished.

‘Is there any more identification—anything at all sensitive—to which we’ve got to react?’ demanded Jane.

‘No,’ assured Charlie, tightly.

Passmore had remained by the telephone and answered it on its first ring. ‘We’re lucky that it’s eleven at night in Australia,’ he announced, replacing the receiver. ‘Blackwater’s in bed, in the compound. Nothing’s so far happened to the others, all of whom are being recalled to their embassies.’

‘Definitely lucky all around,’ agreed Smith, the continued criticism of Charlie unmistakable. ‘I think we should begin your debriefing right away.’

‘So do I,’ agreed Charlie. There was surely nothing else about which he could be caught out!

‘Ahead of which, why do you believe they implanted that tracker in your back?’ questioned Passmore, finally returning to his seat.

‘Improvisation,’ said Charlie. ‘And opportunity, utilized by some brilliant FSB forward thinking. I couldn’t have been more completely trapped, bandaged up like a mummy in a psychiatric hospital, for my brain and everything it held about British intelligence to be taken apart. But here in England they had three active agents who could be uncovered at any minute. Which they were, far more quickly than Moscow expected, because of the help you got from the genuine defector, Natalia. The tracker was their insurance against that discovery, if they’d had more time to spread the intended confusion. Losing whatever I would have been drugged into disclosing was a more acceptable sacrifice than losing what they hoped to achieve through Irena and Radtsic’s doppelganger: let’s not forget the damage they’ve already inflicted on the CIA for believing Lvov was genuine. They calculated I would inevitably be reunited with Natalia: the tracker, which we know they were following from my arrival at Heathrow, would have led them to her. As it would have led them to Irena: it was more than an even possibility that I’d see Irena, whom we all thought I’d trapped when I exposed Lvov, an operation they’d already abandoned for the lesser success of planting Irena and Radtsic on us. Both Irena and Natalia—perhaps even Sasha—would have been taken out by an assassination squad. So would I. And when he learned they’d been killed, there would have been very little chance of Radtsic disclosing any real intelligence, would there?’

‘But you found the tracker?’ said Passmore, admiringly.

‘
Suspected
the tracker,’ qualified Charlie. It was a relief to have rid himself of its irritation but there was still the pulsating foot discomfort Charlie always felt when he was treading, figuratively, on dangerous ground.

*   *   *

‘His identifying Prichard and Blackwater should have been the first thing Charlie Muffin told you at the hospital,’ declared Aubrey Smith, who’d insisted upon an instant analysis of the safe-house encounter when they got back to Thames House.

‘I checked with Warren,’ said Passmore, who’d detoured to the control room before joining the other two in the Director-General’s suite. ‘He didn’t tell Charlie about our blockading the Russian embassy and Charlie certainly didn’t know what we were going to do with those who followed the bus: when I left him we hadn’t decided to do it ourselves!’

‘And when he wasn’t in a Moscow mental institute having bugs planted in his back he was being held in virtual isolation,’ supported Jane.

‘He identified two fellow agents whom he should have done everything to protect at the first opportunity,’ persisted the Director-General. ‘Charlie’s the total professional: it should have been an automatic reaction.’

‘He’s insisting on being completely debriefed
and
seeing the recordings of the Radtsic and Irena interviews ahead of seeing his wife!’ Jane pointed out. ‘That’s pretty damned professional.’

‘And no harm’s been done,’ reminded Passmore. ‘He’s acknowledged his mistake. And we don’t yet have a complete picture of what he went through in Moscow. I think we should make allowances.’