“Until we start getting a little back, it might be an idea to keep our hand covered.”
“You didn’t
offer
anything: interpret the fact they weren’t armed, anything like that?”
“No,” assured Charlie.
“You got a lot, Charlie—concluded a lot,” praised Dean. “And you’re right. We should be able to find a name, this end. But until we do—and get an idea of what our dead man was doing—I agree we should keep a tight lid on things.”
How difficult might it be following that instruction and resolving
Natalia’s new, as yet unknown problem? Everything had to be adjustable, as long as it was in his favor. He said, “The people at the embassy here will want an explanation.”
Sir Rupert Dean was silent for several moments. “And we’ve got to maintain a working relationship there,” he agreed. There was another silence. “Keep it all general, without positively lying. Particularly test out Gallaway. When this first broke, I expected it to be a military investigation, but the Defense Ministry ran a mile, not wanting to dirty their hands. Maybe they know something they’re not telling us.”
“
Will
they tell us, ever?” questioned Charlie, more to gauge the other man’s thinking than for the answer. He was pleased at the director-general’s acceptance of what had, until now, only been a suspicion.
“Not if they don’t want to. Or can’t,” said Dean, simply. “It’s not just identifiable responsibility everyone’s running from. The publicity is hysterical. Questions are being asked in the House. Daily demands for a statement from the prime minister. It’s all getting out of hand.”
“I’ll have whoever’s job it is get the body and belongings back today,” promised Charlie.
There was another silence. Then Dean said, “I might bring you back: continue here what you’ve started there. Be ready, if I do.”
That would leave Natalia—and Sasha—alone. Which he couldn’t do, not immediately—not until he’d sorted out whatever it was that was worrying her. Quickly Charlie said, “Shouldn’t I first see what the Americans and Russians are prepared to share? There seems to be some anxiety in the American embassy about people flying in from Washington.”
“This has waited more than fifty years. I’m not counting in days,” said Dean.
He was, thought Charlie, if there was any danger to his Moscow appointment. Or to Natalia. And apart from the voice mail impatience and the director-general’s initial greeting, there hadn’t been any rebuke. Praise, even. Probingly he said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to say more from Yakutsk. If it caused any problems.”
“Nothing serious,” dismissed the director-general. “Certainly nothing that needs to be discussed after this conversation.”
“I got the impression of a lot of angst in London.”
“Your only concern is my support. And you have it.”
Charlie celebrated the moment of satisfaction by picking up the airplane with the separate tail section and on impulse tried a test flight at the moment Colonel John Gallaway flustered into the room. The plane crashed at the military attaché’s feet. The immaculate, cologne-smelling man frowned at the bristle-chinned, crumpled Charlie and said, “What in God’s name is going on?”
“Just seeing if it would fly as well as my ideas,” said Charlie.
“It didn’t,” said Gallaway.
They gathered in Gallaway’s office because that was where the six surviving wartime photographs had been assembled. Charlie carried with him the lieutenant’s uniform, which he decided smelled only slightly worse than he did, and everything it had contained. While McDowell, Gallaway, and Cartright prodded and poked among it all, Charlie took the pictures to the window, where the sun’s early promise had been fulfilled with a brilliantly bright day. The glare made him feel gravel-eyed, from tiredness.
The photographs were grainy and sepia-faded from age. Among the recommendations he’d already sent to London—carefully retrieved from the cipher room, with everything else, on his way to Gallaway’s suite—was that a Foreign Office and Defense Ministry archive search be made there for wartime pictures and Charlie decided to ship Gallaway’s trove back with the body of the dead man, despite there being no one in the prints even vaguely resembling the long-dead man in the basement refrigerator.
He didn’t hurry providing a greatly edited account of Yakutsk to the other three men. He omitted completely his belief of there being a second British officer involved.
“So!” he finished, looking at the military attaché. “That’s my story. What’s yours, from the Ministry of Defense files about an intelligence operation?”
“Absolutely nothing!” declared Gallaway, glibly. “There wasn’t one.”
Charlie let the silence settle, until the others began to stir uncomfortably, not understanding. “Okay,” sighed Charlie. “The body of an English officer, wearing an English officer’s uniform, is in a
grenade-created grave in a part of Siberia no one fifty years ago could get to. The Defense Ministry, which inherited the War Office, has no record of any lieutenant being there. Or here … .” Charlie paused, feeling another snatch of tiredness. “You tell me, John … you don’t mind me calling you John, do you? I’d like you to call me Charlie.”
Unable to anticipate what was coming, Gallaway shook his head.
“Thank you, John,” Charlie resumed. “So you tell me, John, what our man was doing there unless he was on a covert operation? And then you try to convince me—with the amount of publicity that this is getting—that your ministry hasn’t gone through every bus ticket and postage stamp receipt of its archives of fifty years ago to find out why a British army lieutenant was where he was. But before you do all that—John—you tell me what your brief is from London right now.’Cause if you don’t, I’m not going to share with you any more than I’m going to share with anyone else. And the loser—John—will be you. You think about it … .” Charlie looked sideways to Cartright. “And I’d like you to take that on board, too, Richard. Strikes me I’m doing all the work, being stung to buggery possibly in more ways than were obvious in Yakutsk, and getting very little back in return.”
“I shall most definitely report everything about this conversation to London!” said Gallaway. His face was puce but not totally: there were isolated white blotches, making him lizard-skinned.
“I obviously will, too,” said Cartright. “I’ve done everything I could think of to help. You can read my cable traffic if you like.”
“I want all of you to do that,” encouraged Charlie but ignoring the offer. “Just as I want you all to know I’m not making any accusations against you personally. It’s not the way those bastards on the top floor operate. When you complain to London about me, you also tell them that I’ve got a lot more they’d like to know but I’ve got to get a lot more in exchange.”
Gallaway was gulping for words when his telephone rang. He answered without greeting and just as wordlessly handed it to the head of chancellery. Raymond McDowell’s face contorted into disbelief. “The body’s in the canteen refrigerator! None of the staff will go in to get the food for breakfast!”
“I’m sorry,” apologized Charlie. “I haven’t got ’round to telling you.”
Gerald Williams was right, thought Cartright. This man was practically beyond belief.
Natalia listened intently as Colonel Vadim Lestov recited back to her the statement she’d just dictated to him, knowing even the intonation was important, correcting the detective twice.
“We’re going to issue something similar from here,” she said, finally. She’d spent an hour that morning suggesting the phrasing with the deputy foreign minister, Mikhail Suslov, and a further hour waiting for any correction from their presidential adviser at the White House. Dmitri Nikulin hadn’t called. There was only forty-five minutes before her meeting with Charlie.
“I’m very sorry,” apologized Lestov. “Nothing has gone as it should have, as it was intended.”
“You’re not being held responsible.”
“Why, then, is it you I’m being briefed by, not Colonel Travin?”
“This is political as well as being operational,” said Natalia, cautiously. Politically survivable for whom? she wondered.
Belying the appearance of a man who always looked as if he’d crawled out from under an ancient hedge, Charlie Muffin was fastidiously clean: the way he dressed was camouflage for him to be overlooked, hopefully not even seen. Necessarily going back to Lesnaya to shower, shave and change—and even then make a telephone call—delayed him, but Charlie wouldn’t anyway have arrived at the gardens ahead of Natalia.
She had never been operational, walking dark streets and even darker alleys; couldn’t instinctively recognize the difference between shadows and shade, which after so long was second nature to Charlie. Not yet knowing her latest concern, he had to protect her, ensure she was alone. It had been Natalia who’d remembered their old rendezvous, so she’d remember the rules: expect him to check from
somewhere unseen and know that if he didn’t approach after half an hour he wouldn’t make the meeting, not believing it safe.
She had to be wrong, overreacting, he told himself as he emerged from the Botanicheskiy Sad metro, cloaked by the crowd. This sort of thing had been necessary in the old, paranoid past, but one of the few real changes in Russia—Moscow, particularly—had been the ending of the KGB’s spy-upon-spy internal control. In addition to which officially Natalia was no longer attached to an intelligence organization since her liaison transfer to the Interior Ministry.
His going through the charade of a clandestine meeting, behaving in the ways of that old, obsessive past, was important, though, for what it told him. Natalia
was
becoming paranoid: overpressured and overstrained trying to live as they were. As they had no alternative but to live. Charlie tried unsuccessfully to recall the Shakespeare quotation about a tangled web he’d had to learn at school, unable to remember if it was the same play that had the phrase about protesteth too much that had occurred to him that morning, confronting the supposedly outraged diplomats and offended intelligence officer. School had been a long time ago, like so much else seemed to be.
But not tradecraft.
Sure of the geography, Charlie eased into the park by the side gate, the one that gave him immediate cover from the arch-roofed hothouse and the branch-skirted gymnosperms. He saw Natalia at once. She was sitting on what he’d taught her to be their marker seat, from which he could isolate the people around her, seeking out the seemingly engrossed newspaper reader on adjoining benches or entwined lovers whose eyes never closed in ecstasy or pet owners whose dogs couldn’t pee anymore.
Dutifully Natalia got up after a few minutes, striding forcefully off toward the rear gate, as if leaving: a never-fail trigger to startle a watcher into movement. Two newspaper readers read on. A third continued dozing. The solitary dog walker went on in the opposite direction. It was too early for lovers. Natalia sat as abruptly as she’d risen, on the seat closest to the first hothouse, not more than five meters from where Charlie stood beneath the tree canopy. The gardens remained tranquil, apart from the entry of a noisy school party of giggling girls who
were
giggling schoolgirls. Charlie still gave it
another five minutes, smiling toward Natalia as he eventually approached.
He said, “That was nostalgic.”
“I didn’t need the memories.”
“You’d better tell me about it.”
Natalia did, at last, in short, tight sentences, finally holding back nothing, looking away from him most of the time.
Charlie didn’t speak for several moments after she’d finished. “It was ridiculous, stupid, not to have told me from the beginning.”
“I know. Now. I didn’t guess how you’d react at there being an overhang from the Popov affair.”
“There was an official inquiry. You were completely exonerated.”
“Viktor Ivanovich was a member of the tribunal,” she reminded Charlie, in turn. “He obviously didn’t accept the finding.”
“There couldn’t be any other reason?”
“Not that I can think of. And I’ve thought about it a very great deal.”
Charlie raised his hands, warding off apology before he spoke. “You couldn’t have misunderstood?”
“Not after yesterday.”
“Which you seem to have won?”
“This time. I need to go on winning.”
“More than that, even. If they’re trying to destroy you, you’ve got to destroy them.”
“I’m so tired of playing games: our games, their game, anyone’s game!”
“We’re not playing games anymore,” insisted Charlie. “We’re going to fight.”
“With what? I was lucky yesterday—the timing was in my favor—but it was a fluke. If I don’t stay ahead on this every step of the way, I’ll be replaced.”
Charlie lapsed into silence again, immersed in thought. He wouldn’t say it—couldn’t say it—because the resolve had been obvious for a very long time and they’d shaken it to death like two dogs holding on to a single bone, but if Natalia
were
forced to leave the ministry—to become simply but all-importantly his proper legal wife, Sasha’s mother—all their personal working difficulties would
be ended, at a finger snap. But Natalia needed her job, as much as he needed his. Until now—uncertain, unsure now—both their personal lives had been a litany of one disaster imploding upon another. They were only confident about their professional ability and success, clinging to it as a blind man tightly holds his stick to get through each day without colliding with unseen obstacles. He said, “If they want a war, we’ll take it to them.”
Natalia said, “I’ve talked to Lestov. He thinks you had a lot you hadn’t shared. According to the American woman, you’re a sneaky son-of-a-bitch. Her words.” That was an exaggeration, but Natalia had no difficulty with it.
So, thought an unoffended Charlie, was Miriam Bell. “You knew that without being told.”
“Have you got something I can fight with?” demanded Natalia, gazing steadily at him.
Decision time, Charlie recognized: shit or get off the pot. Loyalty to the department? Or loyalty to Natalia? The department had cheated him and been disastrously cheated in return; and they’d cheat him again, if it became expedient to do so. Natalia had never cheated him—tried to even any score—despite the times and the ways he’d failed her. Nor, he thought, would she ever. And was the job as important to him as he’d tried to make out, with his elaborate blind man’s analogy? Charlie was surprised he even needed to pose himself the question.
He stood, breathing in deeply, offering his hand to bring her up with him, and began slowly wandering the path toward the hothouses. And as they walked, Charlie told Natalia all he knew or thought he knew: even, toward the end, his director-general’s now-ignored insistence that he offer as little as possible to gain as much as he could, until a reason was established for the English lieutenant being in Yakutsk.
“Miriam Bell’s right. You are a sneaky son-of-a-bitch.”
“Do you still have sufficient authority to try to find the records of Gulag 98?” demanded Charlie.
“It would have been Beria’s time. The NKVD,” Natalia recalled, talking as much to herself as to Charlie. “It’s said that for more than a layered mile beneath the Lubyanka there’s a virtual city beneath a city stretching as far as Red Square and the Kremlin and Ploshchad
Sverdlova, under the Bolshoi: Stalin had his own railway system, to move around it. One entire level is occupied by archives, hundreds of millions of them. Yakutskaya
was
one of the biggest secrets, so records might have been destroyed, as they were in Yakutsk itself. But we won’t know that until we look.”
“Don’t be specific,” warned Charlie. “A general inquiry about camps is an obvious extension of the inquiry: something you’d be expected to do. Isolating a specific camp at the very beginning wouldn’t be, unless the information came from your own people.”
“Charlie!” she protested, pained.
“If we’re not going to take chances, we’re not going to take chances,” he said, offering Charlie Muffin logic. “Channel everything through you. You’ll know what you’re looking for. Dump the rest on Travin. Drown him. Nikulin is your secret weapon—so secret that he doesn’t know it.”
“You’re going to have to spell this out for me step by step!” protested Natalia.
“You’ll understand every little skirmish,” promised Charlie.
“Recognize something?” she demanded, stopping abruptly where they were.
Charlie gazed around the huge glassed building with its giant, roof-sized fern leaves, realizing for the first time they’d actually gone into one of the houses. “No,” he conceded.
“It’s the same one you walked me to when you admitted your defection was phony and that you’d lied,” identified Natalia. “It was right here you told me you were going to abandon me and go back to London.”
The recollection—and the remorse—was immediate. Charlie said, “I came back. And this time I’m not abandoning you.”
“No,” accepted Natalia. “It’s a good feeling.”
Going personally to the American embassy, leaving the protection of his own territory for the uncertainty of theirs, was as conscious a psychological act as dressing to be despised and therefore underrated, despite Miriam Bell’s suspicion. Charlie didn’t expect an identity for the murdered American to be freely offered if it had already been found, but he’d sense the nuance if there had been progress. There were other considerations, too. The FBI quarters at Ulitza Chaykovskovo
were far more extensive and certainly more luxurious than his badger’s hole in which more than three people at any one time risked suffocation, and the American embassy mess extended happy hour to two and on occasions three. There was no drink price concession at all at the British bar. Charlie suspected Gerald Williams.
It had been Miriam’s number he’d called from the Lesnaya apartment before leaving to meet Natalia, and the Americans were waiting for him, easily accommodated in Saul Freeman’s office. It was little more than a passing impression that Miriam had showered and washed her hair and tried makeup on a face showing scarcely any sign of the Yakutsk ravages. His immediate concentration was upon two men already in the room, against a far wall almost as if they were not part of the intended gather. Charlie looked curiously, invitingly, to Freeman, who instead of introductions said, “Coupla guys from State. Just sitting in.”
The elder, white-haired man was clear-skinned and tight-bodied and beak-nosed, which, combined with the length at which he wore his hair, gave him a patrician appearance. It was the second man who held Charlie’s attention. He was slightly built and unobtrusively dressed in muted gray and sat completely unmoving. What registered most was washed-out blue eyes that never blinked. In Charlie’s experience men with no name who didn’t blink either wore six-guns in Western movies or ear protectors on practice ranges, where he’d never been able to stop blinking. And this man didn’t look at all like an actor.
Determinedly Charlie said, “Hi. Charlie Muffin.”
The two men nodded back but didn’t speak.
Freeman said, “Must be good to get back?”
“Great,” said Charlie. And waited.
“Good of you to come,” said Freeman.
“We’re all working together, aren’t we?” Charlie spoke looking at the two silent strangers, able to see Miriam at the same time. She was subdued, unsmiling.
“Like to think so,” agreed the FBI chief.
“So would I,” said Charlie.
“Everything escalated while you were away. It’s been a media circus. The president’s responded with an executive order demanding answers. Plans an Arlington burial.”
“Very impressive.”
Freeman shifted, seemingly uncomfortable. “Thought it might be useful to talk through everything we’ve got.”
Who thought? wondered Charlie. “I’d like to hear that, too.” He took from his pocket a much-edited and sometimes altered version of the account he’d earlier sent to London. “That’s all I’ve got together at the moment.”
Freeman’s forced bonhomie faltered at being outmaneuvered. His eyes flickered to the men against the wall.
Miriam said, “I’m afraid I haven’t worked as fast as you. All we’ve done is talk it through in very general terms.”
Charlie estimated it had been a full five minutes since the blue-eyed man had blinked. He wondered if he could make him now. He said, “Okay, so let’s talk. It was clearly a combined intelligence mission. Records of American military intelligence, G2, are stored at Adelphi, Maryland. With the urgency and authority of an executive order, you’ll have accessed them by now, so I’d appreciate knowing the result of that. It’s too soon, obviously, to have got your own photographs of your body, but you’re quite clearly geared up to run graduation checks at West Point. What sort of time frame are you running on that? You have a Rapid Physiognomy Comparison facility at Bureau headquarters, don’t you? It shouldn’t take long, if you use that. I’d be interested in your theories about the missing articles, against what was left on the bodies. We’ve quite a lot to talk about, in fact, haven’t we?”
The stranger didn’t blink but Freeman did, looking even more obviously at the Washington visitors. He said, “You’ve covered quite a lot of ground there.”