‘But the smuggling attempts – even what’s actually been seized in transit in the West – aren’t in kilos,’ offered Burton, helpfully. ‘The amounts have been far smaller.’
‘What’s to stop small amounts being stockpiled to make up an amount sufficient for a bomb if they’re all bought by the same person or country?’ demanded Charlie.
‘Nothing at all,’ admitted the man.
Scott cleared his throat, the prelude to a pronouncement, and said to Charlie; ‘In view of what I understand your posting to be, you’re probably already aware of discussions between countries within the European Union to create a Star Wars protection against some countries in the Middle East?’
Discerning the tone in the other man’s voice, Charlie said, ‘Which you don’t think necessary, after your investigation here?’
‘For God’s sake man, it would cost?20 billion!’
As they walked to the entrance of the embassy, Bowyer said, ‘I thought that was interesting, didn’t you?’
Charlie looked quizzically at the station head. ‘It frightened the shit out of me.’
Charlie felt instant empathy with Barry Lyneham, guessing at once he wouldn’t have to go through any getting-to-know-you bullshit because he was sure he knew the man already. He put Lyneham around 55, although maybe a little older, because Lyneham had clearly stopped worrying about inflicting personal damage upon himself. His belly bulged over the lost waistband of his trousers, presumably supported by an equally lost belt and the shirt collar was loosened for comfort or even by necessity. Lyneham’s face, particularly around his nose, was reddened from finishing too many bottles before too many evenings had ended and Charlie wasn’t sure if the wheezing was caused by excess weight or asthma: probably a combination of both. The words, when they came, hinted the deep south birth and were never hurried anyway and Charlie was quite sure the pouched eyes saw everything, just like he was sure the man heard everything, even the words that w eren’t spoken, an operational trick instinctive to their craft. Barry Lyneham was an old timer who’d been there and done it and didn’t need telling how to do it again. After the morning with Thomas Bowyer and the technical session that had followed it was refreshing to be with someone with whom he could relax but at the same time take seriously, confident he was on the same wavelength.
They went comfortably through the low foothill pleasantries of agreeing Russia was a bigger mess now than it had been under communism and would probably take years if not decades to get right and in the meantime it was causing a hell of a lot of people a hell of a lot of worry.
‘Nuclear shit top of the list,’ said Lyneham, starting the ascent to what mattered.
‘I’d welcome whatever steer you can give to me.’ He was in Lyneham’s territory, where it was polite to appear at least to defer, but after what he’d already listened to he wanted some balancing, rational judgment. He was curious at the absence of James Kestler, but that, too, was Lyneham’s decision.
‘Total fucking disaster. Crime’s king here, right? This is Capone country, reincarnated. You want anything, you get it from organized crime. The only way. It was always the way in the old days. Now nobody bothers to pretend any more. Yeltsin and all the others made all the right sounds and let the Bureau come here officially and now they’ve let you come and it doesn’t add up to a row of beans. This country was so fucked up, lying about production norms and meeting quotas, that they don’t even know what nuclear stuff they had in the first place so they sure as hell don’t know what’s gone or going missing.’ Lyneham had to pause, to recover his breath after such a concerted diatribe. To cover his difficulty, he took a bottle of Jim Beam from a lower drawer and Charlie nodded acceptance although hardly expecting the tumbler to be half filled. ‘Forgetting my manners by taking so long,’ apologized the American.
More with which to doubt Scott’s report, in his first account to London, Charlie recognized. ‘How are we supposed to operate?’ demanded Charlie.
‘You find out, you let me know,’ suggested Lyneham. ‘You were warned in London about jurisdiction and protocol?’
‘Endlessly,’ confirmed Charlie. The whisky was very different from Islay or Macallan but was an interesting change.
‘We can’t operate, not properly. We’ve no effective investigatory facilities and no right to employ them even if we had. I’ve actually advised Washington how we’re being suckered but it makes political sense for us to be officially recognized and based here so no one wants to hear it’s all a heap of shit.’ Lyneham’s protest had been one of his first attempts at a defence against failure.
‘Suckered?’ queried Charlie.
‘Liaison, right? Which in my book means a two-way trade. Not, apparently, in their dictionary. We get virtually nothing from the Russians. But they expect us to keep feeding them with everything we pick up in Europe and the Middle East. Which is the ass-about way of trying to do anything; by the time we pick up anything outside, that’s where it is, outside and lost.’
‘What about working backwards to prevent it happening again?’
Lyneham exploded into jeering laughter, adding to both their glasses. ‘You’re not listening, Charlie! The nuclear business is mafia business. And by mafia I mean Mafia: as organized and powerful as anything in Italy or what we’ve got in America. Bigger, maybe. We know – from Italy and from America, again not from here – they’ve even established working links, one between the other. And organized crime buys police and militia and anything else it wants to buy. Always has done. Always will.’
‘The corruption can’t be that complete!’ Perhaps that was why there wasn’t any trace of Natalia. She wouldn’t have been bought.
‘Not at the top, maybe,’ conceded Lyneham, although doubtfully. ‘But the top people don’t go out kicking in doors and putting up road blocks around nuclear installations. It’s the middle-ranking and operational people who do that, people like us, and in Russia those guys are as dirty as hell, believe me.’
Charlie did and was unsettled by it. Rupert Dean and the others who’d briefed him in London expected more than that, like he did himself. And if London weren’t satisfied, they’d made it brutally clear he didn’t have a job any more. With such an easily presented opportunity Charlie said, ‘So why was Kestler specifically appointed: just part of the same empty politicking?’
Lyneham’s within-seconds reaction was confusing and, having already decided upon the American’s experience, Charlie wasn’t completely sure whether it was genuine or feigned. ‘Washington advised it was a specific appointment?’ It wouldn’t be right to talk about Kestler’s favoured relationship back home in Washington: he didn’t know the Englishman well enough yet.
‘Yes.’ Hardly the tell-me-more remark of the century, Charlie conceded to himself. But it would have to do.
‘ That was political.’
Charlie missed the point but didn’t want to say or do anything to hint his disadvantage: hiding disadvantages was one of the most inviolable of all personal Charlie Muffin survival rules. ‘So we’re just going through the empty motions, like mentally screwing every girl with big tits we pass in the street?’
Lyneham smiled, lasciviously. ‘I like that! Some day I’ll use that as my own!’
Charlie was almost offended at the weak, avoidance-attempting flattery: he’d thought the other man better than that. ‘So what’s the answer?’
‘Jamie’s very keen. Superman role model, know what I mean?’
Charlie believed he did but he felt there was a message or a reason beyond the obvious. He tried to put himself into Lyneham’s position, unsure if the tentative deduction was a flickering spark or a shining light at the end of the tunneclass="underline" close-to-weary old career man bothered by unpredictability of anything-but-weary young career man. Too early and too unsubstantiated to be considered seriously but something to be borne in mind. At this early stage there were other more important things that had priority. Charlie knew nothing was going to be easy – there was every eventual chance of this being the most difficult operation in a long and mostly difficult operational life – but he remained disoriented by the ease of things so far. Charlie decided that if he didn’t more forcefully set the pace he risked Lyneham believing, figuratively at least, that he was as lightweight as Bowyer. ‘Embarrassed by him?’