Lvov nodded. That’s part of it. A lot of stuff is being moved from Kirov, by special trains. Mostly to one of the closed-city sites around Gorkiy. It’s going to go on for several months.’
‘ Had!’ declared Natalia, realizing the mistake of going off at a tangent.
Both men frowned at her, bewildered.
‘Had,’ she repeated, to Lvov. ‘You said the guard contingent had consisted of fifty men. But that it was being scaled down?’
‘Yes,’ agreed Lvov, doubtfully.
‘So what is it now?’
‘Fifteen. I’m the lieutenant in charge.’
‘So how properly can you fill your rosters? Police everything?’
‘We can’t,’ admitted Lvov, in a puzzled voice as if he thought Natalia already knew that.
Beside her Popov stirred and Natalia guessed the information was new to him. ‘So what do you do?’
‘We don’t man the perimeter guard towers at night any more. Or mount the perimeter patrols we used to…’ Defensively, Lvov hurried on, ‘The bunker security… the entry combinations and the codes… are very good. They’re changed, daily. That’s enough, really.’
‘What about the guard posts on the entry roads?’ prompted Natalia.
‘That’s where I assign the officers I’m left with: the most obvious places.’
‘Day and night?’ she challenged, expectantly.
‘When I can. I’ve sometimes got to come down to one man.’
Natalia felt the satisfaction warm through her. She looked sideways at Popov, surprised he didn’t answer her smile. ‘They want the codes and security strengths from you?’
Lvov frowned towards Popov, then back to Natalia. ‘I told you that! I told Colonel Popov, too!’
‘Not in the way we understood it,’ said Natalia, sympathetically.
‘So because you’ve got to set them, you know in advance the main and subsidiary gate entry codes?’
‘Yes.’
‘How many days in advance?’
‘Two.’
‘And you allocate, days in advance, the number of guards there’ll be on the approach roads?’
‘Yes. They’ve said they want one road unmanned. Some are, sometimes.’
There was a more positive movement from Popov. ‘You never told me this!’
‘I told you they wanted rosters and codes!’ insisted Lvov, nervously.
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ said Natalia, as if she were reassuring Lvov but in fact wanting to cut off any criticism from Popov. Because it didn’t matter. They had it! She’d found how they’d know, ahead of the attempt, when the robbery was to take place. It would be the day of a special code number – which they would know Lvov had supplied – through a gate Lvov had to ensure would be unmanned. So their ambush was guaranteed.
‘I suppose not,’ agreed Popov, reluctantly.
‘You’ve done very well,’ Natalia told Lvov. ‘Very well indeed.’
‘You will protect me? And my family?’ pleaded the man.
‘You have my word,’ promised Natalia.
There was a final meeting the following day with Nikolai Oskin to reinforce the need for closer than usual contact with Lvov and because she felt it necessary, Natalia repeated her safety assurances to the man. That night she and Popov ate alone but at the restaurant close to the cathedral. She chose quail again and ate it this time and agreed to the second bottle of wine, flushed with her success.
’I didn’t expect you to bring Lvov to Moscow as well as taking him back into the service,’ said Popov.
‘We couldn’t have stopped this without him. And don’t we need to recruit honest men?’
‘And we can stop it now, can’t we?’ smiled Popov. ‘Nothing can go wrong.’
‘Definitely.’ If she hadn’t personally questioned Lvov they might not have found the way, thought Natalia, allowing herself the conceit. She quickly cast it aside. ‘I’m glad you didn’t need the gun.’
Popov didn’t take the remark with the lightness she’d intended. ‘We might have done.’
There would be shooting, Natalia knew: people would be killed, wounded. ‘I want everything planned very carefully.’
‘What about the Englishman?’ asked Popov, suddenly. ‘He suggested participation, at the end of an investigation. For the American, as well.’
For the first time in days Charlie Muffin came into Natalia’s mind. She was pleased the consideration was entirely professional. ‘We are going to stop it,’ she said, reflectively. ‘It would be right to get the maximum benefit, not just here but abroad as well.’ Reminded, she said, ‘There’ve been several attempts to reach you, from both of them. The American’s message was that it was important.’
‘If it was it’s been delayed,’ said Popov, critically.
She should have mentioned it earlier, Natalia conceded, although only to herself. ‘Nothing’s more important than this.’
‘What about them?’ said Popov, finally allowing his own satisfaction to surface. ‘Do we include them? Prove how efficient we are, after all?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Natalia. ‘I think perhaps we do.’
The anticipated howl of protest at the size of Charlie’s expenses came from Gerald Williams, culminating with the financial director’s unequivocal refusal to reimburse them, under any circumstances. Savouring the fact that he was arguing from an unshakeable base, Charlie launched the sort of missile he was in Moscow to prevent being manufactured. In one single protest memorandum he invoked the amended Wages Act of 1986, the Trade Union Reform and Employment Rights Act of 1993, the Employment Protection (Consolidation) Act of 1978 and the Employment Protection Regulations of 1995, which between them made Williams’ threat technically illegal. At the same time he appealed directly to Rupert Dean, who accepted Charlie’s suggestion that Thomas Bowyer accompany him to the nightclubs for which he claimed and independently establish their cost. Bowyer covered it well but Charlie was sure the man was shellshocked at the cost by the end of the evening. There was no acknowledgment or apology from Williams, merely the authorization to Peter Potter in the embassy’s financial office to settle the claims in full.
The argument provided the brief relief to what settled into a mundane round of routine contact with the American, German and Italian embassies and unsuccessful attempts, still with the Ukraine excuse, to contact Aleksai Popov. The only really positive development was Simpson’s confirmation from London of the embassy’s legal assessment that there was no proper, comprehensive Russian law to enable organized crime groups effectively to be targeted: under communism, the myth had always been that crime did not exist.
With so much time on his hands Charlie allowed the nostalgia of revisiting what had been some of their favourite places when he’d lived in Moscow with Natalia. With the advantage of foreign currency he shopped for food at the free enterprise market on Prospekt Vemadskovo and several times came close to going into the nearby State circus, remembering how much she’d enjoyed a birthday outing there. He subjected his feet to the botanical gardens on Glavnyy Botanichestiy Sad that they’d gone to several times and bench-hopped around the park on Sokol’niki. He had, of course, kept the find-me photograph and studied so hard and so frequently not the baby but the background he’d believed to be her suggested rendezvous that he ended unsure if it was, after all, the spot near the Gagarin memorial on Leninskaya.
Charlie intensely disliked the Lesnaya apartment for which he had fought so hard, feeling like the only bone-clattering ghost in a mausoleum large enough to be the waiting room into the Hereafter. Ironically, its only benefit was the enormous television he ordered from the embassy commissary and upon which he avidly watched the Russian language educational slots, gradually extending his viewing to the more general programmes to tone up his Russian. Apart from which he used Lesnaya like he had the box in Vauxhall, somewhere in which to sleep and shelter from the rain, which was actually becoming more frequent with the approach of autumn.