‘No! I will not undermine your authority; embarrass you in any way. A memorandum of today’s meeting has to be prepared, for the understanding between us and the ministers to be confirmed. Mine will state, as you stated, that you will be in overall charge. But from a central command position co-ordinating both separate actions. Which is where, and how, you should be.’
‘Which central command position? Where?’
Natalia didn’t know. Desperately she said, ‘Militia headquarters in Kirov.’
‘Which we’ve already decided to be corrupt and which you have already ordered to be cleared out, the moment this is over. So any security will be breached, before the first move is made against anybody… headquarters in which there are not, to my understanding, electronic or radio facilities adequate for three-way communication between me and the two separate forces.’
‘There would be even less facilities if you were with just one force.’ She recognized it was only just an argument.
‘Where then?’ he pressed, isolating the weakness.
‘A command helicopter!’ she said, recovering. ‘It will have every sort and type of communication equipment and give you complete mobility.’
‘I am asking you not to do this,’ said Popov, with quiet forcefulness.
‘I am asking you not to oppose me.’
‘I know why you’re saying this. You know I love you, too. And I love you for saying it… for wanting to do it. But you’re mixing our private lives with what we have to do, officially. And that’s wrong.’
He was correct, of course. Not totally but with a stronger argument in his favour than she had in hers. Natalia’s awareness did nothing to lessen her determination. ‘I don’t want – won’t have – you in the middle of a battle.’
‘Regulations permit me to send a separate memorandum to the ministers, protesting your decision.’
‘Which would be you embarrassing yourself. Create uncertainties at the very top, when there’s no need and where none exists at the moment. And possibly endanger what we’re trying to achieve.’
‘This is wrong, Natalia,’ he insisted.
‘It doesn’t endanger anything professionally,’ she said. ‘Or you, personally.’
Popov left the office tight-lipped and without any talk of that evening, which he rarely did any more unless he was involved in some chess activity that took up a lot of his leisure time. Natalia waited later than she normally did but he did not contact her and when she passed his office the engaged or disengaged slide on the door was marked closed.
The wooden toys Popov had bought her were Sasha’s favourite of the moment. She’d taken them to the creche and unpacked them for a fresh farmyard the moment they got back to the apartment.
‘Ley coming?’ asked the child, from the floor. ‘Ley’ was the closest she could get to Aleksai. It had been Sasha’s choice, getting over their problem of how she should refer to the man whose presence she never questioned.
‘Not tonight.’
‘Why?’ Communication with Sasha very much revolved around ‘why?’
‘He has to work.’ She wondered if he would send a contrary memorandum. Hers, to the ministers, was marked for a copy to be sent to Popov so courtesy as well as regulations required he should duplicate any protest to her.
‘Why?’
‘He’s very busy.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he has to look after a lot of people.’ Me most of all, Natalia thought. She wanted to be cared for by Aleksai Popov more than anything else she had ever imagined or dreamed of.
‘Look!’ demanded Sasha, proudly.
‘Clever girl!’ praised Natalia, scooping Sasha up for her bath but leaving the animals lined up as the child arranged them. Natalia had a vague recollection of Charlie telling her of all the animals of the world being saved from drowning by a vengeful God when they’d once discussed religious mythology, but she couldn’t remember enough to turn it into Sasha’s bedtime story. It had been right, referring her intention about Charlie and the American to the ministers, although she had been, and still was, totally off-balanced by the dispute that arose after it with Popov. She was quite confident she wouldn’t be off-balanced by the outcome of her second decision. She knew she would be quite able, without the slightest nostalgic difficulty, to come face to face again with Charlie Muffin.
That was why she was going to conduct the meeting to which he and the American James Kestler had been summoned the following day.
When Sasha was asleep Natalia swallowed her pride and telephoned Popov. There was no reply to that or to the succeeding two attempts.
chapter 13
T he self-serving courtship of others, whom unashamedly he’d courted in return and for the same if not greater self-serving reasons, became an irritating claustrophobia for Charlie Muffin, the perpetual loner unwilling to become a team player in anything. Charlie lost count of the approaches from the uninvited German and Italian in the intervening days, impatient with Kestler’s defence for having told them that both were owed the cooperation for what they’d provided about the possible Ukrainian shipment and the separate rumour about fuel rods. Charlie insisted that Balg and Fiore would have limited what they shared, casting as little bait as necessary upon the waters, and was proved right when both supplied more in their desperation to learn all they could about the Interior Ministry encounter: Fiore confided the Italian Anti-Mafia Commission were targeting a Sicilian clan headed by Gianfranco Messina for conventional weapons smuggling and Balg provided named identities of three Russians the Bundeskriminalamt suspected of setting up a smuggling cell in Leipzig.
Charlie, who’d never had a problem with professional hypocrisy when it was to his benefit, was quite happy to ferry the new information to the Interior Ministry and after initially deciding against a night-before planning session with the over-zealous Kestler, changed his mind because there was potential benefit in his doing that, too. Lyneham sat nodding approvingly as Charlie, careless of the condescension, lectured on the danger of offering everything at once.
‘Let’s trickle it out, a little at a time. Which shouldn’t be difficult because that’s all we’ve got. A little.’
‘They’re not calling us in for nothing!’ said Kestler.
‘We don’t know why they’re calling us in,’ Charlie pointed out. ‘Everyone’s far too excited for no good reason.’
‘Listen to the man,’ Lyneham urged the other American. Jesus, he thought, the frenetic son-of-a-bitch needed a brake; actually what Kestler needed was his foot nailed to the floor.
‘We’ve got enough,’ argued Kestler, unpersuaded.
‘What?’ demanded Charlie, unknowingly as worried as the FBI chief at Kestler’s unbridled enthusiasm and wishing he was going alone to the following day’s meeting. He held up his hands, to count off points. ‘All we’ve really got is an unsubstantiated rumour, about a possible theft from an unknown site in an unknown place of an unknown quantity of nuclear material! Which might or might not involve fuel rods. Grafted on to that rumour there’s another that it just might be coming out of the Ukraine. Which if it is, makes tomorrow’s meeting academic because Russia doesn’t rule the Ukraine any more, even though the contents of its nuclear arsenals belong to them. Fiore’s additional contribution is about the possible smuggling by the traditional Mafia of conventional weapons, which the traditional Mafia has been smuggling since conventional weapons were bows and arrows. And if they are, so what? Fiore wants to trade with what we’re being called in for and in my view has thrown the Messina rabbit into the pot for us to invent a connection. Which is what you’re doing. And Balg is trying the same shell game, giving us the names of three Russian villains who might, but then again might not, have set up a smuggling business in Leipzig. Again, so what? He’s not saying it’s nuclear. You are. Germany – Europe – is full of Russian organized crime smuggling everything from condoms to coffins. So tell me! What have we really got, to bargain with if we’ve got to bargain at all?’