‘A bucket of spit,’ concluded Lyneham. If the English had had a few more sneaky bastards like this guy a couple of hundred years back, America would still be a British colony and they’d all be drinking warm beer.
The crestfallen Kestler looked between the other two men. ‘You’re throwing away what we’ve got!’
‘That’s exactly what I’m not doing,’ argued Charlie. ‘Put forward properly, it sounds like something. Dump it in their laps all at once and it looks like what it probably is: shit.’
‘Trickle it, the man said,’ endorsed Lyneham. ‘Listen first, speak later.’
‘Maybe I’ll follow you,’ Kestler conceded, to Charlie.
Bingo! thought Lyneham, relief lifting off into euphoria. There was a God after all and He cared about old guys taking six-packs to go fishing off the Florida coast and piss over the side when they felt like it.
‘That’s fine by me,’ accepted Charlie. It was anything but fine by Charlie because whatever his new role was it certainly wasn’t playing nappy-changing nursemaid to a politically well-connected sex machine who couldn’t sit still for more than three minutes at a time. But despite his realistic refusal to invest the following day with unjustified expectations, there had to be some valid reason for a summons that both Lyneham and Bowyer were adamant hadn’t happened before. And whatever it was, he didn’t want it fucked up by a caped crusading Kestler trying to fly faster than a speeding bullet. So for the moment he’d take the nursemaid’s job.
‘We’ll go to the ministry together, then?’ suggested Kestler.
Shit, thought Charlie. ‘Why don’t you pick me up, on your way?’
Charlie’s final impression of cloying claustrophobia came with the repeated-phrase lecture from Nigel Saxon to maintain political awareness at all times and which Charlie was tempted to duck but didn’t, preferring to endure the pointlessness than to have the envious Head of Chancellery add separately to whatever nit-picking Bowyer was channelling back to London. Which wasn’t Charlie modifying the independent habits of a lifetime, just adapting them to the needs of the moment for the purposes of the moment.
Kestler was predictably early but Charlie was ready anyway. As the American picked his way through the traffic, he said, ‘I’ve got five bucks that says I’m right. And that today is going to be something you didn’t expect.’
‘You’re on,’ accepted the financially flushed Charlie.
He lost.
The first person he saw when he entered the small conference room, thirty minutes later, was Natalia. Which was the very last thing in the world he expected.
Charlie’s shock was absolute and numbing. He was aware of almost missing his step, close to faltering, and was glad he was following Kestler, who might have hidden it. By the time he cleared the doorway he had recovered and was sure his face was set.
The Russian group was assembled opposite places ready for him and the American, leather-encased blotters, with notepads and sharply pointed pencils and individual bottles of mineral water, with accompanying glasses. Popov invited them to sit and Charlie took the chair directly opposite Natalia, separated from her by no more than two metres. Popov was to her right, with a grey-haired man next to him. A younger, moustached man sat to Natalia’s left. There was a gap of two chairs before a bespectacled clerk already hunched over a notebook, several pencils laid out to minute the meeting. There was a tape recorder, to the man’s right.
‘Good morning,’ greeted Natalia, in English. ‘I am General Natalia Nikandrova Fedova and I am in charge of the special division within the Interior Ministry specifically formed to combat the stealing and smuggling from Russia of nuclear material…’ Her brief sight of him, in the corridor, hadn’t really prepared her for what Charlie looked like, after five years. He had changed, apart from the pressed suit and crisp shirt, in both of which he seemed vaguely uncomfortable. She thought there was more grey in the hair, which was disordered despite the obvious tidying attempt, and he might be slightly fatter, although she wasn’t sure. He hadn’t shown any recognition – any facial reaction at all – but she thought he might have stumbled coming through the door: it was difficult to tell from the way he normally walked.
Charlie responded to the greeting slightly after Kestler. Her voice was quite level and controlled. Natalia looked exactly as Charlie Muffin remembered, that last day he’d watched her wait expectantly for him to snatch her away from the Russian delegation that had been her excuse to get to him in London; watched her at the same time as looking for the squad, hidden like he had been hidden, waiting to grab him when he made his approach. Which he never did because he hadn’t been brave enough – hadn’t loved her enough – to trust her. The hair was the same length and just as dark, with no visible greyness and coiled in a businesslike chignon at her neck, and she’d been sparing as she could afford to be with such flawless skin with her make-up, just an outline of her eyes and lips. The grey dress was as businesslike as the hair, high-buttoned and long-sleeved and full, with no hint of the figure he knew to be beneath. The dark-stoned ring was new: on the small finger of her right hand, he noted.
‘My colleagues…’ she continued, turning her head first right and then left ‘… are Colonel Aleksai Popov, my deputy, whom you both know, and representatives, respectively, from this and the Foreign Ministry. Observers.’ She didn’t provide names. She nodded further, to the note-taker. ‘An official record is being made. It will be available, if you so wish.’ She spoke, looking directly at Charlie, who held her eyes. He wasn’t trying to discomfort her, Natalia knew: he’d always been able to focus his concentration to the exclusion of anything and anyone around him, seeing everything, even what people didn’t want him to see. Would he be aware how easy it was for her to confront him; that it didn’t matter any more?
So Popov was her deputy. Which made Natalia the higher authority to which the man referred at their first meeting. She must have known he was in Moscow, been aware of his coming even before he’d arrived. Known, too, that he was officially working through the embassy, where she could have contacted him if she’d wanted. Beside him Kestler was saying he would appreciate a transcript and briefly Natalia switched her attention before coming back enquiringly to him. Instead of simply accepting, Charlie said, ‘So there must be matters of significance to discuss?’
He hadn’t changed there, either, Natalia recognized. When they’d been together – after he’d admitted his Moscow defection was a sham but it hadn’t mattered because by then she’d loved him – he’d taught her more about her craft than any instructor. Words had been a creed. Bait, he’d called words. Lures. Which was the way to use them all the time, every time: always make people come to you, never go to them. Words and then silence, like now; silence that people felt they had to fill and made mistakes by rushing in to compensate. ‘If there hadn’t been, this meeting would not have been called.’
Charlie was briefly conscious of the immaculate, full-bearded Popov looking curiously sideways at her. Here it was, he thought, dismissing the Russian. He was face to face again with Natalia, the never-believed-possible moment he’d rehearsed a thousand times in a thousand different ways – although none of them like this – and imagined a thousand different feelings. So what was the feeling, now that it was happening? Nothing like he’d imagined. There really was a numbness, a dead, difficult-to-move sensation in his arms and legs. And a hollowness, as if his stomach had been scooped out to leave a void that ached, almost as much as the ache that had begun in his feet. All of which combined into a disorientation initially far greater than that he’d felt when the Director-General had announced the assignment which made this moment possible. There’d been a lot of operational times when he had forced himself to go that extra mile – or more accurately, that one extra inch – but Charlie could not recall it ever being as difficult as it was now to push himself forward to proper, thinking reality. Even as he did so, he recognized the effort was inextricably linked to his emotions for Natalia. He wanted to perform for her, in front of others who didn’t know: to impress her. With a head movement to include Kestler, he said, ‘It’s difficult to think of anything more important than what we’ve been sent here to help in preventing. So we welcome being involved. And hope we are.’