Natalia hadn’t thought through the complications of what she was asking. She shook her head in another abrupt mood change, this time despair. ‘It won’t work, will it? If you and Kestler are kept out, how can I introduce something I’ve no way of knowing!’
She was too tired to think properly: if she hadn’t been, perhaps she wouldn’t have sought his help in the first place. ‘We’ll make the approach in such a way they’ll have to meet with us. It won’t be down to Popov alone now, will it?’
‘Probably not,’ said Natalia, uncertainly. She brightened. ‘I’m the official link between the operational group and the ministry and presidential secretariat.’
A mixed blessing for her, incredible for him! As the idea came to him, Charlie said, ‘But you must openly campaign for our inclusion, when I tell you.’
Natalia’s exhausted reasoning was ebbing and flowing, each and every thought difficult to hold. There was an overwhelming relief, at there being someone upon whom she could rely. Trust and rely. The contradiction snatched at her. How could she feel relief and trust and reliance for someone who had so consistently let her down? She just did. Natalia didn’t want to think or consider beyond that simple decision. ‘How?’
‘All you have to do is judge the moment. Which you will always be able to do, from what I tell you in advance. And from knowing who’s going to be at your meetings. Always wait until Badim or Fomin or someone in higher authority is involved. At those sessions press as hard as you can for our inclusion. Your judgment, to those in authority, will be proven right, every time, because you’ll know in advance everything we’ve got. And the opposition and resentment of those arguing against you will be proven wrong, every time. When there aren’t people in higher authority, don’t push. Wait.’
Natalia’s relief became a blanket, the sort of blanket she wanted now to pull up over her and sleep. She stood, unsteadily, needing physical movement to keep herself awake. From the window she could just see the Gagarin monument where they’d both so hopefully waited, forever separated now by a nonsense of religious history. ‘ How will you be able to tell me? You can’t call the ministry. And here…’
‘… Popov will too often be,’ Charlie completed for her. ‘I don’t keep in touch with you. You keep in touch with me.’
Natalia turned from the tower block view, with another pendulum swing. ‘It could work, couldn’t it?’
‘It will work,’ guaranteed Charlie. Because he’d make it work; work better and more successfully than any scheme he’d ever orchestrated before. He’d fantasized of coming back to Moscow to care for her and for a child he didn’t know. Now he was going to. Not in the way he’d imagined – what they were devising was beyond any imagination – but sufficient. Whatever followed – whatever could be built on – was a bonus. Natalia looked obviously at her watch and Charlie hurriedly said, ‘So let’s start now.’
It was a superhuman effort to focus her concentration. ‘How?’
‘The leak at Pizhma was intentional,’ he disclosed. His mind more than ever upon cooperation, Charlie found it interesting that he’d been told direct by Kestler of what the expertly analyzed photographs showed just fifteen minutes before Rupert Dean’s call, relaying the same information Washington had made available to London. And which – but with Dean’s permission – he’d relayed to the ambassador.
The shock was sufficient to rouse her. ‘What?’
It took only seconds for Charlie to outline the unarguable discovery from the enhanced image intensified satellite photographs. Desperately Natalia said, ‘I don’t understand! Why?’
‘I don’t understand or know why, either. Not yet.’
‘I won’t have to argue your participation yet: we’d obviously have to meet to discuss the photographs.’
Tell me something!’ he demanded. ‘Kirov was planned as a military operation. And military operations have code names?’
‘ Akrashena,’ she supplied at once.
‘Does it have a meaning?’ queried Charlie, not recognizing the word.
Natalia smiled, bemused. ‘It means “wet paint”. Aleksai thought it fitted. Remember “ mokrie dela ”?’
The phrase translated as ‘wet jobs’ and had been the old KGB euphemism for assassination. ‘I suppose it does,’ agreed Charlie.
‘Why is it important?’
‘I don’t know that it is,’ avoided Charlie. ‘It was just something I wanted to know.’
‘I’m very tired, Charlie.’
‘I’m going,’ he said, standing.
They stood, momentarily, looking at each other. Then Natalia said, ‘I don’t love you, not any more. But I do love you. Does that make sense?’
‘As much sense as anything tonight,’ accepted Charlie. What had transpired was more than enough, that remark – denial though it was – most of all.
The Director-General had apologized during their last conversation that there was still no confirmation from GCHQ of any voice interception from the satellite and Charlie felt too exhausted after leaving Natalia to go back to the embassy to make a further check. Instead he telephoned the London Watch Room from the Lesnaya apartment for a traffic check, pleased to recognize the voice. George Carroll had been with the department practically as long as Charlie.
Carroll seemed as pleased to hear him. ‘I was bloody glad to hear you’d survived, Charlie. Even if it is Moscow.’
‘Good to think I have. Still learning to adjust, though.’
‘Aren’t we all?’
Charlie frowned. ‘How did you hear?’ The Watch Room was a message relay and alert facility, with no operational function. And as he’d had no contact with it since his posting there was no way George should have known he was still with the department and even less that he was in Russia.
‘You’ve got Red Alert classification.’
The designation required the Watch Room immediately to transfer an operative personally to his case officer on a secure line, irrespective of the time. In the circumstances it was hardly surprising, but Charlie didn’t consider the check he was making justified bothering Rupert Dean. ‘It’s not worth going through to the Director-General tonight; it can wait until tomorrow.’
‘It’s not the Director-General,’ said Carroll. ‘It’s Peter Johnson. I’ll put you through.’
‘No,’ stopped Charlie. ‘There’s no point in troubling him, either.’
He was still staring curiously down at the instrument when it rang again, so quickly after he’d replaced it that he thought Carroll had made the connection anyway. But it wasn’t London.
‘We’re getting cavalry in skirts,’ announced Kestler. ‘Washington is seconding a nuclear physicist here. And it’s a woman!’
‘She might be ugly,’ warned Charlie.
‘Every woman is beautiful in her own special way, even the ugly ones.’
Charlie fell asleep wondering what Christmas cracker Kestler had got that aphorism from. Before that he’d spent a lot of time going over the conversation with George Carroll.
There was a large panel of mirrored glass set into a wall of the interrogation cell, enabling Natalia to watch unseen from an adjoining observation room as Lev Mikhailovich Yatisyna was brought into it. One of the guards was a blonde, heavy-breasted girl, the most attractive Natalia had been able to find in the time available. Her selection was just one of several hurried-together psychological devices to disorientate the man far beyond his realizing how little Natalia had to work from. Fingerprints of three of the six arrested Moscow gangsters linked them to the known Agayans’ Mafia group forming part of the larger Ostankino Family. Her only other advantage was knowing, from the inadequate criminal records, that there’d been bloody turf battles in the past with the Shelapin Family, which formed part of the Chechen Mafia.
Natalia was encouraged by the view from her hidden vantage point. Yatisyna had been wearing overalls when he’d been seized but she planned a lot from the reported search of his Kirov apartment. There’d been fifteen suits, in addition to six sports jackets and casual trousers and twelve shirts had still been in their wrappers, in addition to another twenty pressed and folded in the dressing bureau. There’d been ten pairs of shoes. Everything was imported, either from Italy or France. Dispassionately gazing through the glass, Natalia acknowledged that the dark-haired, swarthy Yatisyna was physically handsome; he would have looked good in any of his designer clothes. Most important of all, he would have known it.