Hillary didn’t speak until they got inside. Then, erupting, she said, ‘JESUS!’ and the tension drained from Charlie so quickly he felt as if his strings had been cut.
‘What the fuck happened back there?’ she demanded.
Charlie emptied the Macallan bottle between them before recounting the nightclub exchange. Hillary listened with her drink untouched, elbows on her knees. ‘Jesus!’ she said again, although much quieter, when he finished.
‘I don’t think they followed but I obviously couldn’t take you back to the embassy.’
‘I’m not shouting kidnap.’ For the first time she looked positively around the apartment. ‘Which room’s the Tsar got?’
‘It’s not the usual embassy apartment,’ agreed Charlie.
‘You any idea what embassy compound accommodation is like?’
‘That’s why I live here.’ He hesitated and then said, ‘There are two bedrooms.’
Hillary looked steadily at him, head to one side. ‘Don’t be stupid, Charlie!’
He’d never before had the practical experience of the aphrodisiac of fear but Charlie was surprised how long and effective it lasted. Afterwards Hillary murmured: ‘Don’t ever risk sitting on a plutonium container, will you?’
‘Never,’ promised Charlie.
Peter Johnson’s request for a meeting came at the very end of the day, when Dean was on the point of summoning his deputy to resolve their dispute ahead of the following day’s meeting with Charlie Muffin.
‘I think there has been a gross misunderstanding,’ said Johnson.
‘On whose part?’ demand Dean, refusing the man an escape. The fury he’d felt during his conversation with the FBI Director hadn’t diminished, still so strong that he’d changed his mind about the inconvenience of internal disruption. If Johnson wanted to stay it would only be on his terms and the bloody man would know and have to accept it.
Bastard, thought Johnson. ‘Mine. And I must apologize.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Dean. ‘You must.’
‘It was never my intention to be disloyal. At all times I had the best interests of the department and its new functions in mind.’ The deputy Director had to force the words out.
‘It’s obvious how our exclusion has come about, wouldn’t you agree?’ Dean had checked the telephone log and knew there had been no incoming calls from Washington since he’d spoken to the FBI Director.
‘Yes.’
‘Did you have any knowledge, in advance, what Fenby was doing? Or might do?’
‘No!’ denied Johnson, who hadn’t. ‘That’s unthinkable! I would have been undermining my own organization!’
Dean allowed his scepticism to show in the immediate silence. Then he said, ‘I asked you to make a decision about your future.’
At that moment Johnson actually considered resigning rather than grovel as low as Dean was demanding. But then he thought of the conversations he’d had with the Bureau Director and of their conviction that Dean couldn’t last in a job the man himself had indicated he didn’t regard as permanent. And of their equal conviction that he was the natural and only possible successor to the directorship. ‘I would like to remain with the department.’
‘And I would like acknowledgment of that in writing.’
The disordered office and its disordered incumbent blurred in front of Johnson’s eyes and he had to squeeze them tightly several times to refocus. No! he thought; dear God, no! No matter how ambiguous the wording, an official acknowledgment of a resignation consideration on his personnel record would make him a permanent hostage to the other man. ‘I have apologized.’
‘Verbally.’
‘I consider you are asking too much.’
‘I am asking for the support and loyalty which I don’t believe I have so far had.’
‘I give you my solemn undertaking of that.’
All or nothing, decided Dean. ‘I want from you a memorandum telling me that having considered your position, you have decided to stay as deputy Director. I will consider that sufficient. Alternatively I will write my own memoranda of this and our earlier meeting.’
‘I understand,’ totally capitulated the deputy.
Johnson had shown himself to be a weak man by not telling him to go to hell, Dean decided.
‘NO!’
No torture had torn such a scream from Silin, the anguish bursting from the crushed and mutilated man as Marina came into the cellar between two men, with Sobelov following and she turned at his cracked voice, seeing him for the first time and she screamed the same word, over and over and just as desperately.
Sobelov came around her, putting himself between Silin and his wife. ‘It’s your choice. Tell me what I want to know and nothing will happen to her. If you don’t, you can watch.’
‘Don’t tell him!’ Marina’s voice was abruptly calm, without any fear. ‘They’ll kill us anyway. They’ve got to. So don’t tell him…’
Sobelov slapped her back-handed across the face, stopping the outburst, all the time looking at Silin. ‘Your choice,’ he said again.
‘Go fuck yourself,’ Silin managed.
‘No. I’ll fuck your wife instead.’
Marina kept her eyes shut while they undressed her and while Sobelov raped her and didn’t open them when Markov and then another man raped her, too.
After the third rape Sobelov came very close to the bulging-eyed, bulging-cheeked Silin and said, ‘That was just the start. You want to stop what’s going to happen to her now?’
Silin spat at the man, an explosion of blood and flesh hitting Sobelov in the face and chest. The man staggered back, gagging.
Markov went to Silin, jerking his head back. He turned to Sobelov and said, ‘He can’t tell us anything now. He’s chewed his tongue off.’
‘Hurt him!’ ordered Sobelov. ‘Hurt them both. As much as you can.’
chapter 26
C harlie hadn’t expected the one-to-one session with the Director-General before going in front of the full committee. Or that it would carry over into Rupert Dean’s private dining room with lunch and the best Margaux Charlie had ever tasted.
Charlie decided things were very definitely on an upswing, which he wanted to continue because he had a lot to achieve. Dean’s remark that he’d done better than they could have hoped caused Charlie to work out for the first time that he’d only been in Moscow for three months. It seemed months longer and Charlie realized it had begun as an unconscious impression even on his way in from the airport and in everything that had happened since. London appeared strange, somewhere new and unfamiliar, a place he’d visited a long time ago and didn’t properly remember any more. And brighter, a clean, freshly washed brightness that made the grass and the trees positively green compared to the grimed buildings and threadbare open spaces of the Russian capital, green only in its designated parks. It showed, Charlie supposed, that he was doing what he’d been told, adjusting to Moscow being his home.
The reality of that wasn’t as inviting as it had been the last time he’d been on the seventh floor of this Embankment building. At least he’d returned to congratulations and not the threatened summary dismissal, although the Director-General made an unspecified reference to embassy difficulties, which Charlie tried to turn into his protest about Bowyer. He didn’t, obviously, do so by naming the man. Or even by making a positive complaint because he had no proof, but if Bowyer’s instructions hadn’t come from the man himself the Director-General would certainly have had to know and approve the internal spying. Instead, Charlie talked in generalities of embassy supervision and of uncertainty about chains of command superseding diplomatic seniority. And ended wondering if he’d generalized too much because instead of being as positive as he’d previously been on their telephone links the Director-General merely said it would be interesting to expand the problems with the committee.