The terms, the wiry man explained, were reasonable and fair. They wanted ten per cent of his turnover – not profit – and would expect regularly to examine all books to make sure there was a sound and proper understanding between them. When Charlie protested that sounded like a takeover the spokesman said the benefits included a guarantee against airport pilfering, loss of consignments and interference by any of the gangs he was sure Charlie had heard about and which made business so difficult in Russia. The smiles faltered when Charlie said he had indeed heard about such gangs and asked, with smiling politeness of his own, which Family they were from. The no-longer-relaxed spokesman hoped there wasn’t going to be a difficulty and Charlie hoped so, too: he didn’t intend paying protection to anyone for anything and he wanted them not just to understand it themselves but for the people who’d sent them to understand it, as well. He pressed the summons button as he made the announcement, which was fortunate because both the heavies were rising to the smaller man’s gesture when the spetznaz came into the room.
They did it so quietly and so calmly that they were actually there – led by Viktor Ivanovich – before the extortionists fully realized it. One was trying to draw a handgun from his rear waistband at the same time as coming to his feet when he was kicked fully in the groin and went down retching. His companion made the mistake of going for a weapon, too, so that his arm was inside his jacket when it was seized and expertly yanked sideways and then down over an extended knee. It broke with a snap loud enough to hear. The small man’s gun exploded harmlessly into the floor when it was deflected downwards and then heel-handed from his grasp in a chopping blow that broke his wrist and Charlie, dry-throated, managed; ‘I want him to take the message back.’ The man was howling in pain, holding his shattered wrist, and the soldier who disarmed him slapped open-handed across the man’s face until his nose poured blood and his lips split and visibly began to swell before Charlie realized the misunderstanding and stopped the pummelling. The broken-armed man groped again for a gun and at Charlie’s nod had his second arm broken, and the commando who’d brought the retching man down stomped on his clenched, outstretched right hand, crushing all the fingers and the hand itself. More kicks broke ribs. Charlie said, ‘Enough!’ and motioned for all three to be hauled back into the chairs in which he’d originally sat them. He had them searched and all the money they carried displayed in front of them, which he explained was to repair the mess they’d made. Charlie confiscated a knife as well as the handguns. He told the man whose lips were too swollen to respond to tell – when he could – whoever had sent them that any deal was on his terms, not theirs. This had been a lesson; another extortion attempt – any pressure at all – would end in their being hurt far worse. Charlie managed it – just – without his voice cracking, which he was frightened it would. He was still shit scared – literally – his stomach in turmoil. He walked tight-assed ahead of their escort down to the ground level and out into Dubrovskaya and their waiting Mercedes. While two of the spetznaz manhandled them into the vehicle – the broken-handed man only just the most able to drive – Viktor Ivanovich used one of the confiscated Markarovs to smash in the light clusters, front and rear, and all the side windows.
Charlie didn’t tell Hillary, that night or two nights later when a Jaguar and another Mercedes tried to pincer his BMW into the major traffic island where Gorkiy Street reaches Red Square and which Boris Denisovitch prevented by grinding the BMW even harder into the Jaguar, forcing it on to the pavement near the Lenin library and bringing the Mercedes with them so that it was the Mercedes that smashed into the traffic island. Viktor Ivanovich, beside Charlie in the rear, put three shots from his Walther into the body of the Mercedes, but failed to explode the petrol tank, which was what he tried to do.
They didn’t stop, despite the buckled and punctured rear wheel which very quickly stripped its rubber to the bare rim metal and screeched sparks all the way back to the Ugreshskaya salesroom. Charlie bought the replacement BMW, with cash again, the following day, after drawing another $100,000 from the speechless embassy finance officer. Charlie told Hillary the first car had been wrecked in a hit-and-run crash while it was parked off Dubrovskaya. She said she preferred the white colour of the new one, which again from the chassis and engine number the Bundeskriminalamt traced, with some irony, to having been stolen in Berlin from the small car park opposite the Kempinski where Charlie had stayed five weeks earlier.
From the freeze frames from the video, the small, dark-skinned man was identified as an Azeri named Pavel Suntsov, whom Moscow Central Militia listed as a small-time pimp working prostitution and pornography for the Dolgoprudnaya. The two thugs weren’t on record.
The identification was provided by Petr Gusev at a progress meeting convened by Popov at the Interior Ministry, which Charlie took an hour to reach using all the surveillance-avoiding tradecraft he’d never imagined having to employ again but which he did, with nostalgia, to arrive convinced he’d lost the two men clumsily obvious outside the Dubrovskaya office. Gusev suggested posting protective Militia close to the building, even though Charlie’s office was on the third floor and difficult to reach when the block was closed for the night. Three nights later a Militia street patrol disturbed an attempt to torch the whole building. None of the would-be arsonists was caught. As a further precaution Charlie took a ground-floor apartment at Lesnaya and moved Boris Denisovich and Viktor Ivanovich in permanently. There was no attempt to get into the building but the second BMW, which had to be parked in the street, was burned out. Charlie bought a third, stolen like the other two, at what he considered a bargain at $50,000. He referred Gerald Williams’ appalled protest to the Director-General.
A week later a uniformed man who identified himself as the lieutenant in charge of the Militia post responsible for keeping law and order in the area arrived at Dubrovskaya with two street patrolmen and said he hoped Charlie was satisfied with the service he was receiving. They drank Macallan again and after half an hour Charlie agreed to a weekly $400 which the lieutenant said he would collect personally, every Friday, which he did. A tight-lipped and flushed Petr Gusev named the officer from the freeze frame as Nikolai Ranov, whom he’d considered honest and whom he’d considered promoting.
Charlie sent a short list of questions with the freeze-frame copies to Berlin, through Balg, and within days got back more than he’d bargained for from Gunther Schumann. Four of the six seized plutonium containers had been empty when checked by German scientists and the markings weren’t consecutive with the stolen Pizhma batch numbers. Fedor Mitrov couldn’t – or wouldn’t – explain it. It did nothing to diminish the case against the arrested Russians, whose trial was being fixed for November. The formal witnesses list hadn’t been prepared yet but it was a foregone conclusion he would be called, which Charlie accepted as his deadline: he wouldn’t be able to run his phoney set-up after his court identification.
Mitrov named all the men in Charlie’s photographs. Suntsov had graduated from pimp to corps leader and the Dolgoprudnaya regarded Lieutenant Ranov as one of the best and most reliable Militia officers on their payroll. The Dolgoprudnaya owned the Ugreshnaya garage. Schumann’s message ended with the assurance that he’d kept Silin’s assassination from the Russians, as Charlie had suggested before leaving Berlin, but asking again what the point was. Charlie said he hoped it might fit in with something he was investigating in Moscow, although he didn’t tell the German what he’d learned from what he’d got from Natalia after his return from interrogating the arrested Russians, because he still didn’t understand the significance himself.