“This is something we never expected,” opened Boyce. “Bit of a damned nuisance, all ’round.”
“Nothing we can’t handle.”
“Of course not.”
“How do you intend handling it, from your end?” asked the American.
“Involve every intelligence department we’ve got, to create the maximum confusion. And insist I have access to everything, so I know at all times what’s going on and how to misguide, if necessary.”
“You think we might have to stage a diversion?”
“Such as?” questioned Boyce.
“If anyone were to get too close and have to die, it could be blamed on the Russians or people in Yakutsk, couldn’t it?”
“I don’t think there’s the remotest chance of anyone getting close, but it’s certainly something we should consider.”
“Your person in Moscow disposable?”
“They’re all disposable.”
“I could move someone in from here to do it-someone nobody knows, with no provable attachment to an agency or government,” offered Peters.
“Let’s make contingency plans,” agreed Boyce.
“And keep in touch?”
“Absolutely.”
“How?” shouted Natalia, knowing she was taking out on Charlie all the fears and frustrations of the meeting she’d just left but unable to separate them from the shock of finding Irena calmly sipping whiskey with him when she’d gotten home. And then having to sit through an hour of frigid conversation before it had been possible to get rid of the woman.
“You gave her the bloody number. And the address!” Charlie shouted back. “She rang and said she had something for Sasha and I told her to bring it around sometime. I didn’t expect her to come right away.”
She had given Irena the number, Natalia remembered. “Did you tell her you were attached to the embassy?”
“Not directly. I let her think it was something to do with joint venture trading.” He wouldn’t tell Natalia that Irena knew Saul Freeman.
“I’m sorry,” apologized Natalia. “I’m …” She stopped. “I’m not being a very nice person at the moment, am I?”
“No,” answered Charlie, honestly. “But you’re allowed. The adjustment is bigger for you than it is for me. And obviously you’ve got a lot of work pressure.” He waited hopefully but she didn’t respond.
6
Charlie Muffin was on his first paper airplane of the day-a new prototype, with a separate tail section-when the dust-covered telephone rang and Sir Rupert Dean announced, “You’ll get everything on paper, of course. But I need you to understand a lot of things that aren’t written. The most important is that the future of the department-and your posting to Moscow-depends on your getting everything right.”
Charlie had never wasted time over personal disappointments-apart from the death of his first wife, Edith, which would always be a personal disaster for which he’d never forgive himself-but there was a lasting surge of regret as he listened to the director-general. Sadness came close behind. And then-surprising himself-sympathy. Natalia hadn’t been intentionally perverse, hadn’t tried, in some way, to trick or ridicule him. Maybe she’d even thought the assignment wouldn’t be given to him, although he couldn’t really accept that, convenient though it would have been.
Natalia was making a mess of it. Of everything. Of their being together-living together-and by trying to keep separate their professional lives and by not being able to trust him (for which he couldn’t blame her) and by trying to do everything her way, wrongly, was endangering all that they hoped to exist between them.
Which was not the immediate consideration: the immediate consideration was his need totally to concentrate and understand what he was being told.
“Every other agency is involved?” he demanded, determined against the slightest misunderstanding.
“Every other agency has been asked to search their archives: contributewhatever they can,” replied Dean, equally pedantic. “The investigation is ours.”
“Which you see as a test?”
“We’re vulnerable: everyone snapping at our heels. We’ve got to answer all the questions, find out who he was and what he was doing there. We do that-you do that-and I’ll be able to fight whatever survival battle we’re confronted with.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then that’s what it could become: a battle for survival. At best we could become a branch of some other agency.”
“What about my remaining here in Moscow?”
There was a pause from the London end. “There are arguments being put up against the posting. They’d be hard to oppose.”
Gerald fucking Williams, guessed Charlie. Why did the parsimonious bugger take as a personal insult Charlie’s special interpretation of an expense account? It wasn’t as if it was Williams’s money. Perhaps, thought Charlie, he should have considered the early challenges, too long ago now to remember, as more than the game he chose them to make it, virtually challenging the man to catch him out. Bluntly he said, “I fail to solve it, I get withdrawn? My role-my reason for being in Moscow-won’t exist anymore?”
“It would certainly come up for very hard discussion.”
“From what you said, these killings happened fifty years ago!” Charlie pointed out.
“I know,” accepted Dean.
“And no one’s acknowledging our victims belonged to their department?”
“They’ve only been checking for a few hours, but so far, no.”
“Supposedly checking,” qualified Charlie. “No one’s going to want this coming out of the woodwork. SIS or military intelligence or Christ knows who find they’re involved, they’re going to bury it for another fifty years.”
There was a further silence from London. “The edict from Whitehall-and Downing Street-is that there mustn’t be any embarrassment, no matter how long ago it happened. Whatever it was.”
“Which means they don’t want it solved!” protested Charlie. “It’s impossible. Ridiculous. We’re being set up.”
“That’s why I’m calling you. I do believe we’ll stand or fall bythis. You’ve personally got every support it’s possible for me to offer. I wish there were more. Better. And I know what I’m asking.”
Charlie wished he did. Slipping back on to yesteryear wordage, Charlie said, “Who’s my control?”
“You deal with me, direct, at all times,” stipulated the director-general. “But let’s stay with that. Control. Don’t you even think of trying or doing anything without discussing it with me first. One mistake-one miscalculation-is all it’s going to take.”
This time it was Charlie who didn’t speak at once. Eventually he said, “Am I expected to work with SIS and the military attache here? Let them know everything I’m doing?”
“Not until you’ve talked whatever it is through with me first.”
“Which is what they’re being told, probably right now.”
“Probably,” accepted Dean again.
“You know it’s hopeless before I start?”
“Close to being hopeless,” allowed the older man.
“There’s not a lot left to say, is there?”
“Everything we’ve got from the Russian Foreign Ministry is being faxed back right away. And don’t forget my personal support.”
There wasn’t any point in further protests or arguments. “A British officer-and an American-dead for fifty years without anyone wondering what happened to them! And a woman, too! How the hell can you explain that?”
“I can’t,” conceded Sir Rupert Dean. “That’s what you’ve got to do.”
Natalia recognized she was the most exposed of them alclass="underline" the one in the greatest danger. Although there was the outward, cosmetic appearance of personal and authoritative involvement, the presidential emissary and the deputy ministers all had their blame-ready intermediaries, after whom there was the final buffer of Natalia Nikandrova herself. It was she who provably had to select the Russian investigatory team and just as provably had to propose the precise moment to invite Washington and London to an international game of musical chairs and after that monitor from a distance of three thousand miles its progress in a time-lost republic where everyone would be trying to pull the safe seats away from everyone else at every discordant note. With one of its chair-snatching participants beingCharlie Muffin, whose feet were always too painful for any sort of musical dance.