As soon as she began to speak, Charlie recognized that in her anxiety to escape, Miriam Bell was panicking, offering far more than was necessary. She repeated Charlie’s insistence upon jurisdiction and cooperation and babbled on that they hadn’t established a reason for the killings, nor any victim identities, although they had no doubt of nationality. Her disclosure of the method of execution at once prompted a shouted interjection.
“Wasn’t a bullet in the back of the head the favorite killing method of Russian intelligence in Lubyanka?”
“Yes,” agreed Miriam.
“So they were killed by Russian intelligence?”
“We don’t know who they were killed by,” intruded Charlie, still working damage limitation. “That’s what the Russian team is trying to establish. Why there is such excellent international cooperation.”
He held back at a demand to know what specific leads they had, curious for his own part how Miriam would reply, but she said there weren’t any.
“What’s your next move?” shouted a woman from the rear of the room.
“Analyzing the autopsy and forensic evidence,” Charlie came in quickly, anxious to be as vague as possible, but Polyakov added, “And the items found upon the bodies.”
“Which at this moment we don’t intend to make public,” persistedCharlie. Thank Christ he hadn’t discussed what he considered significant. An enterprising journalist could still get a lot from the cigarette case inscription. The thought lodged in his mind. There hadn’t so far been the concentrated questioning he’d feared-no one, for instance, had asked about photographs of bodies perfectly preserved-and he abruptly wondered how of and how far he could manipulate the situation into which he’d been thrust. He would be taking a hell of a risk by trying and if he got caught out it could go catastrophically wrong, but they already had a catastrophe, so there was very little more to lose.
“We have,” he began, “probably one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the Second World War. Two Allied officers. A Russian woman. And a secret that has lain buried for fifty years ….” He had them, Charlie decided. There was scarcely a sound in the room, the coughs muted. Charlie thought faster than he could remember in any previous back-to-the-wall situation, sifting the innocuous from anything that could give the slenderest clue to his real thinking, determined to out-exaggerate Polyakov and spread as many false leads as he could make up on the spot. He acknowledged that it had obviously been a covert mission (“What other reason for it remaining secret when it went wrong?”) and invented the possibility of special German prisoners being incarcerated in special gulags (“in the remotest, most unreachable part of the world”). Hitler had Mussolini snatched from captivity after the Italian dictator’s overthrow. What if, held somewhere in Yakutskaya, there had been a German, possibly several, with the knowledge of a weapon or a development-jet propulsion, of which the Peenemunde rockets had been the forerunner, nuclear fission ahead of the Americans’ Los Alamos development-that would have shortened the war?
Enough, Charlie decided: stop before he became a contender for the Nobel prize for Fantasy. Time to let his still-enraptured audience work up their own embellishments. There was a fresh cacophony of demands from which he picked those most likely to mislead, ignoring those that could have been pertinent. After seeming to prevaricate, he allowed himself to concede his belief that the three victims could have been an advance reconnaissance group and that there could be other victims, in undiscovered graves. He intentionally shifted questions about surviving registers of possible German prisoners to ValentinPolyakov, enjoying the man’s difficulty admitting they had either been lost or intentionally destroyed. Quickly Charlie picked up that there should be some files in British and American intelligence archives, although finding them would undoubtedly be hard and conceivably impossible if the operation was covered by a special, time-restricted security release.
Polyakov made a determined effort to stop Charlie’s takeover and to bring it back to the intended anti-Russian platform by switching the questioning to the local militia, which was a mistake. Yuri Ryabov was too excited by an international spotlight, never managing to complete replies too convoluted for Kurshin to finish for him and in his desperation the homicide chief seemed to agree that the investigation was concentrated as Charlie had suggested and Polyakov hurriedly tried to conclude the conference by repeating an apparent earlier undertaking to escort everyone to the grave site. There was an immediate demand from both television teams for individual interviews with Charlie and Miriam.
Miriam followed Charlie’s lead by refusing. And did so again when he insisted he would not be photographed near the grave, either.
As they hurried back into Polyakov’s office, Miriam whispered in English, “We got well and truly suckered.”
“We got well and truly fucked,” corrected Charlie.
Charlie guessed Polyakov’s anger matched his but hoped his was better controlled. He’d had time now to rationalize his mistakes, acknowledging that he’d underestimated everything and everybody, which had been foolishly arrogant. He wasn’t sure how much of a recovery he’d managed, but he had to go on working at it and at the same time not lose sight of the fact that, devious, conniving bastard though he’d been, Valentin Ivanovich Polyakov was a diplomatically recognized head of a semi-autonomous republic who had to be accorded the respect due to his title. It didn’t necessarily extend to the man himself, of course. Only the three of them had returned to Polyakov’s suite, leaving Ryabov and Kurshin to organize the transportation to the grave. Possibly his first advantage, recognized Charlie. He’d have to make sure he isolated all the others.
For that reason Charlie waited for Polyakov to speak, but unexpectedly it was Miriam who broke the angry silence. “That was monstrous!I am going to make a full report to my embassy in Moscow. Ask that protests are made from my State Department in Washington.”
Wrong, thought Charlie. There was no threat in that: Polyakov, who’d caused the offense, was the same man who’d sit in judgment upon any diplomatic complaint about it. Don’t get sore, get even, remembered Charlie, calling upon another dictum. What other advantages were there? The eavesdropping was a definite advantage there: a signpost to follow, in fact. He’d told McDowell and Gallaway he was getting nowhere-probably never would-and the listening Polyakov had believed him. The bastard would never have chanced a trick like the one he’d just pulled if he’d known Charlie’s bullshit was going to be spread thicker than his. The benefits were stacking up. What else? He had the official release of the body and possessions snug in his inside pocket. Important to ensure those possessions, including the uniform, weren’t picked over by anyone else. There were the lists, of course, carefully prepared by Vitali Novikov. But the local medical examiner had not been able to read the English lettering of the cigarette case inscription, so the danger was minimized there.
Insufficient for a total recovery, assessed Charlie objectively. Publicly-in Moscow and London and Washington-it would still probably be regarded as an unmitigated debacle requiring his head on a pole. If he stood any chance at all of keeping it instead on his shoulders, he had to solve all the mysteries, not make up any more. But not here, at this precise moment. At this precise moment he had verbally to manacle Valentin bloody Polyakov as effectively as the victims they were trying to identify. And Charlie thought he could do it. Calmly, conversationally-no longer, in fact, furious-he said, “You should have told us: prepared us for what you were going to do back there.”