“Deadly serious.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I like less the thought of what will happen if we don’t move.”
“I need to think about it very seriously indeed,” said Hamilton.
“The time for thinking is over,” insisted Williams. “Now we’ve got to do something positive.”
Charlie was kept at the embassy cabling the full text of the Russian release to London and afterward answering the queries that came back, which distilled down into contributing nothing new, and Natalia was at Lesnaya when he got home, Sasha already asleep.
There was still the reservation of the previous night-the uncertainty there’d been at the beginning-although not quite so awkward. Charlie told her about the encounter with Vitali Novikov and then showed her the log. While she read it, he made drinks.
When he returned to the main room she said, “This isn’t anything. Just confirmation of what we already believed.”
“I know. I’ve read it a hundred times, trying to find something.” He decided against telling her the nagging feeling that kept pricking at him. There were enough mysteries without the need to invent more.
Natalia said, “What did you tell Novikov?”
“That it won’t affect their residency.”
Natalia looked at her watch. “Let’s see the result of the Russian contribution.”
The Russian announcement was the lead item on all the English-language satellite news programs through which Charlie flicked. Photographs of the recovered art had been issued with the release claiming them as further proof of Raisa Belous’s heroic wartime work keeping Russia’s heritage-particularly actual treasure from the Amber Room-out of Nazi hands. Fyodor Belous was included in the eulogy for returning the safeguarded articles the moment he’d discovered the truth about his mother. CNN and the BBC also carried footage outside Belous’s empty apartment, with reporters quoting official sources suggesting the man was helping the authorities search further for things still hidden. Inevitably every program carried library pictures of the treasures of the Catherine Palace and the other royal residences at Tsarskoe Selo, as well as film of the devastation after the Nazi occupation of the park. Just as inevitably there was speculation that the further lost art that Belous was helping locate was the missing Amber Room itself.
“I tried to get it delayed,” disclosed Natalia.
“Why?” Charlie frowned.
The expression remained as she talked, although more in guilt at his disbelieving her-and at setting the test she was at that moment passing-than at anything else. Charlie was glad Natalia would never know he’d doubted her. He said, “Nikulin was right. Whatever brought about the American decision won’t be influenced by the art announcement: that was only bait in the first place. All that’s going to happen is America refusing to bite and a lot of renewed publicity.”
Natalia offered the log back to Charlie. “You were relying on that, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“What now?”
“I don’t know,” Charlie forced himself to admit. And then, in a rush and without warning, he thought he did. He had sufficient about the mystery English officer, at least, and most of it allowed the pieces to fit.
“What?” demanded Natalia, seeing the expression on Charlie’s face.
Instead of immediately answering, Charlie flicked the televisionback to the permanently running CNN, leaning forward intently to study the pictures of what had been recovered from Belous. And then he told Natalia.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.” He looked down at the log of Novikov’s father and said, “And it was here, all the time!”
35
Charlie’s satisfaction ebbed by the following day. Sitting in his shoebox office, surrounded by a squadron of reflectively folded paper airplanes, Charlie acknowledged reluctantly that Natalia was right. His conclusion-even more positively confirmed by examining in detail the Tsarskoe Selo treasure catalogue of Catherine the Great’s palace-didn’t explain America and Russia quite independently closing the investigation down.
And there was only one way to try to prove what he now did know. With no guarantee that he’d succeed and, after Henry Packer, possibly physically dangerous. If he made the attempt and it went wrong by just one millimeter-even excluding the Packer-type risk-he’d be dismissed and withdrawn from Moscow. On top of which he couldn’t discuss it with the director-general, who couldn’t possibly condone it, even if the man’s personal support hadn’t been wavering as much as Charlie knew it was. So he’d be totally disregarding-defying! — the department and going off station without authority, which was very definitely a firing offense.
But what choice did he have? It was the only way forward, it did fit sufficiently for him to be sure of at least part and there was Kenton Peters on tape describing him as a fall guy, if one was necessary. So he was damned if he went solo and damned if he didn’t. He refused to think about being dead.
Charlie forced his mind from the negative to the positive. It was physically possible to fly to England and back in one day, leaving on the first morning plane and returning on the last at night. So he’donly be away for twelve hours at the most and it wouldn’t be difficult to give London an excuse in advance for his absence from the embassy. The newspaper coverage of the art recovery-particularly the speculation that Fyodor Belous was guiding the authorities to more treasure, possibly even the Amber Room-had been enormous, but Charlie already knew from Natalia there wasn’t going to be anything more London might panic about, so that wasn’t a bar to his going. What else? An ally, he decided, now that he and Miriam had resolved their personal war. She’d been described as a fall guy, too. It would require slight adjustment to his dislike of being dependent on someone else, but Charlie Muffin’s rules of engagement were always adjustable to suit his needs and at that moment he judged his need to be quite extreme.
The positive fell far short of outweighing the negative, but there was a balance of sorts. And he took as an omen the fact that when he inquired there was availability on both the outgoing and incoming British Airways flights the following day. He made reservations and then set about establishing the cover for his absence. Which would be easy. He could use the art recovery. Charlie was later to remember the startled look with which Richard Cartright greeted him when he entered the MI6 man’s office.
“I don’t like this,” objected the military attache at once, looking to Raymond McDowell for support.
“Neither do I,” agreed the head of chancellery.
“Do you think I do?” demanded Richard Cartright. “They’re my instructions, from London!”
“Why?” asked Gallaway. They were in the military attache’s office and theatrically the man got up and locked the door.
Cartright’s relief, at being told officially by his own department to assess Charlie Muffin’s investigation, was limited: it had briefly been shattered by the scruffy man’s arrival in his office an hour earlier, which Cartright had at first thought, frightened, to be a confrontation. Since then he’d tried to rationalize what there was to work from and realized how limited that was, too. Apart from the contempt with which Charlie Muffin had dismissed his superiors on his return from London, everything else remained totally unsupported, mostly bedroomtittle-tattle. But what increased Cartright’s unease was being asked, in the authorizing message from his operational officer that morning, if the man had boasted of making misleading telephone calls during his London recall or had ever referred to someone named Lionel Burbage. A confused Cartright was still awaiting clarification on that.
His explanation prepared for the inevitable question from one or the other of them, Cartright said, “I didn’t like his attitude, when he came back: behaving as if what we’re all supposed to be doing wasn’t important. I asked London if anything had happened there to sort the whole business out. When they asked me why, I told them.” Seeing the look on the faces of the other two men, Cartright added, “I don’t consider that disloyal. I see it as self-protection, for us all.” He looked pointedly at McDowell. “You forgotten what happened to your predecessor?”