“How did the cocksucker find out I hadn’t been fired?” demanded Miriam.
“I don’t know,” said Nathaniel Brindsley, in Washington. “Asked the director outright, apparently. The director didn’t have any alternative.”
“The son-of-a-bitch!”
“I’m sorry, honey. Really sorry. When Kenton Peters comes on the line, God takes the call.”
“What am I to do?” Miriam suddenly felt lost.
“Pack up. Close your apartment. We’ll do our best about severance. Personal word of the director himself.”
“Fuck you. Fuck all of you!” Miriam shouted down the telephone.
“Know how you feel,” sympathized the Bureau’s overseas director.
“You know fuck-all, like the rest of them,” said Miriam.
37
There was instant professional-to-professional recognition and they didn’t ask Charlie why they’d had to arrest him and Charlie didn’t offer any explanation, which would have been difficult anyway, his not being precisely sure. There was bound to be a wide choice under the Official Secrets Act. The policemen tried with soccer, to which Charlie couldn’t contribute because he didn’t follow it on his satellite sports channels, and eventually they found common ground with movies, agreeing there was too much sex and violence. The driver mourned the passing of those wonderful musicals and admitted an unrequited passion for Doris Day.
Charlie’s curiosity was answered when they passed between the headquarters of both intelligence agencies on opposing sides of the Thames to sweep into the entrance tunnel of the Foreign Office. As Charlie was signed into the custody of a Foreign Office uniformedcustodian, like the special delivery he supposed he was, one of the Special Branch officers wished him luck and Charlie thanked him. As the custodian escorted Charlie along darkened corridors and into noiseless elevators, the man said Charlie would probably need it because James Boyce was a bastard. Charlie didn’t bother to reply, passingly surprised at the indiscretion, more immediately aware that his not being escorted into the building by the Special Branch-being brought in fact to the Foreign Office instead of a police station-meant he wasn’t under arrest. It was essential for whatever was awaiting him to seize every pointer like that.
The corner office, on the fourth floor overlooking the statued square, the Houses of Parliament and across Westminster Bridge, immediately designated the sleek, diminutive man behind the regulation landing-strip desk as a permanent secretary. Charlie assumed him to be James Boyce, although once more there were no introductions. There were six other men already waiting. Sir Rupert and Patrick Pacey, the department’s political officer, both sat stone-faced, unsympathetic mourners at a funeral.
Charlie guessed the only way Sir Peter Mason could have arrived ahead of him after giving Special Branch the rented car number was by helicopter, which was significant.
It put the final piece in the puzzle to make everything crystal clear. Charlie had only once before, a long time ago, been involved with a traitor who had been given amnesty in exchange for all that he’d known and done for the other side. It had been one of the few occasions-apart from now with Natalia, which was totally different-that he’d been unable to separate business from personal animosity. He could recite backward all the professional justification for turning a traitor back upon his masters, but it was one of the few established practices of a totally amoral professional that was anathema to Charlie. He assumed from the proprietorial way Mason sat easily in one of the encompassing leather armchairs by the Parliament Square windows that the room had once been the man’s own.
It was not the tribunal Charlie had expected, and with this new and complete realization he wondered how much advantage he could maneuver out of it. Follow their lead, he told himself. But not necessarily subserviently, which was always inherently difficult anyway and would be especially so now that he understood all he neededabout Mason. What else could he read from the situation, before it began? They clearly believed he did know it all to have picked him up and to have arraigned him at this level of authority. And were shit-scared. There was obviously no question of his relaxing, but Charlie began to feel vaguely comfortable.
Boyce said, “You appear to have made very serious allegations.”
“I am carrying out an assignment,” said Charlie. The bastards were going to make him stand, which was stupid. To their disadvantage, not his. It put him on the orchestra podium, baton ready.
“It was not part of your assignment to leave Moscow without authorization.”
Like a lot of small men, Boyce was a bully, Charlie guessed. He was also a lousy interrogator, if indeed that’s what the man saw his function to be. There was no hurry: let them set out their battle formations. “I was authorized ten days ago to come here from Moscow to carry out inquiries as part of that assignment. I considered my going back to Moscow for the Russian announcement merely an interruption of that original authorization. I had not finished the inquiries I came here to complete. Now I have.” Charlie hoped the director-general appreciated not having any responsibility off-loaded.
“That’s a fatuous explanation!” rejected the permanent secretary.
Blustering, deciding Charlie. He wondered how many times pompous men at this echelon were openly opposed. Not often, he wouldn’t have thought. “Then that must be your judgment. Mine is that by coming back today I have totally obeyed my director-general’s instructions to find out how-and why-a British lieutenant, with others, was murdered fifty-four years ago in a remote part of what was then the Soviet Union ….” He turned slightly, to look directly at Mason. “Wouldn’t you agree that to be a reasonable assessment, Sir Peter?”
It became so quiet, Charlie could hear the sound of the long-cased clock; even its tick was respectful. He thought the chill that permeated the room would be akin to that at the depth of winter in Yakutsk itself, when the climate was at its subzero worst. They really did have to be shit-scared to be staging this performance.
Boyce said, “I’d like your response to what I said about your making serious allegations against Sir Peter.”
Thin-ice time. Charlie said, “I put a number of points to Sir Peter as part of my investigation.”
“Points you claim to have communicated to others,” said Boyce, briefly looking directly at the director-general. “Yet Sir Rupert does not appear to be aware of them.”
The bloody fools were seeking damage limitation, Charlie accepted. “I was responding to a question from Sir Peter about a battle-dress button and a shell casing from a revolver,” said Charlie. “Both of which formed part of a very early report to London.”
“That is so,” cut in Sir Rupert Dean, from the side.
“From my battle dress and revolver!” interjected Mason.
Why, apart from overwhelming pomposity, was the man this confident? Looking around the room, Charlie estimated that the man, whom he knew from the Who’s Who entry to be close to eighty-five, had to be at least twenty years older than anyone else. “I’ll take that as the confirmation you didn’t provide earlier.”
“I meant that’s what you claimed them to be,” flustered the man.
One of the unidentified men leaned briefly to his companion, whispered, and then said more loudly, “This isn’t getting us very far, is it? Let’s discuss it more directly, shall we?”
“I think you should tell us everything you know,” ordered Boyce.
If he hadn’t been one hundred and one percent right about Sir Peter Mason, he wouldn’t be standing on increasingly painful feet in front of this Star Chamber, Charlie knew. So he could be far more accusative than he had been trying to trap the man into an admission earlier. How much further could he go? He could bring in the Hitler bunker staff, although cautiously. And the fact that Larisa Krotkov and Raisa Belous had switched from art conservators to Trophy Brigade looters to NKVD intelligence officers, using their art expertise as a cover for their association with Norrington and Timpson. And what about Mason, too? Charlie reminded himself. He still wasn’t sure how to bring that accusation in.