For once Paula-Jane Venables and David Halliday were in their offices, both doors closed with NOT TO BE DISTURBED signs in their occupancy slots, which Charlie ignored, still with time to fill before his appointment with the embassy lawyer. The woman jerked up irritably at his unannounced entry, relaxing when she saw who it was.
“This is proving to be an absolute fucking nightmare!” she announced, unasked.
“How bad could it be, bottom line?” asked Charlie. His being forbidden to share anything upon which he was engaged was no obstacle to his learning as much as he could about everything else in the embassy.
“God only knows. I’m going to have to admit gaps in the telephone log I’m supposed to have kept but haven’t.”
“Don’t admit anything,” advised Charlie, the survival expert. “Wait until you’re asked, answer one question at a time, and don’t volunteer anything.”
“At the moment, I’m guessing the bastards could have listened to something in the region of a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty, incoming and outgoing calls.”
“What about written stuff?”
“Luckier there. I do have a full log of the sensitive e-mail material and it’s all gone through the communications room, which your friend Harry Fish tells me isn’t compromised.”
“You’re not supposed to rely upon luck,” reminded Charlie.
“You’ve been seconded to the internal inquiry team as well!” she challenged.
“No,” said Charlie, mildly. “But if I were, that would have been the wrong response. You didn’t open the doors to let the bad guys in. As far as I am aware, it was Reg Stout, under Dawkins’s authority, condoned by an ineffectual ambassador. You haven’t got any reason to be defensive. All you’ve got to do is warn the guys who are coming from London of anything the FSB might have learned.”
“I just told you, my telephone logs-the logs they are going to want to examine and question me about-aren’t complete.”
“How much-how many-can you remember of what you haven’t logged?”
“Most of it, I’m pretty sure.”
“So verbally include from memory whatever’s missing from the log when you’re questioned in detail about your telephone records.”
“Considering the way I greeted you when you arrived, you’re being very kind,” said Paula-Jane, smiling.
“Who told you I was anything otherwise?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” said the woman, her initial uptightness easing. “I want to make amends!”
“I’m not sure you’ve got any amends to make,” coaxed Charlie, curious to know who’d been digging the mantraps ahead of him.
“I am,” she insisted. “I’ve been invited to a dinner party tonight by the current CIA guy at the American embassy. And I don’t have a partner. Would you have a problem filling the vacancy?”
Charlie found an immediate response difficult, the uncertainty of Natalia’s reaction to his letter in the forefront of his mind. If she missed him on her first call, she’d phone again, came the quick reassurance. It was unlikely there’d be any professional benefit socializing with the Americans, but there was always the possibility of the unexpected. Which was all Charlie ever asked for, a simple possibility. “That could be fun.”
“Let’s try to make sure it is.”
“Don’t tell me it’s a nightmare: I’ve been told that already.”
Halliday gestured Charlie farther into the unexpectedly littered MI6 rezidentura, files, dossiers, and newspapers-English language as well as Russian-overflowing from benches and side desks onto a floor shadowed by unclosed cabinets and open desk drawers. Halliday said, “Not as bad as it looks.”
“Which looks bad enough,” commiserated Charlie, needing to move some of the records to take the offered seat. The headline in that day’s unfiled Moscow News on top of the heap read: MYSTERY DEEPENS IN BRITISH EMBASSY MURDER.
Halliday shook his head, smiling. “On open, possibly intercepted transmission, little more than embarrassment. A lot of analyses about Stepan Lvov’s presidential chances, which is occupying every Western embassy in Moscow and shouldn’t surprise anyone in the FSB. My judgement is that Lvov’s a shoo-in, so if I’m right, it’s not even embarrassing that we’ve been monitoring him. If he loses, I’m a bad analyst they don’t have to worry about keeping too close an eye on.”
“Very pragmatic,” complimented Charlie. “I’ve never seen so many worried people running around so many corridors. Or quite so many journalists, cameramen, and TV crews outside this embassy.”
“The inquisitors are due any time, thumbscrews and all.
There’s bound to be a lot of other transgressions swept up in the spring cleaning. And Reg Stout, who’s rightly shitting himself, says he’s called the militia to clear the media away.”
“He told me he hardly speaks Russian.”
Halliday shrugged. “He’s always talking through the hole in his ass.”
“How worried are you about the internal inquiry?”
Halliday smiled again. “I certainly didn’t let the FSB bug-masters in.”
“You must have recognized how fucked up the security was here, before the shit hit the fan?”
Halliday patted the closest folder to him on his desk. “I did, long before the shit hit any fan. And here’s the log, with attached copies of every warning message I’ve sent to London over the last six months. London’s going to have a lot of self-explaining to do, as well as the idiots here. .” The man patted his special folder again. “With this already on my record, I’m going to come out of this inquiry smelling like a rose.”
“Always better than smelling of shit,” agreed Charlie.
“I told Monsford, my director, you’d declined my offer of help, by the way. He said he might take it up with your boss. Thought you should know in advance.”
“I appreciate your telling me that,” said Charlie, deciding at that moment that although admiring Halliday’s apparent professionalism, he didn’t personally like the man. But then, Charlie asked himself, when had liking someone have anything to do with anything?
Charlie had wondered if in five years the official interior design preponderance of desk and countertop Bakelite with matching linoleum floor covering would have disappeared but, of course, it hadn’t-it just became more scratched and scuffed. The insolent, blank-faced disinterest of the counter clerk at Ulitsa Petrovka was the same as Charlie remembered, too: Charlie’s guess at four minutes before the man would bother to look up from the curled-edged, unturned page of what he was reading was short by an additional full minute.
“Important to keep up to date with all the regulations,” sympathized Charlie, sure the man was looking at the latest office-circulating porn magazine: the clerk was two pages short of the photographic offerings.
There was grunted surprise at Charlie’s mockery being in Russian. “You the Englishman to see Sergei Romanovich Pavel?”
“That’s me,” agreed Charlie, equally surprised at the expectation.
“It’s the top floor, second door on the right when you get there,” dismissed the man, nodding toward the linoleum-clad stairs as he went back to his magazine.
Charlie took his time and was glad he did. The top floor was six flights up, and by the time he got there his feet were burning and he was panting, even though he’d paced himself. He’d passed seven people on the way up two of them women, and been ignored by them all, despite being an unauthorized, foreign stranger. It wasn’t casual security, Charlie decided, but stage management to indicate his unimportance. Charlie waited until he’d fully recovered his breath before knocking on the identified door. He had to knock twice more before there was an unintelligible shout beyond, which he took to be an invitation to enter. The outside office was empty, but Pavel was visible through the open door of the next room, behind a cluttered desk. The man’s jacket was looped around the back of his chair, crushed by his leaning back against it. Pavel’s tie was loosened and his shirt collar open. The shirt and tie, as well as the suit, were what the man had worn at the mortuary: at least, Charlie thought, he’d changed his own shirt. And socks. It reminded him he needed to get some laundry done at the hotel. He supposed he’d have to change again, into the better of his two suits, for that evening’s dinner with Paula-Jane’s American friends.