Carstairs flushed bright red, the skin on his neck nearly matching the color of the pasta sauce on his collar. “The OSS put one of their best men on it,” he said ruefully.
“One of our best men, Talbot,” corrected Walker. “He was a shared asset.”
“I do note your unfortunate use of the past tense,” said Harry.
Talbot Carstairs swept up the small pile of tungsten shavings, carefully placing them back in the envelope.
“A shared asset, yes, yes,” he conceded. “One of your people, actually, Colonel.”
“Sorry? You mean from the Twenty-second SAS, or another uptimer?”
Carstairs nodded at the last option. “Ivanov, the Russian. You know of him, I assume? One of your special commando Johnnies.”
“We’ve met,” said Harry. “A long time ago now. Just after the war.”
He searched his memories of the encounter. Ivanov, as he recalled, was looking for SAS men, either uptime or contemporary, to freelance inside the USSR. Harry had sent him off with nothing but his best wishes.
“Well, he was supposed to meet Sobeskaia this evening, over in the Soviet sector,” Carstairs went on. “At a hotel called the Albergo Grimaldi, where Sobeskaia was staying. But it’s all gone rather pear-shaped, I’m afraid. We don’t know anything about what’s happened to Ivanov other than that there’s been some gunplay out there.”
“And bombs going off,” added Walker as he took up the explanation. “We put him together with one of our local contacts. A guy who could get him over the Wall and back.”
“Mafia,” said Harry. It wasn’t a question.
“They love their freedom and their country as much as the next guy,” said Walker. “Anyway, Ivanov was just supposed to meet with Sobeskaia. Shake him down for some information, see what was up with this shit …” He waved a hand toward the small envelope in front of Carstairs.
“But the meet-up went wrong,” surmised Harry.
“Never even happened. This Sobeskaia asshole sent his girlfriend to the first contact. This is the broad who got the shavings to us-who we’re pretty sure is dead now, or as good as. He’s fucking her, so he trusts her. They’re looking to get out from behind the Wall. Figured they could buy a ticket with a few twirls of shredded tungsten.
“Anyway, we’ve got no real-time link to Ivanov. His presence there is deniable. But we’ve got other sources over in the Soviet sector telling us there’s been a heap of gunfire, some grenades going off, all of it in the vicinity of the Grimaldi. Sovs are saying it’s just fireworks. But the word on Sobeskaia’s girlfriend is good, we reckon. He sent her to the meet as a decoy. Probably knew it was a fucking washout.”
“Charming. And Sobeskaia?”
At this, Carstairs appeared to be trying to suck the fillings out of his back teeth, while Walker merely grimaced. The SIS man spoke first.
“He’s turned up here in South Rome, at the same cocktail party you’re due to attend this evening. He arrived about forty minutes ago, although it seems he’s been over in our sector for a day already. We now suspect that the rotter never intended to meet with Ivanov. He sent his mistress into a trap while he hid out here, then ran for it, turning up at our shindig tonight. Uninvited. Unexpected, of course. But he is a senior member of the Soviet trade delegation, so he gained access. He has been hanging off the arm of the ambassador ever since, demanding to meet with you. Naturally, the caterers are going spare because now the party’s absolutely swarming with security men. Ours, theirs, and God only knows who else.”
Harry rubbed his eyes, which were throbbing with the start of a tension headache.
“I don’t suppose he said why?”
“To defect. To you. Personally.”
Harry nodded slowly as he made an effort to control the adrenaline surge. He felt dizzy with hunger, and perhaps even a little giddy from the drink earlier. Not the best of shape to find oneself in at the current impasse.
“And I imagine there’s some reason why you haven’t just walked him out the door and into a car?”
Walker smiled. “Yeah. It’s like Talbot says. About ten minutes after Sobeskaia showed up at Babington’s, an NKVD snatch team arrived. All of them with bona fide invites. Junior trade envoys, second assistant cultural attaches-that sort of crap. And all of them now circling our guy like fucking bull sharks. I think that’s why he wants you in there, Harry. You’re a two-for-one deaclass="underline" an SAS officer and, now and forever, an heir to the throne. He figures they won’t dare throw down on him while you’re standing there. And if they do, what the hell-you’re just the sort of guy who’ll jump in and take a bullet for him.”
“The hell I will,” Harry retorted. “And I’m no more an heir to the throne now than you. And I haven’t even had dinner yet.”
Carstairs shook his head. “I’m sure, Colonel Windsor,” he said, “that just like the gossip rags who follow your every move, Mr. Sobeskaia is either unaware or unimpressed by the Succession Act of 1949 and subsequent amendments. As far as he is concerned, you are an heir to the British throne, here and in the future. He wants to defect to you, and only to you. As for dinner, we all missed out, but you can eat when you get there. I hear the shrimp cocktail is excellent.”
Talbot Carstairs smiled weakly. His second attempt at wit for the evening.
Never a good sign.
7
North Rome (Soviet sector)
After an hour of crawling, running, waiting, and crawling some more, Pavel Ivanov found himself back in the narrow, subterranean storeroom. He recognized none of the tunnels or crawl spaces through which Franco had just led them, but when they pushed through the heavy gray blankets, there was no mistaking the shelves piled high with terra-cotta jars and bottled preserves.
He’d kept his own counsel following the short battle with the NKVD, preferring to have his issues with the priest out when they were not fleeing pursuit. But even now the opportunity wouldn’t arise. Once out of the underground labyrinth, the Furedi siblings exchanged a few whispered words before Marius made the sign of the cross over his brother and disappeared back through the blankets and into the tunnels. Franco grabbed Ivanov by the elbow and drew him upstairs.
“You must move now, Russian.”
Biting back a curse, he followed, stowing his MP5K. They hurried up the stairs, returning to the maze of cramped corridors that seemed to run through a dozen or more apartment buildings. Nobody paid them any notice. Not the old men he saw smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and playing cards on a front stoop. Not the mamas and nonnas who met at the junction of two well-trafficked hallways to exchange limp bundles of green vegetables. Not the children who raced up and down, lost in some game involving laughter and mock gunplay and squealed Russian curses.
In some ways, he thought, the war, the Transition, the Communist occupation, the wrenching destruction of the twentieth century’s settled history-none of it had much affected the day-to-day life of Franco Furedi’s people. The mafia soldier had probably passed through here dozens of times in the past twenty years covered in filth and blood. And never once did anyone see anything. He wondered how long their hard-bitten omerta would last under interrogation by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs-the NKVD. Men and women who would remain obdurately close-mouthed while they themselves were being tortured often became babbling torrents of information by the time you had snipped the second or third finger from their child’s hand. In Ivanov’s personal experience, and to his unutterable shame, he knew that in especially masculine societies like this one, you could move the whole process along with greater speed by taking the tiny manhood from a captive’s favored son. (Or even just the tip, if you were a soft-hearted type, like him.) It always made for terrible reprisals later on, though.