Red Star Rising (29 page)

“You really are a motherfucker, aren’t you?”

“We’ll complete the check, shall we, Harry?”

The second microphone was between the fulsome cups of her bra, black lace to match the suspender belt. Charlie said, “Let’s not fuck about with helping you disconnect it. Just take it off.”

As she did so, quickly buttoning her blouse afterward, Svetlana Modin slumped into the interrogation chair, legs splayed but covered. “What do you want?”

“The name of your informant.”

“You know I won’t do that. I’ve got a much better idea. You give me something, I’ll give you something. If you’re as clever as you’re making yourself out to be, you’ll have the name and I’ll have the exclusive I hope to get. How’s that sound?”

“You were too obvious with the way your framed your questions, from the word go, on the telephone. But I never expected the pussy-peek.”

“You’d be surprised how often it’s worked before.”

Charlie turned to Harry Fish. “You think you could run that part of the film on which Svetlana’s proving herself to be naturally blond?”

Fish made the connection within minutes, beckoning the Russian to the small viewing screen, from which she very quickly looked up. “Very enticing, even if I say so myself. What’s your point?”

“Your international as well as national fame. If I released that footage to all your rival Moscow TV stations, as well as those throughout Europe, America, and Asia, your vagina—even with the necessarily discreet editing—would have phenomenal viewing figures, alongside the edited and unedited tape of our telephone conversation. We’d describe it as evidence of how far—up to and including blackmail and sex, with your invitation to Harry and me to take the first microphone off—you’re prepared to go to get what you want.”

“I’ve got enough to face you down, you bastard!”

“And I’ve got film of your openly offered and freely displayed crotch. Whose face is going to be redder, yours or mine?”

“It was an anonymous caller,” said the woman, tightly.

“Male or female?”

“It sounded male but it was difficult to be sure.”

“Why?”

“It was distorted through a synthesizer.”

“In Russian or in English?”

“Russian.”

“A genuine Russian speaker or with an accent?”

“There was an accent.”

“What sort of accent?”

“The synthesizer made it impossible to guess.”

“Try.”

“I can’t.”

“How soon after the press conference here?”

“An hour; maybe an hour and a half. I’d just gotten back to the studio. I’d told the switchboard to put any calls that referred to the press conference directly through to me. We’d made an appeal for callers, throughout the morning.”

“Tell me—the actual words the caller used.”

Svetlana gave another of her familiar, open-armed gestures. “I can’t remember the exact words!”

“Try,” Charlie said.

“It was something like, ‘I have information about the conference at the British embassy. The man on the far right of the platform, the one who didn’t say anything. He’s been arrested for spying. It’s to do with the listening devices that were found earlier.’ That’s as much as I can remember.”

“You’re lying,” accused Charlie. “That sort of conversation couldn’t have been within a ninety-minute time frame. Stout was still being questioned an hour and a half after the end of the conference.”

“Maybe it was longer than an hour and a half.”

“Doesn’t your recorder have a time counter?”

Svetlana’s face twitched. “I don’t remember the precise timing! There was sufficient time for me to catch the main news bulletin.”

“You went to a lot of trouble when I first called you today, telling me how important integrity and accuracy is to your station. So, set out the sequence in more detail for me. You get an anonymous call from someone whose gender you can’t even identify, because they’re using a synthesizer?”

“I asked him questions.”

“So tell me the
first
thing he said.”

“It was something like ‘I have information about the murder at the embassy.’ ”

Charlie made as if to speak but didn’t, not immediately. Then he said, “Let’s go back to integrity and accuracy. What did you do to substantiate the information you got from your anonymous caller, before going on air?”

Svetlana looked steadily across the space separating them, her mouth a tight line only broken when she said, “I’m getting very pissed off with this.”

“Don’t, for a single mistaken moment, imagine that I won’t do what I warned you I would if you tried to fuck me about . . . as I think you’ve tried to fuck me about ever since we began talking. So you know what we’re going to do, to achieve a lot more a lot quicker. We’re going to stop now. You’re going to go back to the station and you are going to get me the tape you recorded—the original, not a copy . . .”—Charlie gestured to the silent Harry Fish—“I know you’ll take a copy, but he’ll know if you’ve doctored it in any way and if you do, I’ll expose you more effectively than you’ve ever exposed yourself before. And you’re going to tell me who you called here at the embassy to confirm Reginald Stout’s detention. Is there anything I’ve said that you don’t understand or need me to explain in more detail?”

Svetlana’s face had been reddening as Charlie talked and now it was blazing. “You shouldn’t talk to me like this . . .
imagine
you can talk to me like this!’

“Noon!” stipulated Charlie. “I’ll be waiting.”

Charlie was halfway back across the courtyard after escorting Svetlana Modin to the gatehouse, having enjoyed her furious gestures to her crew to stop filming her emergence outside, when Harry Fish came hurriedly out of the embassy, waving him back into the building.

“What is it?” demanded Charlie.

“Hear for yourself,” said the electronics expert, bustling
Charlie into the elevator to the apartment where the dedicated telephones were recording incoming calls. One of Fish’s technicians was by Charlie’s personal line, and as they entered the room the man depressed the replay button.

The voice, in Russian began: “Charlie! I’ve got . . .” before the room reverberated with a deafening roar.

Charlie said: “That was Pavel’s voice.”

Fish said: “And that was a gunshot.”

Charlie Muffin was again swept by a feeling of déjà vu, the comparisons everywhere: the same mortuary in which he’d first seen the body of the one-armed man, facing across his dissecting table the same pathologist, with Mikhail Guzov hovering at the man’s shoulder, as he’d hovered then.

And Sergei Romanovich Pavel had been killed the same way as the first victim, by a single shot to the back of the head, although this time the bullet had not been hollow-nosed or had dum-dum crosses carved into its tip, so the face, apart from the absurdly neat exit wound to the forehead, remained comparatively intact, although the man’s nose was broken and his left cheek lacerated from the force with which the impact had smashed him into the wall of the telephone kiosk. Charlie wasn’t sure if the death-mask grimace had also been caused by that impact or if Pavel had felt a brief second of agony.

Mikhail Guzov said, “He’d been searched, pockets pulled inside out but he wasn’t robbed. Some coin was lying around the body, as well as his wallet with some rubles still in it. Twenty dollars in American money, too.”

“What about his militia identification?”

“Still in his jacket pocket. And his gun was in its holster.”

“He was most likely killed by a Makarov, too,” offered Vladimir Ivanov. “I’ll confirm that when I complete the autopsy: forensic
will positively identify the compressed remains of the bullet they dug out of the kiosk frame.”

“Where was it, the kiosk?” asked Charlie, the questions more instinctive than formulated to a pattern, the greater part of his concentration on why Guzov had so quickly included him, particularly after the previous TV entrapment at Petrovka. By the time Guzov arrived personally at the embassy, an hour earlier, Charlie had already been alerted to Pavel’s murder by the obediently returning Svetlana Modin, with the tape of the anonymous tip of Stout’s detention. She’d still been there when Guzov arrived at the embassy, recognized the man at once, and just as quickly addressed him familiarly by his patronymic, which was another memorized-for-later curiosity. As was Guzov’s apparent willingness to confirm to the woman that Pavel’s murder was unquestionably linked to that of the one-armed man, which had provided her with another exclusive to mitigate Charlie’s earlier outmaneuvering.

“At the junction of Bogoslovskij and Palashevsky,” identified the Russian intelligence agent, without hesitation.

“Two busy, inner-city roads in broad daylight!” exclaimed Charlie, knowing the location.

Guzov shook his head. “Bogoslovskij is closed off, for roadwork. There’s a lot of drilling, which would have covered the sound of a shot. We haven’t been able to find any witnesses: no one who heard anything.”

“Wouldn’t the roadwork and the drilling have still made it a bad choice?” persisted Charlie, hoping to encourage the Russian further. Was it a good idea to have brought Pavel’s murder tape with him?

“There’s no indication that he had made a call. The telephone was still on its rest when his body was found by one of the workmen farther along the street: if it hadn’t been it might have given us a lead. It’s possible he was lured there.”

Charlie briefly hesitated before taking from his pocket the CD Harry Fish had copied from the master tape of Pavel’s call. Offering it to the Russian, Charlie said, “He did make a call, to me.
He manages three words—
Charlie. I’ve got
—before the sound of the shot. There’s no disconnection sound but there’s noise in the background, which I now guess was the roadwork.”

“ ‘Charlie, I’ve got . . .’ ” echoed Guzov. “What the hell had Sergei Romanovich got?”

“I doubt we’ll ever know,” accepted Charlie. “If he’d written it down it would have been found by whoever went through his pockets: maybe
why
he was searched.”

“Why replace the telephone?” persisted Guzov.

“To prevent the call being traced,” said Charlie. “I didn’t get the impression of anyone listening, trying to discover if he’d made a connection. There was a noise, which until now I couldn’t identify. Then silence.”

“I’ve been put in charge of the investigation into Pavel’s murder,” disclosed Guzov, straightening at his side of the dissection slab as if expecting a confrontation.

“Which you told Svetlana Modin was connected to the first murder. Why’d you do that?”

“Hopefully it’ll make the killers think we know more than we do: that Pavel told others what he was doing.”

Charlie didn’t completely follow the other man’s reasoning but decided against questioning it. “Let’s hope you’re right and they make a mistake we can follow.”

“My being put in charge of the Russian side of the investigation means we’ll be working together, sharing everything,” said the Russian, staring very directly at Charlie across the corpse.

Which the FSB had been determined to achieve from the outset, recalled Charlie. And which probably explained Guzov’s quick arrival at the embassy, the obvious preparedness to include him in the most preliminary of medical examinations. Surely not! Charlie thought, as his reflection lengthened into a possible conclusion: surely the FSB wouldn’t have taken their determination to the extreme of sacrificing a militia colonel who’d openly opposed them, as Sergei Romanovich Pavel had done! Why wouldn’t they? Charlie at once asked himself. Pavel had even suspected he was being set up as a sacrifice, although not literally.
There was an unarguable logic in Guzov taking over Pavel’s role, the switch from militia to FSB cosmetically easy to adjust by stressing Guzov’s prior participation.

“I look forward to that.”

“If the head of your embassy security is responsible for planting the listening devices he’ll break under interrogation?” suggested the other man.

“I would expect him eventually to make a
confession,
” mildly qualified Charlie.

“When he does you’ll have to finally concede that no agency of the Russian Federation is in any way involved in a security breach within your embassy, nor in the death of the still unidentified man,” said Guzov. “When that is accepted we’ll be able to make progress in solving both crimes instead of constantly wasting time.”