Red Star Rising (9 page)

Pavel shook his head. “I did not know . . .”

“I am not accusing you. I’ve given you my confidence for you to understand the attitude of people to whom I am responsible: why they ordered whatever their forensic people retrieved to be examined and tested in London, instead of here, by your people.”

“How can we be expected to continue with such a barrier between us?” Pavel asked, desperately. “It’s been made impossible.”

Charlie hadn’t anticipated that capitulation and the alarm swept through him. “It’s only impossible if we allow it to become so. We have to cut ourselves off from it, entirely. But if we are going to continue with total openness between each other, there is something further I must tell you, because it affects our investigation.”

“What more can there be?”

“The CCTV cameras kept failing, intermittently, finally failing altogether. But there are some images upon them: images of what could be our murder victim and those who killed him.”

The Russian’s complete silence, the man’s inability momentarily even to speak, further convinced Charlie of Pavel’s ignorance of the spying intrusion. At last, Pavel haltingly managed: “The films, the recordings, whatever they are? Where are they?”

“Back in London, being enhanced, with all the other recovered material.”

“Is it possible that you will get identifiable pictures?”

“That is what our scientists are trying to achieve.”

Sergei Pavel personally escorted Charlie down to the ground-floor reception area, animatedly assuring daily contact.

Charlie felt a satisfying warmth at how Pavel’s attitude—from dismissal to reliance—had changed. Charlie’s estimate of how long it would take Sergei Pavel to contact the FSB’s Mikhail Guzov at the Lubyanka coincided with his reaching a pavement newsstand, at which he was brought to a halt by the
Moscow News
billboard. There was no other story on its front page apart from the bugging of the British embassy, with a sidebar speculation of it plunging diplomatic relations between Russia and Britain back to the frostbitten era of the Cold War. His revelation to Pavel was far too recent for the Russian detective to be the source. So which of the others at yesterday’s confrontation in Sir Thomas Sotley’s suite hadn’t been able to keep their undertaking of secrecy?

The media posse had grown by the time Charlie returned to pick up Paula-Jane Venables from her embassy compound apartment. Some uniformed Russian militia officers had arrived to supplement the British security cordon, keeping the pedestrian door clear. They weren’t doing anything, though, to prevent the television cameramen and photographers from taking pictures, and Charlie told his taxi driver to continue on to a telephone kiosk farther along the embankment and wait while he made a call.

“Ashamed to be seen with me?” Paula-Jane asked, flirtingly, when Charlie warned of the likely ambush.

“You don’t need to be identified with me by the FSB and I don’t want to be linked with you by them.”

“Don’t you think they already know who we’re from: you’ll be on file, for Christ’s sake!”

“Why advertise it?”

“There’s caution for you!” she mocked.

“Pity there hadn’t been a lot more of it in the last few weeks,” said Charlie, heavily.

“You had a bad day?”

“Not at all,” denied Charlie, hoping he wasn’t showing his disappointment at not finding a telephone message from Natalia when he’d gone back to the hotel to change. “I’ve got a cab. I’ll pick you up at the Kalininskaya Bridge, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, her lightness gone.

It took her twenty minutes, arriving uncomfortably on elevated high heels, the shoes coordinating with the clasp bag. The cleavage was so deep, the single rope of pearls looked like a suspension bridge between two peaks. Settling gratefully into the back of the cab, she said, “Television didn’t really show the extent of the scrum. I guess you were right.”

“Where are we going?” asked Charlie, as the cab moved off.

“Where else but the American Café, just off the ring road?” She gave the driver the address in Russian.

“You seen the papers?” asked Charlie.

“Heard it on television, when I was trying to estimate the crowd outside. Your friend Harry’s gone ape-shit, along with the entire inquiry team that came in this afternoon. I actually didn’t think I was going to be able to get away tonight after all: they’ve got Sotley in with them now, with Dawkins on standby.”

Charlie was intent upon the cab driver’s reflection in the rearview mirror, relieved from the disinterest on the man’s face that he really didn’t understand English. “Who’d you think couldn’t keep their mouth shut?”

“If we take you, me, and Halliday out of the frame you’ve got a fairly short list of suspects. My money’s on Reg Stout.”

Stout was certainly the most obvious, accepted Charlie. They were on the multilaned freeway now, swept along by the tide of vehicles all around them. Recognizing the landmark of Pushkin’s house, Charlie looked to the right where Natalia’s apartment was, little more than a hundred yards off the main highway.

“Familiar places from when you were here before?” asked Paula-Jane.

“No,” denied Charlie, honestly. The apartment he’d occupied with Natalia and Sasha, an entire floor of a minor, prerevolutionary palace, was on the far side of the city. Wanting to move on from the unwelcomed reminder, he said, “Tell me about the people we’re going to be with tonight.”

“Tex Probert is from the Company,” she said, using spook-speak to identify the CIA. “His wife, Sarah, is over on a visit. Bill
Bundy’s his intended replacement, overlapping to settle himself in. Shirley Jenkins, who’s partnering Bundy, is in their legal department. Nice guys, although it takes a lot for Shirley to unbend. . . .” She smiled, the remark prepared. “Although she does quite a lot of unbending in certain circumstances, according to the stories I’ve heard.”

Charlie ignored the innuendo. Instead, he said, “Sarah’s over on a visit?”

“From what’s officially described as relocation leave,” explained Paula-Jane. “Tex is due to go back permanently any time now. He’s been assigned a CIA headquarter’s posting at Langley so she’s house-hunting around Washington and finding colleges for the two kids, who’ve been at school there. Bill’s the eventual replacement, like I said: third-term assignment, the Company’s acknowledged Russian guru.”

“I know,” said Charlie.

“You know?”

“He was on station here the same time as me.”

“How about that!” exclaimed Paula-Jane.

How about that indeed? thought Charlie, easing his finger inside his left shoe to massage the discomfort.

Charlie had never understood why nostalgic, back-home theme restaurants and bars in foreign cities never properly replicated back home at all. The American Café, which hadn’t existed when he’d lived in Moscow, was designed to represent a 1940s diner that, as far as Charlie was aware, didn’t exist anywhere in the United States. This one was complete with blown-up photographs of Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth, and a cigarette advertising poster of a young, Chesterfield-smoking Ronald Reagan. There was even a bulbous, multilighted although silent jukebox. All the tables were covered in red checked cloths, each topped with a totem ketchup bottle.

“Cute, eh?” enthused Paula-Jane.

“Fascinating,” allowed an unimpressed Charlie.

The American party was already there, around a centrally placed circular table. Charlie instantly recognized Bill Bundy in the middle of the group, guessing from Paula-Jane’s rehearsal that the serious faced, dark-haired girl to the man’s right to be the lawyer Shirley Jenkins. Which made the man next to her Tex Probert, with blond wife Sarah completing the group. Both men stood to shake hands at their introduction and Bundy said, “Good to see you after all this time, Charlie.”

“And you,” said Charlie, who couldn’t isolate a single apparent difference in the man’s appearance from when they’d last met. The preppy, short haircut didn’t look out of place on a man who had to be at least fifty. Nor did the regulation Ivy League suit, complete with metal-pin collared shirt clamping the club tie in place.

“You two guys already know each other?” exclaimed the angular-featured Probert, whose accent explained the nickname: the formal introduction had been John.

“From way back,” confirmed Bundy. “We two can actually remember what the Cold War was like.”

“And dinosaurs,” said Charlie, to the laughing appreciation of the three women, giving him the necessary moment to think. Bundy’s posting quite clearly had nothing whatsoever to do with what he’d been sent from London to investigate but Charlie had never before heard of a third-time overseas assignment—certainly not one that involved moving such an acknowledged Russophile at a time of impending political change. His professional curiosity was piqued.

The arrival of the waiter stopped the conversation. The women agreed to share a bottle of white wine while they decided the menu. Probert chose beer and Charlie stuck with vodka in preference to doctored scotch, knowing the restaurant definitely wouldn’t have a bottle with the correct label, let alone genuine Islay malt, which reminded him to collect his commissary order the following day. Bundy, whom Charlie belatedly remembered never chanced losing control, stayed with mineral water, insisting on breaking the bottle-cap seal himself. The American food order was uniformly T-bone steaks upon Probert’s insistence that
they were definitely flown in from Texas. Paula-Jane wanted trout, ordering from prior knowledge of the menu without needing to consult it, and when Charlie asked for borscht Bundy said, “Staying native, Charlie?”

“When in Rome,” Charlie answered, using the cliché. He started putting people in their pigeonholes. There was very definitely a frisson between Probert and Paula-Jane, which he guessed Probert’s wife was as conscious of as he was. Probert also appeared overly deferential to Bundy, even making allowances for the Bundy legend within the CIA. Deciding to use that reputation to goad the man in return, Charlie said, “How about you, Bill? What brings the head of the CIA’s Russian desk back to Moscow?”

“Interesting times, politically, don’t you think?” said the man.

“I always thought ambassadors and diplomats assessed things politically and that people like you and me were expected to make other sorts of contributions.”

“My philosophy has always been that you can’t do one without studying the other. You here simply because of your murder?”

“Who said I was here for that?” demanded Charlie, aware of the others shifting uncomfortably at the sudden seriousness between him and the American.

Bundy looked around the table, as if aware of it, too. “Now here’s a lesson for all of us, the danger of assuming too much. Charlie’s on a mission he obviously can’t tell us about.”

“Which is another dangerously accepted assumption,” said Charlie, raising his delivered vodka in a toast to the group to cover his irritation at losing the exchange.

“Can’t say I envy you guys,” came in Probert, attempting to lessen the atmosphere. “Must be a hornet’s nest down there at Smolenskaya Naberezhnaya?”

“It’s kind of busy,” agreed Paula-Jane.

“You just won the understatement of the year award, P-J,” said Probert, leading the laughter.

“From the outside, looking in, I’d say there’s going to be a wholesale massacre,” suggested Bundy.

“I’m keeping my office door locked,” said Paula-Jane, over-emboldened by her earlier reception, although only Probert laughed again this time.

“From what I’ve read in the American papers it seems too late for that,” said Sarah, adding to her wineglass for the third time. “I thought all this spy nonsense was over: actually I never believed most of it in the first place.” She was blue eyed as well as blond, with perfectly sculpted teeth and a milk-and-vitamin-fed complexion. She looked challengingly between her husband and the two other men and said, “Okay, let us in on the secret! How many James Bond coups have any of you had that you know saved the world?”

“Sarah, stop it!” protested Probert.

The arrival of their food contributed to the interruption. Unasked, Charlie took the initiative and ordered his favorite Georgian red wine, intrigued by the total unexpectedness of the dinner party and the vague undertones he was detecting, most surprised—and curious—at facing an adversary he’d never imagined confronting ever again, socially or otherwise. His mind held by Sarah Probert’s outburst, Charlie tried to recall a start-to-finish operation of which he was proud, and couldn’t. He’d stuck a hell of a lot of wrenches into a hell of a lot of engines, though, and who could calculate their outcome if he hadn’t done it? Perversely wanting to keep the uneasy conversation on its present track to see where it might lead, Charlie said, “There’s no such thing as a one-man band in our business: it’s lots of different people offering lots of different tunes eventually to create a song to hum to. Wouldn’t you say that’s how it is, Tex?”

Before her husband could reply, Sarah said, “John says very little about anything, to me at least. That’s why I’m glad we’re moving back to Washington, D.C., where things will be much more normal and I can get my husband back.”