Brian Freemantle - Red Star Burning

“It’s too much for me to understand,” protested the woman. In contrast to her husband, who was fifteen years her senior, Elana was a slim, even elegant woman committed to her career as professor of physics at Moscow University. “My work … what about my work … I mean … I don’t know.”

“I can’t go without you. You’d be arrested: dismissed from the university.” Radtsic was agonized by the conversation, his whole body clammy with perspiration.

“I didn’t mean I wouldn’t come with you. I was thinking of everything I would be abandoning … leaving behind. Are you sure, really sure, that you’re being targeted?”

“I found two listening devices in my office today, one actually in the telephone handset, the other in the base of the desk light: that’s why we’re walking-so we can talk-out in the open like this,” disclosed Radtsic. “And today I was told there’s no reason for my attending the quarterly operational review, which I’ve done ever since I was appointed deputy chairman: actually headed more sessions than the chairman himself.”

“Oh my God!” said Elana, who was a devoted churchgoer. “It’s true, isn’t it? You’re going to be purged.”

“No, I’m not,” insisted Radtsic, defiantly. “I’m going to get out.”

He’d screwed up big time, Charlie acknowledged. How big he didn’t yet know, nor how to find out: whether, even, if he would. Feigning inferiority to encourage the underestimation of those against whom he was pitted was one of several chameleonlike survival cloaks in which Charlie Muffin so often professionally wrapped himself. But it hadn’t worked with George Cowley. On film and on sound, Charlie knew, he’d looked a lost, vacant-eyed idiot who, in the specialized environment in which, until now, he’d existed, had lost not just the will but the professional ability to live. And become a potential liability.

How, in his eagerness to reassure Natalia that he was still alive-and financially to provide for her and Sasha-could he have failed properly to consider the possible misunderstandings! The core concern of MI5 heirarchy had to be that pissing about as he’d intentionally, stupidly, done-neither properly in nor improperly out of the protection regime-risked his detection by those murderously hunting him. And that however they chose to destroy him would publicly expose how close Russian intelligence had come to insinuating itself into the very heart of the Oval Office in Washington D.C., with an equally gullible, puppy dog Britain led unsuspectingly by the nose to the same disaster.

Charlie stirred from the chair into which he’d slumped after Cowley’s departure fifteen minutes earlier. It would appear on the all-seeing cameras as bad as the confrontation itself, as if exhausted by it he’d collapsed into continuing depression, not what he’d objectively been doing, taking time for self-critical self-examination. Resulting in what? Irritation, predominantly, Charlie answered himself: irritated at having been so obviously beaten in a verbal who-can-shout-loudest contest and at that humiliation being filmed and recorded and at being so completely cut off from everything and everyone and because of that isolation not able to gauge the full extent of his self-created situation.

Charlie started up, determined to identify all the cameras upon which his every waking-and sleeping, through infrared technology-moment was monitored. By the time he reached the kitchen and the cupboard containing the Islay single malt, he was reasonably sure he’d located four before abandoning the pointless exercise. Miniaturized as the lenses were, he’d never pick them all out. And what if he did? He wasn’t on an operational assignment, where he had to protect himself against every eventuality. He was in a permanently recorded goldfish bowl. And there was no recovery advantage from his being able to pose or perform to mislead his constant watchers. Whatever he did would be further misconstrued as proof of his mentally eroding hold on reality.

Which it most certainly wasn’t, Charlie assured himself, as he splashed whiskey into his glass intentionally to be visible to a camera in the window-blind coping. The whiskey and how much of it he drank would scarcely be a revelation to his observers. They actually provided it because of its rarity: known as it inevitably would be to his pursuers, it could have led to his whereabouts if he’d placed a regular order with an outside supplier.

How many pursuers would there be? wondered Charlie, carrying his tumbler back to his accustomed lounge chair overlooking the small, sensor-seeded garden. This soon, only three months after he’d wrecked an espionage operation the Russians had nurtured over practically eighteen years, there’d be a lot: a code-name-designated operation, in fact. Would it be only Russian? Almost certainly not. The Russian target had been the CIA, convincing them-which it had, completely-that a former KGB-cum-FSB officer about to be elected president of the Russian Federation would, once in absolute power, remain their deeply embedded agent through whom America could virtually manipulate the Moscow government, never suspecting that it would have been the misguided occupant of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., who would have been the puppet on the Kremlin’s strings. There would doubtless have been a lot of head rolling at the CIA’s Langley headquarters. Enough, certainly, for the Agency to consider matching, murderous retribution. Was he safe even from his own people? Charlie knew the mass clear-out of those who’d swallowed the Russian bait at MI5’s Thames House headquarters had been only slightly less sweeping at the MI6 building on the other side of the river at Vauxhall Cross, both sufficient to gain him far more enemies than admirers.

He wasn’t simply caught between a rock and a hard place, Charlie accepted. He was trapped beneath a collapsing mountain range: if one avalanche didn’t sweep him away, another one would. Most of which, to some extent, he’d already worked out. Today’s humiliating psychoanalysis had simply concentrated it in its entirety. As much as it had concentrated his mind, which was no longer fogged by the indignation with which he’d rejected the psychiatrist’s accusation. He definitely hadn’t contemplated suicide. But subconsciously he’d allowed himself to sink into an acceptance of his eventually being detected: of his being killed by one or other of the groups committed to his destruction.

Which was preposterous and unthinkable: he’d never capitulated to anything or anyone and he didn’t intend rolling onto his back and spreading his legs in submission now, no matter how different or stultified that life might now be.

Charlie smiled and looked up in the direction of another suspected camera. It was, he determined, a decision that deserved another drink, in celebration this time.

“What the hell does he think he’s got to smile about?” demanded Aubrey Smith, turning away from the safe-house recording that directly followed Charlie Muffin’s psychoanalysis.

“Normally I’d try an answer that would help,” apologized George Cowley. “This time I don’t think I can.”

“You’ve put him on suicide watch, for Christ’s sake!” exploded Jane Ambersom, the androgynously featured, newly appointed deputy director. “You actually think he’s going to top himself!”

“I also find that difficult to accept,” said the mild-mannered, mild-voiced Smith, whose confidence remained undermined by his knowing how dangerously close his overthrow, orchestrated by Ambersom’s predecessor, had been. As it fortunately turned out, Jeffrey Smale had been the highest-profile casualty from Charlie Muffin’s success.

“I think he’s a potential danger to himself and because of that a danger to the service,” insisted Cowley, repeating the warning with which he’d begun the assessment meeting.