Brian Freemantle - Red Star Burning

For as long as he could remember, and Charlie Muffin had an elephantine memory, self-preservation had been a major preoccupation, but never so much as now, incarcerated as he was in a window-barred and double-locked room with only the glazed-eyed relatives of the other wall-mounted animals on the ground floor for sightless company. But this was the first time the preoccupation was not for his own survival. How had Natalia-and Sasha-been detected? The money trail had always been the obvious weakness although it couldn’t have triggered this discovery: two of Natalia’s anguished calls to his abandoned Vauxhall apartment were dated and timed before his Jersey visit. How else? He would have been the concentrated focus of the excoriating, stop-at-nothing FSB investigation after the destruction of Russia’s intended puppetmaster emplacement of Stepan Lvov. What of Natalia’s long ago insistence that she had wiped from KGB and succeeding FSB records as much trace as possible of their connection during his supposed defection debriefing? There was a stomach lurch of belated-too belated-realization. A search as complete and as intense as the FSB’s would have encompassed every government institution. The Hall of Weddings was one such institution, in which every ceremony was bureaucratically registered, electronically as well as in a handwritten ledger.

Why was he looking backward? Charlie asked himself. Whatever the route, whatever the disclosing mistake, their relationship had been uncovered. Or had it? If it had been positively confirmed, Natalia would no longer be at liberty to telephone him as she had. Suspected at least, Charlie qualified. But sufficient for the scourging fear in which Charlie felt locked because even if she was suspected, Natalia and Sasha had to be got out of Russia.

But how? And by whom?

Judged against a lifetime’s need for split-second thinking to split-second confrontations, Charlie believed he’d adequately responded to the stomach-dropping sound of Natalia’s voice. But only just adequately. He’d answered every question about Natalia with complete and total honesty-without offering any additional information-just as he had recounted his Jersey journey, omitting only the financial reason for his making it. But the debrief had concluded without the slightest indication of what might happen to him. Far more worryingly, there had been nothing at all about Natalia and Sasha.

He had to think of a way to rescue them: a very quick, stop-at-nothing way as guaranteed as possible to get them to safety. What? he asked himself again. And again failed to find an answer.

“To quote Shakespeare, ‘with as little a web as this I will ensnare’: they’ve gone for it!” announced Gerald Monsford, triumphantly. He spoke with his back to the other two in his office in MI6’s Vauxhall Cross headquarters, looking up toward the Houses of Parliament on the opposite side of the Thames.

“Even dear Jane?” queried Rebecca Street, well aware of Monsford’s antipathy toward the woman whom she had replaced, although unaware of how it had been manipulated.

“She needed the assurance that she wouldn’t be kept out of the loop,” said Monsford, who’d appointed Rebecca not only as his deputy but as his easily persuaded mistress, which Jane had consistently refused to become, providing an additional reason for her transfer.

“What about Smith?” asked James Straughan, the director of operations.

“Palmer and Bland got in with their support first, which wrong-footed poor old Aubrey,” patronized the Director. “Then I played my ace by insisting that he’d control it all, with us limited to committing our Moscow resources, which left him high and dry.”

“You think he’ll trust us?” asked the woman, professionally objective.

“At the moment he’s totally confused by the sudden appearance of this mysterious Natalia Fedova,” said Monsford, turning at last from the window. To the woman he said: “I want you to monitor everything: act as our secondary check to guarantee against mistakes.”

“Nothing will go wrong,” said the blond Rebecca Street, smiling. She dressed to advertise her full-breasted but otherwise slim figure. That day’s promotion was a low-necked crossover black dress, the bodice pin the diamond clasp Monsford had given her as a consummation present. She’d been far more impressed by the clasp than by the over-in-seconds lovemaking she’d endured in the office’s adjoining bedroom suite to gain it.

“What about our own operation?” queried Straughan.

“The entire reason for what I achieved today,” declared Monsford. “This MI5 business is a bonus we’re going to bleed dry, maybe even literally. Have we got an unsuspected conduit to Moscow: something the FSB will believe unquestioningly?”

Straughan considered the question. “It’s not as easy as it was when there was a Soviet Union.”

“I didn’t imagine it would be,” said Monsford, testily. “I want something to tie Charlie Muffin closer in to whatever the hell these telephone calls are all about: something connected to the Lvov business, for instance.”

“There’s an FSB source at the Polish embassy in Rome we’ve used before,” said Straughan. “Not for more than a year, though.”

“After all the damage Charlie did, the FSB would obviously like to find him, wouldn’t they?” suggested Monsford.

“That’s why he’s in a protection program, isn’t it?” said Rebecca, frowning.

“And because of it no longer living where he once did.” Monsford smiled. “But the FSB don’t know that, do they?”

“So it wouldn’t expose him to any actual harm?” said Straughan.

“Of course it wouldn’t,” agreed Monsford.

“I’ll try to set it up,” undertook the operations director.

“Not try: do it,” said Monsford, heavily. “It’ll be an irony that Charlie Muffin’s last service to British intelligence will be for us, not his own people.”

“Everything’s agreed,” Maxim Radtsic assured his wife, his head close to hers as they went north on the Arbatsko line of Moscow’s Metro service, upon which, three hours earlier, he’d kept his latest meeting with Harry Jacobson.

“When?” the woman asked, matchingly low voiced.

“Soon. They know the urgency.”

“I don’t like all this nonsense,” Elana protested, looking around the packed commuter carriage. “It’s silly, playacting like children.”

“It’s very necessary if we’re to keep safe,” insisted Radtsic.

“Why don’t I go to Paris, for a holiday with Andrei, and go to London with him from there. It would be easier for you to get out alone, wouldn’t it?”

She was more frightened than he, realized Radtsic, sympathetically. “It would alert them: make them suspicious.”

“Andrei should be given more warning.”

“It’s got to be the way the British want it.”

“Let’s not take the Metro back to the apartment. I want to walk.”

“It’s a long way to walk from Kurskaya,” Radtsic pointed out, identifying where they were from the route map above the seats.

“I know.”

She knew she wouldn’t very much longer be able to walk the streets of the city, accepted Radtsic, sadly. Would she ever properly understand what he was having to do when it was all over?

“Good-looking kid,” remarked Albert Abrahams, looking down at the selection of photographs he’d taken two hours earlier outside Andrei Radtsic’s Sorbonne college.

“I prefer the girl,” said Jonathan Miller, MI5’s station chief at the Paris embassy. “Can you imagine those legs wrapped around your neck?”

“Name’s Yvette Paruch,” identified Abrahams. “And I have already imagined it. Our Andrei’s not just good-looking, he’s a lucky bastard as well. So what do we do now?”