Brian Freemantle - Red Star Rising

“What?”

“We can’t break the code. There’s more than one, each of which needs separate unconnected ciphers. And there’s obviously a further cipher-again, maybe even more than one-necessary to identify the participants. Without all the keys, we can’t open any doors.”

“Which proves how important it is: sensational, like Ivan said,” insisted the woman. She lighted a cigarette.

“It isn’t anything unless we can read it: understand it all.”

“What about your code-breakers? They must have decoded something !”

“Ivan must have told you more?” coaxed Charlie, avoiding her question.

She hesitated, the nerve in her cheek tugging her mouth into an unintended smirk. “He said Cairo was involved.”

“So he must also have told you a lot of the stuff was CIA traffic? That’s where a lot of it came from, the CIA station in Cairo.”

“He told me some of the early stuff was.” She lit another cigarette from the butt of that she’d almost finished, coughing.

“ Told you? Or showed you?”

“Told me. . showed me some things.” Her voice was almost inaudible now.

“He also told you it was sensational?”

“Yes.”

“Why was it sensational?” pressed Charlie. “He must have told you why!”

Irena shook her head. “I told you. He said it was too dangerous for me to know.”

“Irena, I don’t think you’re telling me the whole truth.” Charlie very carefully kept his voice flat, hinting no irritation or annoyance.

She sat, avoiding his eyes, for several moments before her lips moved, as if forming words, but there was no sound.

“I didn’t hear what you said, Irena?”

“People,” she managed, in a hoarse whisper.

“What about people?”

“That’s why it is sensational. Because of the people it is about.”

“Who are they, these people it is all about? What are their names?”

The woman shook her head, the first forcefulness since she’d let him into the apartment. “No! He wouldn’t tell me any names. That’s what I couldn’t know, to keep me safe. Any names.”

“You read it all, didn’t you?” Charlie openly accused. “Ivan didn’t show you some ; he showed you all of it, didn’t he? And you looked at it all again, after he was murdered and you’d recognized he was the victim from the description at the press conference from which you got my number?”

The silence lasted much longer this time. At one point, Irena’s shoulders started to heave and Charlie was frightened she was going to collapse, but she didn’t, although when she looked up her eyes were red from the nearness of tears. “He showed me everything and I looked at it all again, when I knew it was Ivan who’d been killed. But I couldn’t read it because I didn’t have the ciphers to understand it!”

Charlie didn’t speak immediately, either, knowing the importance of every word in every phrase from now on. “Then there’s no way forward. We’re beaten.”

“No!” Irena protested. “Your code-breakers and analysts haven’t had it long enough! They’ve got computer systems that can do things, calculate things, in seconds. They’ll break it, in time! They’ve got to!”

“In time , maybe,” agreed Charlie, stressing the doubt.

“What have your people said in London? About me; about what I asked in return for giving you what I had?”

“Everything’s possible, once they know what they’re rewarding you for. Which brings us back to time. You know how the Russians are trying to close everything down. Officially there’s no reason for me to stay any longer in Moscow, if we publicly accept their story. And I’ve got nothing with which to challenge their nonsense. And if I’m recalled, with me goes your contact. . your only chance”-Charlie hesitated, in brief reluctance, before offering the folder across the narrow space between them-“which is why I’ve brought Ivan’s material back to you.”

For a moment Irena remained staring in astonishment. “You’re not going to do anything? But-”

“London has a copy of everything, of course. And they’ll go on trying but I don’t know for how long. . if they’ll ever break it.”

Irena hesitantly accepted the package, gazing disbelievingly down at it. “I thought your experts would work it out. . that it was the way. .”

“So did I,” said Charlie, moving to get up from the uncomfortable chair.

Irena finally burst into tears, hunched forward over the folder, rocking back and forth.

“I’m sorry,” said Charlie, moving toward the door.

“Don’t go,” she pleaded, and stood up.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Charlie demanded, when he finished reading what she had brought from the bedroom two hours earlier.

Irena shrugged. “I thought you’d just take it. I don’t want to be abandoned. I want to be helped.”

There was nothing to be achieved by scolding her. He had it now. Everything. Not everything, he immediately corrected himself. “I’ll buy you a ticket: a return, as if you’re coming back. And get you a new passport, with a visa we can attach in London. I don’t want you coming into the embassy. It’s under media siege.”

“No. I don’t think I could do that.”

“I’ll need a photograph.”

She began gnawing at her lip. “I don’t have one.”

“You must have something! We can enhance it in London if it’s not very good.”

She shook her head.

“There’s photographs of you there,” reminded Charlie, pointing to the shrine and its selection of pictures of her and Ivan together. “We’d have to cut Ivan out.”

Irena hesitated. “All right. Then what?”

“I’ll call. Give you flight numbers and tell you what to do.”

“You won’t abandon me, will you? Leave me here now that I’ve given you all I’ve got?”

“No, Irena. I promise I won’t abandon you.”

It was past midnight before Charlie finally got back to the Savoy, unencumbered any longer by the folder he had left with Irena, what little he now carried making no curious bulge inside his jacket pocket, glad in his initial moments of euphoria back at Irena’s flat that he’d resisted the impulse to alert London instantly by going directly to the embassy. There was the customary hand-holding couple in the hotel lobby and Charlie was sure others watching the embassy would have inferred from such a late return that he had something so vital it had to be reported to London at once. To prevent such an assumption, Charlie sidestepped into the bar and ordered vodka that-unusually-he didn’t want. Nothing could have improved his total exhilaration.

Which, unplanned though it was, made the bar stop a good idea: his first place and opportunity to sit and think beyond his almost unbelievable awareness. Ivan Oskin had been right-close to being terrifyingly right-in assessing as sensational what he’d found in KGB archives: could it, Charlie wondered, be too sensational? Not his question to consider. Or answer. His remit, the remit he’d insisted upon the Director-General acknowledging not that many hours earlier, was to solve the murder of Ivan Nikolaevich Oskin. Which, Charlie accepted, he hadn’t done. Nor would he ever be able to solve it. What he had discovered was the reason for the poor, overconfident, desperate man’s savage killing and doubtless prior, although unsuccessful, torture. Had Irena come close to guessing the unspeakable agonies Ivan Oskin must have endured without disclosing the whereabouts of what his captors would have been so frantically determined to recover?

Charlie resolved to make her understand: not the horror which would have been so bad that even Charlie didn’t think himself capable of fully imagining it. What he’d try to make her understand was how much Ivan must have loved her to have resisted until he’d died rather than tell them where their secret was hidden.