Brian Freemantle - Red Star Rising

“I’m sorry, Charlie,” apologized Smith. “It’ll look bad, publicly, because of all your exposure. But that same publicity would have made things operationally limiting for you, from now on.”

“What about Irena?” Charlie asked, anxious to get some order into his confusion. “Does everything I agreed stay, as far as Irena is concerned?”

“Absolutely,” guaranteed Smith. “That stuff you shipped back under the diplomatic seal is in the vault, by the way. Under your name and release authority.”

“And Jack Hopkins?”

The Director-General looked blankly across his desk.

“The driver who was crippled instead of me, being driven off the embankment road?” prompted Charlie.

The other man’s face cleared. “Full pension and medical support, for life. An ex gratia payment of?25,000.”

“I’m glad about that,” said Charlie.

One of the several working condition improvements Charlie had enjoyed under Aubrey Smith’s patronage was a single-occupancy, senior grade office, and Charlie had been there for only fifteen minutes, running all the thoughts and half thoughts through his mind when a call on the dedicated line from Aubrey Smith’s office broke into his reflections.

“Seems there’s a bit of a problem,” announced Smith. “Irena seems satisfied enough with her safe house but she’s refusing to undergo any debriefing until she’s talked to you about what she gave you.”

“That’s not right,” said Charlie, a man reciting a litany.

“I don’t want anything to go wrong with the handover to Smale; give an impression of sour grapes,” said Smith, ignoring Charlie’s insistent interjection. “You’re still officially her Control. Can you sort it out?”

“I intend to,” said Charlie.

“Never expected-or wanted-to hear from you again,” greeted Jack Smethwick, when Charlie identified himself on the telephone. “I submitted a disassociation report, like I told you I would after all that bullshit you had me set up.”

“This is much easier,” Charlie assured the forensic scientist.

“I’ll protest again if it’s not; I’m definitely not falsifying anything else.”

“I’m not asking you to,” said Charlie. “It shouldn’t take you longer than an hour.”

It didn’t. Neither did the next telephone call Charlie made.

“I expected you yesterday!” complained Irena, the moment Charlie entered the room.

“I sent you a message that there were some things I had to sort out,” reminded Charlie, aware how cautious he had to be. “I’m here now.”

“I don’t understand why I had to wait until tonight, either. Or why I have been brought here,” she continued, waving her hand toward the obvious recording apparatus on the table separating them. “This is a debriefing room, with the exception of that television, which I also don’t understand. I’ve told you everything I know; given you all I had.”

“You know the bureaucracy of these things,” said Charlie, soothingly, spreading out his hands in apparent helplessness. “You wanted to see me?”

“Ivan’s things; all my memories and mementos. You said you’d get them here for me but they weren’t here when I arrived. I want them with me, as I had them in Moscow.”

“I’ve got them,” promised Charlie.

Irena smiled, unexpectedly, her familiar tension lessening. “I was frightened something might have happened to them when they weren’t here.”

“They’re all safe.”

“I’m sorry I was rude, just then. But they’re all I have. . they’re my life, what life I’ve got left, I suppose. Can I have them? I’d like to set everything up, as I had it all in Moscow.”

“I first want you to see something that’s very important,” said Charlie, picking up the television control box. He estimated that he had an hour-ninety minutes tops-and the recording ran for ten minutes. Could he get it all, in that time? If he didn’t he could, quite easily, be a dead man: he’d never gambled as desperately as this in his entire life and hoped it wasn’t showing.

The room was filled with the familiar theme tune introducing ORT’s nightly news, backing a montage of Svetlana Modin’s recent exclusives before dissolving into a wide, outside broadcast shot of the anchorwoman with the British Houses of Parliament in her background, tightening down into a close-up of Svetlana’s face.

“As you can see from the buildings behind me, I am broadcasting by satellite tonight from London, England, a country so recently the subject of so much mystery, intrigue, and speculation from Moscow, following the unexplained murder in its embassy grounds there. Tonight I can solve that mystery, identify the victim, and disclose the most sensational story in the history of modern-or even premodern-Russia. It is that Stepan Grigorevich Lvov, until tonight and until this revelation so confidently predicted to become the next president of the Russian Federation, is and has for almost two decades been an agent of America’s Central Intelligence Agency. A spy against the very country he wanted to lead. .”

Irena broke away from the hypnotism of the TV screen to look at Charlie, bulging eyed, the nervous tic pulling at her open mouth, which moved but from which no words came.

“Had Lvov attained that presidency then he-and the Russian Federation-would have become puppets performing in whatever way the strings were pulled by the president of the United States of America, reducing our great country to a vassal, jump-to-order client state. .” Svetlana was saying.

The British picture dissolved into a compilation of library footage, dominated by film of Lvov at crowded rallies, at the hijacked Russian press conference giving his undertaking of openness and cooperation with America, and at the funeral of Sergei Pavel, all the time with Svetlana’s voice relayed over. She identified Ivan Oskin as a long-serving Russian intelligence agent and Afghan war hero, who discovered evidence of Lvov’s treachery in KGB and FSB records but of his having been detected and murdered by an American assassination team as he tried to reach the sanctuary of the British embassy, believing as he had that it was impossible for Lvov to be working alone but supported by a major but unidentified cabal of suborned Russian spies deep within the Lubyanka. The outside broadcast returned to Svetlana, holding up to the camera a sheet of paper she claimed to be the evidence of secret CIA cables identifying Lvov’s code name as ICON. Svetlana concluded that she was broadcasting from London because she’d feared the Lubyanka cabal would have prevented her transmitting from Moscow.

“She was right about that,” remarked Charlie, conversationally, inwardly in turmoil at twenty-five minutes having passed since his entry into the room. “That was the full transcript. What was being shown in Moscow was blacked out after about four minutes, just enough time to identify Lvov as a CIA agent and to name Oskin. But the satellite feed came from London and went out worldwide, translated and uncensored to all the TV stations who’d bought the transmission-blind, before its broadcast-on the reputation of her previous exclusives. . ”

“Do you realize. . have any conception. . the destruction. .” Irena groped, no coherent thought held in her mind.

My destruction uppermost, thought Charlie, completing the woman’s thought. “I think I do. I was close to missing it because like everyone else I missed the little things and as an actress you were phenomenal. If you hadn’t been so anxious to get your phony shrine back, so that you could destroy it, you would probably have gotten away with it. The message I got was that you wanted the things you’d given me, meaning what I shipped here for you. But then I remembered you gave me the ciphers for the transmitted CIA cables. Which wouldn’t have been in the KGB archives, so conveniently close to the cables themselves, would they? It would be unthinkable for them to be together even in an ongoing operation, precisely because it would make it all so easy to understand, as it was easy for me virtually to understand. . ”