Brian Freemantle: Red Star Rising

“You’re talking in riddles. . not making sense.”

“I think I am making sense, Irena, although that isn’t your real name, is it? That phony shrine, which totally fooled me, was your only danger, wasn’t it? I’d missed your having the ciphers ready to convince me further and I really did think your shrine was genuine. . ” Come on, Charlie thought, for Christ’s sake, break! Forty minutes had already gone by.

“You’re mad. . gone mad,” accused Irena, shaking her head.

“Our forensic people thought all the memorabilia was put together brilliantly,” continued Charlie, as if she had not spoken. “Those superimposed photographs of you and Ivan together were fantastic. They really did look as if you and he were a genuine couple. Did you ever really know him? You weren’t ever in Cairo together-that camel-skin case was a clever prop, by the way-because we named everyone who was there and they were all men. An oversight but again, one that would have been easily missed.”

“Stop it!” demanded the woman.

“None of it would have amounted to a row of beans without your shrine, though. You totally convinced me it was your altar to the man you loved. But then I thought back to the picture I had to have for your passport. That wasn’t your real apartment-I realize now it was an FSB operational nest-and you wouldn’t have had any individual photographs of yourself there. But instead of promising to find one the following day, you let me cut up one supposedly of you and Ivan together, in happy times. That was your one mistake, although again I didn’t realize it at the time, only when other things didn’t knit together. Loving him as you convinced me you did, you’d never have let me destroy a picture of you and him together, but you were thinking more of how cutting it up would destroy the evidence of it having been doctored photographically to join you and him together. Which it did. It wasn’t until all the other stuff was looked at scientifically that I worked it out.” When the hell was she going to crack and fill in all the missing bits!

“I want help. . someone to get me away from you.”

“We’ll send you back to Moscow, of course. We’ve got everything we can possibly get from you. There’re no more flights tonight-I’ve checked-but there’s plenty tomorrow.”

“No!” she said, her tone audibly different.

He was getting there! Shouldn’t rush. “Irena-it’s easier to go on calling you that-now it’s you who isn’t making sense. Why should we keep you here. . look after you here. . knowing what we know now?”

“They’ll think I told you, not that you worked it out; had the sense to have that fucking shrine forensically examined,” blurted the woman.

He’d got her! “Not my problem. You’ve got nothing more to give me.”

“Yes, I have. You haven’t got the half of it. I’ve got all of it.”

It took her thirty minutes, running right up to his longest time estimate, and throughout it Charlie remained coiled spring-tight, tensed for the interruption that might still have ruined everything but never came.

When she finished he got as far as, “You’ll get everything I promised you. What I-” before the door burst open and the room was suddenly crowded with men.

To Charlie, the leading arresting officer said, “We’ve got you, you bastard!”

One of Charlie’s many fears was that he’d be interrogated at the American embassy where he would probably have been denied any opportunity to speak. He wasn’t, although there was little comfort in his being taken to an anonymous hut complex at the security-restricted RAF base at Northolt, on the outskirts of London, with the obvious threat of his being put aboard an always-denied CIA rendition flight to the United States or, worse, with Islamic terror suspects to one of the torture destination flights to Romania or Albania.

But at least it appeared that Jeffrey Smale was chairing the panel of eight unidentified men confronting him. The deputy director was the only man Charlie recognized apart from the Director-General himself. Aubrey Smith was not part of the examining group but ostracized to one side, like a fellow defendant. From the way they were dressed, at least three of the men facing him were American. Charlie’s reassurance came from the operator hunched at the recording apparatus on its separate table and that in their urgency to get him before a kangaroo court, his arresting officers had not searched him to discover the video he had extracted from its debriefing-room recording machine seconds before they had swept into the room in which he’d been with Irena.

“Normal formalities are being dispensed with,” announced Smale, his usually red, blood-pressured face purple with unsuppressed fury. “You have knowingly wrecked an intelligence operation twenty years in its planning and execution, and caused incalculable harm and damage to the United States of America and to this country. Any recovery or salvation of that operation is impossible but you will provide, immediately, the names of all others with whom you are in contact for them to be detained as soon as possible. Is that clear to you?”

“Time isn’t your problem,” said Charlie. “You’ve been saved, all of you, from making the biggest intelligence mistake since the creation of the CIA and possibly in the modern history of either British security service.”

There was at least a full minute of total silence before the man next to Smale exploded in an accent confirming Charlie’s American recognition: “For Christ’s sake, what’s happening here?”

Aware of at least six of the arresting officers grouped in a semicircle behind him Charlie extended his arms fully in front of him and said, “In my right, inside jacket pocket is the recording of my debriefing of the woman known as Irena Novikov. If you will not allow me to take it out, to be played to you, I ask that someone does it for me.”

“Stay as you are!” came the command behind him and a hand was thrust roughly into his jacket. The man who’d called Charlie a bastard came into view, examining the disc. To Smale, the security officer said, “It’s a recording, not a weapon.”

“Start it as eighty-four on the use register,” Charlie told the recording technician, at Smale’s nod of agreement.

Into the room came Charlie’s voice: You’ve got nothing more to give me .

Then Irena’s: Yes I have. You haven’t got the half of it. I’ve got it all .

Charlie: That’s what it’s got to be. All of it.

Irena: It’s my only operation, ever. A lifetime’s work, all gone .

Charlie: I’m waiting .

There was no hint of the anxiousness he’d been feeling, decided Charlie, satisfied.

Irena: The Americans were wrong, as they so often are, about my not having been in Cairo. They simply didn’t identify me. Valeri Voznoy wasn’t the KGB station chief. I was. My cover was a typist. It was my idea, all of it, after Vladimir Putin left the KGB and became the Russian president. Why can’t we become president of the United States of America? I thought. That was my concept. And I chose Lvov, too. We were lovers even then. Bundy was the CIA’s Cairo station chief -a laugh- That was our first success, making Bundy into the supposed Russian expert, feeding him whatever we wanted. It was genuine stuff, of course, but low level. Everywhere Lvov went, Bundy was transferred with him: the CIA was convinced Lvov was theirs and Bundy was his Control. Lvov fed him the idea of going into politics, using Putin as an example and the stupid bastards fell over themselves: over maybe ten years they’ve paid us over $20,000,000, all of which has gone into other operations against them -another laugh- Christ, they’re so gullible and stupid.