Brian Freemantle - Kings of Many Castles

“I thought you told me it was for her own protection.”

“Bollocks,” rejected Charlie.

Brooking looked embarrassedly to Anne, who smiled and said, “That’s what I think, too.”

“I’m not sure it would be proper for me to accompany you to a prison,” said the diplomat.

“Don’t then,” accepted Charlie, relieved.

“It probably would be better left to us at this preliminary stage,” agreed Anne.

“Thanks for the support,” said Charlie, as they made their way along the corridor towards his office.

“Things are difficult enough without dicks like Richard Brooking,” said the lawyer.

Charlie thought that it just might be that he and Anne Abbott were birds of a feather, which would be a welcome change from being surrounded by either vultures or cuckoos.

The information-starved international media thronged Petr Tikunov’s press conference at the Duma. The Communist Party presidential candidate, a burly, beetle-browed man whose campaign managers tried to avoid facial comparison with Brezhnev, said that irrespective of any current investigation the new government he would be leading after the forthcoming elections would institute the most searching and thorough enquiry into the outrage.

It took the authority-and intervention-of Aleksandr Okulov’s office for Natalia to reach the FSB counter-intelligence chief and by the time she did it was to announce the exasperated acting president had ordered her personally to the Lubyanka, which made her as uneasy as it clearly did General Dimitri Spassky.

The only delay when she entered the Russian intelligence headquarters from which she herself had operated for fifteen years was for the security formality of photographing, identification and official authorization. As she followed the required but unnecessary escort across the marbled and pillared hall to the elevator bank Natalia thought that Charlie was probably right that the sole difference between old and new was the name change. Not true, she corrected herself at once. She’d been transferred outside the service, a change she was certainly glad about. Or had been, until now. She’d recognized quickly enough the professional hazards of being appointed the crisis committee’s coordinator but she hadn’t expected to be sucked quite so quickly-and potentially deeply-into such obvious in-fighting. But she was here as the coordinator-the emissary of the acting president, in fact-not as a deputy director of the InteriorMinistry. It put her into a stronger position, despite Spassky’s seniority. It had also been regulations when she worked there that visitors were searched, irrespective of their outside security clearance or whoever’s emissary they were. So things weren’t the same. She hoped her apparent advantage continued.

Natalia smiled at the care the escort took selecting the elevator bank, away from the lifts that went to the twelve basement levels-a subterranean township for the intelligence elite, with shops, roads and even a railway connection to the Kremlin on which Stalin once travelled by special carriage personally to witness the interrogations of purged Central Committee colleagues.

Spassky’s smoke-fumed office overlooked one of the inner prison courtyards in which such victims were finally put out of their agony and Natalia wondered if there was an element of nostalgia in the old-time KGB general’s choice.

He didn’t rise at Natalia’s entry, occupying himself lighting a fresh cigarette and having done so said, “It was unnecessary involving Aleksandr Mikhailevich.”

“You weren’t accepting my calls-as you didn’t yesterday-or returning the messages I left.” There was a recording being made: every Lubyanka office had been equipped within the first week of the invention of audio tape. She was glad-maybe fortunate-that this was such an old office. She still had to be alert to responses that could be edited to Spassky’s advantage and her detriment.

“You mustn’t question my authority here, Natalia Fedova.”

“I am not questioning your authority. I am trying to fulfill the function I was given at yesterday’s meeting.” She’d probably cocooned herself in more protection than she imagined by protesting to Okulov’s secretariat about Spassky’s awkwardness.

“A meeting would have been arranged today.” The man was perspiring as visibly as he had been at the previous meeting but Natalia didn’t think that was the smell competing with the cigarettes. There was the sourness of alcohol, although she’d believed vodka to be odorless. Perhaps the old man was mixing his drinks.

“You promised the Bendall file in twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours has elapsed. Aleksandr Mikhailevich has to address the Duma this afternoon.”

“There are considerations.”

“What considerations?”

“To whom it is going to be made available.”

“Are you suggesting that the acting president of the Russian Federation-and a former regional director of the KGB! — has insufficient security clearance!”

Spassky’s hands were shaking as he lighted another cigarette. “Of course I’m not!”

“Then I don’t understand the objection you’re making.”

“It’s not an objection.”

“Have you found the Peter Bendall file!”

“Yes.”

Too quick, gauged Natalia. What was she missing! “The complete file, covering everything he did after arriving here from the United Kingdom up to the time he died, to include his family?”

The hesitation of the bloated general was indicative. “That is what I am trying to establish.”

“How!”

“Having the names of Bendall’s case officers cross-referenced.”

Spassky was an anachronism, the last stumbling dinosaur of an otherwise extinct species to whom it was instinctive to lie and evade. She supposed she should be grateful but she was abruptly determined not to be crushed when he finally fell. “Dimitri Ivanovich! Cross-referencing case officers on a Control that spread over thirty years could take another thirty years! You have three hours in which to provide our acting president with each and every recorded detail of George Bendall!”

“There is very little,” finally conceded Spassky.

She had to guard against hurrying, Natalia recognized, in growing understanding. “The son is mentioned in the father’s records?”

“Occasionally.”

“Over what period?”

“Early.”

“What do you mean by early?”

“When the family were first reunited here.”

“How regularly?” There was a forgotten satisfaction at conductingan interrogation-being so sure of herself in an interrogation-after so long.

Spassky spilled butts on to his already burn-scarred desk stubbing out the existing cigarette. For once he did not attempt instantly to light another. “Every month or two I suppose.”

“What sort of details?”

“Progress at school … assessments at assimilation …”

“Is it a complete stop or just interruptions?”

“Interr …” began Spassky before jerking to a stop, too late realizing he’d fallen into the easiest of interrogation traps, a question asked with the inference of the answer already known.

“They have been tampered with,” accused Natalia, openly.

“They are incomplete,” tried Spassky. “They were in disarray. The missing sections will be found.”

“Not in time.”

“I can let you have everything we have, up until the time the boy was maybe fifteen or sixteen.”

“Not let me have,” corrected Natalia, at once. “They are to be sent under FSB seal, by FSB courier, direct to Aleksandr Mikhailevich Okulov in the Kremlin.” It was fitting, she supposed, that she should exercise such paranoid self-protection in the Lubyanka. “Please do it now, to avoid wasting any more time.”