Brian Freemantle - Kings of Many Castles

“ … By someone we don’t know,” completed Charlie. “Now let’s talk about other things we don’t have, either.”

“We talking Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963!” demanded Walter Anandale, empty-voiced in disbelief.

“There’s unquestionably another gunman, logically a group,” said Kayley. It had only taken five minutes for him to come up from the basement and for Wendall North and James Scamell to be summoned to Cornell Burton’s embassy office. The ambassador sat to one side.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” decided the president. “Get Ruth out of here.”

“I’ll get on to Donnington right away, tell him the situation’s changed,” said North, moving towards the desk phones.

“Wait!” ordered Anandale. “Let’s talk this through. You think this whole godamned thing’s been a set up, right from the beginning?”

“No,” cautioned Scamell. “What I do think is that quite early on, once we started to negotiate, people saw an opportunity-for what, exactly, I don’t know-and began to plan.”

“What people, whose people?” demanded the Texan. “Yudkin’s? Or the communists? Or Okulov? Who, for Christ’s sake!”

The secretary of state shrugged, helplessly, turning to the FBI Rezident. “I can’t help there, sir. Not yet.”

“Nor can I,” said Kayley.

Anandale turned back to his chief of staff. “We don’t make any more public appearances. I don’t personally meet Okulov or anyone connected with Yudkin. We time a spokesman-issued statement about the hope to continue negotiations an hour after we’re airborne, on our way to Washington. Everyone clear on that?”

“Clear,” echoed Wendall North.

Anandale came back to the FBI man. “You did good, John. I’ll remember that, make sure that the director knows it, too.”

“So Charlie was right!” declared Sir Rupert Dean. He spoke looking at his criticizing deputy. Jocelyn Hamilton remained silent.

A copy of Charlie’s Moscow fax lay before each of the control group.

“The bullet that killed the American still came from George Bendall’srifle,” professionally pointed out Jeremy Simpson, the legal advisor.

“And now Bendall’s part of a conspiracy,” said Hamilton, choosing his time. “Our situation’s worse, not better.”

“We don’t know what the situation is,” rejected Patrick Pacey. Irritation at the deputy director’s constant carping deepened the permanent redness of the man’s blood pressured face.

“We know it’s escalated,” insisted Hamilton. “We need to start thinking-planning-proactively.”

“There’s certainly a need to withdraw Muffin for consultation,” conceded Dean, his spectacles working through his hands.

“And for preparing contingency plans, to build up our investigation in Moscow,” insisted Hamilton. “This service-maybe its future-could be decided by the outcome of all this. Since the end of the Cold War and the de-escalation of violence in Northern Ireland it’s been difficult to justify a counter-espionage function apart from becoming even more of an anti-terrorism force. Defining an FBI role is still experimental, it can’t be seen or allowed to fail.”

“Replace Muffin, you mean?” directly accused the heavily moustached Simpson.

“Safeguard the department. And ourselves,” qualified Hamilton.

Olga Ivanova Melnik felt as if she’d been engulfed by a flooded river-the swollen Volga of her Gorky birthplace at the start of the March thaw-swept helplessly along by swirling currents over unseen, snagging rocks. All-or any-of which was totally alien to Olga Melnik’s until now carefully structured and even more carefully disaster-avoided career. She wasn’t, of course, frightened of being sucked down. Olga Melnik wasn’t the sort of person to sink beneath the first ripples of uncertainties. She just needed a momentarybackwater; time briefly to tread water and examine-apportion and equate-everything swamping over her.

Olga accepted, objectively, that she should have anticipated Charlie Muffin’s challenges; been readier, even, for the suggestion that Vera Bendall’s death might not have been an accident. She shouldn’t have needed the difference in the size of the Russian-recovered bullets to be pointed out to her, either. Nor been unprepared for the demand about the bullet casings, none of which had been found. The reason was obvious from the chaos and panic at the scene of the crime, there for everyone to see and understand from at least five different television films, but she should have offered the explanation instead of having the admission drawn from her. But perhaps her greatest embarrassment, close to positive humiliation, had been having to admit not knowing the whereabouts of any of George Bendall’s personal papers the initial militia search squad-her officers! — had removed from the Hutorskaya Ulitza apartment. She’d heard Vera Bendall’s eavesdropped claim within an hour of the stupid bitch making it and let more than another twenty-four elapse without even asking about it!

She would have got around to it eventually, she reassured herself; not eventually, almost at once. Tomorrow, certainly. How could she have been expected to cover everything, the smallest details, in such a short time! It was easy for the motherfucking Englishman, getting everything handed to him on a plate, not having to supervise an entire investigation and think about each and every political implication.

Those political implications-every implication-were too great properly to encompass now, this soon. But the escalation made it logical for Leonid Zenin to share this first interrogation of George Bendall. But that was all it was, the escalation, not any inferred criticism of her oversights. How could it be? The confrontation-the rock jarringly awkward question after awkward question from the motherfucking Englishman-in front of the fortunately limited audience in the American embassy basement hadn’t been recorded. So there was no way Zenin could know. Would ever know. But she couldn’t be caught out again: shouldn’t have been caught out at all.She’d identified Charlie Muffin for-and as-the danger he was from the very beginning. A mistake recognized is another mistake avoided, she reminded herself, calling to mind the appropriate Russian proverb. She felt firm ground underfoot, no longer jostled by conflicting currents.

She was impatient to begin the interrogation and hoped Zenin wasn’t late, standing close to the window and looking up Gospital’naya Ulitza towards the blue domed church of Saints Peter and Paul, the direction from which she expected him to come. He’d sounded pleased, excited even, during the telephone conversation when he’d told her to wait for him and Olga was curious about the crisis committee meeting. Clearly it had gone better for him than hers had for her.

She almost missed Leonid Zenin when he did appear because she’d been looking for an official car and Zenin was on foot, striding past the small commemoration to Peter the Great’s favorite general, Swiss-born Francois Lefort, who was never to know-and doubtless wouldn’t have liked it if he had-that his was going to be the name given to one of the most infamous prisons in Russian history. Olga decided that the bearded militia commandant looked even more impressive in civilian clothes than he did in uniform and felt a pleasant stir of interest, wondering what the obviously athletic body looked like in neither.

She was well away from the window, to avoid hinting any impatience, when Zenin came urgently into the dusty waiting room, smiling as Olga imagined he smiled during their telephone conversation. Despite the white-coated Nicholai Badim beside him Zenin said, “God, what a place! An incentive never to become ill.”