Brian Freemantle - Kings of Many Castles

“What about the practical, on-the-ground operation?” asked Wendall North.

“There isn’t one,” dismissed Kayley. “The Russians have withdrawn from our combined incident room. Switched the timing of an exhumation that might be important, so I wasn’t able to be there. It’s the autopsy that’s important and I’ve no way now of getting that …” He hesitated, wanting to build his self-protecting barricade as strong as he could. “We were told, at the Foreign Ministry, that we wouldn’t in future be allowed any access whatsoever to Bendall. Effectively, we’ve been closed down.”

“Jesus!” said Anandale, stretching the word in his exasperation.

“We didn’t do it …” started Wendall North.

It was a rhetorical remark but Kayley’s day had begun facing Scamell’s suspicion. The dishevelled man said, “Can we get this straight, the first and last time! We-did-not-drug-the-goddamned-man!”

“Appreciate you making that so clear to us,” continued the chief of staff. “So who did?”

Kayley shook his head, discomfited by his over-reaction. “God only knows!”

“What about the British?” persisted North.

Kayley shook his head again. “Too long an interval, from the time they saw him.”

“Which only leaves the Russians,” isolated Smith, desperate to make some sort of recovery. “How about it being a set-up? Injecting the guy and pointing the finger at us, to break up the cooperation?”

“What’s the point of their going to all the effort?” demanded Scamell.

“Resentment, at our leadership,” answered Smith.

Everyone waited for someone else to make the point. It was Anandale who did. “We made a pretty good job of screwing that up for ourselves.” The president let the repeated criticism settle before he said, “OK, what can we do to restore the situation?”

“It’ll need a substantial gesture,” advised the secretary of state. “Something like getting the treaty back on track.”

“I agree,” said the ambassador. “Diplomatically we’re looking pretty bad here. I can’t remember so bad.”

“I don’t want to go that route,” rejected the president. “OK, we’ve got to play pull-back. But as it wasn’t us and it couldn’t have been the British, the Russians did it themselves and are using it to force us into treaty concessions. I’m not going to do that.”

“That’s my only idea,” said the secretary of state.

“What about my talking to Okulov direct?” suggested Anandale.

“That’s the one thing I don’t think you should do, get directly involved,” warned Scamell. “I think you’ve got to remain above the actual recrimination.”

“So do I,” said Wendall North, at once.

“I want to get the damned thing back on course. Find the son-of-a-bitch who did what he did to Ruth,” insisted Anandale.

“It’s got to be right, first time,” said Scamell. “Thought out, from every which way.”

“So let’s do just that,” agreed Anandale. “Let’s you and I think about it from every which way over the next hour or two, Jamie. Call me at four, your time. I want a recovery idea by then.”

Olga Melnick pushed herself back in her chair, waiting for Zenin’s lead. She didn’t feel dependent; inadequate. The feeling was of being comfortable, able for the first time to rely on someone. She wasn’t ready yet to start thinking of love, because she wasn’t sure she knew how to recognize the emotion, but it was something she had to confront soon.

The militia commandant said, “There’s just no way of telling how big this conspiracy is, is there?”

“It doesn’t look like it,” she agreed. She picked up the autopsy report on the exhumed remains of Vasili Isakov. “For this much pentobarbitone still to be tissue traceable in the body he would at least have been too deeply unconscious to have felt anything when the train hit him.”

“I read the opinion,” reminded Zenin. “He couldn’t have been forced to take it all orally. It would have been injected. Probably mixed with alcohol, too.”

“And that couldn’t have been the Americans!” said Olga.

“So we’re back to the FSB.” Now Zenin took up and let drop the official security log of everyone admitted to George Bendall’s ward. It lay among the other reports on the table between them in Zenin’s top floor Moscow Militia headquarter office, a starkly functional, bakelite-tiled Brezhnev era memorial to personal, bribebolstering aggrandisement and boxed awfulness. There were already cracks fissuring from the dried-out, water-and-dust glued bricks of the outer rooms into the man’s inner suite in one corner of which the floor was already too uneven to support anything heavier than a triangular stand for Zenin’s exchanged mementoes-mostly unhung plaques-of foreign police visits. “So how did they do it! Not Isakov, on the level crossing. They could have managed that a dozendifferent ways, particularly if he had been drinking the night it happened and was already incapably drunk. I mean at Burdenko. I’ve personally questioned every squad leader: each one is adamant no one who isn’t recorded on that log entered Bendall’s room. And apart from the British, us and the Americans, it’s just doctors and nurses.”

“One of whom has to be an FSB plant,” declared Olga.

“Obviously,” agreed Zenin. “I want every member of the hospital staff on that list investigated, until we find out who it is.”

“I’ll personally organize it,” Olga promised. She hesitated, unsure whether to make the suggestion, remembering Zenin’s annoyance at what he considered his being overlooked. Their relationship allowed her to do it, she decided. “Don’t you think we should pass this on to the presidential commission?”

“It’s negative, at the moment,” said Zenin. There was no irritation in his voice.

“There’ll be a lot of FSB people altogether in one place at the same time, people who could be questioned to shorten the time it’ll take us to find the FSB operative at the hospital; if, indeed, we ever do find who it is.”

“That’s a constructive point,” agreed Zenin. “We’ll pass it on, ahead of my seeing Natalia Fedova at our next group assessment.” He tapped the third folder on the table, the finally arrived and complete military medical record on George Bendall, listed however as Georgi Gugin. “There’s nothing constructive about this. Liver enlargement, through excessive drinking. A stomach ulcer, probably from the same cause …”

“ … But no psychiatric evaluation,” broke in Olga.

Zenin wearily shook his head. “He might have been selected as a sharpshooter but he was still only an ordinary soldier, like one of the twenty million sacrificed during the Great Patriotic War. Which is what men like George Bendall are. Sacrifices, to be offered up whenever the need arises. There’s no concern about their mental health; the less they can think-rationalize-the better.”

“That’s exactly what George Bendall is, isn’t it!” seized Olga. “A sacrifice, selected when a need arose.”

“He’s all we’ve probably got,” said Zenin. “My fear is that we’renot going to be able to get beyond him, to discover the rest, to understand the true story.”

Olga was surprised at the unexpected depression. “We’re making progress.”

“No we’re not, Olga Ivanova!” refused the man. “We’re being directed further and further into a maze. And I don’t know how to avoid our going deeper into it or how to get out, from where we are now.”

Reluctantly-for the first time making herself face the total reality of it-Olga acknowledged that Zenin was right. “We can’t let it happen. Fail, I mean.”

“What’s the way to stop it happening?”