Brian Freemantle - Kings of Many Castles

Olga smiled at his automatically talking in the plural, of both of them. “I think we already have.”

“You got it, Charlie!” agreed Anne, excitedly. “An absolute defense to murder! An expert witness, even.”

“I’d still prefer him to be British,” said Charlie. He was distracted by the Isakov file. Like so many other unresolved impressions-frustrations-there was something in it demanding to be seen. But like all the others, he couldn’t see it!

“I’ve filed the diplomatic protest. So’s Noskov, legally.” Anne was disappointed-curious even-at how subdued Charlie was.

“We’re still short of too much else.” He was glad he’d printed off the Isakov material to bring back to the embassy, to go over it further.

“There could be the breakthrough with Bendall if you continue teasing him along as well as you did today. And that could be as early as tomorrow.”

Her ambition was making her over-confidence-or overexpectant-Charlie decided. “Then all our problems will be over. Or just beginning.”

“Misery guts!”

“Realist,” he corrected.

Anne put into its designated order the material Charlie carried into her office thirty minutes earlier and gestured vaguely in the direction of the embassy’s residential apartment block. “The weary end to a long day. You fancy a Happy Hour drink?”

Charlie couldn’t at that moment imagine anything he would have enjoyed more. “No.”

“OK.” Anne showed no offense, no anger at a rebuff, which Charlie hadn’t intended it to be.

That night Natalia came to him in bed and the lovemaking was as uninhibited and passionate as he could ever remember, even from their first, excited, discovery days. Afterwards Natalia said, “I’m sorry, Charlie: sorry for too long being such a shit.”

“We’ve both been shits,” said Charlie and at last felt the overdue and searing guilt.

Viktor Ivanovich Karelin was the first intelligence chairman Natalia had ever personally met but the apparent diffidence was so alien to the lower hierarchy with whom she was familiar that she was vaguely disconcerted by it. Which, she acknowledged, she was perhaps supposed to be, although she didn’t get the impression there was any affectation about the self-effacing demeanour. Another interpretation could be that Karelin was so sure of himself and the power he represented that he didn’t feel the need to posture and intimidate.

“Thank you for returning to us so quickly,” greeted Natalia. What would the man have managed to achieve in thirty-six hours compared to what their president-endorsed demand to the Defense Ministry had generated in less than twelve, five of those with the previous night intervening? It would be important for her-the tribunal-not to appear to try to trap the man.

“You stressed the urgency,” reminded Karelin.

“We’re indeed anxious to hear what you have to tell us,” said Filitov, stilted in his eagerness to get himself on the ever-kept record.

“There has clearly been considerable, malicious interference-possibly destruction-of a substantial proportion of archival material concerning Peter Bendall and his family,” admitted Karelin, at once. “I have instituted an enquiry, the results of which I will make fully available to this commission when it is completed.”

Honesty or yet further prevarication? She was the trained interrogator, Natalia reminded herself. “This malicious interference? Is it indiscriminate, consistent with the haphazard pilfering by disgruntled former personnel, about which we talked earlier? Or is there a pattern?”

A smile wisped across Karelin’s face. “There is unquestionably a pattern.”

Had the smile been admiration or something else? Having been specific Natalia intentionally generalized. “Help us with that.”

“No material whatsoever remains for what would have been the last five years of Peter Bendall’s life.”

“And the son?”

“Nothing.”

“Which there would-should-have been?”

“Unquestionably.” The woman, with her KGB background, was the only one who might be difficult. The lawyer and the politician were spreading their bets.

“So the interference has been calculated, carried out for a reason?”

“Obviously,” agreed the FSB chairman.

“What reason?” demanded Yuri Trishin.

Karelin frowned. “That’s what I’ve set up an internal enquiry to find out.” The man looked fleetingly across the echoing Kremlin room towards the record-keeping secretariat. “There is clearly an attempt being made to discredit the organization I head by apparently implicating it in the assassination of the president. The FSB was, obviously, in no way involved. Its only culpability is a serious lapse of internal security, which has already been corrected as well as those responsible being punished.”

The fulcrum upon which Natalia’s early employment in the KGB had been balanced was her being able to judge whether the person she was interviewing was lying or being truthful. Karelin had conceded what they already knew. And had established internal enquiries, which was precisely what her outside commission had been created to prevent. Despite which Natalia’s professional assessment was that the FSB chairman was telling the truth. Continuing to call upon her previous association and awareness of Russian intelligence working, Natalia said, “Peter Bendall’s records would not have been concentrated. Archives would have been cross-referenced with Registry. While he was alive, even though his practical use might have become minimal, there would have been a current file maintained upon him?”

The shadowy smile came and went again. “It’s the very fact thatthe removal has been from several different centers that confirms a pattern.”

“Nothing whatsoever beyond that which has already been made available has survived?” persisted Natalia.

Karelin had his tidbit ready. “I have obtained from Registry the identities of four of Peter Bendall’s Control officers, one of whom might, calculated from the son’s age, have been the man who might have corrected George Bendall in his teens and obtained psychiatric help for him.”

“The KGB would have had a copy of that treatment,” insisted Natalia.

“I’ve checked. There is no copy,” said the man.

There was a shift from the men either side of her but Natalia remained unmoving, curious at how Karelin was providing his information. He was unarguably cooperating but at his own careful pace, which she realized she was making easy for him. The occasional smiles were more likely to be self-satisfaction-just tinged with gratitude-at how he was manipulating her questioning than admiration of her technique. It would be as wrong too obviously to challenge the man as it would not to make him aware, as subtly as possible, that she recognized his skill. “I’d like to think that he particularly was available to help us. But I don’t imagine that any of them are.”

“They’re all dead,” the FSB chairman confirmed. She was very good, to have anticipated that: a loss to the service, in fact.

“How?”

Karelin, in his complete self-confidence, decided to test the woman. “The first, who took Peter Bendall over upon his arrival in 1972, died of cancer in 1975. His successor had a stroke, in 1981. The Control most likely to have put George Bendall back in line-briefly at least-was electrocuted by faulty wiring in his apartment and the fourth committed suicide by hanging himself. He was one of the officers made redundant during the restructuring of the old service.”

“A disgruntled officer!” seized Filitov, overanxiously.

“Beyond which we’ve already extended the discussion,” dismissedNatalia. Karelin hadn’t finished but wanted prompting, she guessed. “You didn’t give dates, for the last two deaths?”