Brian Freemantle - Kings of Many Castles

“Could it have been Trishin: be Trishin?”

Natalia’s mind was in a turmoil, too many unconnected thoughts fluttering in a wind-blown paperchase. “Doing what?”

“Using you … manipulating …?”

“ No! ” Natalia’s mind cleared, the paperchase wind abruptly blowing away the uncertainty. “You didn’t mean using me … manipulating me. You thought it was me! Suspected me ! Imagined I was part of something …!” She was forward in the chair, eyes bulged in outrage.

“No!” frantically denied Charlie, despairing of her psychologytuned intuition. “I’m frightened you’ve been used …”

“I have, haven’t I Charlie? Used for such a very long time!”

“Stop it, Natalia!” he shouted. “Stop this going wrong … getting any worse. I can help … there’s a way …”

She jerked up but having done so didn’t know what to do, thrusting forward but then coming back, to stand over him to stare down contemptuously. “Sasha is staying with Marina’s family because I asked if she could. I didn’t want her to be here tonight. To see. I’d even changed my mind. Was going to try to forget whatever you did with that woman because it could have been a mistake … something you didn’t think about. But you don’t do anything without thinking about it, do you, you bastard! You’re even ready to think I’d cheat on you : be prepared to mislead your fucking precious professionalism …”

“Stop it!” Charlie shouted again. “This is stupid … shouldn’t be happening …”

“I’m not part of anything … a conspiracy or a cover up or whateverelse it is your contorted, convoluted mind imagines. You want to know what I’m guilty of! I’m guilty of believing that you could change and love me and trust me and dear God, wasn’t that a mistake! You did it very well, Charlie. You got a posting here and you realized how useful I’d be and you managed to make it work for all this time …”

She was hysterical, beyond immediate reason. “Sit down. Please sit down and listen to me, Natalia. You’re wrong. All the way wrong. Sit down and listen to me: listen to what I have to say. What has to be said.”

“I’m leaving, Charlie,” announced Natalia, shaking her head as she walked away. “It’s over. Should never have begun.” She emerged at once from the bedroom with a case in either hand.

“I’m asking you not to leave.” Charlie was standing, his hands out.

“You should learn to trust someone sometime, Charlie. But you never will.”

“Where are you going?”

“An hotel, initially.”

“Which one?”

“Don’t become a nuisance.”

“What about Sasha?”

“What about her?”

“What are you going to tell her?”

“How about the father who didn’t want to see her for the first three years she was born had to go away again?”

“That’s not fair. Or true.”

“Let’s not get into a discussion about fairness or truth.”

“I love you!” Charlie called after her.

Natalia quietly closed the door behind herself.

Charlie waited at the British embassy entrance to authorize John Kayley’s admission. The American said: “You look rough. Bad night?”

“Kind of,” said Charlie. Wallowing in a lake of self-pity and Islay malt hadn’t been the best idea. “You mind passing on the cigars for a while?”

“Not if you tell me what I’m here for.”

“Pictures and moving lips.”

Kayley followed the video struggle between Bendall and Vladimir Sakov with the lip-read transcript before him and did the same directly afterwards with the courtroom killing but on this showing Charlie freeze-framed the tattoo comparison between the NTV cameraman and the FBI-collected photograph of Vasili Isakov. Charlie said, “Bendall and Davidov have the same tattoos in the same place. Their bodies are at the Burdenko mortuary but the hospital wants to get rid of them.”

“We need photographs.”

“London’s taken responsibility for Bendall’s body. We might be able to bluff the hospital about Davidov but at the moment the priority is with the living more than the dead, before he gets dead.”

“You’ve done good, Charlie. Damned good. You worked it out to the very end already?”

“Not yet,” Charlie admitted. “But I think I know how to.” Would Natalia ever learn what he’d done, to keep her safe? He already had the list of Moscow hotels to call later, to find out where she was. “How’s this measure for size?”

Once, as Charlie talked, Kayley’s hand strayed to his cigars but the American remembered in time, smiling apologetically. When Charlie finished Kayley said, “We swing a trick like this, I’m permanently in the Bureau’s Hall of Fame and you’re a to-die-for friend for life. But we’ll never get it to work.”

“That mean you don’t want to give it a try?”

“Sure as hell no! But we’ll only get one hit.”

“You think Washington will go for it?”

“The president’s wife was shot, for Christ’s sake! By a bullet meant for him! And you ask if they’ll go for it!”

“You going to ask them, first?”

Kayley snorted the rejection. “It doesn’t work, my tit’s in the ringer for failing. If it does work, I’ll announce it and wait for the presidential congratulations.”

“Officially I’m on watch and listen, no active participation.”

“It’s my call, anyway.”

“And there’s no jurisdiction.”

“Now you’re trying to talk me out of it!”

“Just getting the rules of engagement clear between us,” insisted Charlie. “Like you said, we only get one hit. So where?”

“The station says he’s off sick. I called without saying who I was.”

“Let’s hope he’s not too sick.”

Vladimir Petrovich Sakov didn’t sound too sick but there wasn’t the belligerence there had been in the mess room of the NTV studios. The muffled demand to identify themselves was shouted through the chipped door of the apartment in a crumbling block on Kazakova Ulitza gradually being shaken off its sand-ballasted foundations by the perpetual shuddering traffic of the inner peripherique behind and the reverberating railway line in front. When they said who they were the voice came back stronger. “Fuck off!”

“Relieved it’s us?” Kayley shouted back.

There was no reply.

“We know, Vladimir Petrovich,” said Charlie. “We’ve got all the proof we need, too. We even know about the tattoos.”

Kayley gently pushed Charlie out of the direct firing line through the door, pulling himself to the opposite side. The American said loudly, “You worried? I’d be, if I were you. I’d be shit scared.”

There was still no response from inside.

“I just realized something,” said Charlie. “This railway line is the one on which Vasili Isakov was murdered, further up at Timiryazev, isn’t it? You think they might try that again?”

“Why not?” said Kayley, responding to Charlie’s nodded invitation. “You got away with it well enough last time, didn’t you Vladimir?”

“What’s it like, knowing you’re going to die and that there’s nothing you can do about it?” asked Charlie. “You really must be shit scared.”

“You want your life saved, you open the door, Vlad old buddy,” advised the American. “We’re your only chance, so stop being an asshole.”

The shuffling was audible on the other side.

“We’re waiting,” said Charlie.

“But not for much longer,” added Kayley.

There was the grating of more than one lock being released aheadof a longer clattering sound. Vladimir Sakov put himself to one side, for a warning view of several meters along the outside corridor, head-nodding them into the room. The long sleeves of the wellpressed blue woollen shirt were buttoned, hiding the body markings, and the jeans were much cleaner than those at his meeting with Charlie at the TV station. The apartment was surprisingly neat and well furnished, in contrast to the outside neglect and there were photographs-one of instant interest was of a much slimmer, younger Sakov in army uniform-but Charlie didn’t get the impression of permanence. The impression he did get was of a very different man from the gut-rot swigging slob of the TV mess room.