Brian Freemantle: Dead Men Living

“Mason surprised me.”

“Bloody man. I actually think he believes he was a hero who didn’t do any harm and worked out the deception all by himself. I obviously needed to find out precisely what Muffin knew before having the damned man fired or disposed of, but Mason insisted, without any warning, on talking like he did to impress people who didn’t know the full story and didn’t need to. If he’d left it to me, everything would have been all right. He’s only himself to blame for the humiliation in front of the cabinet secretary and the head of SIS.”

“I reread Dunne’s interrogation transcript. He was full of self-justification, too. Managed to make his identification of Mason a patriotic act. You didn’t know about the heritage art Mason had?”

Boyce shook his head. “I should have reread Mason’s debriefing, as well, instead of relying on the precis from my predecessor. It’s there. The Russians targeted Mason and Dunne months before Berlin. Put Raisa Belous beside Mason in Belgium. He was using Norrington’s expertise to treasure-spot for himself even then, although Norrington didn’t know it, of course. Mason was a veritable magpie and Raisa was busy recording everything he stole. He was a goldengoose waiting to be plucked and the Russians recognized it. That would have been the original blackmail, of course: why they couldn’t go to the military authorities after Yakutsk. Never really understood why the Russians went to all that trouble: truss them both up completely, I suppose.”

“We subjected Dunne to a polygraph,” disclosed Peters. “He said the Russians didn’t think their art-thieving was a strong enough pressure-that murder was better and knowing the choice he and Mason would make with a gun to their heads. The art-thieving was enough to keep them from going to their own authorities when they got back to Berlin.”

“Makes some sort of sense, I suppose,” said Boyce.

“Larisa got to Dunne’s looting investigation squad in Poland,” continued Peters. “Ironic that’s where Raisa’s husband died. Wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t involved in some way, although the question wasn’t put to Dunne. Belous and Larisa would have known each other from Tsarskoe Selo, after all. Larisa really did put herself in the way of Dunne’s first bullet, incidentally: they’d had an affair going since Poland. In his statement Dunne seemed more upset by that than being forced to shoot Timpson.”

Boyce shrugged. “Dunne and Mason were real bastards, weren’t they? But useful, in the long run.”

“Wonder where Larisa’s buried,” said Peters.

“God knows; we never will,” said Boyce. “Damned clever of the Russians to have used their Trophy Squads like they did. Already to be looking that far ahead, well beyond the ending of the war. And putting Larisa in Gulag 98, trying to trick Hitler’s bunker squad into disclosing all they knew. It was probably down to Larisa that the Russians still have Hitler’s will today.”

“To get our hands on that really would be a treasure,” said Peters. “But I’m not surprised how far ahead Stalin and Beria were thinking. That’s what Stalin was doing at Yalta and Potsdam, carving up Europe for himself.”

“All very clever,” mused Boyce.

“Muffin really did turn out to be a nuisance,” said Peters. “It was a bad mistake not eliminating him.”

“Not only chopped Mason up into little pieces but coated himself and his department in Teflon. Can’t do anything to any of them now.Too many people know after that damned confrontation.”

“Who’s going to be your scapegoat?”

“Not sure we need one at the moment. The MI6 man in Moscow made a fool of himself, so he’s available. I’ll wait to see which way the media hysteria goes.”

“Muffin back in Moscow?”

Boyce nodded. “Your woman?”

“Spain. It’s only a temporary respite. We’ll transfer her from the foreign division after the normal two-year tour there. Bury her in a home station somewhere like Montana or North Dakota.”

“Bit of a waste, for someone so clever.”

“That’s not the point,” reminded the American. “She was impertinent.”

“Of course not,” apologized Boyce.

“There we are, then!” said Peters, in finality. “All’s well that ends well, as long as the bumps in between don’t derail anything.”

“The club special today is steak and kidney pudding.”

“Tradition!” said Peters. “Excellent.”

Charlie and Natalia sat side by side, watching George Timpson being buried as an unknown hero in Arlington. There was a rifle volley over the grave and the poignant Last Post and the president talked of America’s great and good, and of the hostilities of the past becoming the hope for the future. At one stage he choked to a halt and wiped what appeared to be a tear from his left eye. His rating was to climb five points by the end of the week.

Charlie sighed and said, “That’s it. All over.”

“Until the next time.”

“There’ll never be another one like this.”

“I couldn’t stand it if there were.”

He reached out for her hand and Natalia let him take it. “My internal problems are over, your internal problems are over. Like Sasha’s storybook says, we can live together happily ever after.”

“There were some changes in the Duma while you were in England,” announced Natalia.

He looked at her, unspeaking.

“Viktor Romanovich Viskov got elected deputy of the Communist faction. I think I should still keep the Leninskaya apartment.”