Brian Freemantle - Bomb Grade

They were coming to him and Silin solicitously arrived well ahead of the arranged time. Not that he intended to be subservient – that would have been quite wrong as well as difficult for him – any more than he expected them to be subservient towards him. They were going to meet and conduct their business as equals. His being there early was simply the politeness of a host.

The two men arrived together, which surprised him, and precisely on time, which didn’t. The handshakes were perfunctory, without names: the namelessness had been their insistence from the beginning, after the initial confirmation of their identities, and Silin thought it theatrical but was quite prepared to go along with the pointless affectation. Both declined Silin’s hospitality, making it another pointless gesture.

The seats made protesting noises when they sat and Silin’s skin itched at once at the thought of who had sat on the lounge chair before him: he didn’t lean back, wanting to minimize his contact with the upholstery as much as possible. The leader of the two, neither of whom appeared discomfited, briefly looked around the functional meeting place and said, ‘This is well chosen.’

‘I don’t want what we’re discussing going beyond this room,’ said Silin. ‘Or beyond us three.’

‘Neither do we.’

‘Everything you promised me is possible?’

‘Guaranteed,’ assured the spokesman.

‘As much as 250 kilos?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘When?’

‘Four months, maximum. We want to achieve more than just a robbery.’

Silin listened without interruption to the proposal, nodding at the awareness of how much it would, incredibly, benefit him. ‘That would not be difficult to achieve between us.’

‘So you could help?’

‘Easily.

‘That’s how it will be done then. Opening up everything to us.’

‘How much money are we talking about?’ came in the second man.

‘For the full 250 kilos, exactly what I guaranteed you in the first place: a total, for you, of $25,000,000 on completion of the sale.’

‘With an initial deposit in Switzerland?’ stressed the first man.

‘You’ll be handed the certified deposit books the day after I get the 250 kilos,’ promised Silin. ‘There’ll be formalities before that: signatory authority forms, passport identification, that sort of thing.’ His promise to them was $8,000,000 and he’d insist upon ten per cent in advance from the purchasers Berlin set up, so there was no financial risk whatsoever. He wished the Commission could have been here, to see how their business should really be conducted, as a business in a sophisticated, calm-voiced way, not screaming around the city in imported stolen cars with machine pistols on the seats beside them and posturing in nightclubs trying to outspend each other.

‘It all seems very satisfactory,’ said the leader of the two.

‘And this will only be the beginning?’ pressed Silin, anxious to get everything properly established.

‘You can think of this as a trial run,’ nodded the man. ‘The way we prove our good faith to each other. What can follow is virtually unlimited.’

He would be unassailable, Silin thought: totally and absolutely unassailable. He’d watch what was done to Sobelov, inflict some of the pain himself perhaps. Laugh at the man when he begged for mercy and hurt him all the more.

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ Marina asked him that night.

‘Of course.’

‘I’m worried.’

‘You’re safe. So am I, now I know where the threat is.’

He cupped her face between both his hands, bringing her forward to kiss him. He was glad she didn’t try to tint the greyness showing through in her hair: he thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever known, although he hadn’t tried to know any other for the twenty years they had been married.

‘Sobelov is an animal,’ she warned.

‘Which is how I’m going to treat him, when it suits me,’ promised Silin.

Only during the subsequent briefings from Johnson did Charlie try fully to dismiss Natalia from his mind. Otherwise, in those first few following days, his mind ran the entire gamut of his totally misconceived (on his part), totally mishandled (on his part) and totally misunderstood (on his part) relationship with Natalia Nikan-drova Fedova.

There was no guilt about deceiving her during their initial encounters. She’d been officially debriefing him after his supposed prison escape – defection for which he had been set up by that Old Bailey court sentence of fourteen years. His deceiving her then had been professional. She’d even accepted it – a professional herself – when the love affair had developed, after his Soviet acceptance. A further deception, Charlie acknowledged, forcing the honesty. Love hadn’t been part of the affair, in the beginning. He’d been lonely and thought there might be an advantage in sleeping with a KGB officer and the ‘sleeping with’ had been good and sometimes better than good. He hadn’t been able to concede love – definitely not allow it to overcome his professionalism – when he’d double-defected back to London. The job required he return and the job came first, before everything and everybody. Nor had he been able to recognize what had happened between them the first time she’d risked personal disaster accompanying an official Russian delegation to London to seek him out, not able to accept it wasn’t a retribution trap for the damage he’d caused his misled KGB champion by leaving Moscow. Her second contact attempt, when she’d traced him with the photograph of their London-conceived baby, had finally proved to him how wrong he’d been. He’d tried, too late and too ineffectually, finally to go to her by returning to Moscow after Gorbachev and then Yeltsin, to keep her suggested rendezvous: by every day and at every hour going to the spot he believed she had identified by the photograph, until he decided he’d misinterpreted that like he’d misinterpreted so much else and that the photograph was her sad and bitter attempt to show how absolutely he had betrayed and abandoned her.

She had every reason to be sad and bitter, to despise and hate him. Having thought so much and for so long about what a fool he’d been, Charlie found it very easy to understand what he regarded as ingrained professionalism would by Natalia be seen as disinterested cowardice.

As the preparation days passed, bringing Moscow nearer, Charlie’s initial euphoria gave way to realism and from realism to depression. Why should he have thought that Natalia would ever want to see him again? It was preposterous conceit to imagine that after five empty years and every rejection she’d even want him to be in the same city or the same country as her! Or to acknowledge or accept him as the father of the daughter he’d never seen and hadn’t known about until the photograph with the four word inscription: Her name is Sasha.

He’d failed Natalia like he’d failed Edith, although the circumstances were entirely different. When he’d fled Moscow he’d fixed for Natalia to be the one to expose his initial defection as the phoney KGB discrediting exercise it had always been. When he’d humiliated, by brief Russian detention, the British and American Directors willing literally to sacrifice him – and run with their $500,000 to add to their shame – he’d thought only of his own retribution, not theirs to follow. It had been Edith who took the assassination bullet intended for him.

In his self-admission of failing them, Charlie wasn’t thinking of physical neglect or abandonment. His failure, to both, was never being able properly to say ‘I love you.’ He’d uttered the words, of course, but automatically and emptily. He’d never told either of them spontaneously. His entire life had been spent living lies and telling lies and being someone he wasn’t until the truth was so rare he didn’t know how to express it or how to show it or, more often than not, even what it was.