6
Charlie Muffin was on his first paper airplane of the day-a new prototype, with a separate tail section-when the dust-covered telephone rang and Sir Rupert Dean announced, “You’ll get everything on paper, of course. But I need you to understand a lot of things that aren’t written. The most important is that the future of the department-and your posting to Moscow-depends on your getting everything right.”
Charlie had never wasted time over personal disappointments-apart from the death of his first wife, Edith, which would always be a personal disaster for which he’d never forgive himself-but there was a lasting surge of regret as he listened to the director-general. Sadness came close behind. And then-surprising himself-sympathy. Natalia hadn’t been intentionally perverse, hadn’t tried, in some way, to trick or ridicule him. Maybe she’d even thought the assignment wouldn’t be given to him, although he couldn’t really accept that, convenient though it would have been.
Natalia was making a mess of it. Of everything. Of their being together-living together-and by trying to keep separate their professional lives and by not being able to trust him (for which he couldn’t blame her) and by trying to do everything her way, wrongly, was endangering all that they hoped to exist between them.
Which was not the immediate consideration: the immediate consideration was his need totally to concentrate and understand what he was being told.
“Every other agency is involved?” he demanded, determined against the slightest misunderstanding.
“Every other agency has been asked to search their archives: contributewhatever they can,” replied Dean, equally pedantic. “The investigation is ours.”
“Which you see as a test?”
“We’re vulnerable: everyone snapping at our heels. We’ve got to answer all the questions, find out who he was and what he was doing there. We do that-
“And if I don’t?”
“Then that’s what it could become: a battle for survival. At best we could become a branch of some other agency.”
“What about my remaining here in Moscow?”
There was a pause from the London end. “There are arguments being put up against the posting. They’d be hard to oppose.”
Gerald fucking Williams, guessed Charlie. Why did the parsimonious bugger take as a personal insult Charlie’s special interpretation of an expense account? It wasn’t as if it was Williams’s money. Perhaps, thought Charlie, he should have considered the early challenges, too long ago now to remember, as more than the game he chose them to make it, virtually challenging the man to catch him out. Bluntly he said, “I fail to solve it, I get withdrawn? My role-my reason for being in Moscow-won’t exist anymore?”
“It would certainly come up for very hard discussion.”
“From what you said, these killings happened fifty years ago!” Charlie pointed out.
“I know,” accepted Dean.
“And no one’s acknowledging our victims belonged to their department?”
“They’ve only been checking for a few hours, but so far, no.”
There was a further silence from London. “The edict from Whitehall-and Downing Street-is that there mustn’t be any embarrassment, no matter how long ago it happened. Whatever
“Which means they don’t
“That’s why I’m calling you. I do believe we’ll stand or fall bythis. You’ve personally got every support it’s possible for me to offer. I wish there were more. Better. And I know what I’m asking.”
Charlie wished he did. Slipping back on to yesteryear wordage, Charlie said, “Who’s my control?”
“You deal with me, direct, at all times,” stipulated the director-general. “But let’s stay with that. Control. Don’t you even think of trying or doing anything without discussing it with me first. One mistake-one miscalculation-is all it’s going to take.”
This time it was Charlie who didn’t speak at once. Eventually he said, “Am I expected to work with SIS and the military attache here? Let them know everything I’m doing?”
“Not until you’ve talked whatever it is through with me first.”
“Which is what they’re being told, probably right now.”
“Probably,” accepted Dean again.
“You know it’s hopeless before I start?”
“Close to being hopeless,” allowed the older man.
“There’s not a lot left to say, is there?”
“Everything we’ve got from the Russian Foreign Ministry is being faxed back right away. And don’t forget my personal support.”
There wasn’t any point in further protests or arguments. “A British officer-and an American-dead for fifty years without anyone wondering what happened to them! And a woman, too! How the hell can you explain that?”
“I can’t,” conceded Sir Rupert Dean. “That’s what you’ve got to do.”
Natalia recognized she was the most exposed of them all: the one in the greatest danger. Although there was the outward, cosmetic appearance of personal and authoritative involvement, the presidential emissary and the deputy ministers all had their blame-ready intermediaries, after whom there was the final buffer of Natalia Nikandrova herself. It was she who provably had to select the Russian investigatory team and just as provably had to propose the precise moment to invite Washington and London to an international game of musical chairs and after that monitor from a distance of three thousand miles its progress in a time-lost republic where everyone would be trying to pull the safe seats away from everyone else at every discordant note. With one of its chair-snatching participants beingCharlie Muffin, whose feet were always too painful for any sort of musical dance.
It was a maze from which she desperately needed guidance and Charlie was the obvious person to give it. But if she did seek his guidance, this early, she’d have to tell him why Viskov distrusted her and she didn’t want any reminders of Alexei Popov.
She’d grossly, stupidly overreacted the previous night to Irena being at the apartment, which had nothing at all to do with Charlie but everything to do with other fears-memories-she didn’t want to share with him, either. She was going to have to share a lot of other things, though. He’d hear today. Be told by London of the Yakutsk murders and realize she could have warned him. But hadn’t. Maybe, despite her aching loneliness and aching hope for her personal life at last to change, it would have been better if Charlie hadn’t come back to Moscow at all.
Natalia physically shook herself, as if sloughing off her personal reflections.
She had left Charlie in bed to get to the Interior Ministry before eight, determined to preempt Viskov or Travin-or both-from imposing a squad of their choosing and their loyalty upon the investigation. She worked, wearily resigned to the fact that she would be judged from whomever she assigned and that she couldn’t afford the slightest miscalculation. And to miscalculate the honesty and loyalty of the Moscow militia, in which neither existed, was the easiest possible mistake to make.
It was ironic-and she hoped to her advantage-that the investigation would be in Yakutsk and not here in Moscow, where virtually the entire militia would have been initially distracted by the automatic requirement for financial reward for doing-or not doing, depending upon the paymaster-a job they were paid supposedly to do anyway. The disadvantage was that, denied the usual bribery by both the obvious age of the crime and the inevitable hostility from the indigenous Yakutsk and the gulag descendants, finding anyone without an impossible- to-leave workload could be more difficult than solving three fifty-year-old murders themselves. For the militia homicide detective she went for comparative youth, seeking out the most recently promoted, someone, she hoped, only yet ankle-deep in thecorruption swamp and, she hoped, even more, still anxious to prove his ability.
It took Natalia five interviews to reach Colonel Vadim Leonidovich Lestov. She was immediately encouraged
