Dead Men Living

Cartright had warned of had come about.

Charlie had spent his entire operational life trying always to be as amorphous as the graveside mist and until this appalling, stomach-dropping moment had succeeded. So shocked-bewildered-was he by the abrupt exposure that for perhaps the first time in that operational life Charlie’s mind went completely blank, momentarily refusing to function. He was conscious of Polyakov (“the conniving, manipulative bastard!”) thanking the Canadian and American media for flying in at such short notice and the inconvenience and of being introduced, with Miriam, by name (holy shit, no!) as he was herded toward a table to sit upon a raised dais behind a hedge of microphones. Yuri Vyacheslav Ryabov and Aleksandr Andreevich Kurshin were already seated, waiting. Able at last to focus, Charlie saw translation booths along the left side of the room and that a lot of the waiting journalists-close to thirty, he guessed, as well as two television teams-wore earphones.

It was at that moment, in reality only a hiatus of seconds, that Charlie began to function, to try to assess and calculate: and from whichever and whatever way he considered it, he reached the same conclusion. It was an absolute fuckup. And worsening by the second, steered inexorably toward further and greater disaster by Valentin Polyakov.

The Yakustkaya chief minister had achieved his lifetime’s ambition, gaining an international audience to denounce successive Russian leaders who perpetuated what Stalin had begun by turning an entire country into a penal colony. At last, declared Polyakov, there was going to be the opportunity for the world to be made aware, after half a century, of the crimes against humanity exceeding those of the Holocaust. Six million Jews had perished in that attemptedgenocide. Double that number had been worked to death and put to death in the Siberian gulags. To Charlie’s fidgeted discomfort, Polyakov inferred the two lieutenants (“brave, fearless agents”) had been murdered because they had discovered the secrets of Yakutskaya (“a secret terrible enough to have destroyed war time alliances”).

At this point Polyakov gestured to either side of him, to include Miriam and Charlie. “Now, after so long-too long-two more brave, fearless agents have come to this godforsaken country, to rediscover and expose secrets Russia even now would prefer kept hidden. Now, at last, the world will eventually be told the truth.”

It was a disaster, Charlie recognized. An utterly unparalleled, irrevocable disaster. His cover, always the paramount consideration, was blown. Which did not create the physical, life-threatening danger it once would have, but as bad on every other level. None of which was the most important consideration. His new creed, the doctrine constantly preached, was never, under any circumstances, to become involved in a diplomatic incident. And here he was-they were-by association, by sitting beside a ranting xenophobe, denouncing Russia and by so doing causing not a diplomatic incident but an inevitable, devastating diplomatic sensation. Beyond that-worse than that-even: it was, potentially, personally devastating. This was of recall and dismissal magnitude: the collapse of the house of cards. As things were between them at the moment, he didn’t think Natalia would bring Sasha to London. She’d virtually said so. And it was immaterial whether he was dismissed or resigned from the department. He’d be refused residency permission to remain in Russia.

The immediate barrage of questions, in English, were all directed at Charlie and Miriam, too many and too quick at first to isolate one from the other. Charlie didn’t wait properly to hear, desperate to limit the damage. It was, he insisted, important to stress that it was neither an American nor English investigation. He and his FBI colleague were observers on a joint inquiry being conducted by a Moscow murder squad working with the local militia. To the visible face-hardening from Polyakov, earphoned for the translation from English, Charlie said the Moscow team-to which Polyakov had studiously not referred-was kept from the conference by continuing inquiries. Charlie spoke accepting that his qualifications would be overwhelmed by the carefully prepared drama of the chief minister’sclaims but was not, at that moment, addressing the media. He was talking to whoever later examined the transcript at whatever inquiry there would unquestionably be to decide his future.

There was an audibly shouted question-“Just what were these guys doing, all that time ago?”-directed to Miriam by name and Charlie looked along the table, unaware if she had already fully accepted their entrapment but conscious of her additional discomfort. A lot of the previous night’s swelling had gone and her face wasn’t as purple-red as it had been, but it was still lumped in places-one eye was half closed-and greasy from that morning’s antiseptic balm. She wore absolutely no makeup. She sat apparently trying to shield her eyes from the camera lights, in reality hoping to conceal as much of her face as possible, and two still photographers crouched at the lip of the dais were repeatedly gesturing for her to lower her hands. She still had difficulty in talking, too.

As soon as she began to speak, Charlie recognized that in her anxiety to escape, Miriam Bell was panicking, offering far more than was necessary. She repeated Charlie’s insistence upon jurisdiction and cooperation and babbled on that they hadn’t established a reason for the killings, nor any victim identities, although they had no doubt of nationality. Her disclosure of the method of execution at once prompted a shouted interjection.

“Wasn’t a bullet in the back of the head the favorite killing method of Russian intelligence in Lubyanka?”

“Yes,” agreed Miriam.

“So they were killed by Russian intelligence?”

“We don’t know who they were killed by,” intruded Charlie, still working damage limitation. “That’s what the Russian team is trying to establish. Why there is such excellent international cooperation.”

He held back at a demand to know what specific leads they had, curious for his own part how Miriam would reply, but she said there weren’t any.

“What’s your next move?” shouted a woman from the rear of the room.

“Analyzing the autopsy and forensic evidence,” Charlie came in quickly, anxious to be as vague as possible, but Polyakov added, “And the items found upon the bodies.”

“Which at this moment we don’t intend to make public,” persistedCharlie. Thank Christ he hadn’t discussed what he considered significant. An enterprising journalist could still get a lot from the cigarette case inscription. The thought lodged in his mind. There hadn’t so far been the concentrated questioning he’d feared-no one, for instance, had asked about photographs of bodies perfectly preserved-and he abruptly wondered how of and how far he could manipulate the situation into which he’d been thrust. He would be taking a hell of a risk by trying and if he got caught out it could go catastrophically wrong, but they already had a catastrophe, so there was very little more to lose.

“We have,” he began, “probably one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the Second World War. Two Allied officers. A Russian woman. And a secret that has lain buried for fifty years ….” He had them, Charlie decided. There was scarcely a sound in the room, the coughs muted. Charlie thought faster than he could remember in any previous back-to-the-wall situation, sifting the innocuous from anything that could give the slenderest clue to his real thinking, determined to out-exaggerate Polyakov and spread as many false leads as he could make up on the spot. He acknowledged that it had obviously been a covert mission (“What other reason for it remaining secret when it went wrong?”) and invented the possibility of special German prisoners being incarcerated in special gulags (“in the remotest, most unreachable part of the world”). Hitler had Mussolini snatched from captivity after the Italian dictator’s overthrow. What if, held somewhere in Yakutskaya, there had been a German, possibly several, with the knowledge of a weapon or a development-jet propulsion, of which the Peenemunde rockets had been the forerunner, nuclear fission ahead of the Americans’ Los Alamos development-that would have shortened the war?

Enough, Charlie decided: stop before he became a contender for the Nobel prize for Fantasy. Time to let his still-enraptured audience work up their own embellishments. There was a fresh cacophony of demands from which he picked those most likely to mislead, ignoring those that could have been pertinent. After seeming to prevaricate, he allowed himself to concede his belief that the three victims could have been an advance reconnaissance group and that there could be other victims, in undiscovered graves. He intentionally shifted questions about surviving registers of possible German prisoners to ValentinPolyakov, enjoying the man’s difficulty admitting they had either been lost or intentionally destroyed. Quickly Charlie picked up that there should be some files in British and American intelligence archives, although finding them would undoubtedly be hard and conceivably impossible if the operation was covered by a special, time-restricted security release.

Polyakov made a determined effort to stop Charlie’s takeover and to bring it back to the intended anti- Russian platform by switching the questioning to the local militia, which was a mistake. Yuri Ryabov was too excited by an international spotlight, never managing to complete replies too convoluted for Kurshin to finish for him and in his desperation the homicide chief seemed to agree that the investigation was concentrated as Charlie had suggested and Polyakov hurriedly tried to conclude the conference by repeating an apparent earlier undertaking to escort everyone to the grave site. There was an immediate demand from both television teams for individual