“If it all does go wrong-and you’re dumped because of it-it’ll all be over for us here, won’t it?”
“But it wouldn’t be the end of the World,” qualified Charlie.
“No,” agreed Natalia. “It would just seem like it.”
“It’s only been days!” protested Charlie, urgently. The telephone had been ringing as he’d entered his office that morning. Afternoon in Yakutsk, he calculated.
“I have something about Gulag 98,” said Novikov.
“I could arrange for you to come to Moscow by yourself.” Even that would be a risk, Charlie accepted.
“Only with Marina and the boys. And with the residency permits.”
“I’m doing everything I can,” said Charlie.
“Make it soon.”
“As soon as I can.”
21
The release of the Russian victim’s photograph caused a continuing series of sensations far greater than Charlie had anticipated, although it made perfect something else he had in mind. He hadn’t really expected an identification, either, which was the ultimate phenomenon.
The predictable excitement, from the existing press hysteria, was the publication itself. Despite the written and verbal insistences that all three bodies had been preserved in their ice grave, the first visual proof of just how perfect that preservation had been caused shock not just in Moscow but throughout the West. The
It also brought about an unremitting media clamor for photographs of the British and American lieutenants as well as for Charlie and Miriam Bell publicly to be again made available for interviews. The FBI’s inept reason for refusing-that photographic publication or a press conference could possibly interfere with ongoing inquiries-brought an even greater clamor to know what those inquiries were and within twenty-four hours newspapers in America and Europe were speculating with ironic accuracy at a cover-up.
Encouraged by the American president’s already declared insistence that the American was a hero to be given a hero’s burial, the free-reined theorizing spiraled into total fantasy, up to and including-disregarding both the history of the time and the fact that Yakutsk is three thousand miles from Moscow-that it had been a mission to assassinate Stalin to end communism, prevent the division of Europe and stop the Cold War before it began. Germany and France-and Charlie-preferred the suggestion that it had been a joint operation to rescue Princess Anastasia from imprisonment in one of the Yakutskaya gulags after escaping the Ekaterinburg slaughter of the Imperial Russianfamily in April 1918. Claimed former gulag inmates recounted stories of a beautiful woman with black hair to her waist, living in moonscaped isolation in her own crenellated, barbed-wire-enclosed dacha guarded by watch towers and an elite Cossack troop.
Brighton Beach, on New Jersey’s Atlantic coast, is a ghetto of Russian emigres, although demographically the majority are Ukrainian by birth or ancestry. They also represent the broad spectrum of Russian mafia in the United States. It was from the Beach-the waterfront avenue itself-that the first claim came from a man insisting the victim was his mother’s sister, with whom they’d lost contact after leaving her the custodian of priceless heirlooms, including a selection of icons for which he now sought reward or compensation from the Russian government. The virtually immediate FBI location of a three-page rap sheet for fraud, criminal deception and larceny didn’t prevent a day of headlines in the nearby New York newspapers.
There were three similar deception attempts in Moscow, two of which drew heavily upon the Anastasia invention, the third stretching it with the assertion that the victim was the secret daughter of Rasputin. Each demanded money, always in dollars, for their stories and family photographs, all of which were faded and blurred and none anything like the dead woman even before scientific examination.
Charlie made his own very personal contribution to the media frenzy on the third day, deciding it might be physically dangerous to delay any longer, although he hadn’t again picked up Henry Packer despite walking far more than he normally did and always going through a series of cut-out detours to get back to Lesnaya, pointless though that belated caution might be.
On the morning of that third day he got to his office early, wanting Packer still to be at the National Hotel. The series of quickly dialed and even more quickly disconnected telephone calls only took thirty minutes and Packer was actually breakfasting in the hotel dining room when the anonymously alerted Moscow-based international press corps descended, en masse.
Such was Packer’s reaction and the momentum of the Yakutsk mystery so self-perpetuating that the entire- and continuing-confrontation ran on television almost in its entirety during the course of the day and what was cut was easily filled in from the blazonednewspaper headlines and Charlie’s various conversations with Miriam and Natalia.
The dining room corner into which Packer had protectively placed himself became instead a trap from which he couldn’t escape through the solid pack of journalists and cameras, and most of the television footage actually showed him wide eyed, like an animal in a snare.
Charlie’s calls had identified Packer as an American State Department official on a secret mission to Moscow personally to explain to the Russian president the mystery of Yakutsk. Packer visibly cowered under the welter of questions, at first doing nothing but shake his head. When he did speak-in a surprisingly high-pitched New England voice-he appeared to confirm the suggestion. In his panic he babbled about speaking with Washington, too late remembering his pipeline engineer cover, which fell apart when he said he couldn’t remember the Russian company he’d come to Moscow to see. When his panic worsened, he tried to force his way through the wall of people confronting him and when they wouldn’t move lashed out, physically trying to fight his way through. At first that was panicked, but when he was shoved in return he openly tried to catch one thrusting reporter with an upward blow to the chin with the heel of his hand, which, if it had connected-which it didn’t, because of the madhouse scene-would have snapped the man’s neck. He chopped and jabbed several more times, very professionally, but again because of the jostling just one cameraman was hurt, a rib broken, because the knuckled punch again missed the fatal heart spot.
At least six reporters and cameramen went down with Packer when he fell, struggling, and he was gouging his way out of the melee when the militia arrived. At the police station, according to newspapers and later confirmed by Miriam, Packer first claimed diplomatic immunity, which immediately involved the embassy, and then claimed he was the victim of assault. Miriam told Charlie it took less than an hour for the State Department in Washington to disclaim any knowledge of the man and insist he in no way qualified for any immunity. It was midafternoon, according to Natalia, before Vadim Lestov got to Militia Post 23 to question Packer about Yakutsk. Fully recovered, the man insisted he knew nothing whatsoever about the television and newspaper stories running by then, nor why theyshould have imagined he did. Just as doggedly he maintained he’d come speculatively to Moscow as a pipeline engineer but had not yet been able to make contact with any oil exploration companies. He now demanded to leave the country immediately.
The colonel in charge of Militia Post 23 consulted with the Foreign Ministry after a junior counselor from the American embassy talked of an irritating diplomatic incident and Packer’s visa was revoked. Packer’s luggage being collected from the National Hotel by a second counselor, who also paid the man’s bill, would have been clue enough for the waiting press pack, even without the telephone calls from Militia Post 23 police on the media payroll. Packer arrived at Sheremet’yevo airport in an embassy car to another press ambush, which provided more footage of Packer fleeing across the concourse, knocking two people over as he ran.
It was when Charlie was assuring Miriam that evening he had no idea how the press had discovered Packer’s presence-reminding her she’d told him the man had returned with Kenton Peters-that he learned of Washington’s disavowal: “The goddamned embassy’s in an uproar: the ambassador didn’t know what to do.” Charlie guessed it had been a badly conceived, independent CIA operation, which was the explanation he later put to Natalia. When he put the suggestion to Sir Rupert Dean, the director-general said, “You really think so?”
“You saw the way he fought on television.”
