checked, hoping someone there might have known Raisa Belous or Larisa Krotkov.” He shook his head. “No one did, although some of the stuff rescued from St. Petersburg was stored there until the end of the war.”
“And there was definitely nothing in Fyodor Belous’s apartment when you went there?” pressed Miriam.
“Not that we found. I think he would have been expecting us, hidden things away. I might wait awhile and jump him again.”
Lestov topped up her glass, leaning immediately forward to kiss her, and Miriam kissed him back, enjoying it, like she enjoyed the man himself. As well as being sure Charlie was still keeping something to himself-despite chest-clutching denials-she was equally sure she was ahead of everyone, largely as a result of sharing her favorite hobby with this militia colonel. Who was better than a lot in the past with whom it had been necessary to sleep in the call of duty and Miriam Jane Bell’s personal advancement. Vadim Lestov hadn’t so far failed to make the chimes ring in bed and was more interesting than most on the embassy fuck circuit, including Richard Cartright, who hadn’t offered anything worthwhile outside the sheets, either. “What, objectively, are the chances of finding Larisa Krotkov’s trial records?”
Lestov shrugged, with his back to her. “Doubtful.”
“You honestly think there might be something in them to account for Raisa being in Yakutsk?” questioned Miriam, going back to a suggestion Lestov had offered when he’d told her of the Gulag 98 discovery.
“Anything else would be too much of a coincidence, wouldn’t it?” He was disappointed that the totally logical speculation hadn’t encouraged a more forthcoming response from her: it was always questions, never answers.
“So where do the two lieutenants come in?” Miriam hadn’t given Lestov the Englishman’s name. Or told him of the OSS possibility. She served the steak and handed Lestov the Napa Valley chardonnay to open.
“If I knew that, it would be the end of the mystery,” exaggerated Lestov. He really had hoped to get more-or the hint of more-from her. He hesitated a little longer from making the commitment that had occurred to him on the way to Miriam’s apartment. He hadn’t wanted to disclose the German names, but he’d exhausted all possible Russian sources. But the FBI would have access to more. So the sacrifice was necessary. He said, “Fifteen Germans were sent to Gulag 98 in April 1945.”
She looked fixedly at him across the table. “You got the names?”
“For yours and my information only.”
“Absolutely,” agreed Miriam, at once. All this and a good fuck, too.
“Vitali Maksimovich Novikov,” identified Charlie. “He’s got a wife and two boys.” Natalia had relaxed during dinner, laughing more readily and genuinely than Charlie could remember for a long time. The last few weeks had been a greater strain upon her than he’d fully realized.
“The Yakutsk doctor?” she remembered, at once.
“He claims to have more. The exchange is to get him and his family out.”
“You promised him?”
“I said I’d do what I could. Without him I wouldn’t have known about Gulag 98, which we used to destroy Viskov and Travin. It was one of the camps Novikov’s father looked after. Was originally sentenced to. I’ve got to know what it is he’s got.”
“We both have,” she agreed.
Charlie’s telephone call to Vitali Novikov was the last of several he made from his embassy office the next morning before leaving for the airport. Miriam Bell was not among them.
Novikov said, “I was beginning to think I wouldn’t hear from you again.”
“Just make the application. It’s being supported through the embassy,” lied Charlie. “Don’t mention that, of course.”
“How can I thank you?”
“You know,” reminded Charlie.
24
Charlie gazed through the window as the plane banked for landing, feeling the usual surge of nostalgia for a city in which he’d worked so often that Berlin had once seemed more like home than London. He couldn’t pick out the odd memorial scraps of the Wall, but didn’t anyway need markers for where, like a bloated aorta along which so much real blood had run, it had gone through the heart of the city. He didn’t see the Commonwealth war cemetery, either. He didn’t bother trying to locate from the air the other building he was anxious to get to, knowing very well where it was.
What embarrassment-what need-could there be after all these years for not one but two countries to be so determined to cover it up, as America and England appeared to be? Something both had combined upon, clearly. Big, then. Mammoth, even. All securely hidden for fifty-four years, never ever intended to be revealed, as the bodies had never been intended to be discovered. A shared secret of one agency? Or several, each in some way involved in some small part? Would the telephone calls he’d made and the ambiguous conversations he’d initiated in the last few days, spreading the inquiry too wide, he hoped, for anyone to see a direction, be sufficient? Or would whoever the puppet masters were have been too clever, getting there ahead of him-years ahead of him? He was pinning a lot of hope on bureaucracy getting in its own way, which in his experience it nearly always did. And on the fact that he’d worked in Berlin so often and knew so well just how many institutions had been created there in the immediate post and Cold War years. He hoped most of all that his memory and knowledge were better than any Whitehallor Washington chair-bound keeper of secrets. And Kenton Peters had another secret now, not one to keep but to discover. Charlie’s whereabouts. Persuading Sir Rupert Dean not to disclose his movements was as personally self- protective as it was to guard the department. More so. The American mistake-Peters’s arrogance-had been letting him know what Henry Packer looked like, not knowing how well tuned Charlie’s antenna was. It was going to be much harder to recognize Packer’s replacement if one was sent.
Charlie had made his reservation at the Bristol Kempinski, the hotel in which he always stayed, without asking the current prices, not thinking until he was checking in of the distress it would cause Gerald Williams to authorize these expenses as well as maintaining the rent on the Lesnaya apartment. Letting the thought drift, Charlie acknowledged it had been several weeks since any expenditure inquisition from the zealously attentive financial controller. He’d almost been disappointed that the cost of his beekeeper’s hat hadn’t been queried. Perhaps, mulled Charlie, the man had given up. Then again, perhaps he hadn’t.
Natalia had insisted on packing for him, everything laid out in his case in meticulous comparison to his customary haphazard effort, and when he lifted out the spare jacket Charlie knew why. There were two notes, with another framed photograph of Natalia and Sasha. Natalia’s note said simply,
He was at the room bureau, writing an immediate reply on a hotel postcard, when the telephone jarred, startling him by its nearness. With a befitting, machine-gun delivery, the voice said, “Jackson here. Thought we should meet, as you suggested. Downstairs when you’re ready.”
Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Jackson’s age-at least half that of Gallaway, Charlie guessed-marked him at once as the complete antithesis of the ineffectual Moscow attache, a fast-track career professional for whom the promotional escalator would never rise fast enough. He came up from the barstool like a spring, the flick of fair hair that would give him problems on parade days falling over hisleft eye. He managed to push it back and shake hands at the same time. The handshake was firm but not arm wrestling. Orange juice, Charlie noted, automatically ordering Islay malt, knowing the hotel stocked it, which was another reason for staying there.
“A table’s probably better,” Charlie suggested, moving away from the bar at which there were only two other people anyway, and they at its far end.
“Of course, sir.”
“You want me to call you lieutenant colonel?”
The man frowned, confused. “No.”
