Dead Men Living

“So you don’t yet have any positive ideas?” persisted the lawyer.

Williams’s redness remained at his awareness of being mocked. “Let’s hope you can find things so amusing in a few days’ time,” he said, stiffly.

“In a few days’ time we could know all about everything, wondering even why it was such a mystery at all,” said Simpson.

“At the same time as standing over there at the window, watching pigs fly over the river,” Williams came back.

“Ten days really is a very short period of time, so let’s not waste it,” said the director-general, stopping the exchange and the meeting.

In his office, immediately afterward, the director-general said, “That wasn’t very good.”

“Give me the ten days!” urged Charlie. “Make that your deadline, too, for letting me work as we’ve agreed.”

“I don’t want it to go on that long,” insisted the older man. “Before the ten days are up I want some idea, at the very least, what the hell’s going on.” Dean paused. Then he said, “You did very well last time. This time it doesn’t seem to be working out as it should. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be working out at all.”

Charlie was tempted to buy a dewy-eyed giraffe bigger than Sasha herself but remembered Natalia’s injunction not to try too hard, as well as realizing he’d have to take an additional passenger seat to get it back to Moscow. He settled for its more easily transported baby, which was still awkward hand-lugged. He bought Natalia a white and yellow gold love bracelet with a key to lock it permanently on her wrist.

Miriam Bell insisted they had a lot to talk about when he called from the hotel and Lestov said he was interested in hearing what progress Charlie’s London visit had achieved and agreed to a meeting for the following day without offering anything about the enigmatic press release that Charlie finally went through the pretense of asking about. Charlie thought he detected an uncertainty in the man’s voice, so much so he called Miriam back. She said the son-of-a-bitch had been avoiding her for the past three days, a problem the Russian had probably contracted from him. Charlie thought her suggested get-together the following day, ahead of that already agreed with the Russian, was a good idea.

Charlie didn’t call Natalia because the Interior Ministry number would be logged on his hotel bill, which had to be submitted with his expenses to Gerald Williams, determining on his way to the airport that the situation with the finance director was something thathad to be resolved although still not knowing how. After today Charlie wasn’t even sure of the confidence of the rest of the group, particularly Jocelyn Hamilton.

All or nothing, he thought again, his mind fixing on the meeting with Vitali Maksimovich Novikov.

“We still need to know what the Russians have got,” reminded Kenton Peters.

“They’re hardly going to do anything about whatever it is they think they’ve got when they dig deeper, are they?” questioned Boyce, in return.

“Don’t like frayed ends,” said the American. “But you’re quite confident now, as far as Britain is concerned?”

“Totally.”

“So we just let it all seep away into the sand?”

“Wasn’t that the intention from the beginning?”

“Not often it works out exactly right, though.”

“Kenton!” said Boyce, in London. “How many times in your very distinguished career has anything not gone exactly as you intended, from the very start?”

In Washington the American chuckled into the telephone, enjoying the flattery. “There’s always a first time. I didn’t want this-of all things! — to be it. Things got too close at times, because of that damned man Muffin.”

“But not close enough. But you’re right about Muffin. No need to dispose of him as we intended, but I think he should be put out to grass. I’ll see to it.”

“You were the one under the real pressure, James,” commiserated the other man, returning the mutual appreciation.

“But you who personally intervened when it was necessary,” said Boyce.

“Only too pleased to help,” assured Peters. “It’s been a useful exercise.”

“But not one I’m anxious to repeat too soon.”

The American laughed more positively. “I suppose we can look back on this as our own very special meltdown, like the Russians had Chernobyl?”

Boyce laughed with him. “Without any contaminating fallout. Asyou came to me last time, I thought I’d come to you to wrap it all up?”

“Make a weekend of it: we can go down to Virginia,” suggested the American.

“Wonderful. I’d like that.”

“You get a call from Charlie that he’s on his way back?”

“No!”

Miriam felt Cartright turn toward her in the darkness and was glad she hadn’t told him earlier. It might have distracted him from the main reason he was in bed with her. On balance he was better than Lestov-enjoyed longer foreplay, as she did-but she still intended to end it soon. It was one of several decisions she’d made. The most important was to manipulate the now-established one-to-one association with Nathaniel Brindsley to get a transfer somewhere more civilized than Moscow. This episode had soured Russia for her. It was still instinctive, though, for her to go on picking and probing, right now to decide if Cartright was lying about not having heard from Charlie, to prepare herself for the following day’s lunch. “I asked him what sort of trip he’d had and he said pretty good-that there were a lot of things to talk about.”

“But not, apparently, to me-a colleague!”

Miriam thought the indignation sounded genuine enough; and although it had lessened, there had been those odd questions about Charlie when she’d first gotten back from Yakutsk. “You two guys have a problem?”

“He’s the one heading for a problem,” said Cartright, unthinking in his bitterness. With convoluted reasoning that defied logic or sense, Cartright was now blaming Charlie for his own mistake of getting involved with Gerald Williams. If he hadn’t avoided Williams’s call late that afternoon, he’d have probably known about the damned man’s return, but he didn’t care. He was sick and tired of the whole damned mess, Charlie most of all.

“What do you mean by that?” questioned Miriam.

“Nothing,” said Cartright, belatedly realizing his indiscretion.

He moved toward her and Miriam responded at once, but her mind wasn’t immediately on what he was doing, pleasant though thehardness of his tongue was. Maybe it was time to make another decision. Several, in fact. She still hadn’t devised a way for Kenton Peters to kiss her ass-which Cartright was close to doing at that moment-without the bastard knowing it was she making him do it.

32

By chance Charlie had been given the same table in the Minsk Restaurant as before and, as before, Miriam’s arrival in a severely tailored trousers suit caused the same head-swiveling contortions. The suit material was close to matching that of Sir Peter Mason’s, but there wasn’t a fresh rose buttonhole. Charlie stood to greet her, aware of the palpable envy throughout the room but not enjoying it as much as at their last lunch, now with too much else to think about, mostly the homecoming announcement he hadn’t expected. As Miriam sat, he poured the vodka, unasked.

They touched glasses and Miriam said, “I missed you. Which isn’t a pass; I’m better at making them than that. I mean workwise.”

Surprise upon surprise, thought Charlie, not as much surprise, though, as there had been at Natalia’s news. Bewilderment, tinged with suspicion, fit that better. He tried to reassure himself that if Natalia was reverting to the earlier nonsense, she wouldn’t in the first place have created the atmosphere between them by telling him the