Red Star Rising

was the sky going to come down on his head? Looking to the other man, Charlie said, “Thanks, Harry, for the discretion.”

“Trying to con the Russians as you are doing is a stupid idea that isn’t going to work and I’m not going to be pulled down by it. Or by you,” returned Fish. “I’ve got friends now stacking supermarket shelves who got too closely involved with you!”

“Let’s not get petulant,” warned Robertson. “Tell me what you know!”

Fuck both of you, thought Charlie. “Is this embassy now totally clean?”

“Guaranteed,” confirmed Fish.

“Which isn’t any reassurance,” dismissed Charlie. “They scored ten out of ten, with a gold star. There had to be inside guidance for them to have hit every target like that as well as removing the counterprotection, in the limited times between Stout going back and forth between the control boxes and CCTVs to check they were working properly after they were supposedly fixed.”

“Our conclusion, too,” said Robertson. “Which gives us a mole hunt and one hell of a problem. The Director- General has told me you’re working directly to him, quite independently of what we’re trying to do. Which is why it’s only you here with Harry and me. And why Harry’s shown you what else he’s found, to give you some idea of the mess we’re in. All I want is your opinion.”

Charlie’s first thought was that what Robertson had just said was a very bad attempt to give the impression that the Director-General had sanctioned this meeting. Aubrey Smith’s edict categorically precluded his cooperation-even his taking part in this conversation-ridiculous though it seemed in the circumstances.

“Do you think the two are separate: your murder having no connection whatsoever with the planting of the listening equipment?” demanded Robertson. “Or, from what you’ve so far discovered, do you think they are linked in some way?”

“You know I’ll have to give a full account of this meeting to the Director-General?” said Charlie, determined against a bureaucratic misdemeanor suddenly biting him in the ass.

“I accept that completely,” assured Robertson. “I’ve already told Smith what I’m asking you.”

Charlie doubted he had been as specific as that. “Until now, until you showed me those three new bugs and we both reached the same conclusion about the FSB having a source embedded within the embassy, I was working on the assumption-an assumption so far without any positive proof-that the Russian electricians were FSB opportunists, not able to believe their luck at being called in by our idiot head of security with the permission of our equally idiotic diplomats. But I had a problem with that assumption; still do have a problem.” Charlie nodded to the miniscule devices on the desk between them. “State of the art, Harry calls them. That’s what the FSB electricians who installed them would have been, state-of-the-art experts at their jobs. And having installed them, they wouldn’t have left the electrics so fucked up that they continued to malfunction, for the bugs to be found when Harry and his team arrived. .” Charlie paused, caught by an unprompted thought. “Unless. .?”

“Unless what?” demanded Fish.

Charlie waited for the conjecture to get firmer in his mind and when it did, although not completely, he said: “I don’t at this moment fully see how this helps any assessment. But how about the FSB technicians not having enough time to do all they wanted at their first opportunity? So they do something to continue the problem, expecting to be called in a second time to get a lot more devices into a lot more sites?”

“But then you arrive to investigate the murder, the security idiots here know they’ve broken the rules, and they start doing things properly and call in Harry and his team?” anticipated Robertson, smiling.

“No,” rejected Charlie, refusing to be tricked into confirming the other man’s conclusion. “The way I understand it-and this can be checked-the alert to London that brought Harry here was sounded before I arrived. .” He hesitated again, unsure whether to continue but then asked, “You spoken to David Halliday yet?”

“No,” said Robertson.

“He’s told me he’s been warning London for the past six months that there’s virtually no internal security here,” said Charlie. “Check his log, to see if he knew locals were being called in before they actually arrived to look at the problem. And if it was another message from him, when the CCTV continued to malfunction afterward, that brought Harry here.”

“We’re throwing up some interesting hypotheses but you haven’t yet given me an answer to whether you believe our two investigations are linked or separate,” complained Robertson.

Throughout the discussion, Charlie had been sifting what he felt comfortable sharing with the other two men against the risk-heightened now by the suspicion of the FSB having a source inside the embassy-of either Robertson or Fish, or both of them, inadvertently saying something that would ruin his dangerously uncertain bluff. Cautiously Charlie said, “I think there is a link. Whoever killed my man needed to sabotage the CCTV systems to get in and out without being detected. What about there being someone inside the embassy-the mole-who separately carried out the initial entry sabotage?”

“Which doesn’t give me any direction in which to work,” Robertson continued to complain.

“It does!” contradicted Charlie, at once. “Until now, until Harry found the additional three bugs where he found them-and we talked it through-you didn’t suspect there was a mole in the embassy. Now you do.”

“And wish I didn’t,” said the counterintelligence director.

Charlie didn’t immediately access the London messages waiting for him in the communications room, intent upon filing without any interfering distraction his own account to the Director-General of the meeting with Robertson, needing two drafts before being satisfied. The writing and rewriting provided the opportunity for Charlie to assess the impact upon his independent investigation of a potential FSB source within the building, reassured at his eventual conclusion that it affected him very little. He’d neither used any compromised telephone connections nor taken anything out of the secure communications system in which he now sat. Looking up to Ross Perrit, the communications controller, Charlie said, “Who else has access to my Eyes Only password to London?”

“No one but you,” said Perrit, a vaguely mannered, seemingly distracted man whom Charlie knew to be anything but vague or distracted.

“What about you?”

Perrit sighed, although not offended. “I didn’t give it to you, remember? You used your London password when you logged on from here and it was from London that you got your operational code. I don’t know what it is.”

“So no one here in this embassy, not even you, can read my traffic?”

“You got something specific, something very specific, you really want to ask me?” pointedly asked the no longer vague or distracted man, abandoning whatever it was he had been doing at another computer terminal to walk over to Charlie’s station.

He had, accepted Charlie, betrayed his knowledge of a so far undisclosed double-agent situation in exactly the same way as he’d feared Harry Fish or Paul Robertson might have let slip anything he told them about the chicanery he was orchestrating. “I was just trying to resolve a question that suddenly came to me.”

“And now that you’ve got my undivided attention, why don’t you ask me the question and let me help you answer it?” challenged the man.

“You just have,” avoided Charlie.

“I know the meaning of security,” belligerently reminded Perrit. “It’s what I’m here for.”

“My misunderstanding,” retreated Charlie. “Let’s not let things get out of proportion.”

“You’re right,” said Perrit. “Let’s not!”

Charlie was neither intimidated nor embarrassed by the confrontation-rather, he was encouraged at the confirmation of remaining out of danger-and his spirits lifted further when he finally opened his personal, Eyes Only file from the London scientist. All the false enhancement and manipulation he’d asked for, particularly on the CCTV loops, was both technically possible and technically undetectable. It did, though, require the personal authority of the Director-General.

Charlie looked up at the unexpected return of Ross Perrit, who said without any explanation or preamble, apart from indicating the single strut suspended, doubly secure box within the communications room: “You’ve got Booth Two.”

“Who’s in Booth One?” asked Charlie, instinctively.