silence between them. She fumbled another cigarette alight, wincing at the sound of a goal being scored on television.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that. .” She had to stop again. “Sorry. The wedding was finally planned for the Saturday after he was found dead, in the embassy. . ” Irena began to shake again.
“Can I get you something?” offered Charlie, not knowing what.
“Sometimes they have brandy here.”
They did and Charlie bought two glasses. It was gritty and probably home distilled and caught Charlie’s throat, almost making him cough. It didn’t seem to cause the hoarse-voiced woman any difficulty.
“Things haven’t been good for you,” Charlie sympathized.
“No,” she agreed. The shaking was subsiding.
Everything still had to be at her pace, Charlie warned himself again, nervous of another near collapse. “What about the KGB? Were you and Ivan kept on after the change to FSB?”
Irena shook her head. “I wasn’t, because of the circumstances in which I was hurt. It was bourgeois; criminal, even-enjoying myself at KGB expense. I was dismissed, on reduced pension.”
“What about Ivan Nikolaevich?”
“He was kept on, of course. He’d been injured on assignment: he was even awarded a distinguished service medal.”
He was getting closer, thought Charlie, more apprehensive than encouraged but deciding to take the risk. “When he was fully recovered, was Ivan Nikolaevich kept in the First Chief Directorate?”
Irena looked at him wide-eyed, open-mouthed. “You know. . the structure. . Directorates and Departments!”
Shit! thought Charlie. “It’s all right! You’re not betraying anything. . anyone. All I want to know, to find out, is who killed Ivan Nikolaevich. .”
“No!” she refused. “If they find out-”
“They won’t find out,” insisted Charlie, desperately. “No one will find out.”
She’d had both hands cupped around her brandy tumbler, but the renewed shaking made it rattle against the tabletop, so she released it. “Ivan Nikolaevich wouldn’t want me to talk to someone like you. . he was loyal. .”
“He was killed, murdered,” argued Charlie, his desperation growing. “And nothing’s being done to find out who did it. Why they did it. Officially they’re lying: you know they’re lying, with stories of Ivan belonging to a gang. Pimping whores. And you know Mikhail Alekandrovivh Guzov is FSB.”
“I know why they did it,” declared the woman, suddenly calm and under control.
“Why, Irena?” pressed Charlie, quietly and controlled. “Why was he murdered?”
“He found out something that he shouldn’t have; shouldn’t have known about. Tried to do a deal.”
“What was it he found out?”
Irena remained silent for a long time, both hands back around her glass, sipping from it once, seemingly unaware of the continued noise from the ice hockey fans. She straightened, suddenly and said, “I’m tired. I don’t want to talk anymore.”
“You’ve got this far. Been this brave,” pleaded Charlie. “I won’t betray you, like Ivan was betrayed.” He reached across the table, taking one of her hands away from the glass to hold it to reinforce what he was saying. “I will find out who killed Ivan. And make sure they’re punished. But I can’t do it without your help. Things went bad for you, both of you, all the time. Don’t let this go bad like all the rest, now that you don’t have Ivan anymore.”
“I need to think. Will think,” she said, defiantly.
If he pressed her any harder he’d lose her, Charlie knew. “Promise me we’ll talk again.” When she didn’t reply he repeated, “Promise me!”
“I promise. I’ll call the embassy.”
“No,” refused Charlie. “No more telephoning. Give me a place: somewhere we can meet like this.”
There was another long pause. “Here.”
“Tomorrow,” insisted Charlie. “Give me a time to be here tomorrow.”
“I have to work on Sundays.”
From the coarseness of the hand he’d briefly held, it could even be close to manual labor, a machinist in a factory perhaps. “You have a lunch break: you always telephoned at ten past twelve. Let’s meet here during your lunch break.”
“Twenty past. But maybe not tomorrow. Monday.”
“Tomorrow, Irena,” insisted Charlie. “Don’t run away. If you run away you’ll be betraying Ivan Nikolaevich.”
“Tomorrow,” she finally capitulated.
Charlie acknowledged the difference-only four or five first-to-arrive-last-to-leave journalists and one television cameraman-the moment he approached the embassy. There were fifteen press approaches logged in the set-aside apartment, none of them from Svetlana Modin. And Mikhail Guzov had not returned his early-morning call, although waiting for him was a torn-off TASS news agency release, topped by Halliday’s name and six exclamation marks, of an official Interior Ministry statement expanding its earlier claim that the British embassy murder had been solved with the arrest of a Chechen drug-smuggling gang. It concluded with the further announcement that the planned press conference had been postponed to a date yet to be decided. There were no messages awaiting him from London when he reached the communications room.
He hadn’t been forgotten, Charlie reluctantly accepted: just momentarily ignored, put aside because of other more important pressures. He should, he supposed, be grateful for the respite, which to a degree he was, very grateful indeed. The reservation was prompted by his uncertainty about how successful his overcrowded day had been, by comparison.
Charlie objectively scored himself 60 percent out of a hundred from the meeting with Natalia, largely based- despite Natalia’s warning not to overinterpret it-upon Sasha’s childishly innocent remark about being taken somewhere far away from Moscow. The 40 percent reduction came from Natalia’s continued reluctance to step out into the unknown and Sasha’s apparent closeness-or accustomed acceptance-to Igor Karakov. There was nothing he could do, no tweak he could attempt, to improve his self-assessed ratings, until their next contact. But it
Charlie forced his mind back to Irena Yakulova Novikov. Charlie acknowledged that he still had little more than instinct to trust her disjointed story. But instinct had rarely-and never completely-failed him in the past. And the very disjointedness of their conversation rang truer in his mind than a coherently timed and dated account could or would have done. Apart from his own physical safety the most pressing professional problem was finding the slightest corroboration of anything she’d told him. Neither the name Irena Yakulova Novikov nor Ivan Nikolaevich Oskin came up on Charlie’s KGB or FSB search of MI5 records, which didn’t surprise him because he knew intelligence officers in both organizations always operated under pseudonyms, as did every other espionage and counterespionage body throughout the world: despite publicly identifiable headquarter buildings and publicly named and identified Directors and Directors-General and Chairmen, intelligence organizations did not officially exist to spy and murder and suborn and infiltrate and manipulate. So how could nonexistent entities be staffed by real, flesh and blood people?
Russia’s war in Afghanistan! The possibility burst upon him, not the possibility of obtaining a name-Ivan would have operated in Kabul under an identity different even from his pseudonym at Lubyanka headquarters-but the disastrous Russian incursion gave Charlie one dated marker, and Irena’s account of the ambush in which Ivan lost his arm further refined it. Charlie concentrated his Internet search among publicly available and openly provided strategic study groups in America-knowing no such facility existed in the Russian Federation nor the Soviet Union that preceded it-and located the incident in two hours. It was in a newspaper cutting from
