his sensational discovery.
Every printed cable and every handwritten note or memorandum was stamped with the highest security restriction, with its access and readership strictly limited to specifically code-named individuals, both inside the Lubyanka and the sending and receiving field stations. Each code-hidden individual had personally signed their code designation for receipt and dispatch and each inscription had additionally been time stamped. Every document was heavily annotated, and every annotation and comment again personally marked.
There were, in total, thirty-two A4-sized sheets but Oskin had sometimes arranged as many as six original cable slips or handwritten notes on one sheet, both to create some further chronological continuity and to minimize the bulk of what he took from the headquarters building at the end of each smuggling day.
It took Charlie only minutes to locate from the cable dates the first envelope in the series and put the following three into sequential order and from those dates to realize that the material was not confined to a strict period of time but covered, in total, a possible range of eighteen years, beginning with a cable sent on December 15, 1991. The date of the final cable was July 24, 2006. At once Charlie was swamped by several realizations, the excitement moving through him. Although at that moment he hadn’t the slightest idea of its importance, he was physically holding material, albeit once removed from its finger-touched original, not just of a well established and entrenched Russian intelligence operation of the highest, your Eyes Only secrecy, but one that could conceivably be currently ongoing: two entire pages in the last batch were crowded with a total of fourteen undated and momentarily incomprehensible telephone and internal memorandum slips.
Throughout Charlie’s initial examination, Irena sat motionless and unspeaking on the nearest chair, her entire concentration upon him. As he looked up, she said: “Well?”
“I’ve got a lot of copied documents the significance of which mean absolutely nothing to me,” began Charlie. So secret were the transmissions that every dispatching
“No higher security designation has ever been used before, not by the KGB or any of its predecessors,” declared Irena. “That’s what Ivan told me.”
“I haven’t properly read-and even less understood-a single thing I’ve looked at yet. But if I had the slightest idea even after a dozen readings-no matter how many dozens of times and how many readings-it would still and will always remain meaningless without the identifying code key to those involved and of the various overseas stations, over what seems to be a period of more than fifteen years.”
“You telling me it’s useless?” demanded Irena, anguished.
“I’m telling you nothing of the sort,” denied Charlie. “I’m not telling you anything, in fact, that you haven’t already told me-without the code key it’s useless: impossible to understand. And probably always will be. At this level of security, it’ll be a code known to half a dozen people, probably electronically changed during transmission from the code grid in which it was sent to that by which it was received.”
“Your people have got computer as well as human code breakers.”
“I’ll need to take it all, even for them to try.”
“I know.”
“I’ll keep my promises. All of them.”
“You talked earlier about our understanding each other?”
“Yes?” agreed Charlie.
“I want you to understand totally everything I want.”
“Yes?” repeated Charlie, the curiosity deepening at another topsy-turvy change.
“What is going to happen to Ivan’s body?”
Charlie, who was rarely rendered speechless, was stunned by the question. “I’ve no idea,” he finally groped.
“The Russians-the FSB-have it? Along with their bullshit story of drug smuggling gangs?”
“Yes,” stumbled Charlie, for the third time.
“They’ll toss Ivan’s body into an unmarked grave. Or maybe not even bother, just incinerate it without even a proper crematorium. I want Ivan properly laid to rest.”
“What are you asking me to do, Irena?” demanded Charlie, striving for control. “You can’t take custody of the body, even though Ivan’s wife is dead. You’re not legally next of kin. And by trying, you’d identify yourself.”
“His body was found in the British embassy,” set out Irena, her argument clearly prepared. “At your press conference you twice, maybe even more than twice, explained British participation resulted from the embassy technically being British not Russian territory. I’ve done research. A body found on British territory is, again technically, the responsibility of Britain, whatever its nationality. I want Ivan’s body given back to the embassy and repatriated to England, for a proper, civilized burial. In return for what I am letting you have I want enough money to live well, if not in luxury, which Ivan promised. I want to live in London or wherever Ivan is buried, so that I can mourn at his grave every day for the rest of my life.”
“That is. .” started Charlie.
“. . what I want,” finished Irena. “Make it happen for me.”
Charlie ignored the waiting messages and contact-insistences waiting for him, descending at once to his communications cell in which he remained for more than three hours recounting the approach and final encounter with Irena Novikov, up to and including her concluding asylum demands. He also attached scanned copies of the thirty-two pages of the stolen KGB and FSB material, designating Director-General Aubrey Smith the sole your Eyes Only recipient. He did so with increasing reluctance, pridefully, even conceitedly, wishing he could have kept everything to himself until he was able to deliver a complete and comprehending solution to the murder investigation and the eighteen-year-plus Russian intelligence operation. But with professional objectivity, he accepted that he couldn’t without the essential code key.
It was not until the end of those three exhaustively concentrated hours that Charlie allowed himself to think beyond the topmost secret Russian intelligence material and its potential significance, to his physical possession and the overwhelming need for it to be totally safeguarded. In normal circumstances that would not have been a consideration, let alone a problem, but with an apparent spy still deeply embedded within the embassy, circumstances were far from normal. There was no one that he could trust. Except, as always, himself. But that would require his permanently carrying everything with him at all times, as he’d briefly carried it from Irena’s apartment, by taxi to avoid the constant danger of Metro pickpockets if not physical attack and robbery as the assassinated Sergei Pavel had been searched, if not actually robbed.
To pad himself like that again would not only attract the attention of Mikhail Guzov and his watchers outside the embassy but the quizzical curiosity of everyone, including the undetected mole, inside it. To carry constantly the thirty-two sheets in a never-surrendered briefcase, an encumbrance with which he rarely bothered anyway, would create the same Russian interest and conceivably FSB robbery, either in a street or far more likely from his Savoy suite.
Could he chance the complete opposite from permanently keeping the material with him by creating his own dead letter drop, an unguarded, insecure hiding place known only to himself? Dead letter boxes, contact caches between spy and controller, were tried and trusted tradecraft facilities which Charlie had utilized but never trusted, but from which, in objective honesty, he had never once lost an exchange.
Not a decision he had immediately to make, Charlie reminded himself. Tonight and tomorrow, every available minute of which was going to be devoted to Ivan Oskin’s hoard, a briefcase would go unnoticed. As anxious as he was to start his examination, Charlie hoped that any waiting calls wouldn’t take much time or throw any surprises.
It didn’t take long to be disappointed.
“It will probably go beyond postponement,” announced Mikhail Guzov when Charlie asked the obvious question. “Everything’s resolved, after all. The thought now is to let the court hearing provide all the answers.”
Charlie’s instant thought was of the disposal of Ivan Oskin’s body and Irena’s determination that the murdered man should be buried in England. His next and almost as quick awareness was that it would spare him the Russian’s intended humiliation. “There are still a lot of questions to which I don’t have answers.”
Guzov didn’t reply at once. “A complete case file is being prepared for you.”
The cancellation had to be connected with the Lvov demonstration hijack, Charlie guessed. But how? “I-and
