Red Star Rising

killed. But I couldn’t read it because I didn’t have the ciphers to understand it!”

Charlie didn’t speak immediately, either, knowing the importance of every word in every phrase from now on. “Then there’s no way forward. We’re beaten.”

“No!” Irena protested. “Your code-breakers and analysts haven’t had it long enough! They’ve got computer systems that can do things, calculate things, in seconds. They’ll break it, in time! They’ve got to!”

“In time, maybe,” agreed Charlie, stressing the doubt.

“What have your people said in London? About me; about what I asked in return for giving you what I had?”

“Everything’s possible, once they know what they’re rewarding you for. Which brings us back to time. You know how the Russians are trying to close everything down. Officially there’s no reason for me to stay any longer in Moscow, if we publicly accept their story. And I’ve got nothing with which to challenge their nonsense. And if I’m recalled, with me goes your contact. . your only chance”-Charlie hesitated, in brief reluctance, before offering the folder across the narrow space between them-“which is why I’ve brought Ivan’s material back to you.”

For a moment Irena remained staring in astonishment. “You’re not going to do anything? But-”

“London has a copy of everything, of course. And they’ll go on trying but I don’t know for how long. . if they’ll ever break it.”

Irena hesitantly accepted the package, gazing disbelievingly down at it. “I thought your experts would work it out. . that it was the way. .”

“So did I,” said Charlie, moving to get up from the uncomfortable chair.

Irena finally burst into tears, hunched forward over the folder, rocking back and forth.

“I’m sorry,” said Charlie, moving toward the door.

“Don’t go,” she pleaded, and stood up.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Charlie demanded, when he finished reading what she had brought from the bedroom two hours earlier.

Irena shrugged. “I thought you’d just take it. I don’t want to be abandoned. I want to be helped.”

There was nothing to be achieved by scolding her. He had it now. Everything. Not everything, he immediately corrected himself. “I’ll buy you a ticket: a return, as if you’re coming back. And get you a new passport, with a visa we can attach in London. I don’t want you coming into the embassy. It’s under media siege.”

“No. I don’t think I could do that.”

“I’ll need a photograph.”

She began gnawing at her lip. “I don’t have one.”

“You must have something! We can enhance it in London if it’s not very good.”

She shook her head.

“There’s photographs of you there,” reminded Charlie, pointing to the shrine and its selection of pictures of her and Ivan together. “We’d have to cut Ivan out.”

Irena hesitated. “All right. Then what?”

“I’ll call. Give you flight numbers and tell you what to do.”

“You won’t abandon me, will you? Leave me here now that I’ve given you all I’ve got?”

“No, Irena. I promise I won’t abandon you.”

It was past midnight before Charlie finally got back to the Savoy, unencumbered any longer by the folder he had left with Irena, what little he now carried making no curious bulge inside his jacket pocket, glad in his initial moments of euphoria back at Irena’s flat that he’d resisted the impulse to alert London instantly by going directly to the embassy. There was the customary hand-holding couple in the hotel lobby and Charlie was sure others watching the embassy would have inferred from such a late return that he had something so vital it had to be reported to London at once. To prevent such an assumption, Charlie sidestepped into the bar and ordered vodka that-unusually-he didn’t want. Nothing could have improved his total exhilaration.

Which, unplanned though it was, made the bar stop a good idea: his first place and opportunity to sit and think beyond his almost unbelievable awareness. Ivan Oskin had been right-close to being terrifyingly right-in assessing as sensational what he’d found in KGB archives: could it, Charlie wondered, be too sensational? Not his question to consider. Or answer. His remit, the remit he’d insisted upon the Director-General acknowledging not that many hours earlier, was to solve the murder of Ivan Nikolaevich Oskin. Which, Charlie accepted, he hadn’t done. Nor would he ever be able to solve it. What he had discovered was the reason for the poor, overconfident, desperate man’s savage killing and doubtless prior, although unsuccessful, torture. Had Irena come close to guessing the unspeakable agonies Ivan Oskin must have endured without disclosing the whereabouts of what his captors would have been so frantically determined to recover?

Charlie resolved to make her understand: not the horror which would have been so bad that even Charlie didn’t think himself capable of fully imagining it. What he’d try to make her understand was how much Ivan must have loved her to have resisted until he’d died rather than tell them where their secret was hidden.

And where it remained hidden, with Irena, because her unknown apartment was still the most secure place until he got her safely hidden away, beyond their reach and vengeance.

Charlie wished he was more confident of doing that. He’d studied her existing Russian passport and was sure that what he had, snug in his inside pocket, was sufficient for what he immediately had to do. His uncertainty was whether Irena could hang on as long as she had to for him to get her safely away from Moscow. His greatest uncertainty was whether he could satisfy everything she wanted, even after that.

The false lovers were still in the lobby when Charlie left the bar after the second vodka. It wasn’t until he got to his suite that Charlie abruptly remembered something else that Irena would insist upon, prompted, he supposed, by their charade. His painfully arduous and increasingly dangerous train hopping wasn’t over after all. The familiar warning throb from his left instep told him that he’d overlooked something. And it was essential that he didn’t overlook anything.

“What made you go back to her?” demanded the Director-General. For the first time ever, Charlie detected a quaver in Aubrey Smith’s voice at what had taken him three hours the following morning to copy to London.

“A hunch,” said Charlie, who wished another one would come as quickly. “It occurred to me when we were speaking yesterday.”

“Why didn’t you mention it then?”

“I could have been wrong about what she’d kept back.”

“Let’s hope you’re not wrong and the deciphering experts confirm your analysis.”

“I am and they will,” predicted Charlie.

“If you are right, there won’t be any more internal problems at this end.”

“What about external? What will we do with it?”

“Not my decision. Our function begins and ends with us advising and protecting the government. Which this certainly does.”

“Irena’s desperate to get out.”

“I’m hardly surprised. You think you’ve got everything?”

“For our immediate needs,” qualified Charlie, deciding not to tell the man why he had to go back to Irena one more time. “A usable passport picture the most difficult. She always stands to hide the burn scars when she’s being photographed. Will there be a problem with the copy of a Russian passport?”

“It won’t be a copy: it’s a genuine, forensically provable document. Which our visa entry and exit stamps will obviously be, as well.”

“No problems there then?”

“You sure you don’t want to copy everything to me electronically rather than use tonight’s diplomatic bag?”

“The bag’s safer in the porous circumstances here inside the embassy. And there might be other things I want to include.”

“That’s how it will come back to you, in the diplomatic bag. You sure she’s capable of going through with it?”