Red Star Rising

the missing bits!

“I want help. . someone to get me away from you.”

“We’ll send you back to Moscow, of course. We’ve got everything we can possibly get from you. There’re no more flights tonight-I’ve checked-but there’s plenty tomorrow.”

“No!” she said, her tone audibly different.

He was getting there! Shouldn’t rush. “Irena-it’s easier to go on calling you that-now it’s you who isn’t making sense. Why should we keep you here. . look after you here. . knowing what we know now?”

“They’ll think I told you, not that you worked it out; had the sense to have that fucking shrine forensically examined,” blurted the woman.

He’d got her! “Not my problem. You’ve got nothing more to give me.”

“Yes, I have. You haven’t got the half of it. I’ve got all of it.”

It took her thirty minutes, running right up to his longest time estimate, and throughout it Charlie remained coiled spring-tight, tensed for the interruption that might still have ruined everything but never came.

When she finished he got as far as, “You’ll get everything I promised you. What I-” before the door burst open and the room was suddenly crowded with men.

To Charlie, the leading arresting officer said, “We’ve got you, you bastard!”

One of Charlie’s many fears was that he’d be interrogated at the American embassy where he would probably have been denied any opportunity to speak. He wasn’t, although there was little comfort in his being taken to an anonymous hut complex at the security-restricted RAF base at Northolt, on the outskirts of London, with the obvious threat of his being put aboard an always-denied CIA rendition flight to the United States or, worse, with Islamic terror suspects to one of the torture destination flights to Romania or Albania.

But at least it appeared that Jeffrey Smale was chairing the panel of eight unidentified men confronting him. The deputy director was the only man Charlie recognized apart from the Director-General himself. Aubrey Smith was not part of the examining group but ostracized to one side, like a fellow defendant. From the way they were dressed, at least three of the men facing him were American. Charlie’s reassurance came from the operator hunched at the recording apparatus on its separate table and that in their urgency to get him before a kangaroo court, his arresting officers had not searched him to discover the video he had extracted from its debriefing-room recording machine seconds before they had swept into the room in which he’d been with Irena.

“Normal formalities are being dispensed with,” announced Smale, his usually red, blood-pressured face purple with unsuppressed fury. “You have knowingly wrecked an intelligence operation twenty years in its planning and execution, and caused incalculable harm and damage to the United States of America and to this country. Any recovery or salvation of that operation is impossible but you will provide, immediately, the names of all others with whom you are in contact for them to be detained as soon as possible. Is that clear to you?”

“Time isn’t your problem,” said Charlie. “You’ve been saved, all of you, from making the biggest intelligence mistake since the creation of the CIA and possibly in the modern history of either British security service.”

There was at least a full minute of total silence before the man next to Smale exploded in an accent confirming Charlie’s American recognition: “For Christ’s sake, what’s happening here?”

Aware of at least six of the arresting officers grouped in a semicircle behind him Charlie extended his arms fully in front of him and said, “In my right, inside jacket pocket is the recording of my debriefing of the woman known as Irena Novikov. If you will not allow me to take it out, to be played to you, I ask that someone does it for me.”

“Stay as you are!” came the command behind him and a hand was thrust roughly into his jacket. The man who’d called Charlie a bastard came into view, examining the disc. To Smale, the security officer said, “It’s a recording, not a weapon.”

“Start it as eighty-four on the use register,” Charlie told the recording technician, at Smale’s nod of agreement.

Into the room came Charlie’s voice: You’ve got nothing more to give me.

Then Irena’s: Yes I have. You haven’t got the half of it. I’ve got it all.

Charlie: That’s what it’s got to be. All of it.

Irena: It’s my only operation, ever. A lifetime’s work, all gone.

Charlie: I’m waiting.

There was no hint of the anxiousness he’d been feeling, decided Charlie, satisfied.

Irena: The Americans were wrong, as they so often are, about my not having been in Cairo. They simply didn’t identify me. Valeri Voznoy wasn’t the KGB station chief. I was. My cover was a typist. It was my idea, all of it, after Vladimir Putin left the KGB and became the Russian president. Why can’t we become president of the United States of America? I thought. That was my concept. And I chose Lvov, too. We were lovers even then. Bundy was the CIA’s Cairo station chief-a laugh-That was our first success, making Bundy into the supposed Russian expert, feeding him whatever we wanted. It was genuine stuff, of course, but low level. Everywhere Lvov went, Bundy was transferred with him: the CIA was convinced Lvov was theirs and Bundy was his Control. Lvov fed him the idea of going into politics, using Putin as an example and the stupid bastards fell over themselves: over maybe ten years they’ve paid us over $20,000,000, all of which has gone into other operations against them-another laugh-Christ, they’re so gullible and stupid.

There was a visible shift of discomfort from five of the men facing him, finally identifying the entire American contingent.

Irena: It couldn’t stay perfect, of course. Cairo was the problem, from where it all began. I didn’t bother about Oskin or Voznoy, after Cairo. It was only when everything started to go wrong, when it was too late, that I went back through their personnel files and discovered they’d been posted to Afghanistan together. We never found out who suspected anything, although it was no secret that Lvov and I were sleeping together but I suppose it must have been Voznoy: we couldn’t interrogate him, because he died in the ambush in which Oskin lost his arm. It wasn’t us who killed Oskin-although I would have done, if I’d known the blackmail he was trying to set up. He died under American interrogation and we don’t know enough of what he told them, just scraps. Like he didn’t go at first to the Americans but tried to speak to the British embassy. .

Charlie: I’ve got to stop you there. How did the British embassy come into it? Why was Oskin’s body dumped there, if he died under American interrogation?

Irena: If only we could have known it all, it wouldn’t have ended like this: it would have ended with Lvov as the president of the Russian Federation appearing to work for the CIA, as far as they believed, with the American president unquestioningly reacting in whichever way we wanted, because Lvov had supplied them with genuine, low-grade material, for so long. The American president would have been dancing to our tune! I wouldn’t have had to improvise so much, give away so much. What we do know is that before he died-of a heart attack, incidentally, not from the bullet to the back of his head that blew his face away-he said he had been to the British embassy. But not who he’d seen or what he said. .

Charlie: Oskin was already dead. Why shoot a dead man?

Irena: Probert decided on a mystery: as much confusion and disinformation as possible, according to what Bundy told Lvov.

Charlie: How? How do you know this?

There was a long silence.

Charlie: Everything, Irena. I want it all.

There was a further laugh from the woman.

Irena: I’m not holding out on you. She’s not our spy. Not anyone’s spy, not properly, I suppose. Just a little gossip who can’t keep her mouth shut.

Charlie: She?

Irena: Your colleague, Paula-Jane Venables.

Charlie: You’re losing me.

Irena: She’s been seduced, in every meaning of the word. It started out normally enough, like these things do: an affair-besotted on her part, according to Bundy who couldn’t stop boasting to Lvov-between her and John Probert. She’s drawn to all things American, her father having been one. She became more than a bed partner for Probert when Oskin talked of going to your embassy before trying to sell whatever he thought he knew to the Americans. She didn’t know what it was; she hadn’t seen Oskin. But Halliday might have. It was Probert’s