“You don’t sound very sure,” quickly picked up the man, whose youthfulness was heightened by a schoolboy enthusiasm and a flop-forward forelock he constantly tried to sweep back into place, as he did at that moment.
“You are aware of all the rumors coming out of Moscow about some impending upheaval?” Jane continued to avoid.
“Nothing beyond the general traffic,” said Elliott. “Your people think it’s got some resonance?”
“We’ve got it flagged after the Lvov business,” she said, nodding to the waiter that she’d have the same at Elliott, who’d studied the menu more thoroughly.
“I’m not sure what you’re telling me,” complained the man.
“There’s nothing to tell. It could be coincidence, so soon after,” refused Jane, content that she had done enough not just to plant but to water a seed she might choose to cultivate further if she suspected she was being offered up as a scapegoat for the second time.
Which was a similar although not such a self-protective thought that came to James Straughan as he replaced the telephone in his Berkhamsted bedroom, long after he’d given up hope of hearing from the night-duty officer. It wasn’t the alert to which Gerald Monsford had decreed he should be awakened but it was close enough and Straughan was glad he at once called Cheyne Walk, sure from the strain evident in the MI6 Director’s answering voice that he’d fulfilled his fantasy and interrupted the bastard in flagrante.
“I got everything you wanted to England!” protested Maxim Radtsic.
“You should have told me, before doing it,” said Elana.
“You’re shouting,” warned Radtsix, looking around him. They’d parked the car and were walking slowly along the riverbank again.
“So are you!”
“Why should I have told you?”
“Because you should!” said Elana, frowning at her own childlike response. She’d known from her first case packing trial-and ensured it further by overpacking it on the trials that followed-that Radtsic would dismiss it as impractical and hoped he would reconsider their fleeing because she believed he was overreacting to coincidence. Now she’d lost every family memento.
“Why are you being like this!”
“I don’t believe we have to run.”
“Elana!” protested Radtsic, anguished at how it was going to be.
“I’m frightened: too frightened.”
The arrangement had been for Radtsic to meet Harry Jacobson that night in Gorky Park, close to the Ferris wheel where families with their children would have provided cover. Jacobson waited, increasingly apprehensive, for an hour after their appointed time before abandoning the rendezvous. He intentionally drove in the opposite direction from the embassy, although the registration would have been traceable, the fear not subsiding until he’d zigzagged through several streets. What the hell had gone wrong now? came the mantra pumping through his head.
“Is something wrong!” demanded Andrei.
“Nothing’s wrong. I just felt like calling you,” replied Elana.
“I’ve written to Father.”
“We haven’t had a letter here.”
“I sent it to his office.”
“I’m not sure that was a good idea.”
“He gave me a
“Should I tell him to expect the letter?”
“It’s up to you. It’s nothing serious. Nothing to worry about, I mean.”
“Have you made many friends?”
“A lot,” said Andrei, smiling across the apartment at Yvette, curled up catlike in an enveloping chair.
“We miss you. Do you miss us?”
“Of course. But I’m kept very busy.”
“When will you be able to come home?”
“I don’t know. Not yet.”
“I’d like more letters.”
“I told you, I’m kept very busy.”
“Too busy for a single page?” The correspondence was channeled through the Russian embassy in the diplomatic pouch to avoid French intelligence interception of e-mails.
“I’ll write soon. I promise. Is Father there?”
“He’s putting the car away. I’ll tell him about the letter. And don’t forget to write.”
“It was my mother,” said Andrei, to Yvette’s inquiring look.
“I want you to teach me Russian. I like its sound.”
”She wanted to know when I was going to visit. I told her not for some time: that I was going to Aix.”
She smiled again. “I know my father will like you.”
10
“It won’t work any other way,” insisted Charlie, confident he’d kept the scourging overnight doubt from his voice as he set out his rescue proposals.
“Then it’s stillborn,” refused Aubrey Smith, flatly. “There’s absolutely no question of your becoming personally involved.”
Despite its vital importance, he’d actually felt embarrassed at the previous night’s close in front of an audience of Smith, Jane Ambersom, and an assortment of earphoned technicians mouthing the carefully prepared words into the unanswered Moscow public telephones from which Natalia had pleaded,
“Everything needs a lot more discussion and consideration before there’s talk of abandonment,” quickly came in Monsford.
“Russian response?” queried Charlie, who’d already registered the return of the familiar apparatus and hoped to have learned the reason ahead of Smith’s demand for his rescue ideas.
“Let me,” quickly offered Rebecca Street, ahead of the other woman, briefly smiling as she went to the machine at the recollection of Monsford’s impotent collapse at Straughan’s previous night’s telephone intrusion.
“Within three hours of your call to the Moscow numbers!” declared Monsford, eagerly. “They’ve bitten!”
“They haven’t bitten at anything,” dismissed Smith. “They’re going with the hand they dealt in the first place, to see if it will play out to their advantage. Which it would if Charlie actually went in. And why he isn’t going. I’m prepared to hear ideas that don’t personally include you, Charlie. If there aren’t any, we abort.”
“And lose twenty years of priceless espionage intelligence, as well as possibly even more priceless personal information about Vladimir Putin, who’s going to go on running Russia for years,” challenged Rebecca. “We can’t discard this chance.”
“I’m not dismissing it,” refuted the MI5 Director. “I’m agreeing to an operation to get Natalia Fedova and her child out. But refusing Charlie’s involvement beyond his inside knowledge.”
“Then it
