he be able to make contact with Natalia later today, when Moscow woke up? he wondered.
“Heathrow, four hours after the departure of Charlie’s Moscow flight,” declared John Passmore.
“Positively confirmed?” Aubrey Smith demanded.
The MI5 operations director shook his head. “Assessed at the moment at seventy-five percent: if it’s Charlie, he’s bloody good. It was the last KLM flight of the day. We’ve got two possible CCTV shots, in each of which he’s shielded, even at the passport check. Technical are doing their best to enhance and work out height and weight.”
“Charlie
Passmore shook his head again. “If we get enough to harden up the Heathrow images I’ll circulate Charlie’s picture to airport-based Special Branch. It’s a shotgun effort to shoot down a sparrow but it might tell us when Charlie goes out of the country again.”
“If he hasn’t already left,” qualified Smith.
“If he’s already left it’ll give us a potential arrival to warn Moscow.”
“I’ve had three buck-passing calls from Monsford, stressing that Charlie’s our responsibility,” disclosed Smith.
“Straughan bought me lunch,” capped Passmore. “The supposedly finest Aberdeen Angus at the Reform, which unfortunately was overcooked.”
Smith smiled. “And?”
“At one stage I thought he was inferring that we’d colluded: had some foreknowledge, even, of Charlie’s vanishing act.”
“What’s your reading from that?”
“Panic, above and beyond any sensible concern,” assessed Passmore. “Straughan’s focus was mostly upon whether Charlie really had been turned all those years ago. I had to agree the sequence of events from Charlie’s disappearance supported that doubt.”
“What’s the doubt I’m hearing in your voice right now?” picked out Smith.
“I don’t believe this is the combined operation it’s supposed to be,” openly admitted Passmore.
“You suspect I’m keeping something more from you?” demanded Smith, matching the openness.
“Are you?”
“That’s an insubordinate, presumptuous inference!” declared Smith, the habitual quietness of his voice reducing the intended indignation.
“And that’s an avoiding answer. I lost an arm and a career because my superiors didn’t tell me the whole truth,” rejected Passmore, feeling across to his empty, left side. “I don’t want to lose whatever career I’m trying to establish in this shadow-shifting environment, to which I still obviously haven’t adjusted, through the same default. To prevent which I’d prefer to resign.”
Aubrey Smith sat with his head bowed, contemplating the totally unexpected turn in the conversation. Finally looking up, he said: “I’d hoped my apology for not being completely honest was sufficient. I respect and admire your integrity and want to convince you of mine. I have kept nothing more of this operation from you. If there is a hidden aspect, I am as unaware of it as you are.”
Now it was Passmore who lapsed into silence for a moment, good arm once more crossed to where his other had once been. “I’m convinced there’s something else. I haven’t the slightest evidence for the suspicion beyond instinct, but from some of the things Straughan said I believe there’s a something being kept from us. If it is, we’re being set up to be scapegoats.”
“Which I won’t let us be,” refused Smith, emptied by what he saw as the confirmation of what he’d feared since this current episode had begun.
“How, then, do we prevent it?” wondered the operations director
“Managing independent contact with Charlie could help.”
“Who could be following the same instinct by doing what he’s done, as well as asking for those separate passports,” suggested Passmore.
Harry Jacobson nervously lengthened his reconnaissance at the ferry terminal, the knot in the very pit of his already hollowed stomach tightening further in his despair of ever properly ensuring there wasn’t a snatch squad in the ebb and flow of people he was scouring for the first glimpse of Maxim Radtsic, hoping against hope that once more the man wouldn’t appear and that the operation would be aborted before it even began. It wasn’t just the apprehension of becoming the victim of an FSB counterplot that convinced Jacobson the Russian’s extraction was doomed. He was equally worried by the accumulated recognition that in the questionably professional planning there were far too many unforeseeable, abyss-deep pitfalls-the unexpected discovery of Andrei Radtsic’s live-in girlfriend the latest-in what had been conceived more like a tin-soldiered, make-believe war game commanded by incompetents safe in their London riverside bunkers. Now the game could be over before it even began because the most undisciplined tin soldier hadn’t obeyed orders, leaving him, if the analogy was continued, the first of the other tin soldiers likely to fall if it was all an FSB entrapment.
Jacobson reluctantly acknowledged that his alternative, walking away and lying that Radtsic hadn’t turned up, wasn’t feasible. The chances of the FSB executive director approaching another Western intelligence agency, the CIA the most likely, were too great and if the man did and there was eventual publicity, his career in MI6-already hanging by a thread, according to Monsford’s most recent diatribe-would be over. But he didn’t need to lie, he realized, finally identifying the Stalin look-alike barging his way through the shifting melee below.
Jacobson observed the postsailing-surveillance precautions, minimally encouraged at isolating no one showing undue interest in either of them, eventually following the Russian into a windowed observation lounge that provided a panoramic view of the red-walled, star-towered Kremlin as the ferry made its slow way parallel along the river. The view kept everyone on the fortress side, leaving the farthest section of the observation room free for Jacobson and Radtsic.
“You had time to settle everything with Elana?” opened Jacobson, choosing a gradual lead-up in the hope of limiting Radtsic’s reaction to Andrei’s romance.
“I think so,” said the older man, although uncertainly.
“Has she really changed her mind back again: agreed to come?”
“Yes.” The uncertainty was still there.
Contrary to which the nervousness wasn’t as visible today, Jacobson saw, as they were constantly intent upon their surroundings: even the chain-smoking seemed less. “What about you? You happier with everything than you were?”
“I still don’t understand the delay,” protested the Russian. “Why can’t we go right now? Tomorrow? Why can’t we make it tomorrow?”
“Tell me about Andrei,” avoided Jacobson, taking the obvious opening.
“Why are you bringing him into the conversation?” The Russian frowned.
“How do you think he’ll react at suddenly learning what’s happening?”
“I want to talk to you about that: make sure there’s a proper, safe proposal.”
“That’s the sort of care I’m trying to convince you we’re taking.”
“Maybe I overreacted earlier.”
They were drifting away from what needed to be talked about, Jacobson recognized. “You didn’t tell me how you thought Andrei might react.”
“It’ll be all right, when he settles down. Understands.”
The Kremlin was disappearing as the boat took the first bend in the river and people began spreading themselves more evenly around the enclosed lounge, lessening their isolation. “It’s the very beginning, the moment it happens, that I want to discuss.”
“What’s the problem?” demanded Radtsic at once, stopping with an unlit cigarette suspended before him.
“We’re making plans to get Andrei out but we’ve discovered he’s in a relationship.”
“What are you talking about? What relationship?” The cigarette remained unlighted.
“A girl, a fellow student. French.”
