Red Star Burning

“You ask me,” replied the American, rhetorically.

I just did and you didn’t come up with the right answer, thought Jane. “We both understand we’re being straight with each other here, aren’t we?”

“I hope so.”

When the fuck, then, was this guy going to prove it by doing something to guide her! Spurred by her own irritation, Jane said: “I don’t think you’re working professionally with me. I think Irena Yakulova Novikov is sending you guys every which way from the right direction and that having been suckered for eighteen years you’re worried that it isn’t over: that the Russians have a fallback that’s still going to leave you swinging in the wind.”

By a road-sign calculation Elliott drove for another eight miles before speaking again. “We’ve lost two guys, one a friend of mine who trained with me at Quantico, following up leads that emerged during what the CIA believed to be Novikov’s truthful debriefing. The other was one of their own guys. Would you think that was a fallback or payback?”

“Lost how?”

“A hit-and-run in Cairo and a drowning in the Moscow river. The guy in Moscow was the one I knew at Quantico. He was his college swimming champion at Kent State.”

“So it’s personal as well as professional?”

Elliott shook his head. “Strictly professional.”

Jane hadn’t known what she might learn professionally from this excursion-even if she would learn anything- and still wasn’t sure of this conversation but it was certainly something to be relayed to Aubrey Smith. “I think we’ve got a lot more to talk about.”

“Which reminds me,” said the man. “There seems to be a misunderstanding about the room reservations.”

“I’m sure it won’t be a problem,” said Jane. I hope, she thought.

“What emerged at our last session has been fully considered, not just by us but by others,” assured Geoffrey Palmer.

“It is to continue as a joint operation,” announced Sir Archibald Bland.

“Which doesn’t cover the absolute resolution should Charlie Muffin proceed independently,” protested Monsford.

“The decision is that it continues to be jointly shared,” reiterated Bland, with a hint of strained patience. “As such, the question of an absolute resolution doesn’t arise.”

“Getting Andrei to London is being organized by the British.”

Elana remained looking down at her scarcely touched meal, oblivious of everyone in the restaurant. “It’s really happening, isn’t it? We really are going to defect.”

“We’re definitely going,” said Radtsic.

“I wish we weren’t.”

“The adjustments won’t be easy but you’ll accept it, eventually. All of it.”

“I don’t think I will: not ever.”

“Don’t forget everything I’ve told you about the British approach.”

“How will they make it? Where?”

“It’ll be their move. They’ll only make it when they’re sure it’s safe.”

“What about the girl?”

“Andrei’s got to understand. You’ve got to make him understand.”

“He’s a grown man, not a child.”

“Talk to him as a man. And as our son.”

“You’re asking too much: too much of both of us.”

“I’m asking you to help save our lives.”

“I want to go home,” said Elana. “Go home for the last time.”

17

Charlie’s brief elation at finding the hoped-for talisman had frozen into ice-hard, questioning reality by the time he uncomfortably awoke in the cold, very early light of the following day, feasted upon by the more regular, multilegged inhabitants of his bed. And it wasn’t because of his fruitless vigil in the botanical garden the night before. It still had to be more, much more, than a 50 percent chance that Natalia had delivered the newspaper signal, in the way only he’d recognize, to their special dead-letter drop.

But the alternative, the fear that Natalia’s coercion had brutally forced from her their meeting code, remained. And if that had happened, he’d swallowed the FSB bait by going to Moscow’s original herb garden. But why hadn’t they sprung that trap and seized him the day before? The hope that Natalia hadn’t been broken was no more than the merest wisp of straw-clutching reassurance but still something for which he could snatch out to hold.

Could he safely interpret the Pravda sign that it was safe to go anywhere near Natalia’s Pecatnikov Pereulok apartment, outside of which Monsford’s photographer had pictured her and Sasha just six days ago? Not yet. Not until he was surer the gardens were safe: that it was Natalia’s intended indicator. Maybe not even then. It was inconceivable that Natalia’s home was not under the most concentrated surveillance: the FSB would have wanted Natalia and Sasha to be photographed, seemingly free, to flavor their snare.

His safer course was to continue with their original, personal tradecraft. And there were other, more immediate self-protections to be established, updated now by an urgent need for medication to ease his red-hot bug bites. The stuttering shower gave some temporary relief until the trouser-chafing walk through the departing congestion of whores and their whoremongers on his way from the hotel. Charlie was abruptly halted on the pavement by the thought of checking the nearby gardens again but decided it was too soon for a visible response to his Pravda deposit. Instead, not abandoning the idea altogether, Charlie used a remembered kiosk conveniently close to the Ulitsa Mira Metro in preference to his pay-as-you-go mobile to dial the number he’d copied from the box in which he’d found the particularly folded newspaper, allowing it to ring unanswered for a full minute before hanging up.

He got a seat on the circle-line train, lessening his insect discomfort, which flared only when he switched for the Arbat connection, which he intentionally chose for its concealing swamp of similarly dressed Western tourists in which to sink out of detectable sight. A more fortunate, secondary benefit was a pharmacy from which Charlie bought balm and insect repellent. He dialed the unresponding botanical gardens’ phone twice from different telephone kiosks as he moved through the tourist mecca, buying on his way the previous day’s London Times and Telegraph, as well as a selection of that day’s Russian and English-language newspapers. Charlie used them to reserve his seat in an enclosed, office workers’ street buffet while he balmed his overnight wounds in its lavatory.

The Telegraph reported a Dutch intelligence theory that Malcolm Stoat, whom it described as a man of mystery of whom no official identification records or background existed in England, was a fleeing Russian spy kidnapped by British counterintelligence. That day’s English-language Moscow News also printed the legend name and linked, although without explanation, the Amsterdam disappearance with what it referred to as reorganization within the FSB.

Charlie sipped his sludgelike coffee and spread soured cheese on his black bread, conscious of the Malcolm Stoat passport in his inside jacket pocket, next to that day’s itinerary promising a free-time afternoon for the Manchester travel group. How free, wondered Charlie, would it remain, which was a question he needed to answer.

He risked the bar with its panoramic overview of the Rossiya, managing to get a stool and a double measure of properly distilled vodka in a shadowed area between the counter and the rear wall, calculating that his slight loss of outside view was compensated by his being hidden from at least a third of the other customers, closely studying