“Single-use Russian cell phones, discarded directly after one call,” elaborated Straughan. “No way it could be intercepted. Staple tradecraft.”
“I’m not…” started Monsford but stopped at the intrusion of his security-cleared personal telephone. He said: “Yes,” and listened without interruption for no more than seconds. Looking up to the other two, he said: “Moscow’s staged its own theatrical production. They’ve arrested the entire Manchester tour group and televised themselves doing it.”
“But Charlie Muffin wasn’t among them?” anticipated Straughan.
“Of course he wasn’t among them,” snapped Monsford, peevishly.
“As he won’t be around for any diversion,” predicted Rebecca, shaking her head to Straughan in a prearranged signal.
Charlie didn’t respond and David Halliday didn’t say anything further, instead leading their way out through a side exit to avoid the still eye-squinting television strobes and continuing on foot in the opposite direction to distance themselves from the scene, picking their way through horn-protesting traffic jammed by the line of vehicles from the still-militia-sealed Rossiya Hotel.
It was Charlie who called them to a halt, demanded by permanently protesting hammer-toed feet, indicating the cinema and shop complex on Ulitsa Kirova. “There’s a bar, on the first floor.”
“They’ll serve cat’s piss.”
“It’ll be drinkable cat’s piss. My feet hurt.” Charlie’s mind was way ahead of his painful, step-at-a-time ascent to the bar level. The MI6 officer had maintained an arm’s-length acquaintance during the Lvov affair, tiptoeing at the very edge in the hope of personal advancement without endangering involvement, able to quote to the penny the pension he’d receive at the conclusion of a disaster-spared career. Why then, instead of slinking away, had the man risked approaching as he had? And, even more unexpected, discarded that previously avoided association by coming with him into this cigarette-smogged, body-odored shopping-mall bar into which he would not normally have allowed himself to be dragged by the wildest of wild horses?
Unwittingly connecting to Charlie’s thoughts, Halliday held up the vodka that Charlie handed him and said: “It’s not cat’s piss. It’s horse piss.”
“It’ll have more body,” promised Charlie.
Halliday touched glasses. “Death to our enemies.”
“Whomever and wherever they may be,” responded Charlie, matching the other man’s overly posturing toast.
“I know who they are,” said Halliday, his face clearing in accepting surprise at his drink. “Gerald fucking Monsford and the rest of the conniving bastards in Vauxhall fucking Cross.”
In espionage parlance, a benefit or a human source-usually embedded within an opposition-is known as an asset. And while the Russian FSB was his most obvious opposition there remained in Charlie’s mind those unresolved uncertainties that still nagged from his Buckinghamshire interrogation, the FSB’s knowledge of his London apartment paramount among them. Was it at all possible that while David Halliday did not totally qualify as an asset-and continuing the vodka analogy-he could be looking a gift horse in the mouth? “Sounds like you’ve got an in-house problem?”
“I’m out in the cold, Charlie. And being left there to freeze to death.”
“You want to talk about it?” coaxed Charlie, tentatively.
“I’m offering you the same invitation.”
Shit! thought Charlie. “You’ll have to explain that.”
“So you’re part of the freeze, too!”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” rebuked Charlie, sure he knew enough to lead. “I’m never part of anything. I’m not at the embassy to
Halliday used the time it took to buy more drinks to consider Charlie’s response. “There’s a big team come in from London-a combined job, both services. I’m totally excluded. And-”
“There’s nothing sinister in that: I was officially told not to include you in the Lvov business,” broke in Charlie. There’d been sufficient embassy gossip for the man to infer that his distancing had, in fact, been self-motivated by Halliday’s own, pension-protecting choosing and that some rapport remained between them.
“You didn’t completely blank me, not like I’m being blanked now,” conceded Halliday, to Charlie’s satisfaction.
“You’re surely not the only one?” tempted Charlie.
“That’s just it,” complained Halliday, petulantly. “Jacobson’s pissing about, too. My own fucking station chief won’t tell me what’s going on! Twenty-five years’ service, unblemished track record, and I’m being treated like the fucking office boy.”
“Jacobson?” queried Charlie, wanting every possible nugget.…
“Harry Jacobson. I just told you he’s MI6 station chief.”
“He wasn’t on station six months ago, when I was here?”
“Monsford went ape shit over the Lvov things, first at not being included from the beginning and then in his desperation not to be linked by all his efforts to be part of it when it all went wrong. I was the only one to survive. By rights I should have been appointed head of station but the bastard sent in Jacobson.”
“I don’t see how that means Jacobson is pissing about.”
“I didn’t mean Jacobson’s appointment,” said Halliday, exasperated. “I meant how Jacobson’s treating me, closing me out from what he’s doing.”
Charlie gestured for more drinks without looking away from the other man. Well aware that it was not the case, he said: “Jacobson’s the Control of this big team that’s been sent in from London?”
“No!” said Halliday, his exasperation worsening. “It’s something quite separate: just MI6 and with Monsford personally involved, which has got to mean it’s big. Which I know it is because everything’s classified Eyes Only, nothing on general traffic, and Jacobson-who’s keeping the entire file in his personal safe-is refusing to talk about it.”
“David!” Charlie smiled, touching his glass to the other man’s to emphasize the I-know-what-you’ve-done mockery. “Are you seriously asking me to believe that having retained that unblemished record for twenty-five years, you haven’t got the slightest clue what’s going on!”
It took a moment for Halliday to smile in return, the exasperation slipping away. “I don’t know what the big team’s here for. Or what that was all about back there at the Rossiya.”
Charlie paused, presented with two ways to go. Choosing to stay on track, he said: “We weren’t talking about the big team or what happened outside the hotel. We were talking about your being closed out of what Jacobson’s doing.”
“I’m sure it’s an extraction,” announced Halliday.
Despite the abrupt chill and as always untroubled by his own hypocrisy, Charlie kept the mocking smile. “David! You’ve asked me to help you and if I’m going to do that you’ve got to be honest. You don’t
Halliday held his smile, too. “Not all of it. Jacobson got suspicious and changed his safe combination. And most of what I saw was encrypted.”
“But you understood what you did read, didn’t you, David?”
“It’s a multiple extraction.”
“How multiple?”
“A man and a woman. And a third, but I couldn’t understand how he fitted in.”
“That’s how it seemed. And I did get the code designation. It’s Janus.”
The physical chill suffusing Charlie began to freeze. “The god with two faces, able to look two ways at the same time.”
“Appropriate for a defector, which it obviously is,” confirmed Halliday. “Monsford’s personal choice, from what I managed to see.”
The code designation for Natalia’s extraction had been Monsford’s personal choice at the Buckinghamshire hunting lodge, remembered Charlie: remembering, too, Monsford’s insistence on subject gender in the code titles
