longer.”
“Where are you supposed to be?”
“With a dementia specialist: discussing getting my mother into care.”
“You think Monsford’s making his escape arrangement?” risked Jane, openly.
“We
“Rebecca is determined she won’t go the same way you did.”
“You going to tell her about this?”
“No.”
“So she’s making her own escape arrangements.”
“She imagines she is.”
“What about you?”
“I have but it’s difficult.”
“We committed ourselves the moment you got into this car,” reminded Jane.
Straughan smiled. “Haven’t lost your touch, have you?”
“I lost it the last time. I’m not going to let the motherfucker beat me again. What’s your difficulty?”
“He’s had his own sound system installed in the office. But he’s using it selectively.”
Jane answered his earlier smile. “So you’ve installed yours?”
“After we discovered what he was doing. He’s always very careful to avoid anything incriminating.”
“How much have you got?”
“All of it.”
“Including how Charlie was to be used?”
“All of it,” repeated Straughan. “The difficulty is how to avoid suicidal self-destruction getting it to those who’ll sit in judgment. It contravenes every internal security regulation as well as the entire Official Secrets Act.”
“I agree you couldn’t personally make it available,” said Jane, the excitement stirring through her.
“You couldn’t, either,” insisted the man. “You’d be even more culpable after all that Charlie did. And what Monsford did to you.”
“There could be a way: maybe even more than one.”
“It’s better you don’t tell me,” Straughan said, hurriedly.
He was backing off, Jane recognized. “Would you make all you’ve got available to me?”
Straughan hesitated. “I didn’t imagine I’d find a problem answering that.”
“I didn’t believe Monsford was capable of sacrificing me.”
“If it hadn’t been you it would have been me: he gave himself two choices. By accepting the sideways transfer you saved me.”
“I know,” said Jane, tensed.
“So it’s payback time?”
Right on the button, Jane thought. She said: “I’d appreciate that.”
“A source investigation could only lead to me.”
“It’s not inevitable,” argued the woman. “I’m assuming Rebecca’s escape is her own copy?”
“It’s the original: mine’s the copy.”
“Could yours be forensically proven to be a copy?”
“No.”
“Then there’s a way to prevent your ever being discovered.”
“I made a mistake, coming here like this. I wish I hadn’t,” declared Straughan.
“We haven’t met, remember?”
“I should get back.”
“Are you seriously considering putting your mother into care?”
“I’ll do everything I can not to.”
“Then you’ve got to save yourself, as Rebecca is determined to save herself.”
“Shit!”
“Rebecca’s double protection is that she got her recordings from you and did her duty bringing them to Bland or Palmer not just to expose Monsford but to protect the service from your ever making it public,” bullied Jane, devoid of hypocrisy. “And that would put you before a security-closed court who’d jail you for a very long time. You wouldn’t be able to go on caring for your mother from a prison cell, would you, James? Without a job you wouldn’t even be able to get her anything but the minimum of care.”
“We work and live in a sewer, don’t we?”
“We do. Your poor mother doesn’t. I’m offering the way to keep her out of it.”
“I’ve got to get back.”
“We can beat Monsford. You know we can.”
“I need to think.”
“Do that, James. Go and think long and hard when you’re caring for her tonight.”
Gerald Monsford didn’t like the continuing impression of so much thin ice creaking dangerously underfoot. Maxim Mikhailovich Radtsic remained the job-for-life prize upon whom, if the pendulum swung the wrong way, his very survival depended. And with whom, therefore, it was imperative the man’s wife and son were reunited. He’d done the right thing sending Jacobson ahead of him back to the Hertfordshire safe house but so far, his own time- to-think journey there almost completed, Monsford hadn’t come close to a guaranteed way of bringing that about. At least getting postponed that day’s Foreign Office session gave time for a resolve to emerge elsewhere, but he wasn’t encouraged by Sir Archibald Bland’s warning during their rescheduling that France’s current presidency of the energy-dependent European Union held it hostage to Moscow’s blackmail to cut off its natural-gas supplies.
There was, too, the until-now-relegated alert from Paris of Andrei’s reluctance to defect in the first place, from which the suspicion naturally followed that the boy was responsible for the French interception. Even if he wasn’t, Andrei might change his uncertain mind after the first failed attempt. To each and all of which had to be added Jacobson’s insistence at their meeting earlier that morning that Radtsic’s cooperation hinged entirely upon their being together in exile.
As his car bypassed Letchworth, Monsford saw through the separating glass that the driver was triggering the automatic signal of their approach and took his own security-cleared telephone from its rear-seat armrest for an update of what he was approaching.
“He’s not physically unwell,” reported Jacobson. “He’s taken his morning exercise but told me he’s not going out this afternoon. The only thing he’s said otherwise is to ask when Elana and Andrei are getting here. When I told him that wasn’t yet known, he demanded the time of your arrival.”
“What’s he done in between?”
“Stayed in his room with a bottle of vodka, watching television. We’re monitoring him on CCTV. He’s flicking between news channels, obviously searching for announcements: as far as I know there haven’t been any updates from France. The vodka bottle’s half empty and he’s already chosen a bottle of burgundy for lunch.”
“We should be with you in less than thirty minutes.”
“Should I tell him that?”
“No.”
“Anything?” Monsford asked when Straughan answered his next call.
“The Novosti news agency is saying our ambassador is again being summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry, without giving a time or date,” relayed the operations director. “Associated Press is reporting under a Washington dateline but without accreditation that there is an impending Russian political development connected with the French arrests. There’s a Press Association sidebar that the Russian and French ambassadors have been summoned to our Foreign Office for clarification. Agence France-Presse are saying our embassy in Paris have delivered a second Note seeking access to our detained nationals.”
“Anything direct from the Foreign Office?”
“Nothing routed to me. Rebecca’s heard nothing, either.”
“Call me at once if there’s anything, anything at all.”