The deputy director said: “Who is she?”
The silence lasted for a very long time after Charlie finished speaking, the panel confronting him statued in apparent disbelief, none looking at the other. Before she did speak, eager to maintain her questioning dominance, Ambersom physically shook her head, like someone awakening from a coma.
“This woman is a serving officer in the FSB.”
“Yes,” confirmed Charlie, who’d been completely honest, omitting nothing in his explanation of Natalia’s three calls, instantly aware that he would need every conceivable help from his own service and that one lie, even an inadvertent omission, would close the door against him. He didn’t like to hear Natalia being referred to as “this woman.”
“And before the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti she served in the KGB?”
“Before the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti was renamed, yes.”
“You are officially, properly, married?”
“A Russian ceremony, in the Hall of Weddings.”
“And there is a child?”
“I’ve already explained all this!”
“Your child?”
“Sasha is my child, yes.”
“And you have run this woman, as an asset, for how long, six, seven years?”
“The relationship began a little over eight years ago. Natalia serves in the specialized section of the analysis division. She was appointed my official debriefer after my supposed defection, all the details of which are in the personnel archives. She has never been an asset, other than that of being my wife. And she is my wife, not ‘this woman.’” He shouldn’t have finished like that, showing his irritation.
“So your supposed defection becomes a genuine one? This woman turned you?”
Bitch, thought Charlie. “I am not, nor ever have been, an agent of either the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation,” he replied, formally. “I never, ever, discussed with my wife any operation in which I was involved. And I repeat, neither, ever, has she. We lived together as man and wife after I was seconded to the embassy in Moscow-which is again officially in my file-but it became impossible for me. Just as she found it impossible then to follow me back to London. I obviously made contact during the most recent Moscow assignment concerning the death of a man in the grounds of the British embassy and the uncovering of an attempted FSB coup involving Stepan Lvov, the outcome of which has resulted in my having to enter the protection program.…” Charlie hesitated, briefly. “I had finally persuaded her to come to live with me in England with our daughter. But the retribution began, beginning with Lvov’s assassination, before I could get her out. She’s trapped.”
The incredulity had spread to the four unidentified men. One turned and said something to the Director- General, which Charlie thought he heard as “preposterous.”
“This-all of this-is beyond imagination!” dismissed the woman.
“Everything I am telling you is the God’s honest truth!”
“I don’t think you know the meaning of truth. Or of God.”
“I need help,” pleaded Charlie desperately.
“You need a miracle and there’s no such thing as miracles,” she said.
“I’ve heard the recording of the Radtsic meeting. You did well: bloody well,” congratulated James Straughan.
“What about the Director?” demanded Jacobson.
“He’s heard it too: says the same.”
“So I’ve got official approval to go ahead?”
“Absolutely.”
“Shouldn’t that approval be official?”
“I’ll send it today.”
“Do you want me to come back for the planning?”
“We’ll do all that here: you just give us the input when we ask for it.”
“We mustn’t lose sight of Radtsic’s flakiness.”
“We won’t. It’s scheduled highest priority now.”
“The approval will be in the Director’s name, won’t it?”
“Everything will be done by the book. Don’t worry.”
The problem was that Jacobson did worry about fulfilling his station-chief responsibilities: he worried a lot.
5
“It’s totally inconceivable,” insisted Jane Ambersom. “The man isn’t suicidal. He’s insane. Deluded.”
“There were times when I thought it was so inconceivable that it couldn’t possibly be made up,” said Geoffrey Palmer, one of the unidentified members of the examining panel and the Foreign Office liaison to the Joint Intelligence Committee.
“Which doesn’t minimize the potential disaster of the situation,” argued the woman.
“I wasn’t trying to minimize anything,” said Palmer, who in every respect personified the career civil servant, even to the striped-trousered, black-jacketed uniform, complemented by the bowler hat and tightly furled umbrella for his daily commute from Orpington suburbia.
“Gerald?” invited the Director-General, addressing his MI6 counterpart, whose inclusion in the meeting he distrusted.
They had moved from their earlier interrogational formality to leathered armchairs and couches around a dead, carved-wood fireplace in which a man could comfortably stand without bending and in which Gerald Monsford had framed his six-foot-three-inch, bulge-bellied figure to be the focal point of the discussion. Monsford said: “From your provisional inquiries, everything he told us about Jersey checks out?”
“So far,” qualified Smith, cautiously, not wanting his insecurity-spurred antipathy to be obvious.
“And it was Charlie Muffin who prevented us and the United States being sucked into the most incredibly successful Russian espionage operation I’ve ever encountered,” said Monsford. Easily lapsing into the pretension of a Classics education he’d never actually had, Monsford added: “If he’s guilty of anything it’s following Ovid’s belief that enemies are the best teachers.”
Jane Ambersom, who’d endured that affectation as she’d endured other irritations, was amused at the startled reactions from the rest of the group at Monsford’s posturing and said: “It could still be part of that Russian operation.”
“How?” immediately challenged the MI6 Director, already sure he could in some way use his totally unexpected inclusion in this emergency-convened committee to extract Maxim Mikhailovich Radtsic out of Russia. He extended a hand with his forefinger close to his thumb. “Stepan Lvov, whom the CIA was convinced they had in the bag as their long-established double agent, was just this far from becoming the next president of the Russian Federation. As such, in reality a committed officer of the FSB, Lvov would have maneuvered and manipulated Washington and us down God knows how many roads to destruction: Russian intelligence would have ruled the West as well as what’s left of their former empire: literally ruled the world. How could this have any connection with that?”
Jane’s face blazed at the ridicule from Monsford, whom she rightly believed was the architect of her transfer to the counterintelligence service. She moved to speak but before she could Monsford went back to the Director- General: “What about other cases, before this last one? How many went the wrong way, to the other side’s benefit?”
“That check began the moment Muffin’s state of mind was questioned and was upgraded when he disappeared. A conclusion will take time,” avoided Smith. “The preliminary assessment is that while a few weren’t completely successful, none was compromised through any personal fault or failing of Charlie himself. And none of
