still have prevented it being turned into the disaster it became if I’d been brought in when I should have been. But I wasn’t. Others with ambition intervened. But there’s no proof, no paper trail, of their intervention: that was the first, internal purge I didn’t suspect. Which left me the architect who didn’t react quickly enough. I should have left the service honorably, an internally recognized and acknowledged legend. Instead I leave it not just as a failure and a traitor but as a failure and a traitor to you and to Andrei.…” Radtsic stopped, brought out of his reverie by the awareness of Elana silently weeping, hands cupped to her face to hold back any sound. “I’ll make it better: try to stop you hating and despising me.”
Elana stayed with her hands covering her face, still weeping.
“My deputy director is handling the situation,” declared Monsford. “I’ve no specific details, other than the indications that Straughan killed his mother before killing himself. Nothing will ever become public: a complete blackout has been imposed.”
“What security implications are there?” demanded Sir Archibald Bland.
Monsford’s eyes flickered toward Aubrey Smith. “Absolutely none.”
“What about letters, an explanation?” intruded Smith, savoring the other director’s discomfort.
“I haven’t had the chance to talk to my deputy,” said Monsford, his voice uneven. “I’ll provide all the details as soon as I have them myself.”
“Which brings us back to the original point of this gathering,” said Aubrey Smith, turning away from the now-dead screen on which they’d watched the encounter between Radtsic and his wife. “What happened after she recovered?”
“They walked outside in the grounds,” said Gerald Monsford, inwardly squirming at being questioned by the other director. “Neither wanted to eat when they got back to the house. Elana insisted upon sleeping in a separate room.”
“What did they talk about walking in the grounds?” Smith continued to press.
“Surely you don’t imagine-” started Geoffrey Palmer.
“Nothing that added to what they’d talked about inside,” hurried in Monsford, eager to save Palmer’s embarrassment. “They hardly spoke, as far as we could detect.”
“So they were heads down?” persisted Smith.
“Could someone help us here?” demanded Palmer, irritably.
“They were filmed throughout their walk,” explained the MI6 Director. “The cameras have special enhancing lenses enabling what’s said out of microphone range to be recorded and then lip-read.”
“Lip-reading that can be defeated by a person walking with their head lowered, avoiding the camera,” added Smith. Directly addressing his counterpart, Smith said: “You didn’t answer my question?”
“Yes,” confirmed Monsford, tightly.
“So we don’t have recordings of everything they said to each other?”
“No,” Monsford was forced to admit.
“What’s your point?” protested Sir Archibald Bland.
“What’s your assessment of the confrontation inside the house, where we did hear every word?” demanded Smith, answering a question with a question.
Bland hesitated, unaccustomed to the reversal. “Very emotional, which was understandable considering every circumstance: Radtsic defecting after being at the top of his profession for so long, being reunited with his wife after what she’s been through, neither knowing if they would ever be together again, all of it topped by their being reviled by a son who’s abandoned them.”
“And I’m intrigued by whatever it is Radtsic was talking about at the very end,” added Palmer.
“All of which you were supposed to be,” warned Smith.
“What the hell are you suggesting!” demanded Monsford.
Again Smith confronted question with question: “Do you normally allow encounters like that to be completely unsupervised?”
“I don’t have a precedent,” Monsford quickly came back. “Neither my service nor yours has had someone from such an echelon of Russian intelligence cross over to us. Nor, after managing such a defection, succeeding in getting released from at least nominal Russian detention a wife with whom to be reunited.”
“Indeed, neither of us has,” agreed Smith, smiling in return. “You’ve very definitely established the precedent. But how did that unsupervised reunion come about? Did you offer it? Or did Radtsic insist upon meeting his wife alone?”
Monsford hesitated. “He didn’t insist: he asked. And it was hardly an unsupervised encounter. We’ve just watched and listened to everything that took place.”
“With no debriefing intermediary to direct or guide it,” Smith pointed out.
“In the intrusive absence of whom, caught up in their emotion, we’ve already got a lead to something Radtsic expected to be the culmination of a thirty-year intelligence career but instead, because of an internal power struggle…” Monsford stopped, his mouth physically distorting to avoid the intended singular boast, “we’ve got the coup.”
“Let’s not keep credit from where credit is due,” enthused Smith, layering the condescension. “The coup is yours and yours alone. Which was how it was initiated and carried out, without the participation of anyone else. Just you, alone.”
“We’re becoming increasingly irritated at this perpetual antipathy,” declared Bland. “As well as becoming increasingly concerned that it’s endangering the matter at hand. True, we’ve got our coup. But externally it’s greatly mitigated by a number of unresolved issues. We want-as others more important want-this constant bickering to stop for the concentration to instead be upon tidying up those issues.”
“I reiterate that to resolve those issues I am offering every assistance asked of me and my service to help the Director-General, whose officer created them,” said Monsford.
“That offer would best be achieved by the immediate withdrawing from Moscow the three MI6 officers seconded to the original extraction for which I am responsible but for whom there is no further need,” responded Aubrey Smith, at once. “MI6 has succeeded with their extraction and achieved its coup, but upon which there would appear to be a need for much more work.”
The only sound in the room for several minutes was that of differing seat and chair shifting prompted by differing reasons. The first-to-speak concentration settled upon Bland, the nominal chairman, who avoided the conflict with a matador’s deftness by inviting Monsford’s contribution.
“Unfortunate and public embarrassments aside, I am not aware of any changes in circumstance-in which, of course, I do not include the reemergence of Charlie Muffin-justifying the Director-General’s astonishing demand.”
“Are there any changes of circumstances?” Palmer asked Aubrey Smith.
“I believe there are considerable changes, none of which I intend discussing here,” said the MI5 Director- General. “I shall, of course, discuss them in full and complete detail when the extraction of Natalia Fedova becomes a wholly independent MI5 matter.”
“Not only is it outrageous to impugn my service, as I believe the Director-General is doing, it is arrogant for him to imagine that the separation of our two services is for him to decide,” said Monsford.
“It is for the Director to make whatever interpretation he chooses,” dismissed Smith. “In making your decision, which I was in no way taking from you, it’s important I make totally clear that I am not prepared to continue the extraction of Natalia Fedova in partnership with MI6.”
“And I must make it equally clear, as I have already done, that I am prepared completely to take over the extraction as an MI6 operation,” declared Monsford.
“You took it over the edge,” accused Jane Ambersom, objectively. “You didn’t have a fallback if the ruling had gone against you.”
“I’d have done what I know Monsford’s going to do, ignore it,” said Aubrey Smith, unoffended at her directness. “The whole intention was to get Monsford and MI6
