Red Star Burning

ability to detect surveillance. Charlie let himself be carried, unresisting, along the stall-cluttered thoroughfare, seeking the remembered centrally placed, brick-built emporium, disappointed from the outside at the limited escape options if Wilkinson once more guided MI6 pursuit to him. After two further top-to-bottom street reconnoiters Charlie failed to locate a better alternative.

Charlie correctly guessed Wilkinson would arrive at the Arbat Metro, despite the man’s vow never again to use the underground system. Wilkinson emerged, manila package tightly clutched beneath his right arm, precisely ten minutes ahead of their appointed time. Charlie remained in the station-bordering cafe, his Pravda spread before him but concentrating upon recognizable faces, needing a second vodka to justify his staying where he was during the forty-five minutes it took Wilkinson to get through the tourist crush in both directions. He let Wilkinson get twenty meters ahead on the man’s third promenade before following. He caught up at the emporium and said: “To your left, with the green-painted shutters,” sure the man would visibly jump, which he did.

Wilkinson moved without turning. Charlie went with him, but didn’t enter, lingering at the outside displays to satisfy himself the man was alone. Wilkinson was in the back of the incense-perfumed arcade, examining icon reproductions, when Charlie finally entered. It took a full meandering five minutes for Charlie to reach him.

Charlie reached out for Wilkinson’s package, slipping it between the pages of his newspaper before turning to keep the main door in view. “What did London say?”

“You’ve got new backup,” announced Wilkinson, copying Charlie’s icon interest. “No connection to the embassy, no connection with us. Your contact is an Ian Flood. He’s at your favorite hotel: you’re supposed to understand that. We’re to decoy the others.”

“Try to get it right this time,” said Charlie, unforgiving.

“I’m glad to be out of it,” blurted Wilkinson. “All three of us are.”

“So am I,” said Charlie. “Did you also tell London MI6 did more than just try to get to me: that Briddle was with you and through you was with me right up to Dmitrouskaya? From where he obviously watched us in the park and afterwards rode the train with you: the train upon which he imagined I’d be, a sitting target.”

“How do you know that?” said Wilkinson, disbelievingly.

“Because watching you leave I saw him in the carriage behind you.”

“I … I mean I should…” stumbled the man.

“Don’t bother,” stopped Charlie. “Is there anything more to tell me?”

“MI6 have been officially taken off, their guys withdrawn.”

“Have they gone?”

“We only got the cable this morning, just before all three of us left the embassy to give us-me-time to lose surveillance. But I told him last night I knew about London’s order: that they were out of it.”

“What did he say?”

“To go fuck myself: that he took his orders from London. That’s why the three of us are staying as decoys.”

Another uncertainty in the lucky dip tub, thought Charlie.

In an afterthought Gerald Monsford stopped to buy roses for Elana. The fumble-fingered florist took almost half an hour to gift wrap them, complete with red ribbon to match the flowers, and he was practically an hour late getting to the Hertfordshire safe house. Radtsic was alone in the conservatory.

“I’m late because I stopped to get these for Elana,” said Monsford, offering the bouquet as if for approval. “Where is she?” He already knew from his arrival meeting with Harry Jacobson.

“Resting,” said the Russian, ignoring the flowers. He was in the chair Elana had chosen the day before, preventing Monsford’s sitting close to him.

“Perhaps she’ll join us later for me to give them to her?”

“She doesn’t want to see you: be part of anything.”

“I’m sorry about that,” said Monsford, putting the flowers on a side table.

“You already knew,” accused Radtsic, looking up to the ceiling joist Elana had identified.

Monsford instinctively followed the look and wished he hadn’t, uncomfortable that it would have been filmed. “It’ll get better.”

“Not without Andrei,” refused the man.

“You’ve got to be realistic, Maxim Mikhailovitch,” cautioned Monsford. “We’re trying, you know we’re trying, but it’s going to take a lot of time.”

“Then it’ll have to take a lot of time,” said Radtsic, flatly. “Our deal was that we’d all be together, a complete family. There’s no deal if we’re not a complete family.”

Not anticipating its weight, Monsford had to struggle to get another chair opposite the Russian and knew the film would show his overweight awkwardness. “What happened in France wasn’t our fault. We don’t yet know how or why it happened. We’ll find a way to get Andrei back. But our deal can’t be put on hold indefinitely.”

“I can’t accept anything without Andrei being here. Neither can Elana.”

“Andrei will be here! But during the time it’ll take we’ve got to start work. There are people you’re going to meet: people you’ll regard as friends as you work together.”

“I know what debriefing is,” snapped Radtsic, in a small spark of his old arrogance. “Just as I know what you want and which you’ll get. But that’s got to be met with what I want. And that’s not empty words and talk of indeterminate time. It’s got to be a balanced exchange: what I have to tell you equated against getting Andrei back.”

“That’s not a balanced exchange,” protested Monsford, tensed against his anger at the other man’s belief that he had a bargaining position. “It’s tilted entirely in your favor.”

“Which creates the incentive to get Andrei here.”

The bastard was playing with him, cat to mouse, realized Monsford, hating his own analogy and hating even more that others would witness Radtsic’s derision. “I won’t be coming down every day. Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to the people you’ll be dealing with all the time. And to a liaison officer, a woman, to ensure Elana’s got all she wants.”

“The only thing Elana wants is Andrei, like me,” repeated Radtsic. “I hope that tomorrow you’ll have something to tell us about that.”

“The confounded man’s refusing to cooperate,” complained Bland.

“It’s early days, as Monsford said,” reminded Palmer. “It’ll settle down when Radtsic realizes he hasn’t any real option.”

“Why did Monsford tell him we can get the boy back?” Bland demanded. “We don’t stand a chance of doing that.”

“It would have made Radtsic even more difficult if he hadn’t,” said Palmer.

“Every day I tell myself it can’t get any worse and every day it does get worse,” bemoaned the other man. “I’m fearing the time when we’re no longer able to shift all the responsibility on these two bloody directors and start getting it apportioned onto us.”

“I don’t want that to happen,” said Palmer, unsettled.

“I’m not going to allow it to happen,” determined the cabinet secretary. “Mine isn’t going to be the head that rolls.”

“Nor mine,” said Palmer, even more determinedly.

It took Charlie a long time to move between individual booking outlets to make, one from each, paid and confirmed reservations on separately available flights on his intended, hedge-hopping escape route the following day. And then to duplicate the entire process from different booking facilities to ensure there were two situation- dictated alternatives for himself, Natalia, and Sasha. In addition, improvising upon their changed roles as decoys against both his M16 pursuers and the FSB, who by now would have identified their presence from embassy surveillance, Charlie confirmed booking on LOT Polish Airlines to Warsaw, with a direct transfer connection to London from Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport-from which none of his other escape flights was departing-for Patrick Wilkinson, Neil Preston, and Peter Warren. Throughout the second ticket buying Charlie also booked tickets for his