Charlie celebrated the moment of satisfaction by picking up the airplane with the separate tail section and on impulse tried a test flight at the moment Colonel John Gallaway flustered into the room. The plane crashed at the military attache’s feet. The immaculate, cologne-smelling man frowned at the bristle-chinned, crumpled Charlie and said, “What in God’s name is going on?”
“Just seeing if it would fly as well as my ideas,” said Charlie.
“It didn’t,” said Gallaway.
They gathered in Gallaway’s office because that was where the six surviving wartime photographs had been assembled. Charlie carried with him the lieutenant’s uniform, which he decided smelled only slightly worse than he did, and everything it had contained. While McDowell, Gallaway, and Cartright prodded and poked among it all, Charlie took the pictures to the window, where the sun’s early promise had been fulfilled with a brilliantly bright day. The glare made him feel gravel-eyed, from tiredness.
The photographs were grainy and sepia-faded from age. Among the recommendations he’d already sent to London-carefully retrieved from the cipher room, with everything else, on his way to Gallaway’s suite-was that a Foreign Office and Defense Ministry archive search be made there for wartime pictures and Charlie decided to ship Gallaway’s trove back with the body of the dead man, despite there being no one in the prints even vaguely resembling the long-dead man in the basement refrigerator.
He didn’t hurry providing a greatly edited account of Yakutsk to the other three men. He omitted completely his belief of there being a second British officer involved.
“So!” he finished, looking at the military attache. “That’s my story. What’s yours, from the Ministry of Defense files about an intelligence operation?”
“Absolutely nothing!” declared Gallaway, glibly. “There wasn’t one.”
Charlie let the silence settle, until the others began to stir uncomfortably, not understanding. “Okay,” sighed Charlie. “The body of an English officer, wearing an English officer’s uniform, is in agrenade-created grave in a part of Siberia no one fifty years ago could get to. The Defense Ministry, which inherited the War Office, has no record of any lieutenant being there. Or here ….” Charlie paused, feeling another snatch of tiredness. “You tell me, John … you don’t mind me calling you John, do you? I’d like you to call me Charlie.”
Unable to anticipate what was coming, Gallaway shook his head.
“Thank you, John,” Charlie resumed. “So you tell me, John, what our man was doing there unless he was on a covert operation? And then you try to convince me-with the amount of publicity that this is getting-that your ministry hasn’t gone through every bus ticket and postage stamp receipt of its archives of fifty years ago to find out why a British army lieutenant was where he was. But before you do all that-John-you tell me what your brief is from London right now.’Cause if you don’t, I’m not going to share with you any more than I’m going to share with anyone else. And the loser-John-will be you. You think about it ….” Charlie looked sideways to Cartright. “And I’d like you to take that on board, too, Richard. Strikes me I’m doing all the work, being stung to buggery possibly in more ways than were obvious in Yakutsk, and getting very little back in return.”
“I shall most definitely report everything about this conversation to London!” said Gallaway. His face was puce but not totally: there were isolated white blotches, making him lizard-skinned.
“I obviously will, too,” said Cartright. “I’ve done everything I could think of to help. You can read my cable traffic if you like.”
“I want all of you to do that,” encouraged Charlie but ignoring the offer. “Just as I want you all to know I’m not making any accusations against you personally. It’s not the way those bastards on the top floor operate. When you complain to London about me, you also tell them that I’ve got a lot more they’d like to know but I’ve got to get a lot more in exchange.”
Gallaway was gulping for words when his telephone rang. He answered without greeting and just as wordlessly handed it to the head of chancellery. Raymond McDowell’s face contorted into disbelief. “The body’s in the canteen refrigerator! None of the staff will go in to get the food for breakfast!”
“I’m sorry,” apologized Charlie. “I haven’t got ’round to telling you.”
Gerald Williams was right, thought Cartright. This man was practically beyond belief.
Natalia listened intently as Colonel Vadim Lestov recited back to her the statement she’d just dictated to him, knowing even the intonation was important, correcting the detective twice.
“We’re going to issue something similar from here,” she said, finally. She’d spent an hour that morning suggesting the phrasing with the deputy foreign minister, Mikhail Suslov, and a further hour waiting for any correction from their presidential adviser at the White House. Dmitri Nikulin hadn’t called. There was only forty-five minutes before her meeting with Charlie.
“I’m very sorry,” apologized Lestov. “Nothing has gone as it should have, as it was intended.”
“You’re not being held responsible.”
“Why, then, is it you I’m being briefed by, not Colonel Travin?”
“This is political as well as being operational,” said Natalia, cautiously. Politically survivable for whom? she wondered.
16
Belying the appearance of a man who always looked as if he’d crawled out from under an ancient hedge, Charlie Muffin was fastidiously clean: the way he dressed was camouflage for him to be overlooked, hopefully not even seen. Necessarily going back to Lesnaya to shower, shave and change-and even then make a telephone call-delayed him, but Charlie wouldn’t anyway have arrived at the gardens ahead of Natalia.
She had never been operational, walking dark streets and even darker alleys; couldn’t instinctively recognize the difference between shadows and shade, which after so long was second nature to Charlie. Not yet knowing her latest concern, he had to protect her, ensure she was alone. It had been Natalia who’d remembered their old rendezvous, so she’d remember the rules: expect him to check fromsomewhere unseen and know that if he didn’t approach after half an hour he wouldn’t make the meeting, not believing it safe.
She had to be wrong, overreacting, he told himself as he emerged from the Botanicheskiy Sad metro, cloaked by the crowd. This sort of thing had been necessary in the old, paranoid past, but one of the few real changes in Russia-Moscow, particularly-had been the ending of the KGB’s spy-upon-spy internal control. In addition to which officially Natalia was no longer attached to an intelligence organization since her liaison transfer to the Interior Ministry.
His going through the charade of a clandestine meeting, behaving in the ways of that old, obsessive past, was important, though, for what it told him. Natalia was becoming paranoid: overpressured and overstrained trying to live as they were. As they had no alternative but to live. Charlie tried unsuccessfully to recall the Shakespeare quotation about a tangled web he’d had to learn at school, unable to remember if it was the same play that had the phrase about protesteth too much that had occurred to him that morning, confronting the supposedly outraged diplomats and offended intelligence officer. School had been a long time ago, like so much else seemed to be.
But not tradecraft.
Sure of the geography, Charlie eased into the park by the side gate, the one that gave him immediate cover from the arch-roofed hothouse and the branch-skirted gymnosperms. He saw Natalia at once. She was sitting on what he’d taught her to be their marker seat, from which he could isolate the people around her, seeking out the seemingly engrossed newspaper reader on adjoining benches or entwined lovers whose eyes never closed in ecstasy or pet owners whose dogs couldn’t pee anymore.
Dutifully Natalia got up after a few minutes, striding forcefully off toward the rear gate, as if leaving: a never-fail trigger to startle a watcher into movement. Two newspaper readers read on. A third continued dozing. The solitary dog walker went on in the opposite direction. It was too early for lovers. Natalia sat as abruptly as she’d risen, on the seat closest to the first hothouse, not more than five meters from where Charlie stood beneath the tree canopy. The gardens remained tranquil, apart from the entry of a noisy school party of giggling girls who were giggling schoolgirls. Charlie still gave itanother five minutes, smiling toward Natalia as he eventually approached.