“How long did it last?”
“Until I divorced him so he could marry her. She didn’t want him then.” She was quiet for several moments. “I’m sorry I’ve been so stupid. About us, I mean.”
“No real harm done.”
“There could have been. I can’t think how awful that would have been.”
“It’s over,” assured Charlie. Irena knowing someone at the British embassy was something else he wouldn’t tell Natalia. Their holding-back roles had been reversed, he realized.
“I’m glad you called,” said Miriam. She really wasn’t sure who was the better lover, Cartright or Lestov. Which wasn’t the most important comparison. Cartright’s usefulness, apart from in bed, was what she could get from his involvement in the case.
“It’s good to have you back.” said Cartright. “It must have been appalling.”
“Known better.”
“How did you get on with Charlie?”
Miriam was surprised Cartright had managed to hold out through dinner and the before-and-after drinks. “Fine. He sure as hell knows how to operate.”
“How’s that?”
“We wouldn’t have gotten on that plane if he hadn’t known how to flash dollars around.”
“He seems adept as making money work,” prompted Cartright.
“But I gave him a ride back, so I guess we’re even. What happened while I was away?”
“Nothing of any consequence. London doesn’t seem to be able to find any trace of our man. Or why he should have been there. How about you?”
“Lots of questions. No answers.”
“You think Charlie’s being straight with you?”
“Don’t you?”
“No. This is a joint operation. Anything I get from London I’m quite prepared to share with you. We do have rather a special relationship, don’t we?”
“Very special,” agreed Miriam, happy in every way with her night’s work.
18
The first shipment from the Lubyanka archives-yellowing, crumbling folders and box files, mostly handwritten and detailing five camps, none Gulag 98-was waiting for Natalia when she arrived at the ministry the following morning.
So, too, were all the replies from Petr Pavlovich Travin to her previous day’s flurry of messages, although none from the deputy foreign minister.
Travin’s overall response-to complain of insufficient staff and inadequate funds temporarily to employ the extra people necessary for such a mammoth task-was precisely what Charlie had predicted, but Natalia felt a flicker of uncertainty at the next step. Just as quickly she realized there was no going back.
She ordered Travin to withdraw clerk and office staff from every militia district station in Moscow and volunteered three of her own secretariat, suggesting that Travin and Viskov match the transferfrom their staff. She proposed that Travin organize a shift system extending until midnight-around the clock, if it became necessary-and in a separate although copied-to-everyone note asked the deputy interior minister to allocate emergency funding for the extra hours’ payment. She reminded her deputy there was a planned meeting that afternoon with the returning Colonel Lestov and suggested they finalize the operation then. Her last message, over which she hesitated longer than any other in the batch she enclosed to him, invited Dmitri Nikulin’s suggestion upon anything she might have overlooked.
The speed of the deputy interior minister’s return brought the stomach-dropping realization of how carefully Viskov and Travin had set their imagined trap-even to corresponding through Nikulin-and how close she was to the final confrontation. She wished Charlie would be with her when it came.
It was to the presidential office that Viktor Viskov’s memorandum was sent, marked copied to her as a matter of courtesy, and Natalia accepted at once that Viskov’s denunciation was intended to be all the more effective by its careful understatement. She was referred to throughout by her cumbersome official title: Interior ministry director of militia and internal security liaison. Nowhere was there a direct condemnation. But to crush her as completely as possible by gaining an overwhelming support as well as an audience, duplicates of the memorandum had also gone to the Finance and Foreign Ministries.
Viskov wrote that although the Lubyanka search ordered by the liaison director had already begun, it had not been possible for staff there accurately even to estimate the documentation involved. It was certainly well in excess of a hundred thousand, possibly treble that number. None of it was indexed, properly annotated or in any dated order; the history of some camps occupied half a dozen dossiers, others as many as twenty. Virtually the entire archival staff of the intelligence headquarters had been assigned to the recovery, but it would be at least a month, possibly longer, before it would all be finally transferred to the ministry. Even then there was no guarantee everything would be included. The archivist-Natalia assumed it would have been Fyodor Lyulin-had warned the material would eventually occupy several thousand square meters of space. The archivist had been given no indication or guidance by the liaison director concerning what was being hunted but thought it could takeas long as six months, depending on the number of people allocated, for everything to be read-longer if the search was for a specific individual. The lists of names ran into the millions.
Viskov estimated thirty clerks could be withdrawn from district militia posts to supplement a possible further twenty within the ministry, as suggested by the liaison director. Their working a shift system-even around the clock, as also suggested by the liaison director-for anything up to six months would cost three times the total yearly clerk and secretarial budget of the entire ministry. It would also, of course, mean none of the normal work of those involved could be done, which would require a further period of overtime working, logically a further six months, which would bring the budgetary overspending to four times the salary allocation. A further but very practical problem was that in the ministry building there was insufficient storage space for the files, the first of which had already arrived.
Such a commitment-in terms of cost, manpower, time and space-was unprecedented in the history of the Moscow militia, the intelligence agencies or the Interior Ministry. Nothing Viskov had so far been told by the liaison director supported such an undertaking; indeed, he was still waiting to learn precisely what was being sought. While in no way criticising the liaison director-nor, even less, questioning its immediate endorsement by the president’s office-Viskov urged serious reconsideration until they were convinced of the need and importance of an operation that quite clearly had not been properly thought through.
The deputy interior minister proposed that the already arranged meeting with Colonel Vadim Leonidovich Lestov be expanded to the whole committee for the liaison director personally to justify her actions. Until then, and their confirmation by the full committee, he had suspended the archival transfer.
Natalia read and reread the denunciation, knowing she could not afford to miss a single accusation. It was far more detailed than Charlie had predicted and for some time she felt hollowed-fleetingly, even, angry at Charlie-before gradually forcing the acceptance that Viskov and Travin had fallen into Charlie’s trap, not she into theirs. And that it looked as if this really was the last battle in a sniping war of attrition. She was frightened, which she supposed people werebefore knowingly going into battle. She hoped the very particular rules of engagement devised by herself at Charlie’s direction proved sufficient. They seemed to be, so far, but there was a long way to go.
Her only real concession would be to admit a total inspection was impractical, and that wasn’t planned as an admission. Everything after that was to lure Viskov on, turning the man’s blind determination back upon himself. And he had been blinded. Or rather unable to see properly, over the bullshit mountain. Possibly the politician’s greatest weakness-despite his attempted insistence to the contrary-was having no alternative but to link Dmitri Nikulin in the attack, because of Nikulin’s endorsement of Natalia. More than a weakness, she corrected: it was a very definite tactical error.