Novikov said, “I was beginning to think I wouldn’t hear from you again.”
“Just make the application. It’s being supported through the embassy,” lied Charlie. “Don’t mention that, of course.”
“How can I thank you?”
“You know,” reminded Charlie.
24
Charlie gazed through the window as the plane banked for landing, feeling the usual surge of nostalgia for a city in which he’d worked so often that Berlin had once seemed more like home than London. He couldn’t pick out the odd memorial scraps of the Wall, but didn’t anyway need markers for where, like a bloated aorta along which so much real blood had run, it had gone through the heart of the city. He didn’t see the Commonwealth war cemetery, either. He didn’t bother trying to locate from the air the other building he was anxious to get to, knowing very well where it was.
What embarrassment-what need-could there be after all these years for not one but two countries to be so determined to cover it up, as America and England appeared to be? Something both had combined upon, clearly. Big, then. Mammoth, even. All securely hidden for fifty-four years, never ever intended to be revealed, as the bodies had never been intended to be discovered. A shared secret of one agency? Or several, each in some way involved in some small part? Would the telephone calls he’d made and the ambiguous conversations he’d initiated in the last few days, spreading the inquiry too wide, he hoped, for anyone to see a direction, be sufficient? Or would whoever the puppet masters were have been too clever, getting there ahead of him-years ahead of him? He was pinning a lot of hope on bureaucracy getting in its own way, which in his experience it nearly always did. And on the fact that he’d worked in Berlin so often and knew so well just how many institutions had been created there in the immediate post and Cold War years. He hoped most of all that his memory and knowledge were better than any Whitehallor Washington chair-bound keeper of secrets. And Kenton Peters had another secret now, not one to keep but to discover. Charlie’s whereabouts. Persuading Sir Rupert Dean not to disclose his movements was as personally self-protective as it was to guard the department. More so. The American mistake-Peters’s arrogance-had been letting him know what Henry Packer looked like, not knowing how well tuned Charlie’s antenna was. It was going to be much harder to recognize Packer’s replacement if one was sent.
Charlie had made his reservation at the Bristol Kempinski, the hotel in which he always stayed, without asking the current prices, not thinking until he was checking in of the distress it would cause Gerald Williams to authorize these expenses as well as maintaining the rent on the Lesnaya apartment. Letting the thought drift, Charlie acknowledged it had been several weeks since any expenditure inquisition from the zealously attentive financial controller. He’d almost been disappointed that the cost of his beekeeper’s hat hadn’t been queried. Perhaps, mulled Charlie, the man had given up. Then again, perhaps he hadn’t.
Natalia had insisted on packing for him, everything laid out in his case in meticulous comparison to his customary haphazard effort, and when he lifted out the spare jacket Charlie knew why. There were two notes, with another framed photograph of Natalia and Sasha. Natalia’s note said simply, Hurry Home. Sasha’s was much longer, the laboriously printed English attempt interspersed with cyrillic letters, each line dipping dramatically at its end, literally falling away. It said, I love you and miss you and I am sorry about that silly word. Charlie liked best that it was addressed to Daddy.
He was at the room bureau, writing an immediate reply on a hotel postcard, when the telephone jarred, startling him by its nearness. With a befitting, machine-gun delivery, the voice said, “Jackson here. Thought we should meet, as you suggested. Downstairs when you’re ready.”
Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Jackson’s age-at least half that of Gallaway, Charlie guessed-marked him at once as the complete antithesis of the ineffectual Moscow attache, a fast-track career professional for whom the promotional escalator would never rise fast enough. He came up from the barstool like a spring, the flick of fair hair that would give him problems on parade days falling over hisleft eye. He managed to push it back and shake hands at the same time. The handshake was firm but not arm wrestling. Orange juice, Charlie noted, automatically ordering Islay malt, knowing the hotel stocked it, which was another reason for staying there.
“A table’s probably better,” Charlie suggested, moving away from the bar at which there were only two other people anyway, and they at its far end.
“Of course, sir.”
“You want me to call you lieutenant colonel?”
The man frowned, confused. “No.”
“Then it’s Charlie.”
The frown became a grin. “Not sure what the form is with you chaps ….” He looked down at himself. “Thought mufti was best.” The trouser crease of Jackson’s muted checked suit would have been dangerous to the touch and the man risked severing an artery moving his head too quickly against the stiff collar. The burnished brogues reflected sufficient light to send SOS signals.
“Fine,” said Charlie, aware for the first time that Natalia must have pressed his trousers, too. It still amounted to a before-and-after comparison. “Sorry to barge in like this at the last moment.”
“Glad to have you aboard. Saw the television from Siberia. Can’t have been much fun.”
There’d been a reference from the attache to seeing him on television when they’d spoken from Moscow. Charlie hoped that had been sufficient official identification, without the man feeling it necessary to check with the Defense Ministry in London. If he had-and there’d been objections-Jackson would hardly have kept the suggested meeting or been so amenable. Charlie said, “It was pretty rough.”
“Any idea yet what happened to the poor bastards?”
Open sesame! thought Charlie. “Not a complete picture. What guidance have you got from London?”
“None,” said the other man, apologetically. “Just told to attend, as official military observer.”
Bugger it, thought Charlie. “What’s the setup?”
“Haven’t arranged anything. Waited for you. Got a car outside. Thought you might like to look around.”
“What about the exhumation?”
“There’s a security blackout on it, of course. Ministry insistence. Fortunately the Commonwealth cemetery at Charlottenburg is under military jurisdiction. Makes it easy. The section we want has already been sealed off. The grave itself has been screened. The workmen haven’t been told whose grave it is they’re opening. Apart from them, there’ll just be us, the embassy padre, a medical examiner and someone from the Berlin coroner’s office. There might be someone from the War Graves Commission; they’re not sure yet what to do about the grave marker, now they know it’s not Simon Norrington ….” He paused. “You know what you’re looking for?”
“Not yet,” said Charlie. Hopefully he added, “Anything else London had you do? Don’t want any confusion between the briefings.”
“Little risk of that,” assured Jackson, still apologetic. He’d been told the Gieves and Hawkes customer archive had provided the address of the family seat in Hampshire and Sir Matthew Norrington had produced the War Office’s 1945 notification of his brother’s death and burial in Berlin; having visited it, Sir Matthew had even known the plot number. He had, it seemed, considered it fitting his brother remain in a soldier’s grave rather than be reinterred in the family vault in England.
“Located the grave myself from the plot number,” said Jackson. “Usual inscription: rank, name, unit, date of death.”
“Everything based on what the family supplied?” queried Charlie, disappointed. “What about from the ministry itself?”
“Family told the ministry, the ministry told me,” said the attache.
“Nothing more than that?”