In Moscow Dmitri Nikulin announced the same decision and Natalia traveled to the White House in the same car as Colonel Vadim Lestov. She was curious at the strange harshness there had been in the presidential chief of staffs voice when he’d summoned them, apprehensive of what it might mean.
“You’re sure you seized everything Belous had hidden?” demanded the tall, austere man.
“After finding what we did, we virtually stripped the apartment,” assured the militia colonel. “There’s absolutely nothing more.”
“Where is it now?” Nikulin appeared distracted, looking around his huge office as if he expected to see it laid out for inspection.
“All in my personal office safe.”
“Fyodor Belous?”
“In custody, in Lefortovo. Held on suspicion of theft,” said Natalia.
Nikulin said, “The NKVD accreditation is the most important.”
“It’s with everything else,” guaranteed Lestov.
“I want you, personally, to bring it to me today,” ordered Nikulin. He hesitated, looking away from them, his mouth moving in apparent rehearsal for what he was about to say. Then, coming back to them, he said, “As of today, this moment, the investigation into the Yakutsk murders and the apparent disappearance of Larisa Krotkov is ended. Neither of you will take any further active part and certainly make no contribution.” He looked directly at Lestov. “You will appear to continue working with the American and the Englishman, to monitor everything they do or might discover, until such time as they announce the case unsolvable. At that time we’ll devise a public announcement, which at this stage isn’t something that has to be considered.”
Natalia broke the stunned silence that followed, stumbling to arrange her own words. “But we surely need-”
“There will be no professional reflection upon either of you,” interrupted the presidential aide, misunderstanding. “In fact, both your records will be personally endorsed, by me, that your investigation has been exemplary and the confirmation of your promotion, Vadim Leonidovich, will also be endorsed with presidential approval.”
“We have already issued a statement of a potential breakthrough, hinting at Tsarskoe Selo,” reminded Lestov, uncomfortable that it had been his idea.
“Which we can easily make it to be,” said Nikulin, another decision already made. “We can produce everything else you found in Belous’s apartment and disclose it as art she saved from being plundered by the Nazis: continue building Raisa Belous into a heroine, which she was. And we’ll keep the man silent by using his fear of security organizations. Tell him if he as much as speaks to the press again he’ll spend the rest of his life in a Yakutskaya labor camp.”
“Are we to be told why and how Raisa Belous became a heroine? Larisa Krotkov, too, presumably?” demanded Natalia, her thoughts in order now.
Once more Nikulin hesitated. “They were both instrumental in one of the greatest-ever services to the Motherland, which continued to benefit for decades. But which will never, ever be revealed.”
“When?” demanded Aleksandr Andreevich Kurshin.
“Immediately,” said Vitali Novikov. “Everything’s fixed.”
“Full citizenship … residency permission …?” groped Kurshin.
“Everything.”
“But you never said … talked about it,” complained the local homicide detective. “I would have expected …?”
“You know how many times I applied before. I thought I’d be refused again,” said the doctor, close to the truth.
It was midafternoon in the mortuary laboratory and Kurshin had already consumed one flask of vodka, squinting to focus and to understand. Befuddled, he said, “You’ll be gone! Forever!”
“I shall miss you, too, old friend.”
Kurshin came awkwardly forward, arms outstretched, and the two men bear-hugged. Novikov felt his boyhood friend shaking.
Kurshin said, “A farewell drink?”
“Of course,” accepted Novikov. “Several.” He had a lot to celebrate. Everything, in fact.
31
“A total waste of time, in fact?” judged Gerald Williams, wearily predictable, the moment Charlie stopped talking.
“No,” denied Charlie. “There was no way of our knowing, until I’d spoken to all three, what there might have been. Which made it essential that I come back to do it.” Charlie, who’d never had to hold up a wetted finger to gauge which way the wind was blowing, discerned a changed attitude in everyone in the conference room. During the last confrontation, only days ago, Sir Rupert Dean himself had intervened to remind the constant attacker that he’d ordered the withdrawal.
“And having spoken to them, you learned nothing!”
“No.” Charlie was forced to admit.
“So there hasn’t been the slightest step forward?” persisted the committed finance director.
Because Williams’s attitude was so predictable, Charlie had withheld Sir Peter Mason’s alternative theory about a second officer, to which the fat man’s reaction was for the first time slower.
It was the director-general who said, “That would certainly be a total rejection of any Russian claim. Put us in the driving seat, perhaps?”
“More than that,” encouraged Charlie, who’d prepared his second presentation during the drive back to London more interested in the maximum benefit than in its absolute accuracy. “As I’ve already told you, I believe the accusation of a second British officer is what’s being threatened by the Russians. If we, in advance-today, even-made the demand for a Russian explanation, we’d completely preempt them.” He’d only spent a few minutes-five at the most-with Sir Rupert Dean before coming into the conference room, but it had been enough to detect the man’s misgivings at previously allowing so much to be withheld from the people now ranged around the table against him. It was therefore the director-general-upon whom above all others his future in Moscow depended-that Charlie was the most anxious to convince or reassure. Or both.
“Unless they know more about another officer than we do,” countered Patrick Pacey. “In which case we’d be admitting a spying mission in advance of being accused of it.” The political officer shook his head. “It’s too risky a strategy and there’s a lot of other people who’d agree with me, I’m sure.”
“Which brings us back, as we are always brought back, to how little has been achieved during this entire mishandled investigation,” Williams said.
“The opinion is not mine,” conceded Charlie, unhappy at what sounded like an excuse. “It was suggested, most strongly, by Sir Peter Mason. Who was the permanent secretary to the Foreign Office.”
“A long time ago,” deflated Pacey. “The Cold War eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations are things of the past.”
“Perhaps unfortunately, as far as our future is concerned,” remarked Jeremy Simpson. “I accept all the political arguments, butspeaking as a lawyer there’s a lot in the cliche of attack being the best form of defense.”
Charlie at once saw the opportunity further to allay the director-general’s discomfort. “Sir Peter also insisted that it is impossible-his word-for Simon Norrington’s records to have disappeared. According to him it’s an inviolable Whitehall regulation that everything is transferred to Kew. Even if something is withheld for reasons of sensitivity, the fact that it is being withheld is publicly noted.”
“Are you suggesting there’s been positive obstruction?” demanded Dean, sharply.
What everyone else would believe to be outrage Charlie recognized as the man’s relief at his committee having belatedly put in front of them a lot of what he and Charlie had earlier kept to themselves. “I’m telling you the opinion of someone who knows the system,” Charlie said, following the older man’s lead. So unproductive had the interviews with the three men been that the latitude Dean had allowed did seem pointless now. It irked Charlie to have to agree, even only to himself, with Gerald Williams’s assessment.