“Thanks for this, too,” said Charlie. The American had offered unasked the complete list of the failed security precautions, as well as the hospital update that the president’s wife could lose her arm, which would be permanently impaired even if she didn’t. Charlie liked the fact that the other man wasn’t trying to disguise the exchange as anything more than the same give-to-receive shell game he was playing. It indicated-he hoped-that they were treating each other as professionals. He was still waiting for Kayley to point up the one incongruity that was so far troubling him. He wondered if the other professional omission was an oversight.
Kayley said, “Don’t envy you the son-of-a-bitch still being British.”
“It’s a bastard,” agreed Charlie. He nodded to his glass being topped up. He’d give the other man a little more time.
“You going to get access?”
“Not applied for yet. I expect it will be.”
“We’re asking for it, although I’m not sure of our legality. It’s Russian jurisdiction and prosecution, even though it’s the president’s wife that got hit.”
Kayley was professional, accepted Charlie. “You’ll be allowed participation, though?”
“Limited’s my guess. He’s your national, you stand the better chance.”
“I’m prepared to share, if you are.” Surely Kayley would pick upon on that!
“Deal!” accepted the American, at once.
Perhaps Kayley was testing him. Charlie said, “Peter Bendall passed over a lot of your stuff to the Russians in the late sixties. There’ll be an American dossier on him.”
Kayley nodded, unembarrassed at being reminded of the obvious. “I guess. It would have been CIA, not the Bureau.”
“Available to you now, though?”
“I’ll check it out.”
A professional like Kayley would have done so hours ago. If the American was trying to control the exchange, he’d failed. Charlie decided it was better to continue in the expectation of getting something but not all, which was the level at which he intended to work. “You getting any political playback this soon?” There might be a loose ball to play off against Brooking and Sir Michael Parnell and at the moment it was scraps he was scrabbling for.
“Nothing positive,” said Kayley, shaking his head. “Washington’s not comfortable about the Bureau’s position here, if the communists get their man in.”
Charlie’s feet tweaked. “How’s that?”
“We were accepted here by Yeltsin and the reformers, all part of the fight against crime,” reminded Kayley. “State’s thinking is that we’d be the first to be told to get out if the old regime was reestablished. Guess that would apply to you, too.”
“Yes,” agreed Charlie. “I guess it would.” What the hell sort of spin would that put upon the situation between he and Natalia!
“This could even be our last case. How’s that for a thought?”
“Unsettling,” said Charlie, honestly. About far too many things, he mentally added.
Senior Militia investigator Colonel Olga Ivanova Melnik was an attractive, even beautiful woman and knew it. What she knew even better was how to use it, in every way. She invariably wore civilian clothes instead of uniform, because dresses and skirts and blouses showed off her full-busted, narrow-waisted figure to her best advantage and always allowed distracting cleavage interrogating male suspects. She also adjusted her demeanor to every encounter, bullying when necessary, awkwardly stumbling sometimes to give her interviewees the dangerously misleading impression of their superiorintelligence. It was an attitude strictly reserved for interview rooms. Outside she was a determined, supremely confident woman with an IQ of 175 that had academically taken her up the promotional ladder in balanced proportion to the occasions she’d climbed bedroom stairs with partners carefully selected more for her career advancement than their sexual prowess. Since attaining her detective seniority by the age of thirty-five prowess had taken precedence over influence among those invited to follow her up any stairs.
Olga Ivanova was politically as well as professionally adept and was more aware than anyone caught up in the immediate, twenty-four-hour aftermath of the shooting how totally successful she could emerge from the inquiry. How could she fail to get a conviction when the crime had been committed in front of a world-wide television jury?
It remained essential, of course, for Olga to be the hands-on focus of every facet of the investigation and that initially had obviously been for her to sit-fitfully sleeping in her chair when it was no longer possible to remain awake-just one whisper-hearing meter from George Bendall since his return from the operating theater.
But there hadn’t been a whisper. Anything except the jagged peaks of the heart monitor and the in-out hiss of the ventilator and the silent blood and saline drip and increasingly dark brown filling of the catheter bag. While all the boring, unproductive time, in walking distance away in Lefortovo prison, Vera Bendall, alias Vera Gugin, had sat for virtually the same period unsuspectingly waiting to be broken.
Olga, a strongly featured, prominently-lipped woman, eased out of the no longer comfortable chair and stretched stiffly around the room, as she had several times before. She’d completed her first circuit and was about to begin her easier, cramp-eased second when the chief physician-administrator, Nicholai Badim, thrust into the room, for the first time in many visits uncaring of the noise. With him was an equally attentive pale-skinned, white-blond-haired psychiatrist, Guerguen Semenovich Agayan.
“We’ve got the brain scans,” Agayan announced. “Look.”
Olga did so, although she was unsure what she was supposed to be seeing.
“There!” demanded the surgeon. “At the base there. It’s a hairline linear fracture. And here …” the finger went to a patch darker than the rest of the illustrated brain. “We did a spinal tap as part of the initial exploratory surgery. There’s no blood in the fluid. So that darkening is suberachnoid bruising.”
“What are you telling me?” demanded Olga.
“That he badly hit his head in the fall, in addition to all the other injuries,” said Agayan.
“Is he brain damaged!”
“I won’t know that until he recovers consciousness,” said the psychiatrist.
“But I’m going to sedate him more deeply, to counteract any possibility of epilepsy,” said Badim. “At the moment his medical condition is more important.”
“When’s he likely to recover sufficiently for any sort of interrogation?”
“I’m not going to allow him to open his eyes for at least another twenty-four hours and only then when I see some lessening in the bruising area. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” said Olga. “That’s fine.”
5
Lefortovo is the embodiment of terror-The Terror-that dominated Russia and its once Soviet Union for most of the twentieth century, initiated there before 1917 but quickly afterwards becoming the experimental laboratory in which was perfected every art and device of bone-crushing, mentally molding State oppression of State opposition.
The Okhrana, the intelligence service that so fatally failed to protect the ineffectual Czar Nicholas II from impending revolution, created it as the prison in which dissent and its advocates were literally snuffed out, like flickering candles. Within its uncleaned,blood-splattered walls the goatee-bearded Feliks Dzerzhinsky, who founded modern Russian intelligence by creating the succeeding Vecheka, installed his torturers and firing squads to maintain Lenin’s rule. He didn’t bother with wall cleaning. Neither did the terrorfuelled intelligence agencies of Stalin-the GPU and the OGPU and the NKVD and NKGB-NKVD and the MVD-MGB and the KGB-that followed, although occasionally spaces were scoured for official plaques proclaiming their chairmen as Heroes of the Soviet Union, psychopaths like Yagoda and Yezhov and Lavrenti Beria, the most psychopathic of them all.