“Have you made many friends?”
“A lot,” said Andrei, smiling across the apartment at Yvette, curled up catlike in an enveloping chair.
“We miss you. Do you miss us?”
“Of course. But I’m kept very busy.”
“When will you be able to come home?”
“I don’t know. Not yet.”
“I’d like more letters.”
“I told you, I’m kept very busy.”
“Too busy for a single page?” The correspondence was channeled through the Russian embassy in the diplomatic pouch to avoid French intelligence interception of e-mails.
“I’ll write soon. I promise. Is Father there?”
“He’s putting the car away. I’ll tell him about the letter. And don’t forget to write.”
“It was my mother,” said Andrei, to Yvette’s inquiring look.
“I want you to teach me Russian. I like its sound.”
”She wanted to know when I was going to visit. I told her not for some time: that I was going to Aix.”
She smiled again. “I know my father will like you.”
10
“It won’t work any other way,” insisted Charlie, confident he’d kept the scourging overnight doubt from his voice as he set out his rescue proposals.
“Then it’s stillborn,” refused Aubrey Smith, flatly. “There’s absolutely no question of your becoming personally involved.”
Despite its vital importance, he’d actually felt embarrassed at the previous night’s close in front of an audience of Smith, Jane Ambersom, and an assortment of earphoned technicians mouthing the carefully prepared words into the unanswered Moscow public telephones from which Natalia had pleaded, I’ve got your messages. I’m coming back: you know I’ll come back. Don’t panic. It’ll all be over soon.
“Everything needs a lot more discussion and consideration before there’s talk of abandonment,” quickly came in Monsford.
“Russian response?” queried Charlie, who’d already registered the return of the familiar apparatus and hoped to have learned the reason ahead of Smith’s demand for his rescue ideas.
“Let me,” quickly offered Rebecca Street, ahead of the other woman, briefly smiling as she went to the machine at the recollection of Monsford’s impotent collapse at Straughan’s previous night’s telephone intrusion.
“Hurry, Charlie. I’m sure they’re close,” came Natalia’s voice, and Charlie’s stomach lurched in recognition.
“Within three hours of your call to the Moscow numbers!” declared Monsford, eagerly. “They’ve bitten!”
“They haven’t bitten at anything,” dismissed Smith. “They’re going with the hand they dealt in the first place, to see if it will play out to their advantage. Which it would if Charlie actually went in. And why he isn’t going. I’m prepared to hear ideas that don’t personally include you, Charlie. If there aren’t any, we abort.”
“And lose twenty years of priceless espionage intelligence, as well as possibly even more priceless personal information about Vladimir Putin, who’s going to go on running Russia for years,” challenged Rebecca. “We can’t discard this chance.”
“I’m not dismissing it,” refuted the MI5 Director. “I’m agreeing to an operation to get Natalia Fedova and her child out. But refusing Charlie’s involvement beyond his inside knowledge.”
“Then it is stillborn,” risked Charlie, desperately, talking more to Monsford than to his own reluctant director. “I don’t need a voiceprint to know that was again Natalia. Just as she wouldn’t have needed a voiceprint to know it was me. She won’t do anything, trust any part of a rescue attempt, if the contact is made in a voice other than mine. And that can’t be done remotely with my being eighteen hundred miles away. Her reaction will be that it was an FSB trick, part of how they’re using her. Which she’ll automatically reject.”
“Do you really believe, expect us to believe, that singlehandedly you could beat the entire Russian intelligence apparatus,” sneered Jane Ambersom, pushing herself into the forefront.
“No, I can’t defeat the entire Russian intelligence apparatus,” Charlie replied, echoing the sneer. “But I believe I stand a better chance than a squad going in cold-a squad she’ll anyway reject-just as I defeated not just Natalia herself but a group of then-KGB professionals during the phoney defection. And just as I beat a dedicated group of KGB and FSB professionals a little over four months ago to stop that Russian intelligence apparatus virtually installing itself in the Oval Office of the president of the United States of America.”
“No one is questioning what you did,” retreated Jane.
“Which I’m not boasting about,” qualified Charlie, caught by the unexpected lessening of the woman’s opposition. “Quite apart from Natalia trusting no one but me, it would take months to train an extraction team and they’d still be ill prepared because as determined as I’d obviously be to omit nothing, I’d still forget something. And we haven’t got months. Whatever move they might have been planning against her will have been stopped now, because of my calls last night. But that hold-off won’t last forever.”
“I think Charlie is talking a lot of logical common sense,” hustled Monsford. “I think there should be made available as much and as many backup provisions and resources as we can anticipate but that the actual extraction be headed by Charlie.”
“I agree,” supported Rebecca.
“What if you fail?” challenged Jane again. “What if they pick you up, which they’re ready and waiting to do, and stage a good, old-fashioned show trial? What happens then?”
“Russia-certainly Moscow-isn’t as controlled as it was in the days of Stalin’s show trials, despite what Putin’s done to turn the clock back,” argued Charlie. “The ultimate humiliation would be theirs, not ours. For a show trial to work they’d need an open although orchestrated court. And some sort of apparent confession to whatever crime they falsify. What they couldn’t control or prevent, when I spoke, would be my disclosing how their intelligence operation so abysmally failed and named those already known to have been assassinated by the FSB.”
“Which would humiliate America as much as Russia,” qualified Jane.
“Not at all,” refused Charlie. “I’d tell it as a CIA success in a joint operation with us, not of the CIA being suckered as they were.”
She didn’t at that moment know how or why, reflected Jane, but she could have a lot more about which to talk to Barry Elliott at their next dinner. “Winning all over again, not just for the second time but publicly, is a forceful argument.”
“No, it’s not,” resisted Smith, recognizing opinion settling against him. “They won’t risk a show trial. They want you dead, like all the others in the Lvov affair they’ve already killed. They’d simply kill you.”
“The others who’ve died were Russian,” Charlie pointed out. “I’m English. And we’ve got three of their diplomats in custody.”
“I don’t believe you seriously imagine those diplomats equate as insurance against your being killed!” said Smith, allowing incredulity into his emotionally flat voice.
“It would give the FSB and even the Kremlin pause for thought if they learned through lawyers representing those arrested diplomats that they’d be named and linked if I died violently, even if it were staged as an accident,” said Charlie.
“By then they would have moved against Natalia and Sasha,” countered Smith.
“Yes,” agreed Charlie, reluctantly forcing the acceptance. “By then I would have already lost them. But you’d have your publicly humiliating second coup, wouldn’t you?”
“We’re wasting time going around in circles,” declared Monsford, impatiently. “We’ve got an intelligence opportunity that’s potentially too promising to ignore. I accept Charlie should participate as he’s proposed, to which I will add all the manpower and resources he’s likely to need.…” Monsford hesitated, and said directly to Aubrey Smith: “Make it, in fact, an entirely SIS operation, with Charlie seconded to me, if you want no part of it and if you, Charlie, are willing to operate that way. It will overcome all the objections, won’t it?”