“And?” prompted Straughan, ignoring the warning.
Rebecca smiled for the first time. “He never bothered to turn on the equipment.”
“Why aren’t I surprised?” said Straughan, in resigned cynicism.
“Well?” prompted the woman, in return.
“Doubly backed up,” assured Straughan, gesturing to the paraphernalia on his desk. “Every word’s recorded and there’s a tandem line to our own system.”
Rebecca looked at the wall behind the regular duty officer, upon which was a five-deep battery of clocks set to the local time of every global capital. “How much longer until the French evacuation?”
“Forty-five minutes,” said Straughan, without consulting the wall clock. “I was talking to Orly when you arrived. Our plane will be cleared for takeoff by the time Elana and Andrei get there. They’ll get here ahead of schedule.”
Now it was Rebecca who gestured to the electronic litter on Straughan’s desk. “Seems as if our precautions weren’t necessary after all. Everything’s gone according to plan, so there won’t be any buck-passing.”
Straughan shook his head, doubtfully. “There’ll be a lot of internal uproar, between us and our brothers across the river. And maybe a lot of internal government examination, too. I don’t think we should stop doing it.”
“Neither do I,” agreed Rebecca.
Straughan didn’t jump this time, even though the telephone’s shrill was unexpected.
Rebecca said: “It’ll be Gerald, from the car.”
It wasn’t. Straughan listened for more than a full minute before saying: “You did the right thing. It’s got to be a cleanup: everything that’s possible to do. I want you as my permanent liaison. This is a catastrophe.”
“What is?” demanded Rebecca, when Straughan stopped although keeping the telephone in his hand.
“There was an ambush at a peage outside Orly. They’ve all been seized. Miller and Abrahams as well as Elana and Andrei.”
“Russian?” groped Rebecca.
“Painter thinks it was French,” said Straughan, emptily.
23
“We have to tell the Director,” insisted Straughan.
“Not yet!” refused Rebecca. What personal benefit was there? There had to be something!
“He’ll be at the safe house in less than an hour.”
“All we can tell him now is that there’s a difficulty. We need to know more. And get Monsford’s reaction recorded.” They now had a disaster of incalculable proportions and she wasn’t going to be hit by a single particle of the shit Monsford would spray in every direction except his own.
“We know Radtsic’s wife and son won’t be there to greet him: the promise we’ve given him.”
“What’s Painter and the rest of them doing?”
“Keeping as far away as possible,” guaranteed Straughan, urgently. “That was their instructions. We don’t want to lose any more people. Painter’s heading them back to Paris.”
“Why’s Painter think it’s a French seizure?”
“All the vehicles were French. There were some uniforms, the sort the French use in terrorist arrests, although they didn’t have any identifying insignia.”
“Are we talking Service de Documentation Exterieur et de Contre Espionnage or French police?”
“I don’t know.” Straughan shrugged, emptily.
“What’s our relationship if it is French?”
“I don’t understand the question,” protested the operations director.
“What’s the chances of the SDECE backing off when they learn it’s us?”
Straughan stared at Rebecca, not trying to disguise his astonishment. “Let me ask you a question back. What would the chances be of us backing off if we seized two French intelligence officers in a car with the wife and son of the deputy director of the FSB?”
Rebecca visibly colored. “So what do you think they’ll do?”
“Take the maximum possible advantage, of course.”
“They’ve got the wife and son: we’ve got the husband and father,” Rebecca tried again. “What about a trade, reuniting the family for joint, completely shared access?”
Straughan again looked at Rebecca in disbelief. “Physically reunite the family where: here in the Hertfordshire house or hand Radtsic over to the French?”
Rebecca’s color, which had begun to subside, flooded her face again. “It’ll have been that little shit Andrei, won’t it?”
“I’ve logged everything Jonathan Miller told me of every exchange he had with both mother and son,” said Straughan. “As far as I recall, Miller never told either of them exactly where we were flying them from: only that it would obviously be from somewhere along the north coast. Yet the ambush was only a few miles from Orly, as if our route was known in advance. And if Andrei knowingly set out to sabotage it, wouldn’t it be more likely he’d go to the Russians and their embassy, not to the French?”
“We haven’t yet confirmed it was a French interception,” Rebecca said.
“Whether it’s Russian or French is largely academic,” dismissed Straughan, philosophically. “The fact is that whichever it is has got them and two of our officers and the service is well and truly in the shit and sinking fast. And we should warn the Director.…” He gestured toward a computer on an adjoining table. “That’s monitoring Radtsic’s flight. It’s on time, landing in thirty minutes.”
“And it’ll be another two hours after that before he gets to the safe house,” said Rebecca. “Painter and the others will be back to Paris long before that, won’t they?”
Straughan looked at the French chronometer on the far wall. “Probably before Radtsic’s plane lands.”
“Does Painter have friends in the SDECE?”
“He has contact. I don’t know how friendly or not.”
“We’ll give it a little longer, for Painter to pull in every favor he can,” decided Rebecca. “We need as much information as possible for Gerald. Get a message to Jacobson. Warn him but tell him to say nothing to Radtsic. That’s Gerald’s responsibility: that and informing our government liaison.”
What sort of marked-card game was Rebecca Street playing? wondered Straughan. Whatever it was, it had been sensible to keep the safeguarding recording running for these exchanges, along with the rest. How much he wished again for someone like Jane Ambersom to help him decide what to do. The telephone interrupted the reflection. Straughan snatched it up, listened, and then said: “Fuck!”
“What…?” started Rebecca, but stopped, trying to understand from the gabbled conversation. “Tell me!” she demanded, as Straughan slammed the phone down.
“Our plane’s been seized at Orly along with everyone in it.”
“You’re right,” agreed Rebecca. “It’s a total fuck-up!”
He was properly floating, acknowledged Harry Jacobson: floating thirty-five thousand feet off the ground, on his way to justifiably well-earned rewards. Nothing could go wrong now: he’d done it! No one would ever know the fears he’d endured, the potentially calamitous mistakes and shortcuts he’d made. And now they never would. This was going to be engraved in his service record as a 100 percent, all singing, all dancing coup that could never-would never-be taken away from him. But he still wasn’t taking chances. Twice since takeoff Maxim Radtsic had turned from his seat two rows ahead, stupidly expecting recognition, which twice he’d refused and was glad he had: Radtsic hadn’t turned again but on the second occasion Jacobson overheard two Russians in the seats behind refer, laughing, to the Stalin similarities. It would be a story embellished in its telling to their families when photographs of Radtsic appeared in the inevitable publicity to follow the man’s defection. There wasn’t anything he’d miss about Moscow, apart obviously from its exquisite ballet. He’d thought the city dirty and its people arrogant, with any professional advancement drowned in a backwater increasingly stagnated by Putin’s constantly tightened control. Until Radtsic’s unbelievable, once-in-a-lifetime approach, what passed for secret information gathering was virtually the distillation of cocktail-party gossip from one espionage operative to another, flavored by the national political mindset of each teller, additionally spiced as it went around the incestuous intelligence circuit. Paris or Washington was going to be far more rewarding.