“Have they gone?”
“We only got the cable this morning, just before all three of us left the embassy to give us-me-time to lose surveillance. But I told him last night I knew about London’s order: that they were out of it.”
“What did he say?”
“To go fuck myself: that he took his orders from London. That’s why the three of us are staying as decoys.”
Another uncertainty in the lucky dip tub, thought Charlie.
In an afterthought Gerald Monsford stopped to buy roses for Elana. The fumble-fingered florist took almost half an hour to gift wrap them, complete with red ribbon to match the flowers, and he was practically an hour late getting to the Hertfordshire safe house. Radtsic was alone in the conservatory.
“I’m late because I stopped to get these for Elana,” said Monsford, offering the bouquet as if for approval. “Where is she?” He already knew from his arrival meeting with Harry Jacobson.
“Resting,” said the Russian, ignoring the flowers. He was in the chair Elana had chosen the day before, preventing Monsford’s sitting close to him.
“Perhaps she’ll join us later for me to give them to her?”
“She doesn’t want to see you: be part of anything.”
“I’m sorry about that,” said Monsford, putting the flowers on a side table.
“You already knew,” accused Radtsic, looking up to the ceiling joist Elana had identified.
Monsford instinctively followed the look and wished he hadn’t, uncomfortable that it would have been filmed. “It’ll get better.”
“Not without Andrei,” refused the man.
“You’ve got to be realistic, Maxim Mikhailovitch,” cautioned Monsford. “We’re trying, you know we’re trying, but it’s going to take a lot of time.”
“Then it’ll have to take a lot of time,” said Radtsic, flatly. “Our deal was that we’d all be together, a complete family. There’s no deal if we’re not a complete family.”
Not anticipating its weight, Monsford had to struggle to get another chair opposite the Russian and knew the film would show his overweight awkwardness. “What happened in France wasn’t our fault. We don’t yet know how or why it happened. We’ll find a way to get Andrei back. But our deal can’t be put on hold indefinitely.”
“I can’t accept anything without Andrei being here. Neither can Elana.”
“Andrei will be here! But during the time it’ll take we’ve got to start work. There are people you’re going to meet: people you’ll regard as friends as you work together.”
“I know what debriefing is,” snapped Radtsic, in a small spark of his old arrogance. “Just as I know what you want and which you’ll get. But that’s got to be met with what I want. And that’s not empty words and talk of indeterminate time. It’s got to be a balanced exchange: what I have to tell you equated against getting Andrei back.”
“That’s not a balanced exchange,” protested Monsford, tensed against his anger at the other man’s belief that he had a bargaining position. “It’s tilted entirely in your favor.”
“Which creates the incentive to get Andrei here.”
The bastard was playing with him, cat to mouse, realized Monsford, hating his own analogy and hating even more that others would witness Radtsic’s derision. “I won’t be coming down every day. Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to the people you’ll be dealing with all the time. And to a liaison officer, a woman, to ensure Elana’s got all she wants.”
“The only thing Elana wants is Andrei, like me,” repeated Radtsic. “I hope that tomorrow you’ll have something to tell us about that.”
“The confounded man’s refusing to cooperate,” complained Bland.
“It’s early days, as Monsford said,” reminded Palmer. “It’ll settle down when Radtsic realizes he hasn’t any real option.”
“Why did Monsford tell him we can get the boy back?” Bland demanded. “We don’t stand a chance of doing that.”
“It would have made Radtsic even more difficult if he hadn’t,” said Palmer.
“Every day I tell myself it can’t get any worse and every day it does get worse,” bemoaned the other man. “I’m fearing the time when we’re no longer able to shift all the responsibility on these two bloody directors and start getting it apportioned onto us.”
“I don’t want that to happen,” said Palmer, unsettled.
“I’m not going to allow it to happen,” determined the cabinet secretary. “Mine isn’t going to be the head that rolls.”
“Nor mine,” said Palmer, even more determinedly.
It took Charlie a long time to move between individual booking outlets to make, one from each, paid and confirmed reservations on separately available flights on his intended, hedge-hopping escape route the following day. And then to duplicate the entire process from different booking facilities to ensure there were two situation-dictated alternatives for himself, Natalia, and Sasha. In addition, improvising upon their changed roles as decoys against both his M16 pursuers and the FSB, who by now would have identified their presence from embassy surveillance, Charlie confirmed booking on LOT Polish Airlines to Warsaw, with a direct transfer connection to London from Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport-from which none of his other escape flights was departing-for Patrick Wilkinson, Neil Preston, and Peter Warren. Throughout the second ticket buying Charlie also booked tickets for his new protection squad, for only one of whom he had a name. At the end he had only three thousand pounds left from the twenty-five thousand earlier provided by Wilkinson in the Arbat.
The delay made Charlie much later getting to Moscow’s permanent state circus for his premeeting security check, restricted anyway by the Saturday-afternoon throng of arriving and departing audiences. Natalia responded at once to his precisely timed call, as she had to be told their rendezvous, and said she was twenty minutes away. Charlie bought admission tickets before becoming a crowd person among the outside refreshment and souvenir kiosks. The area was slightly higher than the main approach and from its elevation Charlie picked out Natalia when she was still some way away. She showed no recognition at seeing him, halting at a souvenir seller five booths away. As he reached her, she said: “It’s definitely tomorrow?”
“We need to go through it,” confirmed Charlie, disappointed at her nervousness. “I’ve got tickets for the circus. We’ll be less obvious inside.”
“No,” she refused. “Let’s walk: maybe find somewhere to sit.”
Charlie took her firmly by the arm, leading her back against the incoming crowd. “You have to get what I’m going to tell you totally clear in your mind. Your actual extraction depends on your getting this right.”
“I’m frightened I’ll make a silly mistake and-”
“You won’t make stupid mistakes,” stopped Charlie, as they reached the main road. “If you do what I tell you, you can’t make a mistake. All you’ve got to do is take Sasha to the airport, go through the normal formalities, make one change en route, and you’ll be safely in England by this time tomorrow.”
“You’re saying me, me and Sasha. Where are you going to be?”
“With you, all the way. With others to protect you both.”
“There’s a bench.” She pointed. “I want to sit, to concentrate.”
Charlie was concerned at the indecision he’d never seen in Natalia when they’d lived together at greater risk of discovery. “These are new Russian passports. They’ve got all the necessary exit and entry visas and documentation. Everything is valid. You and Sasha are booked on Finnair flight 362, leaving at noon from Vnukovo Airport to Helsinki. There’s a transfer connection within two hours on Finnair flight 028 to London. I won’t acknowledge you: keep as far away as possible. Sasha won’t remember me. There’ll be three other people on the plane you won’t know: I’ll only know one. We’ll be taken off before other passengers at Heathrow.”
“Stop!” demanded Natalia, urgently. “You’ll definitely be on the same plane? I want you to be with us. I don’t want to be alone, not knowing what to do.”