The shrine to the man Irena had loved was directly alongside, a table festooned by photographs and memorabilia of Ivan Nikolaevich Oskin. He had been an extremely handsome man, blond and blue eyed in the color prints, with high Slavic cheekbones and very even, almost cosmetically sculpted teeth. Irena, who was featured with the man in all the photographs, had also been attractive to the point of being beautiful before the Cairo accident, her hair very dark before the now fading grayness, slim but heavy breasted. There were pictures of them both in swimming costumes on unidentifiable beaches and others, obviously dating from their Egyptian assignments, beside pyramids and of Ivan on a camel. At the very front of the exhibition were three medals, their citations set out before each. The presentation was completed by three obviously recent photographs in which it was virtually impossible to see Irena’s burned face or Ivan’s missing arm from the way each had posed, the dark, nighttime backgrounds showing white-clothed tables with wine bottles and glasses.
“That was our hobby,” said Irena beside him, pointing to the formal pictures. “We loved dancing. Ivan was good at it, even after he lost his arm: it’s difficult to balance without an arm but he learned how it was possible. We could dance so well, my holding him, not he holding me, that people never realised his deformity. In the darkness, people often didn’t see that I’d been burned, either.”
Irena gestured him towards the couch that ran the length of the main window and Charlie hesitated before it, able easily to see the telephone box he’d used for their contact, understanding how she’d been able so safely to see him and know he was alone.
“Would you like a drink?” she asked, indicating the decanter on the open-fronted cabinet.
The vodka was the yellow of home distillation, as it had been in the cafe. “I’d prefer to see what you were keeping for Ivan.”
She was back very quickly from what Charlie assumed to be the only bedroom, carrying a large manila envelope, inside of which were four separate, smaller envelopes in which Charlie guessed Oskin had divided what he’d discovered in the archives more easily to smuggled from the Lubyanka headquarters of the FSB. Each was marked by a symbol Charlie didn’t understand until he’d taken out the A4-sized contents and realized the markings indicated a sequence, glad he’d kept the packages separate and was able at once to restore each batch to its original envelope.
The material was photocopies of raw but code-deciphered traffic, the majority cable transmissions interspersed by handwritten telephone or radio communication. The cabled messages were both timed and dated, enabling continuity, but some of the handwritten notes on them were not and Charlie was even more relieved that he had not mixed up the order. If he had compiled it all together, with no way of knowing how Oskin had established his sequence, it might have actually been impossible ever to work out what the Russian believed to be his sensational discovery.
Every printed cable and every handwritten note or memorandum was stamped with the highest security restriction, with its access and readership strictly limited to specifically code-named individuals, both inside the Lubyanka and the sending and receiving field stations. Each code-hidden individual had personally signed their code designation for receipt and dispatch and each inscription had additionally been time stamped. Every document was heavily annotated, and every annotation and comment again personally marked.
There were, in total, thirty-two A4-sized sheets but Oskin had sometimes arranged as many as six original cable slips or handwritten notes on one sheet, both to create some further chronological continuity and to minimize the bulk of what he took from the headquarters building at the end of each smuggling day.
It took Charlie only minutes to locate from the cable dates the first envelope in the series and put the following three into sequential order and from those dates to realize that the material was not confined to a strict period of time but covered, in total, a possible range of eighteen years, beginning with a cable sent on December 15, 1991. The date of the final cable was July 24, 2006. At once Charlie was swamped by several realizations, the excitement moving through him. Although at that moment he hadn’t the slightest idea of its importance, he was physically holding material, albeit once removed from its finger-touched original, not just of a well established and entrenched Russian intelligence operation of the highest, your Eyes Only secrecy, but one that could conceivably be currently ongoing: two entire pages in the last batch were crowded with a total of fourteen undated and momentarily incomprehensible telephone and internal memorandum slips.
Throughout Charlie’s initial examination, Irena sat motionless and unspeaking on the nearest chair, her entire concentration upon him. As he looked up, she said: “Well?”
“I’ve got a lot of copied documents the significance of which mean absolutely nothing to me,” began Charlie. So secret were the transmissions that every dispatching rezidentura was encoded, in addition to everyone mentioned in every exchange.
“No higher security designation has ever been used before, not by the KGB or any of its predecessors,” declared Irena. “That’s what Ivan told me.”
“I haven’t properly read-and even less understood-a single thing I’ve looked at yet. But if I had the slightest idea even after a dozen readings-no matter how many dozens of times and how many readings-it would still and will always remain meaningless without the identifying code key to those involved and of the various overseas stations, over what seems to be a period of more than fifteen years.”
“You telling me it’s useless?” demanded Irena, anguished.
“I’m telling you nothing of the sort,” denied Charlie. “I’m not telling you anything, in fact, that you haven’t already told me-without the code key it’s useless: impossible to understand. And probably always will be. At this level of security, it’ll be a code known to half a dozen people, probably electronically changed during transmission from the code grid in which it was sent to that by which it was received.”
“Your people have got computer as well as human code breakers.”
“I’ll need to take it all, even for them to try.”
“I know.”
“I’ll keep my promises. All of them.”
“You talked earlier about our understanding each other?”
“Yes?” agreed Charlie.
“I want you to understand totally everything I want.”
“Yes?” repeated Charlie, the curiosity deepening at another topsy-turvy change.
“What is going to happen to Ivan’s body?”
Charlie, who was rarely rendered speechless, was stunned by the question. “I’ve no idea,” he finally groped.
“The Russians-the FSB-have it? Along with their bullshit story of drug smuggling gangs?”
“Yes,” stumbled Charlie, for the third time.
“They’ll toss Ivan’s body into an unmarked grave. Or maybe not even bother, just incinerate it without even a proper crematorium. I want Ivan properly laid to rest.”
“What are you asking me to do, Irena?” demanded Charlie, striving for control. “You can’t take custody of the body, even though Ivan’s wife is dead. You’re not legally next of kin. And by trying, you’d identify yourself.”
“His body was found in the British embassy,” set out Irena, her argument clearly prepared. “At your press conference you twice, maybe even more than twice, explained British participation resulted from the embassy technically being British not Russian territory. I’ve done research. A body found on British territory is, again technically, the responsibility of Britain, whatever its nationality. I want Ivan’s body given back to the embassy and repatriated to England, for a proper, civilized burial. In return for what I am letting you have I want enough money to live well, if not in luxury, which Ivan promised. I want to live in London or wherever Ivan is buried, so that I can mourn at his grave every day for the rest of my life.”