Dajani went to hurry by and Zenin guessed the man would be able to see Sulafeh, apparently waiting. As the Palestinian drew level Zenin snatched out, the trained attack perfectly co-ordinated. He grabbed the man at the shoulder and jerked him abruptly off balance, and pulled downwards, so that Dajani spun into the mouth of the alley. Zenin saw the man’s mouth open, the beginning of a cry, and cracked upwards with the heel of his left hand but not hard enough to kill, as he’d killed Bara-banov in that final test. All it did was drive Dajani’s mouth closed and jarred his head backwards. Zenin had the man’s coat lapels in both hands now, hauling him into the darkness and bringing his knee up into the man’s groin in the same movement. Dajani stumbled at the moment of contact and Zenin missed. He still caught the man in the groin, so the breath grunted from him in agony, but not at the breaking point so Zenin hauled him upwards and kneed him again, this time conscious of the pelvis cracking. As Dajani doubled up, Zenin chopped against the carotid artery in his neck, once more not hard enough to kill but sufficient to render him deeply unconscious.
There was a dip in the alley wall to accommodate some drainage pipes, and Zenin dragged the slumped man into the alcove. He pulled the heavy gold watch from the man’s wrist and went quickly through his pockets, to make it appear the robbery he intended the police to record. There was some accreditation identification for the conference and this Zenin was careful to throw down nearby, the action of a thief frightened to discover whom he had mugged.
He was at the entrance when Sulafeh reached it.
‘Where?’ she said, trying still.
‘Come on!’ the Russian insisted, urging her away.
‘Let’s get back to the apartment then, quickly!’
‘We’re not finished yet,’ cautioned Zenin.
They walked fast but without any obvious attention-attracting haste back down the Rue de la Corraterie to the bridge and a public telephone kiosk Zenin had spotted when they crossed earlier. He said: ‘The secretariat Director, Zeidan? Is he staying at your hotel?’
‘Yes,’ she said, curiously.
Zenin nodded towards the telephone. ‘Call him,’ he ordered. ‘Say you had an appointment tonight with Dajani but he did not turn up: ask him if he knows where Dajani is.’
‘Why?’
‘To maintain your absolute, unknowing innocence,’ said Zenin. ‘This way you are a worried colleague who has been stood up. If you don’t bother to raise what is later going to become an alarm, there might be some suspicion.’
She smiled up at him. ‘You’re very clever, aren’t you?’
‘Careful,’ he qualified.
Sulafeh was very quick and when she came back to the Russian she said: ‘Zeidan thought there must have been some misunderstanding. He asked what I was going to do.’ She hesitated, pointedly. ‘I said I was going to eat by myself and then look around the city; that I might be late getting back. Which I want to be.’
Zenin did not bother to look at what he’d taken from Dajani’s pockets until he got back to the apartment and when he did he laughed.
‘Dajani’s a careful man, too,’ he said. ‘Look! Condoms!’
‘We’re not going to need those, are we?’ said Sulafeh.
Alexei Berenkov re-read completely the interrogation transcript and the trial record of Edwin Sampson after his return from Potma and created for himself more uncertainties than he discovered answers. It was Kalenin’s turn to eat with them, which gave Berenkov the opportunity to discuss it informally while Valentina was discreetly and customarily busying herself in the kitchen.
‘Sampson is adamant that Charlie Muffin had no part in his attempted infiltration,’ insisted Berenkov. ‘I threatened him with interrogation at the Serbsky again and to block any release approach, from the British. He still maintained his story.’
‘You believe him then?’
‘Yes,’ said Berenkov, simply.
‘So where does that leave us?’
‘With Natalia Nikandrova Fedova,’ said Berenkov, simply again.
‘She was adamant, too,’ remembered the KGB chairman. ‘At the trial she said she followed Charlie Muffin to the GUM department store and saw him meet Sampson there after they had been debriefed and separated from each other here. There was nothing she said that varied at all from what she told me the night Charlie Muffin escaped, the night she raised the alarm.’
‘I’ve read the transcript,’ said Berenkov. ‘She was hardly questioned, because of Sampson’s confession of guilt.’
‘There was no need.’
‘Maybe that was an oversight.’
‘Are you inferring some sort of collusion between the woman and Charlie Muffin!’ said Kalenin. ‘Suggesting in fact she’s a spy, in place?’
‘There was an affair, wasn’t there?’
‘Which she intentionally cultivated, according to her testimony: she was suspicious of him, despite his successfully passing the debrief. It enabled her to maintain a constant watch on the man.’
‘Very praiseworthy!’ said Berenkov.
Kalenin frowned at the obvious doubt. He said: ‘There has never been any reason to doubt that Natalia Nikandrova is not a loyal member of the debriefing section of the KGB.’
‘Until now,’ said Berenkov.
As he spoke, his wife came into the room, carrying the coffee and brandy. Valentina said: ‘You look as if you’re plotting!’
‘I think Alexei is,’ said Kalenin.
‘Maybe others have in the past,’ suggested Berenkov.
Chapter Thirty
Charlie reckoned he’d done bloody well, complying to the letter with the Director’s instructions. He’d gone near no one, upset no one and talked to no one, except to the room service supervisor for a meal and a bottle of wine when he got back from Bern. The only thing he had not done was to sit and do nothing because that was clearly daft. Instead he worked steadily and without interruption – apart from the brief meal and even then he read on – through the Israeli dossiers, determined to absorb as much as possible despite the size of the task. By nine he had gone through the Palestinian and Jordanian backgrounds and stopped because the words were blurring before his eyes, exhausted concentration aching through him. Deciding that it was a deserved reward for effort, Charlie went back to room service and ordered brandy, two large ones because it seemed a waste to bring the waiter all the way with just one.
The more detailed examination completely confirmed his initial impression, Charlie decided, feeling the brandy warm through him: the Israeli files could not be faulted. Every Arab investigation was painstakingly detailed, in the case of the Palestinian and Jordanian records with what Israel considered terrorist links individually itemized along with the incidents and events supporting those allegations, all of which were set out in a chronological arrangement. When such people were picked out there was a red marker on the cover of the folder and top-sheet assessment of that person: in every instance the judgement was that none of them any longer represented risk or danger.
Charlie found no difficulty accepting this view, despite the scepticism of a man who never completely admitted the vice-versa logic of night following day. After all, the majority of Commonwealth leaders jostling to get as close as possible to the Queen during those London conference photo-calls had Foreign Office records identifying them as independence-fighting villains who in their time had danced around demanding the demise of the British monarchy.
He was wasting his time, Charlie reluctantly decided, creating work to convince himself he was working. Whatever or wherever the lead, it was not going to come from this filing clerk’s nightmare. Of which, objectively, he’d already been aware, from the comparable pictures. Where then? He didn’t know. And he didn’t like not knowing and he didn’t like the impotent frustration he’d felt, ever since this sodding job began. In fact he liked bugger all about any of it. If he were honest – which he always was with himself if sometimes not with other people – Charlie accepted it was easy to understand the doubt everyone else was showing. Because he had nothing. His own doubt wormed its way into his mind, disconcertingly. Had he got it wrong: clutched too eagerly at a mistaken identification and really wasted his time, spending days running around like a blue-arsed fly in quite the wrong place? He liked the prospect of that least of all.