Red Star Rising Read online

  The reception-desk security officer closely examined Charlie’s ID, up to and including camera confirmation of his facial and eye characteristics, and insisted upon accompanying Charlie to the embassy intelligence section offices, despite Charlie’s assurance that he knew the way.

  “Everything’s been tightened up,” explained the guard.

  “Bit late now, isn’t it?” remarked Charlie.

  “I’ve just got back from home leave,” the man said, quickly evading the question. “I can’t believe he climbed over the walls or the railings without setting off the sensors.”

  It always paid to pass the time of day with the lowest of the gossiping staff, reflected Charlie. “Neither can I, with or without sensors. He only had one arm.”

  “Ah!” exclaimed the man, with the intensity with which Charlie imagined St. Paul greeted the revelation on the road to Damascus. “It has to be the gates then, doesn’t it? Makes sense now.”

  “How does it make sense now?” encouraged Charlie.

  “The closed circuit television cameras have been playing up.”

  “What about gate guards?”

  Again, with the military spontaneity of someone trained always to avoid any responsibility, the man said, “I’m internal, not external. Don’t know anything about that. Or them.”

  And he already knew more than enough, Charlie accepted, as they reached the door to the intelligence rezidentura, for him to be passed on to another uniformed guard. Charlie went again through the ID ritual, including facial measurement and retina recognition before finally entering the inner sanctum.

  “I’ve been waiting!” impatiently complained the woman on the other side of the door.

  Paula-Jane Venables was a slight-bodied though full-busted woman, who wore her auburn hair short and who knew she looked good in designer clothes. The dress was blue, knee-length, and had the logo-identifying matching shoes. Charlie guessed there would be an ensemble-completing handbag somewhere in the river-fronting office into which she led him, but if there were, it was hidden away to maintain the dust-free neatness of the uncluttered office.

  Charlie took what he recognized to be the victim’s chair and sat back for the obviously intended inquisition. He crossed one leg over the other, to make it easer to lift the pressure on his left heel. The Hush Puppies were new, not yet broken in, and they pinched. She frowned at his doing it. It was too early to tell but she looked capable of pulling out fingernails, which prompted an immediate question. Had those on the right hand of the man back in the mortuary been intact? He’d forgotten to ask, and certainly to look, and he felt a surge of annoyance at the oversight that might have gone further to confirm the extent of any torture to which the man had been subjected.

  “We need to get to know each other,” Paula-Jane announced. “I want to get things straight between us from the start.”

  “That’s always best,” agreed Charlie, noting the peremptory tone.

  There was an imperceptible tightening to her mouth at his close-to-mocking response. “There was clearly a change in your travel plans?”

  Charlie frowned. “You’ve lost me already.”

  “London’s alert was that you were arriving yesterday. I’m guessing that, instead, you flew in this morning and went straight to the mortuary, without having time to make contact with me here.”

  “No. I got here yesterday.”

  “But didn’t bother to call or make personal contact before seeing the body?”

  “Didn’t London tell you in their message why I have been sent in?” asked Charlie, patiently.

  “To minimize as much as possible any direct connection with the embassy,” acknowledged the woman. “I’m the MI5 resident here: it’s my territory. You can front it all, but I want to know everything that goes on. Understood?”

  Charlie sighed. Instead of bothering to answer, he said, “Why don’t you tell me what you know? Like where and how the body was found. By whom. And how you think it got there.”

  Paula-Jane hesitated, clearly undecided whether to dismiss his questions or to demand an answer to her own. Eventually she said, “It was found by one of the grounds staff—”

  “A Russian?” Charlie interrupted at once, knowing the diplomatic agreement—and counterespionage nightmare—requiring local nationals to be employed as domestic support staff.

  “Yes,” answered Paula-Jane, shortly.

  “Name?”

  “Personnel will have it.”

  “So you haven’t questioned him?”

  “I was making arrangements to do so when London told me you were being assigned.”

  “Making arrangements!”

  “The protocol is that in any criminal investigation involving a Russian national employed at the embassy, a Russian Foreign Ministry official has to be present.”

  “Did you go to the scene?”

  “Yes.”

  “While the groundsman who found the body was still there?”

  “Yes.” Her face was beginning to redden with anger.

  “And you didn’t ask him anything!”

  “I told you . . .”

  “. . . about the unbreachable protocol,” finished Charlie, angry himself and intentionally mocking.

  “I was told to obey the rules.”

  What was the benefit of pissing into the wind? Charlie asked himself, resigned. “You saw the scene?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was he on his back or his front?”

  “His front.”

  The answer was vital to keeping him on the investigation, and she wasn’t sure, Charlie guessed. If the Russians found a half unarguable reason or excuse to shoulder him aside—or if he fucked up—the personal repercussions in London would be far more serious than here in Moscow. Charlie knew he was on the weaker side of the power struggle being waged between Aubrey Smith, the ascetic, quiet-voiced man who had championed him since his unexpected appointment from Cambridge University don to Director-General and his passed-over and resentful deputy, Jeffrey Smale. Who hated his guts, like so many in a department in which for far too long—apart from rare respites like that which he’d initially enjoyed under Smith—Charlie had clung by his fingertips. Which would be destroyed like those of this murder victim, if he screwed this assignment up.

  “I don’t think we’re getting off to a particularly good start and I know you think the same,” Charlie said. “So let’s, as you suggested at the beginning, understand each other. I’m going to work this job entirely alone, keeping you well away from any involvement and any possible risk to the career you’ve just begun. But here, with just the two of us in the room, I want everything you can give me. Which is why this question is very important. Are you absolutely sure that the murdered man was lying face down on his front? I know he didn’t have a face . . . not much of a head left at all . . . but front’s very different from back. So which was it?”

  “He was definitely lying on his front,” said Paula-Jane, formally.

  “Whereabouts, precisely, in the grounds?”

  “Quite close to the conference hall. There’s a grassed verge, with flower beds beyond. The body was mostly on the grass, with what was left of the head and his shoulders protruding over onto the flower bed.”

  “How closely did you look?”

  “It was disgusting!”

  Charlie sighed again. “So you can’t tell me how much blood loss or facial debris there was?”

  “Why’s it so important to know that?” she demanded, truculently.

  “If there was a lot of blood and skin and bone debris, it would indicate he was shot where he was found. If there wasn’t, it indicates he was shot elsewhere and dumped. If he was dumped, the Russians have a reason to keep me at arm’s length or to exclude me altogether.”

  “My recollection is that there was a lot of blood around.” The belligerence was receding.

  “Did you stay for the forensic and medical examinations at the scene?”

  “Most of it.”

>   Charlie avoided another sigh of frustration. “Tell me about it. In as much detail as possible.”

  Paula-Jane hesitated, assembling her recollections. “External security was there first, obviously. When I got there, summoned as an afterthought I think, I was told the Moscow authorities had already been called and were on their way—”

  “Which authorities?” broke in Charlie.

  “I wasn’t told. You’ll have to ask Reg Stout. He’s in charge of both internal and external security. There were a lot of people around—”

  “How close to the body?”

  “Stout’s people were very close, like right next to it. Stout told the rest of us to stay back. When the Russians arrived, they told Stout and his men to move back. A man I assumed to be the forensic pathologist spent about twenty minutes examining the body before it was put into a body bag and then into an ambulance. The police—I assumed they were police, although not all of them wore uniforms—looked around, spoke to Dawkins, and then left.”

  “Why Dawkins?” asked Charlie. And why hadn’t the bloody man told him about being at the scene on their way back from the mortuary?

  “He’s responsible for embassy administration.”

  “What about the ambassador? Wasn’t he in any way involved?”

  “He came out when the Russians first arrived and spoke to Dawkins. He left as the body was being removed.”

  “Did he talk to any of the Russians?”

  “Not that I saw. And I’m sure I was there all the time that the ambassador was.”

  “Did the Russians take soil samples from where the head and shoulders lay?”

  There was another hesitation. “I’m not sure. I think so.”

  Shit, thought Charlie, concerned about the amount of blood residue. “What about photographs?”

  “They certainly took photographs. A lot, it seemed to me. I . . .” she started, but stopped as the phone rang. She answered it. “He’s here with me,” she said, offering the receiver to Charlie. “It’s Howard Barrett, the housing and facilities officer.”

  “I’ve been waiting since you came back from the mortuary to arrange your accommodation.” It was another glass-cutting accent.

  “I’m staying at the Savoy.”

  “I am responsible for the housing of embassy personnel. Which makes me also responsible for the applicable budget. The Savoy is not on the permitted list of outside accommodation. If you insist on living outside, we must consult that list and rehouse you.”

  “Howard, you will not be required to pay whatever bills I incur at the Savoy so your budget is not endangered. We’re not going to consult any list or have any sort of discussion about anything.”

  “I have not received any authorization from London, which is necessary under the regulations.”

  Just as there was a regulation forbidding the questioning of the man who found the body of a murder victim, thought Charlie. “You want London’s approval, you go ahead and ask for it.”

  “You go out of your way to upset people?” asked Paula-Jane, when Charlie put down the receiver.

  “Always seems to happen, no matter how hard I try to avoid it.” He’d been out of the field for too long and had forgotten the bureaucratic madrigal of embassy existence, Charlie recognized. It wasn’t going to help him.

  2

  Charlie Muffin had taken his time, as he always did, checking the intruder trap in his hotel room—ensuring that the drawers he’d left slightly protruding hadn’t been pushed closed after a search and that their specially arranged contents were as he’d left them and that flaps pushed into pockets hadn’t been correctly replaced outside—satisfied after almost an hour that no one had entered. Now he sat hunched at the corner stool of the bar, his back instinctively protected by its abutting wall, wishing that the vodka glass into which he was gazing was a crystal ball to tell him the last time an assignment had begun as badly as this one. He certainly couldn’t remember. Which made it a wise move to have concluded the encounter with Paula-Jane with so many initial questions unanswered and leave the embassy, needing to clear his head and to calculate just how many mistakes had already been made. Or had been allowed to be made. He really had forgotten the head-in-the-sand mentality of embassy life.

  Had too much already been avoided or ignored for him to pick up all the dropped pieces? Charlie wondered. He couldn’t allow there to be, came the immediate determination. The poor faceless, one-armed bastard hadn’t survived but Charlie had to, as he’d always survived. But this time could be difficult. He’d never known the department so positively divided as it had been by Aubrey Smith’s promotion over Jeffrey Smale, nor for that division to be so marked by Smith’s consistent operational failures against the litany of successes controlled by his deputy. What Charlie did know was that on this assignment he was very definitely between two warring men, with Aubrey Smith seeing it as his positive last chance and Jeffrey Smale regarding it as the potential coup de grâce in the fight to the promotional death. Which was why, with bizarre irony, both men had for the first time ever been in perfect accord that he got the Moscow assignment. Which, even more bizarrely, Charlie welcomed despite its close-to-overwhelming risks. Now that he didn’t have Natalia or Sasha any longer, the job was all he had left and to keep it, he’d do anything just short of dipping someone else’s fingers into any available acid bath.

  How did that crush-anyone-in-any-way determination square with the placid acceptance that he didn’t have Natalia and Sasha anymore? Charlie asked himself. They weren’t together anymore, as a family anymore, because he hadn’t sufficiently persuaded Natalia. And hadn’t been in Moscow to be able to. But now he was in Moscow. Could he contemplate that distraction from a job so professionally vital and try to convince Natalia that they could still have a life together? Of course he could. It would be ridiculous, his being in the same city as her and their daughter, for him not to make contact and for him to try, yet again, to convince her how perfect everything could be if only she’d come to live in London.

  The simple way to do it was to prioritize, Charlie reasoned. The job first then. Which meant going back to the mortuary and pathologist Vladimir Ivanov, to resolve the uncertainties that had occurred to him since this morning. And to the embassy, to finish the conversation with Paula-Jane Venables and get from Jeremy Dawkins his comparable account of the murder scene. Reg Stout’s, too, to find out the problem with the embassy gates’ CCTV, as well as the identity of—and hopefully to interview—the so-far unnamed Russian groundsman who’d discovered the body. Which Charlie supposed would now have to be in the restrictive presence of the diplomatically required Russian Foreign Ministry official. And then there was Sergei Romanovich Pavel. It wasn’t going to be easy to establish a working relationship with the organized crime detective who’d worn the resentment of Charlie’s involvement like a lapel badge. He had to do his best to build bridges there, because Pavel represented either the pathway or the barrier between him and any official forensic findings. Which left Mikhail Guzov, the watchful FSB observer, about whom Charlie had the greatest uncertainty.

  A lot of people, none of whom appeared either friendly or helpful. He’d left off his priorities list the most important participant of all so far, Charlie abruptly reminded himself: a faceless, one-armed man. How difficult was it going to be to learn the story he wasn’t able to tell?

  “I’d hoped I’d find you here,” said a voice, in English.

  David Halliday was an overweight, soft-bodied man whose gray-flecked hair was greased so tightly to his head it appeared to have been painted on rather than combed. The tie was vaguely regimental and didn’t really go with the sort of single-breasted blue suit mass-produced for door-to-door salesmen the world over. He even carried an order-taking pen in his breast pocket. Charlie admired the determined anonymity, and wondered what else the man might do to establish his professionalism.

  “You want a drink?” invited Charlie, to illustrate his own professionalism, by knowing at once w
ho the man was from the photographs of embassy personnel, although it officially listed Halliday as a financial officer, not the MI6 resident.

  “Better stay with what I’m already on,” accepted the man, nodding unnecessarily behind the bar to the whiskey that Charlie had already detected upon the man’s breath. “It isn’t really Famous Grouse but it’s not a bad fake.” The head movement turned to one of approval at Charlie’s bar command that got his vodka replenished at the same time as the counterfeit scotch was poured. Halliday said: “Thought you were a whiskey man, too?”

  “Only when it’s real.” The mental arm wrestling was beginning.

  “Islay single malt, isn’t it?”

  “You’ve done your homework.”

  “It’s still logged as a special order in the embassy’s commissary book from the time of your permanent posting here.”

  That really was professional, Charlie acknowledged, knowing the man would have trawled London records, too. “I dropped by today, but you weren’t there.”

  “What do you think of our P-J?”

  “What?” asked Charlie, frowning.

  “Paula-Jane. That’s how she’s known at the embassy. She told me you’d tried to make contact. Feisty little thing, isn’t she?”

  “Why does she insist on that double-barreled name?” said Charlie, avoiding a personality discussion this early, but content for the other man to gossip about whatever or whoever he wanted, eager for all the inside help he could get about the embassy.

  “Father was American; met her mother when he worked in the same trade at the U.S. embassy in London.”

  An offering of sorts, accepted Charlie. “FBI or CIA?”

  “CIA.”

  “What’s Paula-Jane doing working for us if she’s American?”

  “She isn’t,” corrected Halliday. “Had the choice between American or British nationality when she reached eighteen. Took her mother’s side in the divorce to be British but compensated by taking Dad’s profession. Ambitious as hell. Wants to follow the already established precedents and put that cute little ass in the Director-General’s chair at Thames House.”