Bomb Grade Read online

  Silin had specifically chosen the Ulitza Razina, in the oldest Kitay-Gorod district, because all the pre-revolutionary buildings, some actually minor palaces, had under communism been turned into apartment rabbit warrens with a warren’s benefit of many different entrances, several from two streets quite separate from the Razina courtyard. Its most important advantage was the personal protection it gave him from Sobelov but it equally protected the people he was meeting that afternoon and upon whom not just his survival but an unimaginable business future depended. Like he could – and would – they could also arrive separately and leave separately and never use the same door or courtyard twice, making discovery or identification totally impossible.

  The apartment was bare-board basic, of course, which he regretted. His two city mansions and the dacha in the outer hills were designer-decorated, the marble shipped from Italy, the wall and upholstery silk specially woven before being flown in from Hong Kong: the opulence awed people, giving him an advantage. For this operation, anonymity and secrecy were the only advantages he sought. His single addition was the bottles and glasses set out on the matchwood sideboard: he hadn’t even bothered to cover the bed in the adjoining room.

  They were coming to him and Silin solicitously arrived well ahead of the arranged time. Not that he intended to be subservient – that would have been quite wrong as well as difficult for him – any more than he expected them to be subservient towards him. They were going to meet and conduct their business as equals. His being there early was simply the politeness of a host.

  The two men arrived together, which surprised him, and precisely on time, which didn’t. The handshakes were perfunctory, without names: the namelessness had been their insistence from the beginning, after the initial confirmation of their identities, and Silin thought it theatrical but was quite prepared to go along with the pointless affectation. Both declined Silin’s hospitality, making it another pointless gesture.

  The seats made protesting noises when they sat and Silin’s skin itched at once at the thought of who had sat on the lounge chair before him: he didn’t lean back, wanting to minimize his contact with the upholstery as much as possible. The leader of the two, neither of whom appeared discomfited, briefly looked around the functional meeting place and said, ‘This is well chosen.’

  ‘I don’t want what we’re discussing going beyond this room,’ said Silin. ‘Or beyond us three.’

  ‘Neither do we.’

  ‘Everything you promised me is possible?’

  ‘Guaranteed,’ assured the spokesman.

  ‘As much as 250 kilos?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Four months, maximum. We want to achieve more than just a robbery.’

  Silin listened without interruption to the proposal, nodding at the awareness of how much it would, incredibly, benefit him. ‘That would not be difficult to achieve between us.’

  ‘So you could help?’

  ‘Easily.

  ‘That’s how it will be done then. Opening up everything to us.’

  ‘How much money are we talking about?’ came in the second man.

  ‘For the full 250 kilos, exactly what I guaranteed you in the first place: a total, for you, of $25,000,000 on completion of the sale.’

  ‘With an initial deposit in Switzerland?’ stressed the first man.

  ‘You’ll be handed the certified deposit books the day after I get the 250 kilos,’ promised Silin. ‘There’ll be formalities before that: signatory authority forms, passport identification, that sort of thing.’ His promise to them was $8,000,000 and he’d insist upon ten per cent in advance from the purchasers Berlin set up, so there was no financial risk whatsoever. He wished the Commission could have been here, to see how their business should really be conducted, as a business in a sophisticated, calm-voiced way, not screaming around the city in imported stolen cars with machine pistols on the seats beside them and posturing in nightclubs trying to outspend each other.

  ‘It all seems very satisfactory,’ said the leader of the two.

  ‘And this will only be the beginning?’ pressed Silin, anxious to get everything properly established.

  ‘You can think of this as a trial run,’ nodded the man. ‘The way we prove our good faith to each other. What can follow is virtually unlimited.’

  He would be unassailable, Silin thought: totally and absolutely unassailable. He’d watch what was done to Sobelov, inflict some of the pain himself perhaps. Laugh at the man when he begged for mercy and hurt him all the more.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ Marina asked him that night.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’m worried.’

  ‘You’re safe. So am I, now I know where the threat is.’

  He cupped her face between both his hands, bringing her forward to kiss him. He was glad she didn’t try to tint the greyness showing through in her hair: he thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever known, although he hadn’t tried to know any other for the twenty years they had been married.

  ‘Sobelov is an animal,’ she warned.

  ‘Which is how I’m going to treat him, when it suits me,’ promised Silin.

  chapter 4

  Only during the subsequent briefings from Johnson did Charlie try fully to dismiss Natalia from his mind. Otherwise, in those first few following days, his mind ran the entire gamut of his totally misconceived (on his part), totally mishandled (on his part) and totally misunderstood (on his part) relationship with Natalia Nikan-drova Fedova.

  There was no guilt about deceiving her during their initial encounters. She’d been officially debriefing him after his supposed prison escape – defection for which he had been set up by that Old Bailey court sentence of fourteen years. His deceiving her then had been professional. She’d even accepted it – a professional herself – when the love affair had developed, after his Soviet acceptance. A further deception, Charlie acknowledged, forcing the honesty. Love hadn’t been part of the affair, in the beginning. He’d been lonely and thought there might be an advantage in sleeping with a KGB officer and the ‘sleeping with’ had been good and sometimes better than good. He hadn’t been able to concede love – definitely not allow it to overcome his professionalism – when he’d double-defected back to London. The job required he return and the job came first, before everything and everybody. Nor had he been able to recognize what had happened between them the first time she’d risked personal disaster accompanying an official Russian delegation to London to seek him out, not able to accept it wasn’t a retribution trap for the damage he’d caused his misled KGB champion by leaving Moscow. Her second contact attempt, when she’d traced him with the photograph of their London-conceived baby, had finally proved to him how wrong he’d been. He’d tried, too late and too ineffectually, finally to go to her by returning to Moscow after Gorbachev and then Yeltsin, to keep her suggested rendezvous: by every day and at every hour going to the spot he believed she had identified by the photograph, until he decided he’d misinterpreted that like he’d misinterpreted so much else and that the photograph was her sad and bitter attempt to show how absolutely he had betrayed and abandoned her.

  She had every reason to be sad and bitter, to despise and hate him. Having thought so much and for so long about what a fool he’d been, Charlie found it very easy to understand what he regarded as ingrained professionalism would by Natalia be seen as disinterested cowardice.

  As the preparation days passed, bringing Moscow nearer, Charlie’s initial euphoria gave way to realism and from realism to depression. Why should he have thought that Natalia would ever want to see him again? It was preposterous conceit to imagine that after five empty years and every rejection she’d even want him to be in the same city or the same country as her! Or to acknowledge or accept him as the father of the daughter he’d never seen and hadn’t known about until the photograph with the four word inscription: Her name is Sasha.

  He’d failed
Natalia like he’d failed Edith, although the circumstances were entirely different. When he’d fled Moscow he’d fixed for Natalia to be the one to expose his initial defection as the phoney KGB discrediting exercise it had always been. When he’d humiliated, by brief Russian detention, the British and American Directors willing literally to sacrifice him – and run with their $500,000 to add to their shame – he’d thought only of his own retribution, not theirs to follow. It had been Edith who took the assassination bullet intended for him.

  In his self-admission of failing them, Charlie wasn’t thinking of physical neglect or abandonment. His failure, to both, was never being able properly to say ‘I love you.’ He’d uttered the words, of course, but automatically and emptily. He’d never told either of them spontaneously. His entire life had been spent living lies and telling lies and being someone he wasn’t until the truth was so rare he didn’t know how to express it or how to show it or, more often than not, even what it was.

  He told lies even to himself, that ludicrous bloody defence – professionalism – always there to excuse or explain away what he didn’t truly want or like to admit. Which was cowardice. He might be – had been, he corrected – a truly professional intelligence officer. But as a man he’d been inadequate.

  Charlie fully accepted the intended permanence of his new role when Johnson confirmed there was no reason for him any longer to maintain his London flat. Charlie had only ever used it as a place to sleep and keep the rain off, so apart from the several photographs of Edith and only the one of Natalia and of Sasha and some books, there were no memories or fondness for the place. In the end there were only three cardboard wine boxes to be shipped care of the Moscow embassy. To empty his apartment Charlie employed one of those firms that strip properties after their occupants die and the men plainly thought that was what had happened to a relative of Charlie’s. The foreman said most of the stuff was crap and it was surprising how some people lived, wasn’t it? Charlie agreed it was. The man hoped Charlie wasn’t expecting a lot for it and Charlie said he wasn’t and he didn’t get it. The furniture and contents of two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen went for £450; the inside of the washing machine fell out of its case and smashed as the men were getting it from the kitchen and the television was sold as scrap to a dealer in old sets to be cannibalized for its parts. As Charlie watched the van and most of his lifetime’s possessions disappear down the Vauxhall Bridge Road the warning echoed in his head that if he didn’t adjust and conform he’d be withdrawn from Moscow just long enough to be fired: if it happened he wouldn’t have anywhere or anything to come back to.

  The disposal of the flat meant Charlie had briefly to move into an hotel, which he did ahead of consulting Gerald Williams, which when the bills came in formed the basis of the inevitable dispute over which the deputy Director had to arbitrate. That the decision was in Charlie’s favour worsened the already bad feeling between them. Charlie fought for, and got, the most expensive of the three apartments the Moscow embassy housing officer suggested, a sprawling conversion in a pre-revolutionary mansion on Lesnaya with bathrooms attached to both bedrooms and a dining room separate from the main living area. Charlie negotiated an extra £20 a day cost-of-living allowance, on top of the highest rate allocated in Washington and Tokyo, and had the longest and most heated argument of all to operate not on a system of fixed expenses but on fixed exchange rates. And to be allowed to submit claims for whatever he spent in the currency in which he spent it. As dollars were an even more common currency than roubles in Moscow it meant Charlie gained the Washington diplomatic dollars-to-sterling equal parity conversion to compensate for the official rate fluctuation. The ruling gave him as much as a fifty per cent profit on every dollar claimed.

  Through the Washington embassy Charlie discovered the FBI agent specifically tasked with nuclear smuggling was James Kestler, although there was no file upon him. Neither was there any Records listing for the man in London archives, but a man named Barry Lyneham showed up as the Bureau’s station chief. Charlie also studied all the traffic between London and Moscow about his posting, eager for the one Russian name that would have meant something to him. Natalia did not appear anywhere. Neither was she listed among interior Ministry executives supplied by Moscow station. Maybe, Charlie thought, Natalia had left instead of being transferred. Or perhaps been moved to another ministry like so many former British intelligence officers had switched to other, peripherally connected departments.

  From his Moscow enquiries Charlie learned the department’s existing intelligence chief was Thomas Bowyer, whom he had not previously known but who sent a personal welcome. The interchange provided Charlie with a further advantage, although at that stage he wasn’t sure how to utilize it: within an hour of the cable exchange between himself and Bowyer, Charlie was lectured by the deputy Director how Bowyer’s seniority had at all times to be respected, convincing Charlie of a back-channel link between London and Moscow upon which his performance and activities would be constantly monitored. Forewarned was forearmed, he reminded himself.

  One of Charlie’s final acts, with the overseas disruption grant Gerald Williams predictably opposed but which Charlie quoted precedence to obtain, was to buy two new suits and a sports jacket and shirts and underwear, which was the largest expenditure on clothes he could ever remember making, another positive change in a changed life. The very last purchase was a new pair of Hush Puppies he had no intention of trying to wear in the immediate future but which he considered a worthwhile investment against the uncertainty of Russian footwear. At the same time he bought a set of shoe-trees two sizes larger upon which hopefully to stretch them until the tentative day he put them on.

  Charlie never seriously considered a farewell party because he didn’t have enough acquaintances to invite so he gatecrashed someone else’s. Billy Baker had been chief of the Hong Kong station, which was being closed down entirely in advance of the colony’s 1997 return to China and Baker arrived back in London the week before Charlie’s departure with enough made-in-three-days, £20 Hong Kong suits to last a lifetime, a container load of Japanese electronic equipment, a Chinese mistress described as a housekeeper and a small, expenses-purchased William and Mary mansion in Devon from which, in his retirement, he intended to lord it over the manor like he’d lorded it over Hong Kong: a lot of the suits were tweed, for him to dress the part.

  The whole affair was a parade – or maybe a parody – into the past. Baker staged it in the upstairs room of The Pheasant, the pub they’d all used when they were based at Westminster Bridge Road and when Charlie got there intentionally late, to cover his uninvited arrival, there were so many people he had difficulty getting into the room and even more difficulty getting a drink. The room was beginning to cloud with cigarette smoke and the ice had already run out. In the first five minutes, after which he gave up counting, Charlie identified twenty operational and London-based officers whom he had known and sometimes worked with, as well as a lot of Special Branch policemen who had been the legally arresting arm of the service. Everyone seemed to have a frenzied determination to follow the host’s example and get fall-down drunk as quickly as possible. Billy Baker held court at the bar, the Chinese girl, who had to be thirty years his junior, bewildered by his side but doubtlessly happy at the escape from Beijing rule. When he saw Charlie, Baker embraced him wetly, thanked him for coming, and said wasn’t it all a bloody mistake and a bloody disgrace. Charlie said yes, to both. It was the persistent, in fact the only, theme in every group he joined and just as quickly left, not having anything to contribute and not interested enough to invent a lie about what he was going to do in the future to make them all believe he’d been dumped, like they had. The constant movement took him frequently to the bar. He was there when the voice behind him said, ‘Pretty depressing, isn’t it?’

  Charlie wished he could remember if her name was Juliet or June, which he should have been able to do because she was one of the Director-General’s secretaries w
hose bed he had almost, although not quite, shared pursuing his pillow talk self-preservation policy. ‘Very. Drink?’

  ‘Gin. Large.’

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘Saw it coming, so I moved over to the Department of Health a year ago, before it turned into a St Valentine’s Day massacre. Secretarial supervisor in the minister’s office. Boring as hell but it’s rent.’

  She was still very attractive in a carefully preserved, carefully coiffeured sort of way, although the hair was beginning to stray in the heat and the crush. ‘Wise girl.’

  ‘Lucky,’ she said, looking around the room. ‘There’s got to be at least forty people here who’ve been told to go or moved elsewhere.’ She came back to Charlie. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Moving on,’ said Charlie, which wasn’t, after all, a lie.

  ‘Sorry, Charlie.’

  Would he be? wondered Charlie. ‘It’ll work out.’

  ‘Charlie the Survivor,’ she declared, gin spoiling the coquettish smile. ‘That’s what they always said about you, Charlie. Even the Director-General.’

  Now she decides to tell me! thought Charlie. How much more would he have learned if she had admitted him to her bed? Too late to be of any use now: the Director-General she was talking about had died at least six years ago. ‘Is that what they all said?’