Kings of Many Castles cm-13 Read online

  Okulov’s KGB background was public knowledge-a target sometimes for attack-but in passing Natalia wondered if the man knew she had also once been a serving officer. In so short a time it was unlikely but it was the sort of preparation automatic for a trained intelligence operative. Ahead of Spassky, she said, “We’re all aware of the reorganization and department divisions of the Komitet Gosudarstvenno Bezopastosti after the events of 1991. That included archives but it would appear that division was incomplete. I have …” she hesitated, bringing duplicated files from her briefcase and distributing them around the conference table of Okulov’s office“ … all that was available from the Interior Ministry files on the defector, Peter Bendall. There is only a two-paragraph reference to the son, at the time he was brought here by his mother. Bendall senior was paid a pension and was responsible to the former KGB until his death. You will see that the records are marked ‘Some Retained.’ Unfortunately I have not had the opportunity to discuss with General Spassky whatever files still presumably held by the Federal Security Service might contain … I hope he can help us with that now …?” She had no alternative, Natalia assured herself. Spassky was one of the old school-proud of his continued membership of the Communist party-and would have tried to bulldoze her into the ground if she hadn’t put the tank trap in his way first. Which she might not have done-not been alerted to do-if Spassky hadn’t studiously avoided her four attempts to reach him before this meeting. The normally vodka-blotched face was redder than normal from what she inferred to be his fury at being anticipated and she decided the tank trap metaphor was appropriate. The iron-grayhaired bear of a man could very easily have physically crushed her and probably would have liked to have done at that precise moment.

  In front of Spassky an ashtray was already half-filled with the butts from which succeeding cigarettes had been lit. There was a snatch of what was intended to be a throat-clearing cough that took several moments to subside and when he finally spoke Spassky’s voice was initially threadbare. “We had insufficient time before this meeting … not enough indication from the Interior Ministry,” flustered the man. “The search is being made now.”

  Okulov, intent upon identifying scapegoats, at once came back to Natalia, who was surprised at the obviousness of the intelligence general’s confusion.

  “The first written, advisory memorandum was personally sent by me to the Lubyanka at 8:33 last night, within an hour of the gunman being identified and after the FSB duty officer informed me there was no senior officer available to talk to me personally,” she responded, quickly again. “That was followed by three more attempted telephone calls and two more memoranda, time-stamped copies of which are attached to what I have already made available.”

  “I mean we can’t locate them,” corrected Spassky. “Not in the time we’ve had so far.”

  “Are they lost?” pressured Okulov. The woman’s competence made Spassky’s inadequacy even more marked.

  “We will have everything available later today,” said Spassky.

  “I personally issued the order to round up all known dissidents, extremists and possible terrorists,” reminded Okulov. “Was the name George Bendall on any such list?”

  “Not that I am aware of,” said Spassky.

  “Not that you’re aware of!” echoed the politician. “Don’t you know!”

  “It was not on any list made available to the Interior Ministry,” said Natalia.

  “Nor to my service,” insisted General Leonid Sergeevich Zenin, Moscow’s militia commander, entering the discussion for the first time. “I have specifically re-checked, before this meeting.”

  “Are you telling me we don’t know anything at all about a man who’s tried-and might even have succeeded-to kill the president of Russia and seriously wounded the wife of the American president!” demanded Okulov, incredulously.

  Not a question for her, Natalia decided.

  “I have appointed an investigatory team. The senior colonel is by Bendall’s bedside, waiting for him to recover from surgery,” said Zenin, hurriedly responding. “His belongings included a workbook, in the name of Gugin, Vasili Gugin. He was employed, in the name of Gugin, by the NTV television channel. He was a gofer, a messenger who fetched and carried. He got the rifle up to the platform in an equipment bag. The address in the workbook is Hutorskaya Ulitza ….”

  “Where did we get his real name?” interrupted Trishin.

  “From his mother, at Hutorskaya Ulitza. She uses the name Gugin, too. But has kept her English given name, Vera.”

  “She in custody?”

  “Of course,” said Zenin. “So far she’s denied knowing anything about what her son was doing or where he got the rifle. It is an SVD sniper’s weapon. It’s being forensically examined, naturally.”

  “The mother must have said something more about him!” demanded Okulov.

  “He’s been ill … mentally ill but she claims he got better.”

  “Do you believe her?”

  “It’s far too early to ask my people that.”

  Okulov went to the chief of staff. “What about the British?”

  “There’s been a formal approach through the Foreign Ministry, for information,” said Trishin.

  “The Americans?”

  “They want access to Bendall. Full investigative cooperation from everyone involved here.”

  “Which we’ll give them. The British too,” decided Okulov. He was contemplatively silent for several minutes. “We have to emerge with unchallengable credibility. There will be maximum liaison between each and every investigatory department …” He smiled across the table. “And you, Natalia Fedova, will coordinate everything …”

  Natalia’s first realization was that she’d been made the most vulnerable of them all. Another awareness was that no one had asked-was bothered even-about the other two victims of the shooting.

  “The trial must be totally open, a media event,” declared Okulov, who’d insisted upon the chief of staff remaining after dismissing the rest. “I mean what I said about openness with the Americans and the British.”

  “Of course.”

  “There’s no danger of the Americans refuting the security lapses being their fault?”

  “They won’t officially be in court,” Trishin pointed out. “There’ll only have observer status. We’ll have the stage, they won’t. And there really is a lot of confirming paperwork.” This was the man with whom, initially at least, he was going to have to work with more than anyone else. The second realization was that Okulov’s chances of being elected to the presidency was even more uncertain that Yudkin’s had been.

  “Good,” accepted the other man, warming to the increasing personal possibilities. “We’ve got to discover a great deal more aboutthis man Bendall or Gugin or whatever he calls himself.”

  “Whatever he calls himself isn’t important,” insisted Trishin, rebuilding his own bunker. “He isn’t Russian. He’s British, the son of a spy who was allowed to come here under the protection of an earlier communist government.”

  Okulov nodded, smiling, content for the other man to spell out the further personal advantage he’d already isolated. “Which he doubtless represents. We need to know if he’s a supporter of the old ways. Anxious for their return. That could be useful.”

  Trishin was encouraged by the direction of the conversation. “I didn’t get the impression from any of the hospital doctors that there’s a possibility of Lev Maksimovich making a full and active recovery, if he survives at all. Which will be a tragedy.”

  “A great tragedy,” agreed Okulov, refusing to respond too quickly to the obvious approach.

  Bastard, thought Trishin. “Yours will be the mantle to continue the policies you’ve been so closely involved in formulating.”

  There’s a power struggle whether Yudkin died or not, accepted Okulov. And he’d need allies who knew the keys to every locked hiding place. “Which I’ll require help to do.”

  “The strength of the com
munists makes this a very uncertain time,” said Trishin, comfortable with platitudes. “It’s important to understand you have my complete trust and loyalty, Aleksandr Mikhailevich”

  “That’s good to hear,” said Okulov. “It will be important to have someone like you, Yuri Fedorovich, upon whom I can rely completely.”

  “Which you can.”

  “You’re quite sure the security lapses can be shown to be those of the Americans?”

  “As I’ve just made clear, Alexandr Mikhailevich, you can trust me.”

  Until there’s a political reversal, Okulov added, mentally.

  John Kayley could very easily have had the native American Cherokee Indian ancestry he frequently-and proudly-claimed. He was saturnine with smooth, black hair. He was also indulgently fat andunconcerned about it. His footwear was neither moccasin nor molded into the shapelessness of Charlie’s Hush Puppies, but the bagged, unpressed canopy of the button-strained suit could have come from a shared reject shop. The windowless office at Novinskij Bul’var was cloyed with the smell of the scented cigars the man smoked and on the table between them was a bottle of single malt already reduced by a third. It wasn’t Islay, Charlie’s favored choice, but he appreciated the gesture.

  Kayley patted the Peter Bendall dossier with a pudgy hand and said, “I’m truly grateful for this. Like I told you, there’s a lot of heat but very little to put on the fire.”

  “Thanks for this, too,” said Charlie. The American had offered unasked the complete list of the failed security precautions, as well as the hospital update that the president’s wife could lose her arm, which would be permanently impaired even if she didn’t. Charlie liked the fact that the other man wasn’t trying to disguise the exchange as anything more than the same give-to-receive shell game he was playing. It indicated-he hoped-that they were treating each other as professionals. He was still waiting for Kayley to point up the one incongruity that was so far troubling him. He wondered if the other professional omission was an oversight.

  Kayley said, “Don’t envy you the son-of-a-bitch still being British.”

  “It’s a bastard,” agreed Charlie. He nodded to his glass being topped up. He’d give the other man a little more time.

  “You going to get access?”

  “Not applied for yet. I expect it will be.”

  “We’re asking for it, although I’m not sure of our legality. It’s Russian jurisdiction and prosecution, even though it’s the president’s wife that got hit.”

  Kayley was professional, accepted Charlie. “You’ll be allowed participation, though?”

  “Limited’s my guess. He’s your national, you stand the better chance.”

  “I’m prepared to share, if you are.” Surely Kayley would pick upon on that!

  “Deal!” accepted the American, at once.

  Perhaps Kayley was testing him. Charlie said, “Peter Bendall passed over a lot of your stuff to the Russians in the late sixties. There’ll be an American dossier on him.”

  Kayley nodded, unembarrassed at being reminded of the obvious. “I guess. It would have been CIA, not the Bureau.”

  “Available to you now, though?”

  “I’ll check it out.”

  A professional like Kayley would have done so hours ago. If the American was trying to control the exchange, he’d failed. Charlie decided it was better to continue in the expectation of getting something but not all, which was the level at which he intended to work. “You getting any political playback this soon?” There might be a loose ball to play off against Brooking and Sir Michael Parnell and at the moment it was scraps he was scrabbling for.

  “Nothing positive,” said Kayley, shaking his head. “Washington’s not comfortable about the Bureau’s position here, if the communists get their man in.”

  Charlie’s feet tweaked. “How’s that?”

  “We were accepted here by Yeltsin and the reformers, all part of the fight against crime,” reminded Kayley. “State’s thinking is that we’d be the first to be told to get out if the old regime was reestablished. Guess that would apply to you, too.”

  “Yes,” agreed Charlie. “I guess it would.” What the hell sort of spin would that put upon the situation between he and Natalia!

  “This could even be our last case. How’s that for a thought?”

  “Unsettling,” said Charlie, honestly. About far too many things, he mentally added.

  Senior Militia investigator Colonel Olga Ivanova Melnik was an attractive, even beautiful woman and knew it. What she knew even better was how to use it, in every way. She invariably wore civilian clothes instead of uniform, because dresses and skirts and blouses showed off her full-busted, narrow-waisted figure to her best advantage and always allowed distracting cleavage interrogating male suspects. She also adjusted her demeanor to every encounter, bullying when necessary, awkwardly stumbling sometimes to give her interviewees the dangerously misleading impression of their superiorintelligence. It was an attitude strictly reserved for interview rooms. Outside she was a determined, supremely confident woman with an IQ of 175 that had academically taken her up the promotional ladder in balanced proportion to the occasions she’d climbed bedroom stairs with partners carefully selected more for her career advancement than their sexual prowess. Since attaining her detective seniority by the age of thirty-five prowess had taken precedence over influence among those invited to follow her up any stairs.

  Olga Ivanova was politically as well as professionally adept and was more aware than anyone caught up in the immediate, twenty-four-hour aftermath of the shooting how totally successful she could emerge from the inquiry. How could she fail to get a conviction when the crime had been committed in front of a world-wide television jury?

  It remained essential, of course, for Olga to be the hands-on focus of every facet of the investigation and that initially had obviously been for her to sit-fitfully sleeping in her chair when it was no longer possible to remain awake-just one whisper-hearing meter from George Bendall since his return from the operating theater.

  But there hadn’t been a whisper. Anything except the jagged peaks of the heart monitor and the in-out hiss of the ventilator and the silent blood and saline drip and increasingly dark brown filling of the catheter bag. While all the boring, unproductive time, in walking distance away in Lefortovo prison, Vera Bendall, alias Vera Gugin, had sat for virtually the same period unsuspectingly waiting to be broken.

  Olga, a strongly featured, prominently-lipped woman, eased out of the no longer comfortable chair and stretched stiffly around the room, as she had several times before. She’d completed her first circuit and was about to begin her easier, cramp-eased second when the chief physician-administrator, Nicholai Badim, thrust into the room, for the first time in many visits uncaring of the noise. With him was an equally attentive pale-skinned, white-blond-haired psychiatrist, Guerguen Semenovich Agayan.

  “We’ve got the brain scans,” Agayan announced. “Look.”

  Olga did so, although she was unsure what she was supposed to be seeing.

  “There!” demanded the surgeon. “At the base there. It’s a hairline linear fracture. And here …” the finger went to a patch darker than the rest of the illustrated brain. “We did a spinal tap as part of the initial exploratory surgery. There’s no blood in the fluid. So that darkening is suberachnoid bruising.”

  “What are you telling me?” demanded Olga.

  “That he badly hit his head in the fall, in addition to all the other injuries,” said Agayan.

  “Is he brain damaged!”

  “I won’t know that until he recovers consciousness,” said the psychiatrist.

  “But I’m going to sedate him more deeply, to counteract any possibility of epilepsy,” said Badim. “At the moment his medical condition is more important.”

  “When’s he likely to recover sufficiently for any sort of interrogation?”

  “I’m not going to allow him to open his eyes for at least another twenty-four
hours and only then when I see some lessening in the bruising area. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” said Olga. “That’s fine.”

  5

  Lefortovo is the embodiment of terror-The Terror-that dominated Russia and its once Soviet Union for most of the twentieth century, initiated there before 1917 but quickly afterwards becoming the experimental laboratory in which was perfected every art and device of bone-crushing, mentally molding State oppression of State opposition.

  The Okhrana, the intelligence service that so fatally failed to protect the ineffectual Czar Nicholas II from impending revolution, created it as the prison in which dissent and its advocates were literally snuffed out, like flickering candles. Within its uncleaned,blood-splattered walls the goatee-bearded Feliks Dzerzhinsky, who founded modern Russian intelligence by creating the succeeding Vecheka, installed his torturers and firing squads to maintain Lenin’s rule. He didn’t bother with wall cleaning. Neither did the terrorfuelled intelligence agencies of Stalin-the GPU and the OGPU and the NKVD and NKGB-NKVD and the MVD-MGB and the KGB-that followed, although occasionally spaces were scoured for official plaques proclaiming their chairmen as Heroes of the Soviet Union, psychopaths like Yagoda and Yezhov and Lavrenti Beria, the most psychopathic of them all.

  There is an irony that in this glowering, barred-windowed mausoleum for a million-tens of millions-ghosts, such uncertified maniacs could unintentionally have left a psychological legacy making unnecessary their truncheons and electrodes and scalpels and syringes.

  Fear is sufficient: fear of those truncheons and electrodes and scalpels and syringes and of the age-blackened gouts on the walls of bare cells without a bed or a lavatory hole or a bucket.

  Olga Ivanova Melnik had learned to use that psychology of fear as successfully as she adopted-and adapted-her different questioning techniques. There were no bars at the sun-filled windows of the room into which Vera Bendall was escorted. There wasn’t a desk, either. Easy chairs were arranged around a low table dominated by a display of bright yellow daffodils that had been moved slightly to one side for the tea thermos and cups. A cherry topped the sugar icing of each of the six cupcakes. The tape recorder was very small, unobtrusive.