Bomb Grade (18 page)

That was why she was going to conduct the meeting to which he and the American James Kestler had been summoned the following day.

When Sasha was asleep Natalia swallowed her pride and telephoned Popov. There was no reply to that or to the succeeding two attempts.

chapter 13

T
he self-serving courtship of others, whom unashamedly he'd courted in return and for the same if not greater self-serving reasons, became an irritating claustrophobia for Charlie Muffin, the perpetual loner unwilling to become a team player in anything. Charlie lost count of the approaches from the uninvited German and Italian in the intervening days, impatient with Kestler's defence for having told them that both were owed the cooperation for what they'd provided about the possible Ukrainian shipment and the separate rumour about fuel rods. Charlie insisted that Balg and Fiore would have limited what they shared, casting as little bait as necessary upon the waters, and was proved right when both supplied more in their desperation to learn all they could about the Interior Ministry encounter: Fiore confided the Italian Anti-Mafia Commission were targeting a Sicilian clan headed by Gianfranco Messina for conventional weapons smuggling and Balg provided named identities of three Russians the Bundeskriminalamt suspected of setting up a smuggling cell in Leipzig.

Charlie, who'd never had a problem with professional hypocrisy when it was to his benefit, was quite happy to ferry the new information to the Interior Ministry and after initially deciding against a night-before planning session with the over-zealous Kestler, changed his mind because there was potential benefit in his doing that, too. Lyneham sat nodding approvingly as Charlie, careless of the condescension, lectured on the danger of offering everything at once.

‘Let's trickle it out, a little at a time. Which shouldn't be difficult because that's all we've got. A little.'

‘They're not calling us in for nothing!' said Kestler.

‘We don't know
why
they're calling us in,' Charlie pointed out. ‘Everyone's far too excited for no good reason.'

‘Listen to the man,' Lyneham urged the other American. Jesus, he thought, the frenetic son-of-a-bitch needed a brake; actually what Kestler needed was his foot nailed to the floor.

‘We've got enough,' argued Kestler, unpersuaded.

‘What?' demanded Charlie, unknowingly as worried as the FBI chief at Kestler's unbridled enthusiasm and wishing he was going alone to the following day's meeting. He held up his hands, to count off points. ‘All we've really got is an unsubstantiated rumour, about a possible theft from an unknown site in an unknown place of an unknown quantity of nuclear material! Which might or might not involve fuel rods. Grafted on to that rumour there's another that it just might be coming out of the Ukraine. Which if it is, makes tomorrow's meeting academic because Russia doesn't rule the Ukraine any more, even though the contents of its nuclear arsenals belong to them. Fiore's additional contribution is about the
possible
smuggling by the traditional Mafia of
conventional
weapons, which the traditional Mafia has been smuggling since conventional weapons were bows and arrows. And if they are, so what? Fiore wants to trade with what we're being called in for and in my view has thrown the Messina rabbit into the pot for us to invent a connection. Which is what you're doing. And Balg is trying the same shell game, giving us the names of three Russian villains who might, but then again might not, have set up a smuggling business in Leipzig. Again, so what? He's not saying it's nuclear. You are. Germany – Europe – is full of Russian organized crime smuggling everything from condoms to coffins. So tell me! What have we really got, to bargain with if we've got to bargain at all?'

‘A bucket of spit,' concluded Lyneham. If the English had had a few more sneaky bastards like this guy a couple of hundred years back, America would still be a British colony and they'd all be drinking warm beer.

The crestfallen Kestler looked between the other two men. ‘You're throwing away what we've got!'

‘That's exactly what I'm
not
doing,' argued Charlie. ‘Put forward properly, it sounds like something. Dump it in their laps all at once and it looks like what it probably is: shit.'

‘Trickle it, the man said,' endorsed Lyneham. ‘Listen first, speak later.'

‘Maybe I'll follow you,' Kestler conceded, to Charlie.

Bingo! thought Lyneham, relief lifting off into euphoria. There was a God after all and He cared about old guys taking six-packs to go fishing off the Florida coast and piss over the side when they felt like it.

‘That's fine by me,' accepted Charlie. It was anything but fine by Charlie because whatever his new role was it certainly wasn't playing nappy-changing nursemaid to a politically well-connected sex machine who couldn't sit still for more than three minutes at a time. But despite his realistic refusal to invest the following day with unjustified expectations, there had to be some valid reason for a summons that both Lyneham and Bowyer were adamant hadn't happened before. And whatever it was, he didn't want it fucked up by a caped crusading Kestler trying to fly faster than a speeding bullet. So for the moment he'd take the nursemaid's job.

‘We'll go to the ministry together, then?' suggested Kestler.

Shit, thought Charlie. ‘Why don't you pick me up, on your way?'

Charlie's final impression of cloying claustrophobia came with the repeated-phrase lecture from Nigel Saxon to maintain political awareness at all times and which Charlie was tempted to duck but didn't, preferring to endure the pointlessness than to have the envious Head of Chancellery add separately to whatever nit-picking Bowyer was channelling back to London. Which wasn't Charlie modifying the independent habits of a lifetime, just adapting them to the needs of the moment for the purposes of the moment.

Kestler was predictably early but Charlie was ready anyway. As the American picked his way through the traffic, he said, ‘I've got five bucks that says I'm right. And that today is going to be something you didn't expect.'

‘You're on,' accepted the financially flushed Charlie.

He lost.

The first person he saw when he entered the small conference room, thirty minutes later, was Natalia. Which was the very last thing in the world he expected.

Charlie's shock was absolute and numbing. He was aware of almost missing his step, close to faltering, and was glad he was following Kestler, who might have hidden it. By the time he cleared the doorway he had recovered and was sure his face was set.

The Russian group was assembled opposite places ready for him and the American, leather-encased blotters, with notepads and sharply pointed pencils and individual bottles of mineral water, with accompanying glasses. Popov invited them to sit and Charlie took the chair directly opposite Natalia, separated from her by no more than two metres. Popov was to her right, with a grey-haired man next to him. A younger, moustached man sat to Natalia's left. There was a gap of two chairs before a bespectacled clerk already hunched over a notebook, several pencils laid out to minute the meeting. There was a tape recorder, to the man's right.

‘Good morning,' greeted Natalia, in English. ‘I am General Natalia Nikandrova Fedova and I am in charge of the special division within the Interior Ministry specifically formed to combat the stealing and smuggling from Russia of nuclear material …' Her brief sight of him, in the corridor, hadn't really prepared her for what Charlie looked like, after five years. He had changed, apart from the pressed suit and crisp shirt, in both of which he seemed vaguely uncomfortable. She thought there was more grey in the hair, which was disordered despite the obvious tidying attempt, and he might be slightly fatter, although she wasn't sure. He hadn't shown any recognition – any facial reaction at all – but she thought he might have stumbled coming through the door: it was difficult to tell from the way he normally walked.

Charlie responded to the greeting slightly after Kestler. Her voice was quite level and controlled. Natalia looked exactly as Charlie Muffin remembered, that last day he'd watched her wait expectantly for him to snatch her away from the Russian delegation that had been her excuse to get to him in London; watched her at the same time as looking for the squad, hidden like he had been hidden, waiting to grab him when he made his approach. Which he never did because he hadn't been brave enough – hadn't loved her enough – to trust her. The hair was the same length and just as dark, with no visible greyness and coiled in a businesslike chignon at her neck, and she'd been sparing as she could afford to be with such flawless skin with her make-up, just an outline of her eyes and lips. The grey dress was as businesslike as the hair, high-buttoned and long-sleeved and full, with no hint of the figure he knew to be beneath. The dark-stoned ring was new: on the small finger of her right hand, he noted.

‘My colleagues …' she continued, turning her head first right and then left ‘… are Colonel Aleksai Popov, my deputy, whom you both know, and representatives, respectively, from this and the Foreign Ministry. Observers.' She didn't provide names. She nodded further, to the note-taker. ‘An official record is being made. It will be available, if you so wish.' She spoke, looking directly at Charlie, who held her eyes. He wasn't trying to discomfort her, Natalia knew: he'd always been able to focus his concentration to the exclusion of anything and anyone around him, seeing everything, even what people didn't want him to see. Would he be aware how easy it was for her to confront him; that it didn't matter any more?

So Popov was her deputy. Which made Natalia the higher authority to which the man referred at their first meeting. She must have known he was in Moscow, been aware of his coming even before he'd arrived. Known, too, that he was officially working through the embassy, where she could have contacted him if she'd wanted. Beside him Kestler was saying he would appreciate a transcript and briefly Natalia switched her attention before coming back enquiringly to him. Instead of simply accepting, Charlie said, ‘So there must be matters of significance to discuss?'

He hadn't changed there, either, Natalia recognized. When they'd been together – after he'd admitted his Moscow defection was a sham but it hadn't mattered because by then she'd loved him – he'd taught her more about her craft than any instructor. Words had been a creed. Bait, he'd called words. Lures. Which was the way to use them all the time, every time: always make people come to you, never go to them. Words and then silence, like now; silence that people felt they had to fill and made mistakes by rushing in to compensate. ‘If there hadn't been, this meeting would not have been called.'

Charlie was briefly conscious of the immaculate, full-bearded Popov looking curiously sideways at her. Here it was, he thought, dismissing the Russian. He was face to face again with Natalia, the never-believed-possible moment he'd rehearsed a thousand times in a thousand different ways – although none of them like this – and imagined a thousand different feelings. So what
was
the feeling, now that it was happening? Nothing like he'd imagined. There really was a numbness, a dead, difficult-to-move sensation in his arms and legs. And a hollowness, as if his stomach had been scooped out to leave a void that ached, almost as much as the ache that had begun in his feet. All of which combined into a disorientation initially far greater than that he'd felt when the Director-General had announced the assignment which made this moment possible. There'd been a lot of operational times when he had forced himself to go that extra mile – or more accurately, that one extra inch – but Charlie could not recall it ever being as difficult as it was now to push himself forward to proper, thinking reality. Even as he did so, he recognized the effort was inextricably linked to his emotions for Natalia. He wanted to perform for her, in front of others who didn't know: to impress her. With a head movement to include Kestler, he said, ‘It's difficult to think of anything more important than what we've been sent here to help in preventing. So we welcome
being
involved. And hope we are.'

He was good, conceded Natalia, like he'd always been. She hadn't begun with any positive intention, apart from personally controlling the encounter at all times, but she had thought of taking her time, which she admitted to herself would have been to let Charlie fully appreciate her position and authority now. But his response had taken control away from her, making her the person who had to respond, not lead. ‘Involvement is what we're here to discuss.'

Natalia sat, waiting, looking at him.

Charlie sat, waiting, looking at her.

Beside him, Kestler shifted, restlessly. Don't! Charlie thought, anxiously; don't for Christ's sake say anything! We haven't got anything yet! In front of him there was another frowned look from Popov towards Natalia. Who was the first to concede.

‘We are sure of an intended nuclear robbery. Which we of course are going to prevent. The decision has been made …' Natalia hesitated, moving her head positively towards Charlie. ‘… following your suggestion, to include both of you, under strictly limited and clearly understood conditions, in that prevention.' There, you bastard! Natalia thought. Now I'm back in command. Like I'm going to be in command of everything else while you sit on the sidelines and watch.

But it wasn't Charlie who spoke. Kestler said, ‘Where is this attempt to be made?'

For the first time Natalia took her attention from Charlie, looking invitingly sideways to Popov.

‘To the northeast,' said the man.

Charlie had tensed, nervously, at the sound of Kestler's voice but it had been a perfectly valid question. Before the American could speak further, Charlie said, ‘Northeast of where?'