Kings of Many Castles Read Free Page A

Bendall’s complete me—together with separately wired photographs—had already been faxed through by the time Charlie arrived at the night-shrouded complex, carrying the video of the gantry struggle he’d recorded himself before leaving the Lesnaya Ulitza apartment. He was only three-quarters through the archive material when the querulous call came from Richard Brooking, the head of chancellery.
    “This had better be justified.”
    “It is.”
    “We’re on the coffee.”
    “Pass the mints and decanter around a second time.”
    The man sighed. “How long?”
    “Fifteen minutes. Have you told the ambassador?”
    There was another sigh. “I need to be sure there’s a crisis first.”
    “Your decision,” said Charlie, who hadn’t given the diplomat the reason for breaking into his dinner party over an open telephone line from Lesnaya.
    “Don’t you forget that. My office. Thirty minutes.”
    Charlie finished reading in fifteen and spent the remainder of the time studying the fading photographs of one of Britain’s most infamous post-war traitors. Peter Bendall had been a skeletally-thin man whose narrow face was dominated by a prow of a nose upon which balanced thick-lensed, round-framed spectacles. Every Old
Bailey trial, family and official government picture portrayed a fastidiously although cheaply dressed, aloofly-featured man bearing no similarity whatsoever to the fanatically staring, mop-haired figure who’d now been seen by every television owner in the world struggling in mid-air for possession of a sniper’s rifle.
    Brooking, a fleshy, overweight man assured an ambassadorial promotion on his next posting, was still wearing his dinner jacket and black tie when Charlie got to the man’s office suite. He tried—but failed—to heighten the unspoken rebuke at having his evening interrupted by the contempt with which he regarded Charlie’s shoe-spread, crumpled appearance. Charlie wondered if the man had told his guests to wait until his return. Around the man still hung a miasma of cigars.
    “So what is it!” demanded Brooking, impatiently.
    “Today’s gunman is British, the son of a defector,” announced Charlie. The theatricality was unnecessary—he should have warned Brooking during their internal telephone conversation earlier—but pompous assholes like Brooking had always irritated Charlie and he never had been able to resist the deflating pin-prick.
    Brooking did visibly deflate. He shook his head, refusing the information, and several times said “No” as if to convince himself he’d mishead.
    “George Bendall,” insisted Charlie. “Son of Peter Bendall, an Aldermaston physicist who escaped from Wormwood Scrubs in 1970 after serving only two of a forty year sentence for betraying to the Russians over the previous fifteen years every British nuclear development, a lot of which was shared with America.”
    “Oh my God!” moaned Brooking.
    Charlie hefted what had come from London. “Virtually nothing on George Bendall, who was only two when his father got caught. Brought to Moscow by his mother three years after his father arrived. She skipped sideways through Austria from what was purported to be a holiday in France using the same escape route as her husband. Gave the stiff finger to British counter-intelligence who were supposed to be watching her because hubby was rumored to have changed his mind and wanted to come back.”

    Brooking’s recovery was as visible as his earlier collapse. “Why didn’t you tell me this from the beginning!”
    “It wasn’t a secure line.”
    The man frowned. “Has this been officially announced by the Russians?”
    “No.”
    “Then how do you know?”
    “It’s my job to know, the job I was posted here to fulfill.”
    “What’s your source?”
    “You know I can’t tell you that.” It was an inviolable rule that official diplomats were always separated from provable intelligence activities, and even though Charlie’s function had