Kings of Many Castles Read Free Page B

changed it provided a very important personal protection for him and Natalia within Moscow. And the director-general in London hadn’t pressed to learn his contacts. Observing his own even more inviolable personal rule Charlie already had a prepared escape if Sir Rupert Dean or anyone else ever became too curious or demanding.
    “It could be wrong.”
    “It’s not.” Charlie belatedly realized that this was the very first time he’d directly acted upon—used—information from Natalia and her intelligence liaison directorship with the Interior Ministry. She hadn’t tried to dissuade him because there was going to be an official announcement the following day but over the last few months he’d become increasingly aware how much of a strain their precarious situation was, far more upon her than him. He’d stopped talking about their getting married or of how easily they could live in England—anywhere in Europe—if their relationship did become known and he was inevitably expelled and she was just as inevitably dismissed her ministry position.
    “You’ve told London?”
    “Sir Rupert personally. He wants the ambassador informed ahead of the Russian announcement.”
    “Yes,” agreed Brooking, briskly.
    Pass the problem parcel time, Charlie recognized. “And lawyers.”
    “Yes,” complied Brooking again, still brisk, aware of another layer of responsibility avoidance. “Their involvement is obviously essential.”

    Brooking’s first telephone call was shorter than the second and Charlie wondered if the lawyer had already been in bed in the apartment block that formed part of the new British diplomatic compound. Charlie was one of a very few still living—because he clearly had to—outside the enclave, once more using as the reason the necessity to distance himself from official diplomacy, although since the post-Cold War re-alignment his was much more an FBI than a counter-intelligence function. Which was why, during his sleepy-voiced conversation with an awakened Sir Rupert Dean in London, the director-general had given the empire-preserving instruction that the embassy-attached MI6 be kept out for as long as possible.
    Since that conversation Charlie had decided the delay, twelve hours at the most, would achieve little more than further alienating him from people who were supposed to be colleagues but who viewed him with the distaste that Brooking had evidenced minutes before. But it was a familiar experience for Charlie to find there was shit on every baton he picked up. He couldn’t ever remember actually being part of a relay team but resisting inter-embassy association was a matter of professional necessity as much as self-protecting ostracism. Charlie never had been, nor ever would be, a team player. It made him reliant upon others and a further Charlie Muffin rule was never to rely upon anyone except himself.
    An unsettling challenge came at once to mind. What about Natalia? Not a contradiction, he assured himself. He trusted Natalia implicitly and absolutely, trusted her more than she trusted him, with every justifiable reason for her doubt. He relied upon her, too, in equal proportion. But that trust and that reliance was personal, not professional. He would never, of course, have admitted it to anyone—most certainly not to Natalia, who would misunderstand it to be a lack of love, which it wasn’t—but because Charlie Muffin knew himself so completely he acknowledged he’d never accept Natalia’s professional judgment in preference to or above his own.
    Sir Michael Parnell entered the room with vaguely hesitant authority. He was a thin man, although not as thin as Peter Bendall appeared in the file photographs, and any further similarity was smothered beneath the fullness of deeply black hair. Like Brooking, the ambassador wore a dinner jacket and black tie and to Charlie,
who did not smoke, the cigar aroma smelled the same. Charlie’s protocol-routed request, through Brooking, had been