Red Star Rising Read Free Page B

responsible for the applicable budget. The Savoy is not on the permitted list of outside accommodation. If you insist on living outside, we must consult that list and rehouse you.”
    “Howard, you will not be required to pay whatever bills I incur at the Savoy so your budget is not endangered. We’re not going to consult any list or have any sort of discussion about anything.”
    “I have not received any authorization from London, which is necessary under the regulations.”
    Just as there was a regulation forbidding the questioning of the man who found the body of a murder victim, thought Charlie. “You want London’s approval, you go ahead and ask for it.”
    “You go out of your way to upset people?” asked Paula-Jane, when Charlie put down the receiver.
    “Always seems to happen, no matter how hard I try to avoid it.” He’d been out of the field for too long and had forgotten the bureaucratic madrigal of embassy existence, Charlie recognized. It wasn’t going to help him.

2
    Charlie Muffin had taken his time, as he always did, checking the intruder trap in his hotel room—ensuring that the drawers he’d left slightly protruding hadn’t been pushed closed after a search and that their specially arranged contents were as he’d left them and that flaps pushed into pockets hadn’t been correctly replaced outside—satisfied after almost an hour that no one had entered. Now he sat hunched at the corner stool of the bar, his back instinctively protected by its abutting wall, wishing that the vodka glass into which he was gazing was a crystal ball to tell him the last time an assignment had begun as badly as this one. He certainly couldn’t remember. Which made it a wise move to have concluded the encounter with Paula-Jane with so many initial questions unanswered and leave the embassy, needing to clear his head and to calculate just how many mistakes had already been made. Or had been allowed to be made. He really had forgotten the head-in-the-sand mentality of embassy life.
    Had too much already been avoided or ignored for him to pick up all the dropped pieces? Charlie wondered. He couldn’t allow there to be, came the immediate determination. The poor faceless, one-armed bastard hadn’t survived but Charlie had to, as he’d always survived. But this time could be difficult. He’d never known the department so positively divided as it had been by Aubrey Smith’s promotion over Jeffrey Smale, nor for that divisionto be so marked by Smith’s consistent operational failures against the litany of successes controlled by his deputy. What Charlie did know was that on this assignment he was very definitely between two warring men, with Aubrey Smith seeing it as his positive last chance and Jeffrey Smale regarding it as the potential coup de grâce in the fight to the promotional death. Which was why, with bizarre irony, both men had for the first time ever been in perfect accord that he got the Moscow assignment. Which, even more bizarrely, Charlie welcomed despite its close-to-overwhelming risks. Now that he didn’t have Natalia or Sasha any longer, the job was all he had left and to keep it, he’d do anything just short of dipping someone else’s fingers into any available acid bath.
    How did that crush-anyone-in-any-way determination square with the placid acceptance that he didn’t have Natalia and Sasha anymore? Charlie asked himself. They weren’t together anymore, as a family anymore, because he hadn’t sufficiently persuaded Natalia. And hadn’t been in Moscow to be able to. But now he
was
in Moscow. Could he contemplate that distraction from a job so professionally vital and try to convince Natalia that they could still have a life together? Of course he could. It would be ridiculous, his being in the same city as her and their daughter, for him
not
to make contact and for him to try, yet again, to convince her how perfect everything could be if only she’d come to live in London.
    The