06
South Rome (Allied sector)
“Oh dear,” said Harry. “I hope we’ve set a place at the table for Mr. Cockup, then.”
The Secret Intelligence Service chief was unimpressed with his attempt at levity. These people, thought Harry, no appreciation for the classics.
“This is serious, Colonel Windsor,” Carstairs said, conspicuously declining to address him as “Your Highness.” “Sobeskaia is running hot right now, and you are the only person he’ll agree to run to.”
The three men—Harry, Talbot Carstairs, and Stan Walker, Carstairs’s OSS counterpart in Rome—all stood around a small conference table in the secure room at the British embassy. “The Quiet Room,” as Harry thought of it, although he would never have used that phrasing in present company. The local spymasters both played to type. Carstairs, with his shiny, bald head and round, almost babyish features, was every inch a civil-service man, even if his service was performed in secret. Walker was old-school OSS, a veteran of the mad, bad days of Wild Bill Donovan. The sort of brute who was most happy blowing things up and hurting people. Probably too smart for one of the military-intelligence workshops, and too dumb for the Ivy League of the CIA, which, in this world, did not dirty its hands or bloody its knuckles with anything as gauche as direct action.
The SIS station chief ran a hand over the shining dome of his head, almost as if he were brushing hair out of his eyes. It was most probably an old habit, Harry figured.
“Gentlemen, we simply do not have the time,” said Carstairs. He tapped two fingers on a buff-colored manila folder lying on the table in front of them, leaving a couple of faint, greasy fingerprints behind, just beneath the only words printed on the cover.
VALENTIN SOBESKAIA.
Harry’s stomach growled. Apart from a few mouthfuls of truffled mushroom, he had not eaten since the morning. The glass of prosecco with Julia hardly counted, and he now deeply regretted waving away the finger food at Sir Alec’s movie premiere. He shook his head as frustration got the better of him. Jules had been understanding at the restaurant, but then, she was more than familiar with the demands of last-minute, unexpected deadlines. Still, he felt awful for having dragged her all the way to Rome, only to abandon her almost immediately. Nothing about this meeting suggested he’d be able to catch up with her again anytime soon either.
“All right.” He sighed. “Valentin Sobeskaia. I suppose you’d better tell me all about my new best friend.”
The OSS man threw a quick glance at the locked door. More a nervous twitch than a conscious attempt to reassure himself that they could not be overheard.
First though, to Harry’s surprise and not inconsiderable annoyance, Carstairs insisted on the formalities. Opening the file, he began to read from a card pasted to the inside, carefully sticking to the exact wording.
“Colonel Windsor, you are about to be briefed into a Top Secret Ultra file. By accepting this briefing, you agree to be bound by the provisions of the Official Secrets Act of—”
“Oh, come on, I don’t think this—”
But Carstairs cut him off, holding up one hand like a traffic policeman. Meanwhile he continued his read-through, explaining to the prince and twenty-five-year military veteran the full range of penalties that would apply to him (yes, even him) under the Official Secrets Act of 1939, were he to divulge the contents of this file to any unauthorized person or persons.
Unable to keep his annoyance in check, Harry wordlessly implored Walker to intervene. The American just grinned back at him, like a hammerhead shark. He was obviously used to the bureaucratic obsessions of his colleague.
“Sign please,” Carstairs said in conclusion. He passed Harry a fountain pen and indicated where he needed to add his signature to the short list of people who had been given access to the file.
Harry scrawled out his name, adding an HRH for good measure and stabbing the pen into the paper to emphasize his disgruntlement. He couldn’t believe he was stuck in this small, airless room in the basement of the embassy. Not when he could be finishing his dinner date and making plans for a couple of days of wanton carousing on the Amalfi coast.
“Sure you wouldn’t like that in triplicate, old boy?”
Carstairs appeared to consider the offer seriously, while flipping open the file and leaning forward to spread its contents out across the table. He had a small splotch of pasta sauce on his collar. “Signing once is more than enough to get you in trouble,” he replied. It was the only time that Harry had ever heard him attempt a joke. Or what Harry assumed was a joke.
“Now, Valentin Sobeskaia,” the spy chief began, in the practiced cadence of a man repeating a briefing he had given many times before, “one of Stalin’s pet commercial boyars …” He looked up at Harry to make sure he understood the meaning of the term. Harry waved him on.
There was nothing particularly exciting or even classified about the information. For all that the Soviets had unleashed an army of theoreticians to explain the failure of their revolution in Harry’s time, and for all that the resulting explanation was utter bullshit, the Kremlin had paid at least some heed to future history. They would never admit it, of course, but they’d attempted to learn from the success of their Chinese comrades in freeing up some market controls while maintaining an iron grip in the political realm. Sobeskaia was a beneficiary of that complicated two-step. A Party boss who had been authorized to run a state enterprise along commercial lines. He was one of millions of Soviet citizens who had profited directly from Stalin’s own, very particular version of perestroika.
“Sobeskaia acquitted himself well, first as the senior foreman, then as director of a tractor factory given over to tank production in the early days of the war,” explained Carstairs. “He then disappeared from view for at least eight years but reappeared in good health as one of the first authorized managers of a corporatized State Business Enterprise.”
“A toaster factory, if you can believe it,” said Walker, with a short, barking laugh. “Automatic toasters. And they worked too, the son of a bitch! He was building them before we were. Exporting the suckers all over the damn world.”
Harry was beginning to get a feel for where this might be going. He stretched his back, which was feeling cramped. Closing his eyes against the glare of the overhead fluorescents, he decided to hazard a guess.
“We’re assuming, I suppose, that Comrade Sobeskaia spent those eight years covering himself in glory with the NKVD’s Functional Projects Bureau.”
“Ha!” Walker chimed in. “As the philosophers say, if a bear shits in the woods but nobody smells it, it was probably working for Lavrenty Beria.”
“Philosophers say that?”
“The ones from the faculty of mixed f*cking metaphors do, yeah.”
Carstairs handed over a couple of photographs of the state-approved businessman. They were good quality, which didn’t surprise Harry at all. Although the Iron Curtain had trapped hundreds of millions of people inside Stalin’s gargantuan prison camp, for those with the trust of the state, travel was much easier than it had been in the original timeline. Over a thousand “enterprise boyars”—businessmen and -women who, like Valentin Sobeskaia, ran corporatized operations for Mother Russia—were now in Rome for the GATT conference. Many of them were even staying on this side of the Wall, doing business, signing contracts, making money with their ideological nemeses in the free world. Just as the once-and-future Chinese Communists would have done.
The photographs Harry flipped through all looked as though they’d been shot while Sobeskaia was visiting the West. Taken from a variety of angles and distances, they mostly featured backdrops of expensive restaurants and hotel lobbies.
“So why the flap over a toaster salesman?” he asked.
“Well, his f*cking toasters are kicking the ass out of GE,” said Walker, not altogether facetiously. “It’s not like he has to pay top dollar for his slave labor, you know. A*shole’s moving into electronics next, transistors and maybe even silicon, according to the word here in Rome.”
“But that’s not why you want him, is it?” Harry asked, perusing the rest of the documents laid out before him, which amounted to a particularly meager report, he noted. Mostly just baselevel commercial intelligence about the operations of Prozpekt Elektric, the state corporation run by Sobeskaia. Harry shook his head. Carstairs had made him sign the Official Secrets form to read a bunch of newspaper ads for some of Prozpekt’s cheap consumer wares. A couple of washing machines, a microwave oven, and a steam iron. All of them looking as though their designs had been stolen from sources uptime—which, of course, they had. The Sovs hadn’t just gained access to 21C military technology after the Emergence. They’d also grabbed up a treasure trove of data on eight decades’ worth of development in consumer goods, and, Harry thought wryly, a history lesson from Deng Xiaoping in how to get the West to pay you to bury them.
“No, we have little interest in Comrade Sobeskaia’s cheap microwave ovens and toasters,” Carstairs replied. “I don’t care for these so-called microwaves personally. Unlike Mr. Walker. I find they either burn one’s food or leave it frozen in the middle, or both.”
An exchange, unspoken but unmistakable, passed between the station chiefs. An in-joke or an old disagreement, perhaps. Carstairs moved on, retrieving a small, plain envelope from the back of the file, which he opened before tipping the contents out onto the table.
“Sobeskaia smuggled these to us via an intermediary.”
“His dame,” added Walker.
Harry frowned at the metal shavings, scattered over an advert for a Nijinsky coffee machine clipped from The Telegraph. The tightly curled metallic tendrils were a dirty silver color and quite lustrous under the harsh, white, fluorescent light.
“Well, I’m guessing it’s not radioactive,” Harry said, only half joking. “You do know not to play with plutonium, don’t you, Mr. Carstairs?”
“It’s tungsten,” replied the British spymaster. “Chinese tungsten, mined in the mainland Communist territories, of course.”
“Of course. I don’t suppose Prozpekt is branching out into jewelry or exotic yacht keels, then?”
“What?” That threw Carstairs, if only momentarily.
“Niche uses,” the prince explained. “Not nearly as popular as using it for armaments.”
The other men nodded. Walker spoke then. “You got it. Penetrator rounds, supersonic shrapnel—all the good stuff. You don’t need tungsten for it, but unless you have a whole heap of depleted uranium lying around, it’s not a bad option.”
Harry picked up one of the small metal shavings. It felt dense and hard, and he was careful not to pinch it too firmly in case he cut himself.
“So, what’s the story? You’re sure Sobeskaia isn’t launching a weaponized toaster onto the market?”
“Could be,” Walker conceded, to Carstairs’s obvious chagrin. “Well, we don’t know, do we?” the American added in reply to a glare from his SIS counterpart.
“No, we do not,” said Carstairs. “We don’t know much about Mr. Sobeskaia at all. Other than that he chose to reach out and make contact with us via an informal channel, requesting a meeting while he was here in Rome for the GATT conference. He sent us these shavings as a teaser.”
“Spiffing. So I suppose your people talked to his people?”
“Tried to,” said Walker.
“And at this point Mr. Cockup joined the party, right?”
Carstairs flushed bright red, the skin on his neck nearly matching the color of the pasta sauce on his collar. “The OSS put one of their best men on it,” he said ruefully.
“One of our best men, Talbot,” corrected Walker. “He was a shared asset.”
“I do note your unfortunate use of the past tense,” said Harry.
Talbot Carstairs swept up the small pile of tungsten shavings, carefully placing them back in the envelope.
“A shared asset, yes, yes,” he conceded. “One of your people, actually, Colonel.”
“Sorry? You mean from the Twenty-second SAS, or another uptimer?”
Carstairs nodded at the last option. “Ivanov, the Russian. You know of him, I assume? One of your special commando Johnnies.”
“We’ve met,” said Harry. “A long time ago now. Just after the war.”
He searched his memories of the encounter. Ivanov, as he recalled, was looking for SAS men, either uptime or contemporary, to freelance inside the USSR. Harry had sent him off with nothing but his best wishes.
“Well, he was supposed to meet Sobeskaia this evening, over in the Soviet sector,” Carstairs went on. “At a hotel called the Albergo Grimaldi, where Sobeskaia was staying. But it’s all gone rather pear-shaped, I’m afraid. We don’t know anything about what’s happened to Ivanov other than that there’s been some gunplay out there.”
“And bombs going off,” added Walker as he took up the explanation. “We put him together with one of our local contacts. A guy who could get him over the Wall and back.”
“Mafia,” said Harry. It wasn’t a question.
“They love their freedom and their country as much as the next guy,” said Walker. “Anyway, Ivanov was just supposed to meet with Sobeskaia. Shake him down for some information, see what was up with this shit …” He waved a hand toward the small envelope in front of Carstairs.
“But the meet-up went wrong,” surmised Harry.
“Never even happened. This Sobeskaia a*shole sent his girlfriend to the first contact. This is the broad who got the shavings to us—who we’re pretty sure is dead now, or as good as. He’s f*cking her, so he trusts her. They’re looking to get out from behind the Wall. Figured they could buy a ticket with a few twirls of shredded tungsten.
“Anyway, we’ve got no real-time link to Ivanov. His presence there is deniable. But we’ve got other sources over in the Soviet sector telling us there’s been a heap of gunfire, some grenades going off, all of it in the vicinity of the Grimaldi. Sovs are saying it’s just fireworks. But the word on Sobeskaia’s girlfriend is good, we reckon. He sent her to the meet as a decoy. Probably knew it was a f*cking washout.”
“Charming. And Sobeskaia?”
At this, Carstairs appeared to be trying to suck the fillings out of his back teeth, while Walker merely grimaced. The SIS man spoke first.
“He’s turned up here in South Rome, at the same cocktail party you’re due to attend this evening. He arrived about forty minutes ago, although it seems he’s been over in our sector for a day already. We now suspect that the rotter never intended to meet with Ivanov. He sent his mistress into a trap while he hid out here, then ran for it, turning up at our shindig tonight. Uninvited. Unexpected, of course. But he is a senior member of the Soviet trade delegation, so he gained access. He has been hanging off the arm of the ambassador ever since, demanding to meet with you. Naturally, the caterers are going spare because now the party’s absolutely swarming with security men. Ours, theirs, and God only knows who else.”
Harry rubbed his eyes, which were throbbing with the start of a tension headache.
“I don’t suppose he said why?”
“To defect. To you. Personally.”
Harry nodded slowly as he made an effort to control the adrenaline surge. He felt dizzy with hunger, and perhaps even a little giddy from the drink earlier. Not the best of shape to find oneself in at the current impasse.
“And I imagine there’s some reason why you haven’t just walked him out the door and into a car?”
Walker smiled. “Yeah. It’s like Talbot says. About ten minutes after Sobeskaia showed up at Babington’s, an NKVD snatch team arrived. All of them with bona fide invites. Junior trade envoys, second assistant cultural attachés—that sort of crap. And all of them now circling our guy like f*cking bull sharks. I think that’s why he wants you in there, Harry. You’re a two-for-one deal: an SAS officer and, now and forever, an heir to the throne. He figures they won’t dare throw down on him while you’re standing there. And if they do, what the hell—you’re just the sort of guy who’ll jump in and take a bullet for him.”
“The hell I will,” Harry retorted. “And I’m no more an heir to the throne now than you. And I haven’t even had dinner yet.”
Carstairs shook his head. “I’m sure, Colonel Windsor,” he said, “that just like the gossip rags who follow your every move, Mr. Sobeskaia is either unaware or unimpressed by the Succession Act of 1949 and subsequent amendments. As far as he is concerned, you are an heir to the British throne, here and in the future. He wants to defect to you, and only to you. As for dinner, we all missed out, but you can eat when you get there. I hear the shrimp cocktail is excellent.”
Talbot Carstairs smiled weakly. His second attempt at wit for the evening.
Never a good sign.