This is a work of fiction.

All of the characters, organizations, and events

portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously.

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

RED STAR BURNING. Copyright © 2012 by Brian Freemantle. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s
Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com
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ISBN 978-1-250-00636-3 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-250-01306-4 (e-book)

First Edition: June 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 f
1

“KILL MYSELF?” ECHOED CHARLIE, DERISION AND ASTONISH-

ment combined.
“That’s what I think you’ll end up doing.”
“Bollocks,” rejected Charlie. At the back—too often in the
forefront—of his mind had always hovered the expectation of dying.
But violently: from a breath-sucking assassin’s bullet or the burn of a
back-alley knife or a shattering explosion. But never of killing him-
self, not even while confronting his now fossilized existence.
“It would be understandable,” sympathized the small, hunched
psychiatrist, George Cowley. “You’ve spent almost thirty years at the
front end of British intelligence, always on the edge. Now you’re blown,
in a Protection Program with a new identity, a retirement salary, a safe
house, and a protection regime. All of which you’re refusing to acknowl-
edge or observe. From which the only conclusion is that you’re either
inviting Russian assassination or intending to kill yourself.”
“Bollocks,” repeated Charlie. He had to do better than this: con-
vince this asshole of an MI5 psychiatrist that he’d got it all wrong. As
he, in turn, had got it all wrong, staging an intentionally deceiving per-
formance for the too easily detected minders during his limited excur-
sions from the safe house. The internal cameras and listening devices
would be recording everything of this performance, too, he accepted.
“It would have been easier for you, if maybe not for them, if you’d
had a family: a wife, children, to fill the emptiness within you,”
RED STAR BURNING | 3 |

Cowley pressed on. “But you haven’t, have you, Charlie? All you’ve
ever had is the job and now you don’t have that anymore.”
Wrong again! agonized Charlie. He did have a wife. And a daugh-
ter. A family still in Russia that no one knew about. Nor could they ever
know, because Natalia Fedova was a senior officer in the Federal’naya
Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the intelligence agency of the Russian Federa-
tion that his own MI5 service believed was determined to assassinate
him.
“You expect me to adjust in five minutes to all that’s happened!”
demanded Charlie, discomfited at his inadequate reply.
Cowley, who had the highest security clearance, tapped Charlie’s
file on the table between them. “I’ve read every word that’s in here:
know everything you’ve done. And having read it I’d expect you to
understand the very real danger you’re in and accept all the protec-
tion that’s being offered.”
What danger was Natalia facing after his most recent Moscow as-
signment? Charlie asked himself, as he had repeatedly over the past
three months. If he was blown, as MI5 believed him to be, the search
might stretch back to his phoney Moscow defection, when Natalia
Fedova had been his interrogator. Charlie had never been totally satis-
fied then she’d sanitized their subsequent relationship from what then
would have been KGB records. “I’m not convinced the risk is as great
as everyone believes it to be.”
“That’s for the Director-General to decide, not you. And that de-
cision’s been made.”
“As yours has been made,” Charlie fought back. “And it’s wrong.”
“You ever kill anyone, Charlie?” demanded the psychiatrist, un-
expectedly.
“Never intentionally.” That was debatable, thought Charlie, uneasy
at the prescience of the other man. Charlie hoped there was nothing in
the bulky personnel dossier with which Cowley could catch him out.
“Didn’t it ever worry you, people getting killed? Assassinated?”
persisted the other man.
Brian Freemantle | 4 |

“It didn’t happen often and when it did—or had to—it was part
of the job: I never pulled a trigger.” That reply was a cop-out, Charlie
acknowledged, but they’d been talking of death and dying for the
past thirty minutes and he was fed up at the verbal ping-pong.
“Could you have pulled a trigger, if you’d had to?”
“I’d been trained to that level, as a last resort: I never got to that
resort.” Charlie was surprised at the sudden although easily suppressed
anger, an emotion he hadn’t experienced for a long time because it in-
dicated lack of control, which was always dangerous professionally.
“Do you still think you could pull the trigger, if you had to?”
“Not with the barrel against my own head, no,” refused Charlie,
guessing the direction in which Cowley was leading.
“You sure about that?” demanded the psychiatrist. “Or are you
pissed off that the rest of your life is going to be spent incarcerated in
security-covered, audio-and-CCTV-equipped safe houses, forever bur-
ied deep within a protection program, never ever able again to meet
or speak to anyone you once knew?”
“I’ll get there,” responded Charlie, dismissively.
“You’re not even trying,” accused Cowley, dismissive in return.
“You’re supposed to have adopted the new name—the entirely new
identity—you’ve been allocated and you haven’t. You’re supposed
never to establish patterns—never the same restaurants, never the
same pub, never the same cinema, never the same route or transport
to the same supermarket—and you haven’t. You’re supposed to alter
the way you dress, alter as much of your appearance as possible, and
you haven’t: you’re even still wearing those spread-apart Hush Pup-
pies about to fall off your awkward feet. As part of that appearance
change—in your particular case, all the more essential because of
the target you now are—you’re supposed seriously to consider surgi-
cal facial reconstruction and you haven’t bothered to attend three
specialist appointments to discuss it.”
“I told you I’d get round to it!” Lame again, Charlie recognized.
“How often, since you’ve been in the program, have you seriously
considered suicide?”
RED STAR BURNING | 5 |

“Since entering the protection program I have never, ever, consid-

ered suicide,” replied Charlie, enunciating each word for emphasis.
“I don’t believe you,” declared Cowley. “It’s a fucking awful exis-
tence. I’ve never had a protected patient who hasn’t thought of taking
his or her own life.”
“How many actually did?”
“Six,” Cowley came back at once.
“I’m not going to become your seventh!” assured Charlie.
“I know you’re not,” agreed the psychiatrist. “I’m going to put
you on suicide watch to ensure you don’t.”
Fuck it, thought Charlie. He had to hurry to reach Natalia in time.

“Defect to the British!” exclaimed Elana, her voice breaking. “You

can’t . . . we can’t . . .” She tried to continue but couldn’t, her mind
seized by the enormity of what Radtsic had told her, her eyes fixed
farther ahead of the embankment road along which they were walk-
ing, the river-bordered British embassy in the distance. “We can’t . . .
you’re the virtual head of Russian intelligence . . . it’s unthinkable. . . .”
She tried again: “What about Andrei?”
“It’ll be easy with Andrei at the Sorbonne,” insisted Radtsic, whose
heavy mustache, gray like his thick hair, and heavy, indulged body
had in the past made him the butt of jokes about his physical resem-
blance to Stalin. “Paris is closer to London than we are here in Mos-
cow. The moment we run he’ll be picked up and brought to us there.
We’ll be together and we’ll be safe.”
“It’s too much for me to understand,” protested the woman. In
contrast to her husband, who was fifteen years her senior, Elana was
a slim, even elegant woman committed to her career as professor of
physics at Moscow University. “My work . . . what about my work . . .
I mean . . . I don’t know.”
“I can’t go without you. You’d be arrested: dismissed from the
university.” Radtsic was agonized by the conversation, his whole body
clammy with perspiration.
Brian Freemantle | 6 |

“I didn’t mean I wouldn’t come with you. I was thinking of every-

thing I would be abandoning . . . leaving behind. Are you sure, really
sure, that you’re being targeted?”
“I found two listening devices in my office today, one actually in
the telephone handset, the other in the base of the desk light: that’s
why we’re walking—so we can talk—out in the open like this,” dis-
closed Radtsic. “And today I was told there’s no reason for my attend-
ing the quarterly operational review, which I’ve done ever since I
was appointed deputy chairman: actually headed more sessions than
the chairman himself.”
“Oh my God!” said Elana, who was a devoted churchgoer. “It’s
true, isn’t it? You’re going to be purged.”
“No, I’m not,” insisted Radtsic, defiantly. “I’m going to get out.”
 f
2

HE’D SCREWED UP BIG TIME, CHARLIE ACKNOWLEDGED. HOW

big he didn’t yet know, nor how to find out: whether, even, if he would.
Feigning inferiority to encourage the underestimation of those against
whom he was pitted was one of several chameleonlike survival cloaks
in which Charlie Muffin so often professionally wrapped himself.
But it hadn’t worked with George Cowley. On film and on sound, Char-
lie knew, he’d looked a lost, vacant-eyed idiot who, in the specialized
environment in which, until now, he’d existed, had lost not just the
will but the professional ability to live. And become a potential lia-
bility.
How, in his eagerness to reassure Natalia that he was still alive—
and financially to provide for her and Sasha—could he have failed
properly to consider the possible misunderstandings! The core con-
cern of MI5 heirarchy had to be that pissing about as he’d intention-
ally, stupidly, done—neither properly in nor improperly out of the
protection regime—risked his detection by those murderously hunt-
ing him. And that however they chose to destroy him would publicly
expose how close Russian intelligence had come to insinuating itself
into the very heart of the Oval Office in Washington D.C., with an
equally gullible, puppy dog Britain led unsuspectingly by the nose to
the same disaster.
Charlie stirred from the chair into which he’d slumped after Cow-
ley’s departure fifteen minutes earlier. It would appear on the all-
seeing cameras as bad as the confrontation itself, as if exhausted by it
Brian Freemantle | 8 |

he’d collapsed into continuing depression, not what he’d objectively

been doing, taking time for self-critical self-examination. Resulting in
what? Irritation, predominantly, Charlie answered himself: irritated at
having been so obviously beaten in a verbal who-can-shout-loudest
contest and at that humiliation being filmed and recorded and at be-
ing so completely cut off from everything and everyone and because of
that isolation not able to gauge the full extent of his self-created situa-
tion.
Charlie started up, determined to identify all the cameras upon
which his every waking—and sleeping, through infrared technology—
moment was monitored. By the time he reached the kitchen and the
cupboard containing the Islay single malt, he was reasonably sure
he’d located four before abandoning the pointless exercise. Miniatur-
ized as the lenses were, he’d never pick them all out. And what if he
did? He wasn’t on an operational assignment, where he had to protect
himself against every eventuality. He was in a permanently recorded
goldfish bowl. And there was no recovery advantage from his being
able to pose or perform to mislead his constant watchers. Whatever
he did would be further misconstrued as proof of his mentally erod-
ing hold on reality.
Which it most certainly wasn’t, Charlie assured himself, as he
splashed whiskey into his glass intentionally to be visible to a camera
in the window-blind coping. The whiskey and how much of it he drank
would scarcely be a revelation to his observers. They actually provided
it because of its rarity: known as it inevitably would be to his pursuers,
it could have led to his whereabouts if he’d placed a regular order with
an outside supplier.
How many pursuers would there be? wondered Charlie, carrying
his tumbler back to his accustomed lounge chair overlooking the
small, sensor-seeded garden. This soon, only three months after he’d
wrecked an espionage operation the Russians had nurtured over
practically eighteen years, there’d be a lot: a code-name-designated
operation, in fact. Would it be only Russian? Almost certainly not.
The Russian target had been the CIA, convincing them—which it
RED STAR BURNING | 9 |

had, completely—that a former KGB-cum-FSB officer about to be

elected president of the Russian Federation would, once in absolute
power, remain their deeply embedded agent through whom America
could virtually manipulate the Moscow government, never suspect-
ing that it would have been the misguided occupant of the White
House on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., who would have
been the puppet on the Kremlin’s strings. There would doubtless have
been a lot of head rolling at the CIA’s Langley headquarters. Enough,
certainly, for the Agency to consider matching, murderous retribu-
tion. Was he safe even from his own people? Charlie knew the mass
clear-out of those who’d swallowed the Russian bait at MI5’s Thames
House headquarters had been only slightly less sweeping at the MI6
building on the other side of the river at Vauxhall Cross, both suffi-
cient to gain him far more enemies than admirers.
He wasn’t simply caught between a rock and a hard place, Charlie
accepted. He was trapped beneath a collapsing mountain range: if
one avalanche didn’t sweep him away, another one would. Most of
which, to some extent, he’d already worked out. Today’s humiliating
psychoanalysis had simply concentrated it in its entirety. As much as
it had concentrated his mind, which was no longer fogged by the in-
dignation with which he’d rejected the psychiatrist’s accusation. He
defi nitely hadn’t contemplated suicide. But subconsciously he’d al-
lowed himself to sink into an acceptance of his eventually being
detected: of his being killed by one or other of the groups committed
to his destruction.
Which was preposterous and unthinkable: he’d never capitulated
to anything or anyone and he didn’t intend rolling onto his back and
spreading his legs in submission now, no matter how different or
stultified that life might now be.
Charlie smiled and looked up in the direction of another suspected
camera. It was, he determined, a decision that deserved another drink,
in celebration this time.
Brian Freemantle | 10 |

“What the hell does he think he’s got to smile about?” demanded
Aubrey Smith, turning away from the safe-house recording that di-
rectly followed Charlie Muffin’s psychoanalysis.
“Normally I’d try an answer that would help,” apologized George
Cowley. “This time I don’t think I can.”
“You’ve put him on suicide watch, for Christ’s sake!” exploded
Jane Ambersom, the androgynously featured, newly appointed deputy
director. “You actually think he’s going to top himself!”
“I also find that difficult to accept,” said the mild-mannered, mild-
voiced Smith, whose confidence remained undermined by his know-
ing how dangerously close his overthrow, orchestrated by Ambersom’s
predecessor, had been. As it fortunately turned out, Jeffrey Smale had
been the highest-profile casualty from Charlie Muffin’s success.
“I think he’s a potential danger to himself and because of that a
danger to the service,” insisted Cowley, repeating the warning with
which he’d begun the assessment meeting.
“There’s no way, no set of circumstances, in which Charlie Muf-
fin could be suicidal,” persisted the Director-General.
“I’ve just spelt out the circumstances to you. And to him,” reminded
Cowley. “He knows just how much of a target he is. And always will
be. Just as he knows, simply to survive, what every day of every week
of every month is going to be for that survival. I can’t imagine—no
one can truthfully imagine—what the constant awareness of that is
like. It’s worse than being imprisoned for life, in solitary confinement.
In those circumstances a man quite quickly becomes dehumanized,
robotlike, because there is no human contact apart from his guards,
which isn’t enough. Charlie Muffin doesn’t have anyone with whom
to adjust, to make a new life. But he’s not incarcerated. He can go out,
to pubs and restaurants and cinemas and theaters, and see other
people all around him. But never risk getting involved, never know-
ing whom he can trust. It’s permanent, unremitting torture.”
“Charlie Muffin’s always been a loner and never trusted anyone,”
disputed Ambersom, gesturing to her own copy of Charlie’s personnel
file. “What’s new now?”
RED STAR BURNING | 11 |

“How he lived before was by his own choice,” the psychiatrist

pointed out. “And before, he had the job. Which I acknowledge from
everything I’ve read he did by his own rules and upset a lot of people
in the process. But he was doing something: he had a reason to live. He
doesn’t have that reason now: any reason whatsoever to go on living
now.”
“What are you suggesting?” asked Smith, whose deceptive, qui-
etly spoken demeanor hinted to his post-Oxford career as professor of
Middle East studies, one of the core credos of which was that once-
suffered harm had always to be avenged, a philosophy he’d quickly
recognized in Charlie Muffin.
“I’m not employed here to suggest,” refused Cowley. “I’m here to
assess his mental health and that’s what I’ve done.”
“Are you saying he’s mentally ill?” demanded the sharply suited,
precisely spoken Ambersom, who’d bitterly opposed and still resented
her manipulated transfer to MI5 from the external Secret Intelli-
gence Service, MI6.
“Not yet,” qualified Cowley, forcefully. “I think in time, a com-
paratively short period of time, he could begin to develop a psychosis.
I also think that he would be intelligent enough to realize himself
what was happening to him and that with the emptiness of his exis-
tence, an emptiness that’s never going to be filled, he’d prefer to kill
himself than gradually, knowingly, degenerate into mental decline.”
The psychiatrist shifted his own copy of Charlie’s personnel file. “It
might be difficult for most people to decipher from all that’s in here,
but from what I’ve read and from the sessions I’ve had with him, I’ve
got Charlie Muffin marked as an extremely proud, even arrogant
man. He’d rather kill himself than end up mentally confused, wear-
ing an incontinence pad.”
 RED  HEAT

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