Necessarily going back to Lesnaya to shower, shave and change—and even then make a telephone call—delayed him, but Charlie wouldn’t anyway have arrived at the gardens ahead of Natalia. She had never been operational, walking dark streets and even darker alleys; couldn’t instinctively recognize the difference between shadows and shade, which after so long was second nature to Charlie. Not yet knowing her latest concern, he had to protect her, ensure she was alone. It had been Natalia who’d remembered their old rendezvous, so she’d remember the rules: expect him to check from somewhere unseen and know that if he didn’t approach after half an hour he wouldn’t make the meeting, not believing it safe. She had to be wrong, overreacting, he told himself as he emerged from the Botanicheskiy Sad metro, cloaked by the crowd. This sort of thing had been necessary in the old, paranoid past, but one of the few real changes in Russia—Moscow, particularly—had been the ending of the KGB’s spy-upon-spy internal control.
