Charlie M
Page 18
‘I never thought it would work, Charlie, when you told me why we were going on holiday after East Berlin and the Berenkov trial. I really didn’t,’ she said.
‘No,’ agreed Charlie, gazing through the window and watching the incoming tide throw pebbles up on to the beach. ‘There were times when I was doubtful.’
‘I’m amazed you and Kalenin were able to cover every eventuality from that one set of meetings in Austria.’
‘Kalenin is brilliant,’ praised Charlie. ‘It was his idea to bring in the Americans, knowing that Washington’s presence would occupy Cuthbertson so much initially that any flaws we hadn’t covered would have more chance of going unnoticed. Kalenin had a personality file on Ruttgers and guessed exactly how the American would behave. He and Cuthbertson were too worried thinking about each other to properly consider what I was doing …’
‘Didn’t you ever make a mistake?’ asked his wife, admiringly.
‘Not really a mistake,’ conceded Charlie. ‘Kalenin was anxious Berenkov should know he’d not been forgotten and that efforts were being made to get him out. So during a meeting with Berenkov in Wormwood Scrubs, months ago, I had to mention Kalenin’s name before I was supposed to have known about it. I sweated for days that it would be spotted on analysis, but it wasn’t.’
He stopped, reflecting Edith’s question.
‘And then,’ he continued, ‘during the first meeting with Cuthbertson, I got worried at one stage that I was being too convincing with the doubts about Kalenin’s defection. I got away with it, though. They might have doubted my courage, but never my loyalty.’
‘Don’t you feel guilty?’ seized the woman.
‘No,’ he insisted, positively. ‘There was hardly a meeting when I didn’t warn them there was something wrong. I repeated it until they were tired of hearing it …’
‘… which was the entire psychology of doing it,’ rejected Edith,’ … and to salve your own conscience …’
‘Perhaps,’ said Charlie. ‘But I’m not sorry to have disgraced Cuthbertson. He’ll have to retire, which means another Director. And that can only result in good for the service. Wilberforce will still be there to ensure continuity. I don’t like him, but at least he understands the system!’
‘I can’t believe you don’t feel any guilt,’ persisted Edith. ‘You betrayed your country.’
‘I rid the service of a man who was bound to lead it to disaster.’
‘That’s a personal justification.’
‘And exposed to every Western intelligence system the identity of Kalenin, who had been a mystery for thirty years.’
‘And got a fortune in return,’ she said.
‘The service had abandoned me,’ insisted Charlie. ‘It’s better than growing roses on a Grade IV pension and being pissed by three o’clock every afternoon.’
Edith shook her head. He would feel ashamed, in the future, she knew. Would it create another barrier? she thought, worriedly. They only had each other, now.
‘I’m going to enjoy being able to afford good clothes,’ reflected Charlie. ‘And keeping a decent wine bin.’
He looked down at his scuffed Hush Puppies. He’d keep them as a souvenir, he decided.
‘You always were a snob, Charlie,’ protested his wife, laughing at him.
‘But honest about it,’ he defended. ‘Always honest.’
‘Why did you have to be so scruffy?’
‘Psychology,’ avoided Charlie. ‘It made them contemptuous of me. People never suspect a person of whom they’re contemptuous.’
And it would have meant using even more of your money, he added, mentally.
‘Don’t you feel sorry about Harrison and Snare?’
He frowned. Why was Edith so determined there should be some contrition? he wondered.
‘Those two bastards stood on a viewing platform in Berlin, watching for me either to get captured or shot. When I got to the Kempinski, they were celebrating my death. Why should I feel sorry for them?’
Edith shuddered, very slightly.
‘You don’t forget, do you, Charlie? Ever?’
‘No,’ he accepted. ‘Never.’
His wife stared at him for several minutes, uncertain whether to raise the question. Then she said, hurriedly: ‘Was it really necessary to have an affair with that secretary?’
‘Essential,’ said Charlie. ‘It deflected their interest away from you completely … made it possible for you finally to draw all the money out without their thinking of checking your account. When they bugged her apartment, which I didn’t expect, it gave me a channel to feed Cuthbertson any attitude I wished. And from Janet I got everything I wanted to know about their thinking.’
She sat, unconvinced.
‘With Janet,’ persisted Charlie, ‘they thought they had a tap on every unguarded moment. Through her and the recorders, I was able to prove myself and allay any suspicion before it had time to arise.’
‘Poor Janet,’ said Edith, sadly.
‘Forget it,’ advised Charlie. There was no feeling. It was a game for her, like backgammon or Scrabble. And I bet she made some money, as well.’
‘It seems a daft thing to say in the circumstances, Charlie, but I hope you’re right. I don’t like to think of you being cruel.’
‘It was a necessary part of survival,’ said Charlie.
‘Promise me you never loved her?’
‘I promise,’ said Charlie, looking up and smiling directly at his wife.
‘Will they be searching for us now, Charlie?’
The man nodded.
‘Bound to be,’ he said. ‘But knowing their minds they will think of the Mediterranean. Or perhaps the Far East. Certainly not here, in Brighton.’
‘I do hope it’s a nice summer,’ said Edith, going to the window. ‘I did so much like to travel.’
‘I gave you a holiday of a lifetime before contacting Kalenin,’ reminded Charlie. ‘And we’ll do it again, in a few years’ time.’
‘Kiss me, Charlie,’ said Edith, urgently. ‘Kiss me and say you love me.’
He crawled across the floor, dislodging the money from the orderly piles, and embraced his wife.
‘I do love you, Edith,’ he said.
‘And I love you, Charlie. I was very worried, you know.’
‘Worried?’
‘That you’d leave me for her.’
Charlie frowned, his face inches from hers.
‘But why should I have done that?’
‘It’s just that sometimes you frighten me, Charlie … we’ve been married fifteen years and there are times when I think of you as a stranger.’
‘That’s a point,’ he said, pulling away and wanting to lighten the mood. ‘I’ll have to get another name.’
‘But Charlie is so … I don’t know. It just seems to fit,’ she protested.
‘Not any more,’ insisted the man. He squatted, reflectively. He would take the Christian name of the old Director, he decided.
‘It will be Archibald,’ he announced, grandly. ‘I’ll keep the first name, but from now on it will be Charles.’
What a pity that Cuthbertson would never know, he thought. He rolled the words uncomfortably in his mouth.
‘Charles Archibald,’ he declared. ‘With a very definite accent on the “Charles”. Charlie Muffin is dead.’
The Home Office car drove directly on to the airstrip, ten minutes after the rest of the passengers had boarded BE 602 to Moscow.
Berenkov got unsteadily from the vehicle and stood for several minutes, supported by one of the officials, gazing for the last time at the Heathrow complex. Finally he turned and shuffled with difficulty up the steps and into the specially curtained first class section.
The steward approached him after they had cleared the airport and the seat-belt sign had been turned off.
‘A drink, sir?’ he suggested.
Berenkov looked up, whey-faced, considering the invitation.
‘It’s been so long,’ he
said, quietly. ‘So very long.’
The steward waited.
‘You’d only have claret in those little bottles, of course,’ said the Russian, professionally. ‘And that wouldn’t be what I’d enjoy. I’ll have a miniature champagne.’
He watched apprehensively as the drink foamed in the glass, then waited for the bubbles to settle.
Finally he lifted it, then paused, glass almost to his lips.
‘Your health, Charlie Muffin,’ he said.
‘Sir?’ enquired the steward, half turning.
‘Nothing,’ said Berenkov. ‘Nothing at all.’
A Biography of Brian Freemantle
Brian Freemantle (b. 1936) is one of Britain’s most prolific and accomplished authors of spy fiction. His novels have sold more than ten million copies worldwide, and have been optioned for numerous film and television adaptations.
Born in Southampton, on the southern coast of England, Freemantle began his career as a journalist. In 1975, as the foreign editor at the Daily Mail, he made headlines during the American evacuation of Saigon: As the North Vietnamese closed in on the city, Freemantle became worried about the future of the city’s orphans. He lobbied his superiors at the paper to take action, and they agreed to fund an evacuation for the children. In three days, Freemantle organized a thirty-six-hour helicopter airlift for ninety-nine children, who were transported to Britain. In a flash of dramatic inspiration, he changed nearly one hundred lives—and sold a bundle of newspapers.
Although he began writing espionage fiction in the late 1960s, he first won fame in 1977, with Charlie M. That book introduced the world to Charlie Muffin—a disheveled spy with a skill set more bureaucratic than Bond-like. The novel, which drew favorable comparisons to the work of John Le Carré, was a hit, and Freemantle began writing sequels. The sixth in the series, The Blind Run, was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel. To date, Freemantle has penned fourteen titles in the Charlie Muffin series, the most recent of which is Red Star Rising (2010), which brought back the popular spy after a nine-year absence.
In addition to the stories of Charlie Muffin, Freemantle has written more than two dozen standalone novels, many of them under pseudonyms including Jonathan Evans and Andrea Hart. Freemantle’s other series include two books about Sebastian Holmes, an illegitimate son of Sherlock Holmes, and the four Cowley and Danilov books, which were written in the years after the end of the Cold War and follow an odd pair of detectives—an FBI operative and the head of Russia’s organized crime bureau.
Freemantle lives and works in London, England.
A school photograph of Brian Freemantle at age twelve.
Brian Freemantle, at age fourteen, with his mother, Violet, at the country estate of a family acquaintance, Major Mears.
Freemantle’s parents, Harold and Violet Freemantle, at the country estate of Major Mears.
Brian Freemantle and his wife, Maureen, on their wedding day. They were married on December 8, 1956, in Southampton, where both were born and spent their childhoods. Although they attended the same schools, they did not meet until after they had both left Southampton.
Brian Freemantle (right) with photographer Bob Lowry in 1959. Freemantle and Lowry opened a branch office of the Bristol Evening World together in Trowbridge, in Wiltshire, England.
A bearded Freemantle with his wife, Maureen, circa 1971. He grew the beard for an undercover newspaper assignment in what was then known as Czechoslovakia.
Freemantle (left) with Lady and Sir David English, the editors of the Daily Mail, on Freemantle’s fiftieth birthday. Freemantle was foreign editor of the Daily Mail, and with the backing of Sir David and the newspaper, he organized the airlift rescue of nearly one hundred Vietnamese orphans from Saigon in 1975.
Freemantle working on a novel before beginning his daily newspaper assignments. His wife, Maureen, looks over his shoulder.
Brian Freemantle says good-bye to Fleet Street and the Daily Mail to take up a fulltime career as a writer in 1975. The editor’s office was turned into a replica of a railway carriage to represent the fact that Freemantle had written eight books while commuting—when he wasn’t abroad as a foreign correspondent.
Many of the staff secretaries are dressed as Vietnamese hostesses to commemorate the many tours Freemantle carried out in Vietnam.
The Freemantle family on the grounds of the Winchester Cathedral in 1988. Back row: wife Maureen; eldest daughter, Victoria; and mother-in-law, Alice Tipney, a widow who lived with the Freemantle family for a total of forty-eight years until her death. Second row: middle daughter, Emma; granddaughter, Harriet; Freemantle; and third daughter, Charlotte.
Freemantle in 1999, in the Outer Close outside Winchester Cathedral. For thirty years, he lived with his family in the basement library of a fourteenth-century house with a tunnel connecting it to the cathedral. Priests used this tunnel to escape persecution during the English Reformation.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1979 by Innslodge Publications Ltd
cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Charlie M
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
A Biography of Brian Freemantle
Copyright Page