He’d won, Charlie decided. Apart from the tobacco and the wages, he wasn’t losing anything he hadn’t lost already. He was still in the library which was the important thing. Charlie knew they were trying to get him into one of the prison workshops, among too much noise and too many people. They’d try again.
‘Remember what I said,’ warned the governor.
‘Yes, sir.’
Charlie marched militarily between Hickley and Butterworth from the governor’s office, through the outer area and then back into the corridors leading into the jail. He didn’t think they’d attempt anything openly against him but he still walked tensed against the smallest movement from either side. No one spoke. He reached his cell without incident, thrusting suddenly into it before they could trap him in the doorway. Hickley smirked at the fear.
‘You should be frightened,’ said Hickley. ‘I’m going to get you. Really get you. Don’t like smart buggers on my landing. Don’t like them at all.’
Charlie knew he meant it.
The restrictions were supposed to be a penalty but Charlie actually found them a relief. He didn’t smoke, so the tobacco represented only a currency and the deprivation of that and of his official wages was bearable. He’d already abandoned the recreation period and his feet, which ached constantly within the incarceration of the prison-issue boots, had always made exercise more of an ordeal than a benefit to his health: he far preferred walking back and forth along the length of his cell in his stockinged feet. In his cell he was safe: protected. He recognised it as an institutionalised attitude; of fear, of Hickley and Butterworth and Prudell and God knows who else. So what? He was institutionalised. And he was scared. Shit scared. Worse than ever before. What made it worse was knowing he only had two weeks of safety.
The governor’s decision meant he was escorted every day from his cell to the library and back again and that the warder in charge had to have him constantly in sight; obediently Charlie obeyed every rule, so there was no opportunity for any conversation between him and Hargrave. Despite the difficulties, the old man thanked him on the first day for not grassing and identifying him as the purchaser of the booze. It was during shelf stocking, the best time.
‘You’re a good guy, Charlie.’
‘It’s a minority opinion.’
‘There’s a joke, going around.’
‘About what?’
‘The booze. Prudell diluted it, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘Do you want to know how?’
‘No,’ insisted Charlie, swallowing with difficulty.
‘He’s a bastard.’
‘Right bastard,’ agreed Charlie. He felt sick.
‘I wanted to be your friend, Charlie.’
‘I understand.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Charlie. ‘Stay safe.’
‘And you.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Try hard,’ murmured Hargrave. ‘I’ve seen this happen to people before in the nick. They end up mad.’
It was on the fifth day of restrictions when he heard them coming along the landing, an hour after he’d been confined to the cell: it wasn’t quite dark, the grey time of night. The cell light was on but it didn’t seem to help much. Charlie pulled away from the door, hunched on the bunk, knowing intuitively where the footsteps would stop. They did.
It was neither Hickley nor Butterworth: Charlie thought he recognised one of the screws from reception but he wasn’t sure. Between them was a comparatively young man, younger than Charlie anyway, still upright and looking about him demandingly. He had an outside haircut and the discomfited look of a new prison entrant, suddenly deprived of clothes that fitted him and put instead into the bluish grey uniform that came only in stock sizes.
His nose wrinkled at the very entrance to the cell. ‘Dear God!’ he said. ‘What on earth is this!’ It was an exaggerated voice, stretching vowels and consonants, a voice that had responded to tutors and prep school teachers and university dons and got respect from head waiters and hotel doormen.
‘Home,’ said Charlie. ‘There’s no place like it.’
The British embassy to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics borders the Moskva river, almost opposite the Kremlin: the view from one to the other is uninterrupted and the story is that during his manic, despotic reign Stalin used to become apoplectic looking from his window to see the Union Jack rippling so close and so defiantly in the wind.
The communications centre for the British embassy is a peculiar room, deep in the basement and far below ground level: before workmen were flown in from London to tank the chamber, dampness from the adjoining river seeped through the walls and stained them. Appropriately, the discoloration was an iron red, not the green of mould.
The brickwork they created remains. Within it has literally been built another room, suspended from the roof and from the base and the sides by single streel struts, so that it looks like a module created for physics instruction. There is a medieval-type drawbridge, linking this suspended chamber to the one outside. It is withdrawn – like the castle of the middle ages – from inside, so that the suspended structure is completely isolated apart from its support bars and those are swept weekly by electronics experts, to ensure no listening attachment has been installed upon the diplomatic and secret radio traffic that emanates from it.
Progress is usually synonymous with improvement. For signals transmissions – clandestine transmissions, that is – it isn’t so. Microwave relay is the easiest thing to eavesdrop on, particularly when an embassy is so close to a suspicious seat of a suspicious government.
By the sixth week of the coded messages being relayed to London, they were being intercepted with complete clarity if without any understanding at 2, Dzerzhinsky Square, Moscow.
That’s the headquarters of the KGB.
Chapter Three
The man shuddered as the cell door closed solidly behind him, turning to stare at it. Charlie remembered doing the same; everyone did, the first time. After several moments the man moved further into the cell, his belongings collected in a rolled up towel. In his swamping tunic, Charlie thought he looked like a shipwreck victim rescued on an island of big men. The newcomer seemed aware of it as the impression came to Charlie, looking down at himself as if for the first time, plucking disdainfully at the rough cloth with his fingers. He put the towel roll on the empty bunk and gazed around, at the table and the chair and the wall rack, briefly at Charlie and then, for the longest time, up at the narrow triangle of light from the only window. Charlie waited and saw the abrupt sag of his shoulders.
‘Christ,’ he said, hollow-voiced.
‘You get used to it.’
The man started, as if he’d forgotten Charlie’s presence. He turned to face Charlie and said ‘Sampson. Edwin Sampson.’
He offered his hand. The instinctive politeness of public school, thought Charlie. He allowed the briefest contact between them, not bothering to stand. Sampson frowned at the rudeness.
‘I know who you are,’ said Sampson. ‘They told me.’
‘I read about you,’ said Charlie. ‘The beginning of the trial, at least.’
‘Thirty years!’ said Sampson. ‘That’s what I got. Thirty years.’ He looked again towards the window.
‘You must have done a lot of damage.’
‘That sounded critical.’
‘It wasn’t meant to sound anything.’
‘You can hardly bloody talk: there isn’t a section in the department that doesn’t know what you did,’ said Sampson, viciously, if you hadn’t managed to run until the Treason Law limitation ran out, you’d be doing thirty years too: most probably.’
‘I wasn’t criticising,’ repeated Charlie, wearily.
‘Everyone said you were bloody rude: people who could remember you, that is.’
Sampson swore with a small-boy defiance, as if he were trying to shock. Charlie swung back on to his bunk, lying with his hands cup
ped behind his head. He had bigger problems than worrying about offending a snotty-voiced little bugger who’d sold his country down the river. Charlie hadn’t done that; no one but he could ever accept the qualification, not even the damned judge to whom it had been so patiently explained, but it was the truth. Charlie knew he wasn’t a traitor.
‘What am I supposed to do?’ asked Sampson. There was a plaintiveness about the question.
‘Why not make your bed?’ suggested Charlie, nodding towards the folded blankets. ‘This is recreation period but you don’t get it first night in.’
‘Recreation?’
‘There’s a television room, place to play chess and draughts and things like that.’
‘Why are you locked up then?’ demanded the younger man.
Clever, thought Charlie, ‘I’m on restrictions… punishment,’ said Charlie.
‘What for?’
Charlie sighed. ‘In prison you don’t ask anyone what they’re doing time for and you don’t ask about their punishments. You don’t ask about their background or their families. In fact you don’t ask about anything. This is the nick, son: not a public school.’
‘That was another thing they said about you: that you’re an inverted snob,’ said Sampson.
‘I don’t give a shit what they say about me,’ said Charlie. It was all past: too long past.
‘Is it bad? In here, I mean?’ The nervousness was obvious in Sampson’s question.
Charlie turned again to look at the man. ‘You’ll find it rough, at first,’ he said, ‘In fact, you’ll find it bloody awful. But you adjust, learn to behave prison fashion. Keep your head down, until you learn the rules,’ Charlie paused. ‘And I don’t mean the official ones, on the printed form.’ Pity he didn’t practise what he preached, thought Charlie.
Sampson had his back to Charlie, trying to arrange the blankets in some proper shape over the bed and failing. Charlie thought kids made their own beds at public school: or did they still have fags to do it for them? Sampson would get a bollocking at cell inspection. After several moments Sampson turned and sat down, squatting forward towards Charlie.
‘I want you to know,’ he announced.
‘Know what?’
‘What I did.’
‘I’m not interested.’
‘It’s important,’ insisted Sampson, ‘I’ve been operating for them for eight years: I was on station in Beirut, so I was able to monitor all the Middle East activities of the British. Then I was liaison in Washington. Made some good friends there, not just in the CIA but in the FBI as well. Managed to let Moscow have a hell of a lot of personnel and biographical stuff; you know how they like that, for the personality index they keep. For two years I was in European Planning, with access to the NATO desk. I suppose that was the most productive time…’
‘I said I didn’t want to know,’ said Charlie, not looking at the man. Sampson was a bastard, to have done all that. Even his arrest would have worked in Moscow’s favour: disclosure of what Sampson had leaked would make America as well as NATO suspicious about co-operating with British intelligence for a long time. Mean a lot of agent and schedule changes would be necessary, too.
‘I’ve got rank, in the Russian service,’ said Sampson, ‘I’m a major.’ He sounded proud, ‘I warned them they could face a disaster.’
‘Good for you,’ said Charlie, uninterested in what the man meant. Bastard, he thought again.
‘You don’t understand why that’s important, do you?’ said Sampson, impatiently.
‘Yes,’ said Charlie, with equal impatience. ‘For your sake I hope you’re not disappointed.’
‘I won’t be,’ said Sampson, with confidence. ‘The great difference between the Russian service and every other one is that they’ll never let their people rot in jail. They always arrange an exchange. They will, for me, certainly after all I’ve done.’ He started up, suddenly encouraged. ‘I won’t spend thirty years in here,’ he said. ‘Maybe a year: perhaps two. That’s all.’ The man had been moving jerkily between the bunks. Caught by the thought he stopped and said, ‘How long have you been in?’
Charlie hesitated. He wouldn’t let the other man know about the daily count. ‘Nearly a year and a half,’ he said.
‘Oh.’ Sampson’s confident excitement leaked away.
‘Don’t use that as any sort of criterion,’ said Charlie. ‘Moscow wouldn’t regard me as they do you. I’m not one of theirs.’ That was the biggest illogicality of all; the people for whom he was supposed to have been an operative knew he wasn’t a traitor and couldn’t give a sod about him.
‘That’s not true,’ said Sampson, more to reassure himself than Charlie.
‘Yes it is,’ said Charlie. ‘Don’t get any half-assed idea that you and I are the same.’
‘Why are you so fucking belligerent?’ demanded Sampson, in sudden, surprising anger.
Fuck: the ultimate defiance, thought Charlie. ‘Can’t seem to help it,’ he said.
‘We’re stuck together,’ said Sampson, the anger growing. ‘Whether you like it or not, that’s a fact. From what I’ve seen thus far, I don’t like you. I think you’re scruffy and you smell and I think you go out of your way to be unpleasant. And all the stories I ever heard, about your stupid social attitudes, they seem to be true, as well. If I had a choice, I wouldn’t touch you with a long, disinfected pole. But I haven’t. I’ve got to live just five feet away from you: I hope to Christ for the shortest amount of time possible. But still live with you. I know all about this crap that you did what you did because the Director set you up to be sacrificed: that you’re still loyal. It’s all bullshit, something you cling to like a child clings to a comfort blanket. You know the Russian way is best, just like I do. I know what’s going to happen to me. I’ve just got to tolerate you, until my release is arranged. So what do you say? Are we going to be friends? Or fools?’
‘Go fuck yourself,’ said Charlie, turning determinedly against the wall, with his back to the man.
Behind he heard Sampson laugh at him. It was a fitting reaction, decided Charlie. He was being a prick.
‘Chekhov,’ identified Wilson.
‘Yes,’ agreed Harkness. ‘It’s from Three Sisters. ’
The British Director looked down at the chosen identification message. ‘If I lived in Moscow,’ he quoted. ‘I don’t think I’d care what the weather was like.’
‘The preceding lines provide the response,’ said Harkness. ‘“People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.”’
‘Good,’ judged Wilson. ‘Innocent enough.’
‘Do you know the other play of Chekhov’s, The Seagull?’ asked Harkness.
Wilson shook his head.
‘There are two characters in it, Medvedenko and Masha,’ reminded the deputy. ‘There’s a scene in which Medvedenko asks Masha “Why do you wear black all the time?” And Masha replies “I’m in mourning for my life. I’m unhappy.”’
‘Maybe that’ll be appropriate,’ agreed Wilson.
Chapter Four
It was a tenet of his early training always to remain objective, irrespective of whatever stress or pressure, because the ability to consider everything objectively was essential for that absolute necessity, survival.
Within a month of Sampson’s arrival Charlie decided, with that long practised objectivity, that the man was bloody good at making the world rotate in exactly the direction in which he decreed it should turn. Better than bloody good: practically a fucking genius.
It shouldn’t have been that way, of course. Not according to the unofficial prison lore. Prison rule dictated that the lowest common denominator was the governing factor, everything and everybody dragged down to the bottom. Anything contrary – like Charlie was contrary – was a worrying challenge to the system, something that had to be attacked and defeated.
Except in the case of Sampson.
Charlie watched Sampson swan around with the languid public school demeanour of inhere
nt superiority with every bugger – the very same buggers giving him a hard time for being different – appearing happy, eager even, to accord the man the rank.
Hickley, who thought spies should be shot, behaved towards Sampson with an attitude that Charlie considered practically respect and Butterworth, as dutiful as ever, did the same. While Charlie had to have his boots laced and be ready and waiting at the cell door for the push-and-shove slop out, Sampson was allowed to take his time, a place always available for him in the unhurried, ready-when-you-are procession.
With the boarding school and university expertise of recognising the dormitory leader, Sampson marked Prudell as the landing boss. Sampson wasn’t gay and Prudell knew it but they established a relationship nevertheless, a compact of understanding that in no way impinged upon Sampson’s inherent superiority or Prudell’s unquestioned rule, the sort of reliance that exists between the owner of the manor and his trusted butler.
There was always a good piece of meat for Sampson in the canteen – not the shitty sort of gristle that always got dumped on Charlie’s plate – and the vegetables were always hot and there was a seat readily available, wherever he wanted to sit. Just as there was, always, in the recreation room, right in front of the television set, where Prudell and his boyfriend of the moment and the other landing chiefs had their reserved places, not where Charlie was always heaved and shunted, if he bothered to go at all, at the back, usually against the wall. If he hadn’t wanted it that way – for the protection – there wouldn’t have been a bloody seat anyway.
Sampson’s uniform jacket was altered, to fit, in the prison tailoring shop and in the second month he got one of the better jobs, in the prison hospital, not as cushy as the library but a damned sight better than the workrooms where they made the mail sacks and the street name signs and car registration plates.
Between them, in the cell, the first day hostility worsened, the attitude so obvious that Hickley and Butterworth were aware of it and spread the story along the landing, which enhanced Sampson further because it meant further harassment of Charlie.
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