Charlie’s Apprentice

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How many times have you been here, to Westminster Bridge Road?’

  Gower paused. ‘Four times.’

  ‘You know it’s the headquarters building?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You wouldn’t disclose it, under duress?’

  ‘Am I under interrogation now?’ demanded Gower, trying to get some sense into the bizarre encounter.

  ‘Would you?’ persisted Charlie.

  ‘I think you know the answer to that, without my telling you. But if this is something for the record, no I wouldn’t disclose it. That would be unthinkable.’

  Charlie made a grunting, reflective sound. ‘There isn’t any record being made. Perhaps there should be.’ There was certainly a memorandum he had to send. They’d probably disregard it, as they’d disregarded everything else he’d sent upstairs to the rearranged Executive echelon on the ninth floor, but that didn’t matter. There were lapses that had to be corrected.

  ‘I think I’m entitled to know what’s happening here!’ said Gower, finally giving way to the annoyance. ‘I haven’t understood a moment of it: it’s been ridiculous!’

  Charlie gave another reflective grunt. ‘And you achieved the maximum in interrogation techniques?’

  ‘Yes!’ said Gower, his voice too loud in his anger.

  Charlie sat intently regarding the other man for several moments. ‘You’re entering the external intelligence service. And you’ve been through all the training? You know all that’s involved?’

  His uncertainty in the car, remembered Gower: the uncertainty a previous instructor hadn’t helped him resolve. ‘No,’ he said, honestly. ‘I don’t think I do know what’s involved: not really involved. I was told there’s no apprenticeship I could properly go through. Just training.’

  Unexpectedly Charlie smiled. ‘There’s some,’ he disagreed. ‘That’s what this is about, to answer your question a while back … the first lesson.’

  ‘I don’t …’ started Gower and then stopped.

  ‘… Know what you’ve learned?’ anticipated Charlie. ‘Nothing yet. Let’s hope you will, when I explain.’

  ‘I wish you would.’

  ‘You’ve just had a very small indication of what is necessary to be a professional intelligence officer. Very small. Childlike, compared to the level you’ve got to achieve. Will achieve, before we’re through.’

  ‘I’m still not properly following you.’

  ‘What was the first thing I said to you, when you came into this room?’

  ‘Ah …’ Gower hesitated, unsure. ‘Something about a mistake.’ He smiled, hopefully.

  ‘What, exactly?’

  There was another hesitation. ‘ “You’ve made a mistake.” ’

  ‘My exact words were “your first mistake”,’ corrected Charlie. ‘You were entering a completely unknown situation, with no idea what you were here for. You admitted that very shortly afterwards, which was another mistake because you never admit anything you don’t have to in an unknown situation. And in an unknown situation you remember every word that’s said: not something like what’s said. Everything.’

  ‘I see,’ said Gower. He thought this was childlike: stupid and unnecessary. He didn’t think he liked this man who would not even introduce himself.

  ‘As someone who achieved his maximum in interrogation technique, tell me what your first mistake was.’

  There was a silence. Then Gower admitted: ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You offered your name,’ said Charlie, simply.

  ‘This is an officially arranged meeting, for God’s sake! We had an appointment! I assumed you’d know my name.’

  ‘All the more reason for not offering it. In an unknown situation, you take, never give.’

  ‘I was personally told to come here by the deputy Director!’ Gower fought back. ‘And this is the headquarters building! Surely it’s safe to think …’

  ‘… Nothing’s ever safe,’ interrupted Charlie, urgently. ‘You’ve got to behave instinctively: in a real life situation there isn’t time to work everything out Immediately putting advice into practice, he demanded: ‘Why do you imagine it was important for me to find out you were right-handed?’

  Gower hunched his shoulders, head bowed to avoid the older man detecting from any facial reaction the continuing annoyance. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How did I find out?’

  ‘I don’t know that, either.’ Pompous bastard, Gower thought.

  ‘I put the chair so you’d have to move it. You did it with your right hand, the same hand with which you offered the appointment docket. Then I told you to look at a poster behind you: you turned over your right shoulder …’ Charlie hesitated. ‘Mean anything?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing.’

  ‘Then either you were badly taught, or you’ve forgotten evasion techniques, if you suspect yourself to be under surveillance that you have to lose. It’s automatic if you are a right-handed person to move to the right: take right turnings, check to your right more than to your left. Learn to check both ways. Never stick to any pattern.’

  ‘I was told about avoiding patterns.’

  ‘But not about right or left?’

  Gower wanted very much to say he considered it a meaningless trick. He didn’t. ‘I’ll remember,’ he promised, emptily.

  ‘If I had you under surveillance out there somewhere on the streets, without any idea where you lived or what your name was, how long do you think it would take me to discover both? Just from how you appear today?’

  Another trick, anticipated Gower. ‘I don’t know.’ He wished he didn’t have to keep admitting that.

  ‘Less than a day,’ insisted Charlie. ‘I knew you’d come up by car, remember? That was obvious from your suit jacket not being creased: even if you’d taken it off on a train, you would have kept it on in a taxi or a bus, showing some signs of recent wear. So you took it off for the drive back from the country. With your own car, there’s a more than fifty per cent chance you would have parked it on a two-hour meter to which you would have to return. When you did, I could have got the vehicle registration number. Your name and address is recorded by the registration authorities: they respond to apparent official enquiries about vehicles possibly involved in unreported accidents. Remember if you’re under official surveillance – anywhere – there are official facilities that can be utilized. The initials on the left cuff of your shirt would be an immediate confirmation, of course. Your ring has a halved shield, the left half blank, the opposing half crossed with swords or possibly lances. I could locate that crest at the Office of Heraldry. Having identified the family name, I could get your full family history from Who’s Who, Debrett and Burke’s. I would expect to find that your father is dead or that your parents are divorced: you qualified spending the weekend with your “mother”. And you weren’t alone. You said “we”. So it was either a girlfriend or wife. If it was a wife, there’d probably be an indication in the listing in the reference books I’ve mentioned. Then there’s the Eton tie. From Eton records I could trace the university you went to: Oxford or Cambridge would be the obvious first choices. The Old Boys’ clubs and societies of either would be another check, whether you were married or not.’

  Gower still regarded it as a trick, but at the same time it was unsettling, like having someone spying on him through a hole in a lavatory wall. ‘What, exactly, am I supposed to be understanding from all this?’

  Charlie paused, isolating a continuing fault that he wasn’t yet prepared to discuss. ‘The value of proper observation. And the disadvantage of being so noticeable. Your suit is too good: and therefore too distinctive. Your shoes, too. The shirt’s too obvious and shouldn’t be monogrammed. You shouldn’t wear your ring: you’d probably get away with it in France and in a few rarefied surroundings in Spain and Germany but there’s no guarantee you’ll ever work in rarefied surroundings and even less that you’d be doing so in France or Spain or Germany. So the ring would p
ick you out – to a properly trained observer – as a foreigner in a country in which you were trying to assimilate, particularly if that country was in any part of Eastern Europe or Asia. The tie is identifiable and wrong, as well, for the reasons I’ve already spelled out.’

  Gower was hot with annoyance. ‘What the hell are you saying, then?’

  ‘I’ve given you the best piece of instruction you’ve had since you got accepted into the service,’ said Charlie, evenly.

  Gower studied the other man from the chair that really did seem about to collapse, wishing he’d concentrated more – instead of making angry judgements – to have avoided the need for yet another question. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, with no alternative.

  ‘The definition of a perfect intelligence officer,’ said Charlie. ‘The perfect intelligence officer is the sort of man that crowds are made of. Which is what I want you to become.’

  Gower wished he didn’t feel so inadequate in front of a man he wouldn’t have even noticed in the street: and then the full import of the thought, against the immediately preceding definition of the perfect intelligence officer, came to him. He only just avoided smiling, not so much in amusement as in acceptance of the lesson. ‘I haven’t done very well, have I?’

  ‘I didn’t set out for you to do well. Or badly. Just for you to realize, from the absolute basics, what your job involves.’ Was this how schoolmasters conducted lessons?

  Which was what he’d wanted so much to discover, conceded Gower: he’d been stupid, allowing the resentment. ‘Anything else I did wrong?’

  ‘Your other instructors didn’t mind you knowing their names?’

  ‘They didn’t seem to.’

  ‘Then why should you bother to conceal their identities, in a hostile interrogation? Cause yourself unnecessary pressure?’

  ‘You mean name them!’ Gower was astonished.

  ‘Why not? They let their names be known: why should you try to hide them?’

  ‘But that’s …’

  ‘… treasonable? It would be an arguable point. But in the circumstances we’re discussing, you’d have to reduce as much as possible what was being done to you. Use the names, if it’s necessary.’

  Gower was concentrating now, not absolutely convinced – but growing increasingly so – of what he had to do. ‘What about the identity of the deputy Director-General, in such circumstances?’

  ‘The same, once your interrogators prove they’ve definitely identified you,’ insisted Charlie. It was looking hopeful.

  ‘And the location of Westminster Bridge Road as the headquarters of our service?’

  ‘Do you really think there’s an intelligence organization anywhere in the world that doesn’t know where every other organization lives, in its own country? Paperback spy writers identify this place!’

  There was silence between them for several moments. Gower said finally: ‘I think I’ve learned a lot.’

  ‘You haven’t,’ Charlie contradicted. ‘You’ve gone through a good three-quarters of this meeting at varying stages of anger. Which I set out to achieve. So that’s something else you either didn’t learn or don’t remember, from your interrogation resistance lectures. You’ve lost the moment you let your temper go. Dead: maybe even literally. Don’t you ever forget that. Don’t you ever forget anything I try to teach you, but don’t forget that most of all.’

  ‘Every other training session had a title,’ said Gower.

  ‘This has, too,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s called survival.’

  Charlie wrote three memoranda.

  The first pointed out the obvious dangers of instructional staff allowing their names to be easily known to trainee officers and the even greater danger of the identity of the deputy Director-General being disclosed by the Personnel department, in inter-office correspondence.

  The second was a detailed account of his initial meeting with John Gower.

  The third official letter to Patricia Elder asked to be informed of any communication John Gower sent to her. It was, Charlie insisted, a particularly important request.

  The official communication completed, Charlie tilted himself back in his chair, reviewing the first day in a new job he disliked intensely. He’d shown off like a bastard, he decided. But then, legally he was a bastard. It reminded him he had to visit his mother very shortly.

  Seven

  Natalia Fedova lived in confused guilt about Eduard. Her son had grown up – until the age of nineteen at least, the last time she had endured his being with her – to be a replica of the father who had abandoned them both when Eduard was barely three years old.

  All the bad memories – memories she’d erased from her mind – had been brought back by the official notification of her husband’s death, just over a year earlier. Memories of the drunkenness and the beatings and the whoring – he’d been in bed with a prostitute the night she’d actually given birth to Eduard, prematurely – had all flooded back.

  But at least, in the first year, he had carried himself with some danger-hinting charm, helped by the dash of a naval officer’s uniform. Initial charm was the saving trait that Eduard had failed to inherit. It hadn’t been so obvious when he had been at university: none of it had been obvious then. It had all emerged, once he’d joined the officer cadet school: considered himself a man, able to do anything a real man could do. A large-for-his-size, perhaps overly confident teenager had left her. The person who returned from the academy had been an army-coarsened, foul-behaved, even fouler-smelling stranger interested only in the material benefits she could provide. Like the car and the apartment at Mytninskaya which he’d literally invaded with other army cadets as ugly and as frightening as himself and who he said were his friends she had to like. Later they had invaded with their whores when she was away, doing to her carefully maintained home whatever they liked, breaking and smashing and soiling. She shuddered at the last word, insufficient to describe the blood and stains and filth she’d found in her own bed, when she’d returned.

  Despite which, despite everything, he was still her son, a son she felt – and could never stop feeling – she had abandoned.

  She had tried so very hard over the months that now stretched into more than a year, to rationalize how she felt. But never fully succeeded. It was, maybe ridiculously, not enough for her to convince herself of the true situation. That it was Eduard who’d abandoned her: never ever making contact – never a letter, never a telephone call – until he was about to arrive in Moscow. When he needed the things – showing them off to the coterie of grabbing, snickering hangers-on – that her official position could provide. Even those sickening, impossible-to-avoid visits had ceased during her last year at Mytninskaya.

  And now she was no longer at Mytninskaya. One of the benefits that went with her promotion – in a country and a city where there were no longer supposed to be elitist benefits but where there always would be – was a much more opulent, better-equipped and more comfortable apartment originally designated for members of the now discredited Communist Party, on Leninskaya Prospekt.

  Without needing a reminder of the time, Natalia went to the chrome-glittered kitchen to begin preparing the baby’s bottle: from the window over the disposal-equipped sink she could see the monument to Russia’s first astronaut, seemingly so long ago, in terms of history little more than yesterday.

  So much of her personal history seemed just like yesterday. And not just the Mytninskaya apartment, with its kitchen fittings so very inferior to this. An apartment she no longer occupied, she remembered, forcing herself to concentrate to get some cohesion into her mind. But the only address Eduard had: the only place he knew where to reach her. Yet it was still controlled by the Russian intelligence service. So this new address would not be divulged if Eduard tried to find her from the old apartment. Would he have tried since she’d left? Inevitably if he’d wanted something. Should she order that he was to be told where she was, if he enquired? Or try to locate him herself? With the power she now had �
�� a degree of power which, after more than a year, she was still sometimes bemused to discover – she should be very quickly able to locate him and his unit or group or whatever it was called.

  If he had a unit or a group. All the military had been withdrawn from the satellites and the no longer linked republics: the army was being decimated, destroyed more quickly and effectively than if there had ever been a war. Would Eduard still be in the army? He’d enlisted on a commission – not been a conscript – so there would have been some protection, but if the military reductions were anything like those already announced the cutbacks would have gone far beyond, biting deep into the structure of the regular army. Eduard would still be the most junior of officers, even if he had passed the promotion examinations. The most junior of officers would be the first to be dismissed under such reorganization.

  Natalia completed the bottle preparation, leaving it to cool until Alexandra awoke. To what would Eduard be dismissed, she asked herself, brutally. Nothing, she knew. No home, no job, no monetary support. Nothing. So he could be one of the destitutes on the streets of Moscow, one of those shuffling, head-bent, sunken-cheeked men whom she drove by each day but never properly saw, or bothered to see, not thinking of them as individual people at all.

  Should she agonize about someone who had treated her as badly as Eduard had done: and who would doubtless treat her as badly in the future if they restored contact? It was difficult for her not to. But she didn’t want Eduard intruding into her life any more. Biologically he was her son, maybe. But nothing more. Therefore hardly enough. She had her own territory: her own peace. She was finally settled. She was in charge of an entire Directorate – perhaps the most important Directorate – of the reformed Russian security agency. Untouchable. Secure. There was a quick qualification: untouchable and secure providing she did not give Fyodor Tudin any opportunities. Which she had no intention of doing. And most of all she had Alexandra – always shortened, of course, to Sasha.

  A peaceful, settled existence, she determined, letting the reflection run on in a familiar direction. What she didn’t have, she couldn’t have: absolutely impossible. And because it was impossible it was easier to live with than her dilemma over Eduard. Not true, she denied herself once more. Not easier to live with: easier to confront because there was no possibility of her ever seeing Charlie again. The baby murmured and Natalia got the cooled bottle before picking her from the cot to feed.