‘Aware, all the time. Of all and everything around me. That was it, wasn’t it?’
Charlie nodded hopefully. ‘So! Do you think you are ready?’
‘I hope so.’
‘There’s no such thing as hope in an operational situation,’ lectured Charlie. ‘Or luck. It’s just down to you: how good you are.’
‘Yes,’ said the corrected Gower. ‘I’ve learned. I’m ready.’
‘You sure?’ Charlie feared he was going to be disappointed.
‘Our flat was entered four nights ago, while Marcia and I were at the theatre,’ said Gower, evenly. ‘The cupboard beneath the sink in the kitchen was open when we got back. It hadn’t been, when we left. My clothes drawers had been gone through, papers in the bureau put back in a different order. The night before last there was another entry: there were even slight score marks where the lock had been picked. We’ve got a rack, for unanswered mail: it’s dreadful but Marcia keeps it because it was a present from her mother. The letters were replaced in the wrong sequence.’
‘I was worried,’ admitted Charlie, finally relieved.
‘I was waiting, in case you’d tried something else. I couldn’t think of anything, apart from that.’
‘The people who went in weren’t told to be obvious. It was supposed to be completely professional.’
‘Will you file a critical report?’
‘Yes,’ said Charlie. ‘And you were quite right, after our first meeting, to put in a memorandum criticizing as bad security my advice about naming instructors and the deputy Director-General.’
Gower shook his head, in mock weariness. ‘So that was another test!’
‘You can never relax,’ insisted Charlie.
‘Your name isn’t James Harrison, is it?’ challenged Gower, enjoying the chance to prove himself.
‘No,’ said Charlie. ‘I didn’t see you check the register of the safe house in Berkshire: that was good.’
‘You knew I’d try to read it?’
‘I would have been unhappy if you hadn’t.’ Charlie spread his hands before him, satisfied. ‘I think we’ve finished.’
‘How did I do?’
‘Well enough.’
‘But not one hundred per cent?’ Gower sounded hopeful.
‘No one ever gets one hundred per cent,’ said Charlie. ‘Two final pieces of advice, as important as always securing an escape route. Never trust anybody. Not me, not this department, not even Marcia. Just trust yourself
‘That sounds bloody cynical! How can I not trust people I work for here? Marcia! We’ll probably get married, for Christ’s sake!’
‘You find your own definition,’ said Charlie. ‘The other rule is don’t ever follow rule or regulation. Not what you were told before we met, or what you’ll find in all the manuals, and not even what you think you’ve learned from me. And I’m not talking insubordination. It’s mixed up with not trusting. Adapt any instruction: go very slightly off course, so that you can’t be anticipated.’
The two men sat without speaking for several moments, neither sure how to end the encounter. Eventually Gower said: ‘I have learned.’ He hesitated, then blurted: ‘I’ve told Marcia about you. She wants you to come to dinner. I do, too. I reckon I owe you dinner, for these last few weeks.’
How pleasant that would be, thought Charlie: a civilized dinner with civilized people. ‘No,’ he said, bluntly.
‘Oh.’ Gower looked nonplussed.
‘And it is personal,’ said Charlie. ‘I have refused to let myself think of you in any terms of liking or disliking. Of forming any personal opinion, apart from a strictly professional one. I don’t want to become your friend. To meet and like Marcia …’
Gower’s face creased in confusion. ‘… What the hell …?’
‘… This way there will only ever be the minimal professional regret if I hear, later, that something’s gone wrong,’ finished Charlie, even more bluntly.
‘Jesus!’ protested Gower.
‘Didn’t I also tell you once this wasn’t a game?’
‘Not as clearly as you just have.’
‘So it’s a third thing always to remember.’
There was a further silence. Gower stood awkwardly, not appearing to know what to do. Then he thrust his hand forward. Charlie scuffed to his stockinged feet to respond.
‘I’m still nervous,’ said Gower.
‘Don’t ever be otherwise,’ advised Charlie.
‘We could have made it to fit in any time with his schedule,’ Marcia pointed out.
‘He said he was sorry,’ repeated Gower. ‘His diary was tight as hell, for weeks. And there was some course or other he was committed to attend.’
‘I wanted to compare,’ she disclosed.
‘Compare?’
‘How close you’d come to making yourself like him: all those outward changes.’
Gower moved to make the denial but didn’t. ‘I don’t think I’m even close,’ he admitted.
*
Liu Yin was acknowledged in the West to be one of the strongest critics of the Beijing government, one of the protesters in Tiananmen Square who survived the massacre and who ever since had lived underground, refusing to leave China. Her escape into Hong Kong therefore received widespread publicity. She had had to flee, she insisted, at an arrival press conference. The Public Security Bureau was moving throughout the country, making widespread but totally unpublicized arrests of people they regarded as dissidents. According to her understanding, at least fifty were already under detention. She believed there might even be show trials, sometime in the future.
Snow heard scraps of the conference on the BBC World Service, recognizing the name and the person. She had been a friend of Zhang Su Lin. It had never been admitted openly, but Snow had guessed the couple lived together during the time Zhang had been his student.
Fourteen
Natalia had never drawn Charlie Muffin’s complete target file from the KGB archives.
Immediately after her return from London, the Directorate had been undergoing external transfer changes because of the political upheaval. Internally it was in turmoil from what Alexei Berenkov had attempted for absurdly private reasons. At that time it seemed more likely that she would be purged, along with Berenkov, not promoted as she eventually was. So to have provably called for the records of the man who had been at the centre of the entire fiasco would have been personally and dangerously impolitic.
After her complete exoneration and quick all-powerful promotion she could, of course, have demanded the file whenever she’d wanted, without any question or challenge. But by then her feelings about Charlie had gone through several phases, becoming confused and intermingled. Natalia Nikandrova Fedova, someone always able without any prevarication instantly to make a professional decision, in this, the most private part of her private life, found herself helplessly lost, unable to decide how she felt.
In the initial weeks and months of her promotion Natalia had hated Charlie. Or believed she had. There had been times when she’d physically wept, with aching frustration, at what she’d lost forever by his not keeping the meeting at which she had finally been prepared to turn her back forever upon the Soviet Union and the KGB – and Eduard – just to be with him. Mentally she had raged against him, thinking of him as a coward, not allowing herself to find any excuse for him.
Realizing she was pregnant could have hardened the contempt, but ironically it lessened the feeling: not, in the beginning, into complete forgiveness but tempered at least with some understanding of why Charlie had held back – professional judgement always having to be more important than personal emotions – and certainly no longer thinking him a coward.
In a country where termination is quite casually used as a method of birth-control, it would have been extremely easy for Natalia to have had an abortion. She had scarcely considered it. It was just as easy, at the echelon she now occupied, to have and to keep a baby: not that there would have been any stigma attached –
and with so few friends, even acquaintances, that hardly mattered anyway – but she had still been officially a married woman within a satisfactory time-frame of the birth, with no cause to justify or explain.
It was during her confinement, with the opportunity to think of little else, that she confronted the impossibility of hating Charlie: of ever hating him. Alone in the privileged private ward of the privileged security agency hospital, the perfectly born, beautifully formed Alexandra beside her, Natalia finally tried to come to terms with how she truly felt. Huge sadness, the most obvious. Bitter disappointment that would always be there. But most of all, above all, the love: a love that overwhelmed everything, consumed everything.
Which gave her the strongest reason possible for not going to the archives. Having acknowledged her true feelings, Natalia equally recognized that she had to find some way of compartmenting the emotion, locking it securely inside her, like a miser hoarding the most precious treasure. Because unlike a gloating miser, she could never retrieve that lost treasure: never again know the pleasure or the beauty. It was difficult, but Natalia grew to think she could make the sadness and the disappointment bearable, as the weeks went into months and Alexandra became the focus of her entire existence: someone upon whom Natalia could lavish the love she could give to no one else, someone who would always be her unbreakable link to the man she would never see again.
In the final analysis there was no useful, sensible reason to recover Charlie’s private records, to disturb from the securely locked emotional compartments all the heartache Natalia hoped she now had under unshakeable control.
Or was there?
The reflective question – after the other reflective question when she’d failed to discover the whereabouts of Eduard – did not come simply or without contradiction, because nothing came simply or without contradiction when she thought about Charlie Muffin. But Natalia knew she did now have her feelings locked, bolted and barred forever.
It wouldn’t be trying to find him, wherever he was, whatever he was doing. That would have been preposterous. It would be finding out as much as she could about the father of her child. One day, inevitably, Alexandra would want to know. Natalia was not sure, at this stage, how or whether she would be able to tell their daughter the truth. Almost certainly not. But at least she owed it to the child to be able to answer the questions that might be asked.
The red-starred, Top Priority designation on the bulky, concertina-sectioned folder was overstamped with a discarding ‘Erase – Grade IV marking, indicating minimal remaining importance. Only important to me, thought Natalia. She realized, with surprise, that she was frightened, without knowing what to be apprehensive about.
The moment she opened the file Natalia was aware her emotions were not that tightly controlled and that the mere sight of him, even in snatched and grainily blurred photographs, was enough to jar her composure. It was the standard assembly, with photographs in the first section. There was a total of five, arranged in dated sequence, the final two far better quality than the others: she didn’t need the dates to know they had been taken when they had been reunited in London, when she had become unknowingly pregnant. In one of the other, earlier pictures Charlie was actually bending, soothing fingers inside the heel of a sagging left shoe. Natalia began to hurry the photographs back into their pocket, not needing any physical reminder of how he’d looked. But then stopped, expertise taking over from emotion. The pictures were unquestionably of Charlie Muffin, whom she believed she would have known and recognized anywhere. Unquestionably identified, in addition, by their being in an officially created file designated by the man’s name and description. Yet none, not even the later ones, were by themselves sufficient definitely to identify him: simply by the way he was standing or holding himself or half-concealing his face in a head-twisted posture, two could arguably and easily have been of quite a different man.
The first written material was almost twenty years old, paper already yellowed and brittle at the edges.
Charlie had told her of this first episode, but not in detail: the Cold War at its most frigid, Alexei Berenkov already suspected as the London-based Control for one of the most successful Soviet cells in Europe in the late 1960s. Now here, before her, were the details. All of them, chronologically set out, easy to comprehend. It had been a Berlin Wall crossing by Charlie and two other SIS officers, to collect the proof legally to bring Berenkov to trial: proof they’d got, because there was a full transcript of the interrogation of the later discovered East German double who’d passed it all over. The next documents in the bundle were the flimsy paper cables, setting out the time – even the vehicle – in which the then unknown Charlie would be making the return, a return that British intelligence and the American CIA had sacrificially leaked to distract from the coordinated crossing back of his two colleagues, with the evidential proof. But it hadn’t been the always cautious, always self-protective Charlie who’d driven the car: it had blown up in the Border Guard crossfire, destroying the identity of whoever the driver had been, providing the diversion for Charlie also safely to cross back to the West by U-Bahn. According to the archive, Charlie had been asked, subsequently, but always refused to supply the name of who he had duped to protect himself.
There was a gap here in the chronology: an actual notation, attested by a signature Natalia could not read, conceding that the interception had been a failure and that the London cell had been wrapped up, Alexei Berenkov with it. The sparse details of Berenkov’s in-camera trial was just a single page concluding with the forty-year sentence.
And then more cable flimsies, from the Soviet embassies in London and Vienna, at first highly suspect but anonymous approaches finally confirmed to be from a man called Charlie Muffin who wasn’t offering secrets or defection. Just a way to wreak retribution upon those prepared to let him be captured or killed, a scheme that eventually enabled Berenkov to be swapped in exchange for the SIS and CIA Directors held in humiliating Soviet detention.
It had meant personal contact, between Charlie and the then head of the First Chief Directorate, General Valery Kalenin, someone else whom she had known but who had long since disappeared into oblivion through KGB changes. Natalia was caught by the assessments that Kalenin had recorded about Charlie. Absolute professional was a frequent phrase. Twice the exchange scheme was qualified as being in no way a defection by the Englishman. Kalenin had written: This is a man believing himself betrayed and vindictively intent upon creating the maximum embarrassment for men who planned to abandon him. I consider it extremely unlikely this man could ever be turned: throughout our meetings he has – although illogically – consistently presented himself as a loyal British intelligence officer. It is a morality difficult to understand but obviously a situation of which we have to take the utmost advantage.
There was another gap in the timetable, but here again Natalia was able to fill it in for herself, from what Charlie had told her. Of months stretching into more than a year of endless running, dragging the hapless Edith from country to country while he was hunted by the British and American agencies: of his wife’s death, intentionally putting herself in the path of a bullet meant for him: an even greater retribution, against her murderer: of eventual capture, treason trial and British imprisonment with a believed KGB agent, and the phoney jailbreak and defection, to Moscow.
The moment of their meeting, reflected Natalia, enveloped now in smothering recollection. She hardly needed any reminders from the file but she read on, actually studying after the gap of almost six years her own reports of debriefing Charlie Muffin. He’d deceived her, Natalia conceded: just as he’d deceived the repatriated Berenkov and even Valery Kalenin, the man who had earlier decided Charlie would never become a traitor. At once Natalia found the personal contradiction. He’d deceived her professionally, convincing her his defection was genuine, so that she never once suspected the entire exercise to be a discrediting operation against Berenkov. But he’d never deceived her personally. Their
s had been a genuine love – still was on her part – and when, finally, he’d triggered the trap for Berenkov he’d done it in a way that kept her beyond any danger from their intimate relationship.
Now, before her on the desk in black and white, she finally had the confirmation of how successfully he had shielded her. General Kalenin had conducted the inquiry, extending to the absolute limit the friendship that existed between the two men to minimize the harm to Berenkov’s career. And exonerating her completely.
Comrade Colonel Natalia Nikandrova Fedova at all times conducted herself in an exemplary manner, the General had recorded. It was she who finally alerted senior officers that the Englishman’s defection was, after all, a false one. The failure to affect an arrest was that of counter-intelligence not reacting quickly enough upon information supplied by Comrade Fedova.
Natalia stretched up from the dossier, needing a moment’s break from the jumble of words, passingly amused now at being referred to as ‘Comrade’, which seemed so archaic after all the changes. She remained scarcely conscious of her official surroundings, still wrapped in long-ago memories. She’d believed she would never see Charlie again, after his escape back to England. But the hurt had not been so bad that time. She’d been more easily able to accept the division between their personal, impossible dilemma and what he had to do operationally.
Natalia hunched over the file again, reaching the second inquiry upon Alexei Berenkov, the one from which the man had not escaped. Nor deserved to escape. It was not difficult, even in the stilted official language of what virtually amounted to a trial without judge or jury, to gauge Berenkov’s megalomania: the man’s unshakeable belief, even under interrogation, that he was justified to carry on a personal vendetta operation to discredit Charlie Muffin as Charlie Muffin had -minimally because of Kalenin’s intervention – discredited him. It was, she supposed, the dread of every organization such as theirs: that someone with enormous power would become mentally unstable and start abusing it to satisfy private ambitions.
Charlie’s Apprentice Page 10