Charlie’s Apprentice

by Brian Freemantle

  Then she told herself that he deserved to know: had the right. What might – or might not – have existed between her and Charlie shouldn’t come into her thinking. The only consideration was Sasha. So Sasha’s father had to know.

  Know more, in fact. Not just that she herself had survived the London episode but that she had maintained a position – risen in rank, even – and that therefore Sasha would always be cared for and protected.

  She didn’t want to write. Not more than she had already decided to do. Apart from the obvious danger, minimal though it might be after the destruction of Fyodor Tudin, for her to write might make it seem that she was asking for something, and she wasn’t. All she was doing was telling Charlie what he should know. Nothing else.

  Gazing down at the London file she had ordered assembled, Natalia suddenly smiled when the way occurred to her, carefully extracting one photograph. She took another, from her handbag this time. It was on this one that she wrote, very briefly.

  That night, packing in the bedroom of the Leninskaya apartment, the baby awake in the cot beside her, Natalia said: ‘We’re going on holiday, darling. Germany is a beautiful country.’

  It was a further and obvious precaution for Natalia to go outside of Russia, which it was now very easy to do under the new freedoms. She supposed she could have even gone to England. She wouldn’t, though: determined as she was – having tried as hard as she had – she could only go so far. But no further. Not to England.

  Forty-eight

  Julia Robb pointed with an outstretched finger to the open intercom, shaking her head but mouthing the word ‘later’, and Charlie nodded his agreement. He started to move towards Patricia Elder’s room but Julia stopped him, gesturing towards the Director-General’s suite as she announced his arrival. Charlie winked at her as he changed direction. He thought she looked very pretty.

  Peter Miller was rigidly upright at his desk. The woman was seated alongside it but with her chair turned outwards, also to confront him. There was no chair for Charlie. Bloody fools, he thought. The stupidity of having him before them like an errant schoolboy didn’t upset him. Schoolboy, schoolmaster, it was all the same. Bloody daft. Standing upset him, though. His feet were playing up: he guessed he must have travelled about fifteen thousand miles and at the moment it felt as if he’d walked every one of them.

  ‘I want an explanation! A proper one. And it had better be good,’ declared Miller. His usually bland voice was tight with anger.

  It was unfortunate he couldn’t give it to them outright, reflected Charlie. ‘It all seems to have worked out pretty straightforwardly,’ he suggested. ‘Samuels told me before I left Beijing we were finally going to get Gower.’

  ‘He’s to be released, without charge,’ disclosed Patricia. She seemed to be having difficulty with the tone of her voice, too.

  ‘So there’s been no public embarrassment, apart from the initial business with Gower,’ assessed Charlie. ‘We can surely smother that with a public relations blitz, about false arrest and imprisonment? Everyone must be very happy.’

  ‘You were supposed to have left Beijing five days ago! On a flight the embassy booked for you. Where the hell have you been, for five days?’

  They really weren’t very good, either of them, reflected Charlie: certainly Miller shouldn’t have been showing this degree of anger. ‘Being careful,’ said Charlie, easily. ‘Snow’s death was a tragedy. Didn’t want any more, did we?’

  ‘You’re arrogant!’ declared Miller. ‘Arrogant and supercilious! I told you I wanted an explanation!’

  ‘I don’t understand how I’ve upset you,’ said Charlie, open-faced.

  ‘You disappeared off the face of the earth!’ shouted Miller. ‘We thought the Chinese might have swept you up, like Gower. We were about to approach the Chinese authorities for information, as we did with him.’

  ‘We want to know!’ insisted the woman.

  ‘A lot’s happened that hasn’t made sense – still doesn’t make sense – so I avoided the obvious risks,’ smiled Charlie, hopefully.

  ‘Don’t patronize us!’ warned the Director-General.

  ‘I’m not!’ asserted Charlie. ‘But you’ve got to admit some odd things happened. Things that just didn’t add up.’

  ‘Like what?’ demanded Miller.

  Charlie levered his shoulders up and down. His feet really did hurt like a bugger. ‘You’ll think I’m rude.’

  ‘We think that already,’ said the woman.

  ‘Gower, for instance,’ continued Charlie, unruffled. ‘This could have been one God-almighty problem, if Snow had been roped in with Zhang Su Lin and all the other political protesters. So it was vitally important to prevent. Too important, I would have thought, for a first-time operation for someone untried and untested, as Gower was. And not just untried and untested. Hardly prepared at all, for the special circumstances of working in China.’

  There was a shift of discomfort, Miller looking briefly to the woman. ‘That was a mistake. I’ll concede that.’

  ‘Which might have been mitigated if you had properly fulfilled the job you were appointed to do,’ said the woman, defensively.

  ‘My fault?’ asked Charlie, ingenuously.

  ‘An admitted mistake not alleviated by any instruction or advice you gave,’ she said.

  You won’t annoy me, my lovely, thought Charlie: I wonder how much I am going to disconcert you. ‘Then there’s that business of keeping Snow away from the embassy. Never quite understood the reason for that.’

  ‘Our operation decision: I think the reason was obvious.’

  ‘Then there was the quickness of things. And their sequence,’ continued Charlie. ‘If the Chinese were seeking to identify a cell, why did they jump Gower when they did? Why didn’t they let him set his signal and wait until Snow came to pick it up? That would have been the obvious thing to do.’

  ‘That was their mistake, moving too early,’ said Miller. ‘What other reason can there be?’

  ‘Don’t know. They were certainly quick at the railway terminus, when they did try to pick Snow up. That really puzzles me, how that happened.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Patricia.

  ‘How they knew he was there,’ said Charlie.

  Miller sighed, impatiently. ‘For God’s sake man, that’s obvious, surely! They followed him!’

  Charlie shook his head, doubtfully. ‘It wasn’t easy, evolving a way to get Snow out: nor accepting, as I had to accept, that there would be a watch for him at airports. That’s why I made the phoney plane booking out of Beijing. And rehearsed him through the visits to the Foreign Ministry and the Security Bureau …’

  ‘Which failed as badly as everything else you tried to teach him and Gower!’ sneered Miller.

  ‘But that’s the problem,’ persisted Charlie. ‘It was the best I could think of – the only thing I could think of –but I wasn’t happy Snow could carry it off. He hadn’t had any proper training, after all. So I didn’t trust him to do it by himself. I set the routing: knew where he was going and how he was going to try to do things. So I picked him up when he left the Bureau. Not that he could see me, of course. Stayed a long way off. To see if he was still followed. If he had been I was going to feign some encounter at the terminus: lost Westerner approaching another obvious Westerner for help, to abort the whole thing and try to think of something else. But he wasn’t followed. I was sure he wasn’t. He had confused them. I covered him all the way to the ticket queue. And became even surer there. That’s why I got on the Shanghai train, to wait for him …’

  Miller sighed again. ‘This sounds to me like a weak defence to a miserable failure that’s going to mark the end of any future for you in this department.’

  Charlie frowned at the threat, refusing to be stopped by it. ‘Think more about it!’ he urged. ‘There were at least twenty people there. Soldiers and civilians. And Li, in control of it all. To keep the hypothesis going, let’s concede that they did follow him, even though I know they
didn’t. It would have been two or three men. Four at the most. From the time he arrived at the station and queued to buy his ticket to the time he disembarked from the Nanchang train to cross to where I was waiting was precisely seventeen minutes. I know. I counted every one of them.’

  ‘What is this laborious point?’ demanded Miller, a man close to exasperation.

  A point for my benefit, not yours, thought Charlie. ‘There wasn’t enough time, even if they had followed him, to get more than twenty people, soldiers as well as civilians, into position. With Li in charge. You’d agree with me about that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘You were clearly mistaken, about his not being followed,’ insisted Miller.

  Wrong! thought Charlie. ‘Still not enough time.’ How much more could he say, at this stage? How much more could he say at all? Not much. It was a pity: more than a pity.

  ‘The fact is they did get into position!’ rejected Miller. ‘Where’s all this getting us?’

  ‘I was trying to explain why I took a long time to get home,’ offered Charlie. ‘I thought it best to use my own airline reservation as a decoy and come out another way.’

  ‘Which way?’

  ‘Through Hong Kong, on the first leg,’ disclosed Charlie. ‘It was a hell of a trip. I had chronic jetlag.’

  ‘You took a holiday, at our expense!’ challenged Patricia.

  ‘There were some other things in Beijing that didn’t make sense to me,’ continued Charlie. ‘Like the obvious observation on the mission. There was observation, you see. It was easy to locate, when I approached the mission the first time …’ Charlie paused coughing. ‘But then there was a funny thing. I made another check, the day after Snow died. And do you know what? All the surveillance had been lifted. No one was watching the mission any more.’

  ‘What’s so surprising about that?’ demanded Patricia. ‘Snow, their suspect, was dead!’

  ‘One priest out of two,’ reminded Charlie.

  ‘What?’ asked Miller.

  ‘Snow was the younger priest, the man better able physically – despite the asthma – to move about on fact-finding trips. But if you had been carrying out the investigation, from your long previous career in counter-intelligence, wouldn’t you have suspected that Father Robertson and Snow might have been operating together? And that it might be useful to maintain the watch on the mission to see what Father Robertson might do? Particularly when Father Robertson was somebody who had been arrested and jailed, in the past? Was someone they’d already accused of crimes against the State?’

  Miller remained clearly disdainful. ‘My interpretation is that the Chinese aren’t interested in him.’

  ‘Oh but they are,’ said Charlie. ‘I wanted to be very sure the surveillance had been lifted from the mission. I was thinking of going there, to talk to Father Robertson. But I was glad I didn’t. On the last two days I watched the place I saw Father Robertson with Li Dong Ming, the man who escorted Snow on his trip and then pursued him, right to the time he went under the train and was killed …’

  ‘What?’ It was Miller who asked the question, voice scarcely above a whisper.

  ‘Li and Father Robertson,’ Charlie said again. ‘Very friendly with each other. Laughing, in fact. Once they walked quite a long way up the road leading from the mission and Robertson even held Li’s arm, for support, although he didn’t look like the frail old man I had seen at the embassy.’

  They were both looking at Charlie. Patricia’s mouth was slightly parted. All the attitudes had gone from both of them.

  Charlie was regarding them just as intently in return. ‘I could never quite understand why, having arrested and jailed Robertson like they did, the Chinese let him stay on to run the mission. But what if he broke, in jail? Agreed to work for them? It all makes sense then, doesn’t it? They’d have someone who is part of the Western community in Beijing, with access to the British embassy, perfectly in place to spy. The perfect asset …’

  ‘… No!’ said Miller, shaking his head, his voice still distant. ‘No!’

  ‘Wouldn’t that also explain why Robertson is still there: why the mission is still open? They lost their chance to stage a trial with Gower and Snow, but they’d have closed the mission down. Thrown Robertson out. But they haven’t, have they? Because he’s too useful to them, remaining in place.’

  ‘There’s no proof of any of this!’ said Patricia. ‘It’s all surmise, based solely upon your seeing Li and Robertson together. And we’ve only got your word for that. It might not even have been Li.’

  ‘It was,’ insisted Charlie. ‘Definitely. I think for a long time the Jesuit mission in Beijing had one priest working for Britain and one for the Chinese. With neither supposedly knowing about the other. We’d better warn the embassy, hadn’t we?’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Miller. He sounded distracted.

  ‘So it wasn’t a miserable failure, was it?’ pressed Charlie.

  ‘No … maybe not …’ faltered Miller. ‘We need to analyse everything.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Charlie. ‘It all needs to be analysed.’ But not any more by me, he thought: I’m sure I’ve got it all right.

  Natalia based herself in Cologne and on the third day took a river trip on the Rhine. The ferry made several stops, the longest in Koblenz.

  Forty-nine

  It was Charlie’s suggestion they go to Kenny’s, in Hampstead’s Heath Street, where they’d eaten the first time they’d gone out together. Julia agreed without apparent thought and didn’t remark upon it when they got there, so Charlie didn’t bother either. He hadn’t chosen it for any special significance anyway. Charlie was careful with the choice of table, getting them into a far corner, close to the speaker relaying the background music which would overlay whatever they talked about. They had a lot to talk about. He ordered Chablis and told the waitress not to worry about the food for a while, they weren’t in a hurry.

  ‘Let me guess,’ he said. ‘There was chaos after I left.’

  ‘I’ve never seen either of them like it before,’ agreed the girl.

  Charlie smiled, happily. ‘Miller said he was going to dump me. But that was before I told him about Robertson.’

  ‘It’s been a bloody awful business. All of it,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Julia frowned up from her wineglass. ‘I’m personal assistant to both, remember.’

  ‘So who do you think Robertson’s working for?’

  The frown remained. ‘Maybe I don’t know everything.’

  ‘It was a set-up,’ announced Charlie. ‘All of it. Right from the very beginning. From Snow getting permission to make the trip south with Li and me being put under the control of Patricia Elder and told I only had a menial future, to make me resentful and distracted, and then Gower, the man who could resist interrogation, being selected for me to train and afterwards sent to China, where he hadn’t been trained to operate.’

  Julia shook her head. ‘Charlie, I’m not getting any of this!’

  ‘I didn’t, not for a very long time. It was sacrifice time: me, Snow, Gower. We should have all been in the dock together, all part of the dissident trials the Chinese are putting on. Would have been in court, if Snow hadn’t been killed. That really did break the chain. Ruined it all, for any public display at least. It was still good enough for Robertson: would have been, that is, if I hadn’t realized the mission surveillance was lifted and then seen him with Li …’

  ‘Please, Charlie!’ begged the girl.

  ‘Robertson isn’t supposed to be theirs!’ said Charlie. ‘He’s supposed to be our source, the man we thought we had deeply in place and would need even more when we lost all our facilities in Hong Kong after 1997: need him enough to sacrifice all of us.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘You tell me!’ Charlie came back. ‘You’re in a position to know. Isn’t Robertson supposed to
be ours?’

  ‘There are things I’m not allowed to know,’ insisted Julia.

  ‘I’d hoped you would know: and that you’d tell me.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I would have been, if I had been swept up. Very sorry.’

  ‘I can’t believe it! Won’t believe it! You must be wrong!’

  Charlie topped up their glasses. ‘I suppose they imagined a lot would be concealed in a Chinese prosecution that could be manipulated to cover anything, but they were still very clumsy. Samuels should be withdrawn. Pickering, too. They’re no bloody good, either of them. And according to what Snow told me, from their visit to the mission when Robertson was ill, they’re not getting on. Rowing all the time.’

  Julia was looking at him unblinkingly, only her throat moving, wine forgotten in front of her.

  ‘And you don’t have to say anything,’ smiled Charlie. Like she hadn’t had to enunciate, confirming word for confirming word, the situation with Miller and his deputy.

  ‘I said from the beginning …’

  ‘… I know,’ said Charlie, indifferent to the protest. ‘I’m really not asking you to tell me anything …’ He seemed surprised to find the bottle empty, holding it aloft for the waitress to see and bring another. ‘I came out through Hong Kong. Did you hear about that?’

  She shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘But you know about the Composite Signals Station at Chung Horn Kok, from which all the electronic traffic in Beijing is listened into?’