He cut newsprint letters from that night’s Evening Standard to address the first envelope to the security division at Westminster Bridge Road, enclosing one duplicate photograph of Peter Miller and Patricia Elder arm-in-arm on the ring road around Regent’s Park.
He addressed with the same cut-out letters the second duplicate print, again by itself without any attempted explanation, in a second envelope to Lady Ann Miller at the Berkshire stud listed in Who’s Who. Knowing that the franking was relevant, Charlie travelled back to Kensington to post them. He didn’t touch either envelope at any time with his bare hands.
He’d fucked them, Charlie decided: either way he’d fucked them, which they’d deserved for what they’d done to Jeremy Snow and John Gower and tried to do to him. They really should have read and understood how vindictive he could be.
He had, of course, got printouts of the transmissions that Hong Kong had intercepted, going to and from the Beijing embassy, and the whole point of telling Julia Robb was to panic them into trying to sanitise the records. But they would have still had enough power to overwhelm him if it had got to an official inquiry when they’d tried to dump him. Now he didn’t have to bother with any of it.
As she had predicted herself, Julia would probably go when Miller and Patricia Elder were discreetly retired and yet another Director-General and deputy were appointed. But then it was simple justice that she should.
In a way, she had been shittier than either of the other two. They at least hadn’t pretended the friendship, like she had, even hinting at the end it could go deeper than being platonic. Although he supposed it had been they who’d persuaded her to see him as often as she eventually had, to pass back whatever he’d said in off-guard moments of any suspicions he might have had before going to Beijing. She hadn’t been very good, Charlie reflected: she’d given away far more than she’d learned, particularly about the relationship between Miller and Patricia Elder.
He supposed protecting himself at all times, in whatever circumstances, came down to never trusting anyone, although he’d trusted Julia until the idea had occurred to him on the flight back from China. He was glad it had. It really hadn’t taken very long at the national registration unit at Southport to discover that Julia Robb had never been married but had always been a spinster. And that she didn’t have a sister, either, with whom the non-existent husband could have run away. Julia really shouldn’t have tried to make her sob-story so wet-eyed.
With the one photograph so protectively utilized, Charlie concentrated again when he got back to his flat upon the print of the daughter he had never seen and hadn’t ever believed he was going to have.
She was beautiful, he decided. Wonderfully, innocently, diminutively beautiful. He wanted to know what she felt like, smelled like, sounded like, was like. Just wanted. But how? How? How?
And then he recognized the background. It was half a sphere, a replica of the capsule in which Yuri Gagarin had been blasted up to become Russia’s – and the world’s – first man in space: the replica which rested at the foot of the ugly tower monument to the achievement in Moscow’s Leninskaya Prospekt. But what did it mean? Did it mean anything? It had to. Natalia wouldn’t have done all this, without everything having some significance. Charlie turned the photograph back and front, from Natalia’s inscription back to the print, and then revolved it again.
And then stopped. She hadn’t simply written Her name is Sasha. There was the date, obviously of Sasha’s birth. By which Natalia was telling him she had been pregnant when he’d abandoned her to go back alone to Russia. And that he was the father. An anniversary recurring in two months’ time.
He had a date, Charlie realized. And a place.
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 wo rk 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 persecutio
n during the English Reformation.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
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 © 1993 by Brian Freemantle
cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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