‘Nothing that justifies a hue and cry of the sort that publication of a photograph would create,’ rejected Rainer. To the counter-intelligence chief, he said: ‘Is there any investigation — anything at all — that remains outstanding?’
‘None whatsoever,’ assured Blom, at once. ‘Every source we have has been tapped and double checked. Quite independently of the British, I have worked in complete co-operation with the CIA and the Israeli Mossad and Shin Bet services. And I know they have made every conceivable investigation possible.’
‘And there has been nothing from any of them?’ said Leland.
‘Nothing,’ said Blom.
‘Would you have expected there to be, if this information from London were accurate?’ asked Delon.
‘Such an operation would have the highest security classification,’ reminded Blom. ‘The restriction would be to the smallest committee of men. Nevertheless, I would have thought there might have been some sort of hint.’
‘I found the debriefing transcript of the Russian, Novikov, very vague,’ said Rainer.
‘My assessment was that he was telling the truth but that he didn’t know enough for it to make sense,’ said Blom.
‘The British themselves admit there are a lot of other European conferences,’ said Delon. ‘Have they extended the warning, do you know?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Blom. The man Muffin seems convinced he’s right about it being here.’
‘Based upon what evidence!’ demanded Rainer.
Blom shrugged. ‘What he has so far produced, I suppose.’
‘We’ve had, in effect, the resources of three intelligence services — four if you include the British — which I would suggest is an unprecedented amount of technical and professional expertise,’ said Rainer. ‘And as far as Switzerland is concerned we’ve come up with nothing more than a few things which appear mysterious, suspicious even, but which might equally well have a perfectly reasonable explanation. I am not for a moment proposing any sort of relaxation in the arrangement for any international gathering on Swiss soil. But I am certainly arguing against anything being made public about this episode.’
‘I agree absolutely,’ said Delon, at once.
‘So do I,’ said Leland. ‘We should proceed as we are at present, nothing more.’
‘I am grateful for the guidance,’ said the responsibility avoiding Blom.
‘Another thing,’ said Leland ‘I think there should be some complaint to London, about the way this damned man has been behaving.’
‘Absolutely,’ said Rainer and there were supportive nods of agreement from everyone else around the table.
Sir Alistair Wilson guessed his deputy’s distress from the unusual colour of his face, much paler than its usual pinkness, and wondered at the wisdom of granting an immediate meeting. Maybe it would have been better to have delayed it, to let the man better compose himself. The Director stood at the window for comfort and outside one of the more adventurous Whitehall pigeons was on an away day forage for scraps in the street outside; Wilson thought there was a similarity in the way the bird and his deputy walked, with their strange, chest-forward swagger.
‘The result of the Charlie Muffin positive vetting?’ anticipated Wilson.
‘There is still the personal interview to be conducted, when he returns from Switzerland,’ said Harkness, defensively.
‘But what have you discovered so far?’
‘He owes various sums to bookmakers. Something in the region of?350.’
‘Yes,’ said Wilson, unimpressed.
‘He hoards pornographic publications in his flat.’
‘What sort of pornographic publications?’
‘Playboy.’
‘Choirboys can buy Playboy on station bookstalls,’ pointed out the Director. ‘I’m sure of a lot of them do. Choirmasters, too.’
‘There is also membership of some disreputable clubs,’ said Harkness. ‘Two are solely for after-hours drinking. The third, it’s called the Fantail, features women either topless or bottomless. Sometimes both.’
‘I think it’s fair to say, then, that Charlie Muffin isn’t gay and likes a drink, don’t you?’
‘I think it also indicates rather questionable morals,’ insisted the Deputy Director.
‘I’ve often thought that an essential requirement for the job,’ mused the Director. ‘What about the business over the restaurant bills?’
Harkness’s colour deepened. ‘Three establishments have been traced, all within a mile or two of where he lives. All insist the money was genuinely spent. He appears to be well known in each of them.’
‘I understand, of course, that having embarked upon it the positive vetting has to be completed but it would seem to me that Charlie is pretty much in the clear, wouldn’t you think?’
‘Not in one thing,’ argued Harkness. ‘At his grading level there is no way he could service an overdraft of?10,000.’
‘So you’re refusing the bank reference?’ guessed Wilson.
‘I sent the rejection letter this morning,’ confirmed Harkness.
Chapter Twenty-five
They started drinking in Levy’s hotel but at Charlie’s suggestion moved from the Bristol almost at once for what turned out to be a pub crawl. By the time they reached the bar on the Rue du Port, Charlie had walked off and drunk off most of the anger.
‘You’re wrong, you know. All of you,’ he insisted.
‘So you keep saying,’ reminded Levy. Like its name suggested it was a port workers’ bar, with no service, so the Israeli carried the brandies back from the counter.
‘And me, too,’ said Charlie, almost in private conversation with himself. ‘I’ve got a feeling I’ve done something wrong, too.’
‘Like becoming obsessive?’ suggested Levy.
Charlie came out of his reverie. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not that.’
‘I’ve got to admit it, Charlie, that’s the impression you’re conveying. Certainly that’s what Blom thinks.’
‘I don’t believe Blom is capable of thinking.’
‘Charlie!’ pleaded Levy. ‘It hasn’t just been the Swiss. The CIA have pulled out all the stops and we’ve done the same. And you know what your own people in England have done. If one had missed something, another group would have picked it up.’
‘He’s here!’ insisted Charlie. ‘I can feel he’s here.’
‘An intelligence agent doesn’t work on feeling,’ said Levy.
‘I do.’
‘For two weeks Geneva has been a goldfish bowl with not just one but three intelligence agencies staring into it-four, if you include yourself,’ said Levy. ‘OK, so our man — if there is such a man — is a professional but to stay undiscovered for that long he’d have to be the most professional operator I’ve ever encountered.’
‘The Swiss did not …’ started Charlie and then stopped. ‘Into,’ he said.
Levy looked worriedly across the tiny circular table. ‘What?’ he said.
‘Into,’ repeated Charlie. ‘That’s the mistake. Into.’
‘You’re not making sense,’ complained the Israeli.
‘Wait,’ said Charlie, excitedly. ‘Just wait … in fact, I’ll get more drinks.’ He did, bringing them back from the bar, and said: ‘We picked up the lead in London and we followed it here and we’ve spent all this time behind him, on the outside, looking in … don’t you see!’
‘No,’ refused Levy, shortly.
‘What about inside, looking out? What about someone in one of the delegations?’
Levy shook his head, wearily. ‘We did that: my people. We compared your Primrose Hill photograph with every delegate and every support member and every secretariat. There were a couple of passing likenesses, but checked again they didn’t fit.’
‘Is that all you checked?’ demanded Charlie. ‘Just photographic likenesses? What about backgrounds? Are you telling me, for instance, that you’re letting your government leaders close to a group of Palestinian Liber
ation people — people you term as terrorists — without knowing everything down to the colour of their knickers! And the Syrians and Jordanians, for that matter!’
‘Of course we’ve got files on as many as possible,’ smiled Levy. ‘All have committed crimes against us, at some stage or other. That’s why we’ve got combined security, Mossad and Shin Bet. I don’t see how it’s going to help find your invisible man.’
Neither did he, conceded Charlie, but he was reluctant to let the idea go. He said: ‘We made the London photograph and the dossier available to you. Novikov, too.’
‘Yes,’ said Levy, doubtfully.
‘Britain is not a participant in the conference, so I’ve got no in-field intelligence back-up.’
‘So what do you want?’
‘Access to your files on the visiting delegations.’
‘I told you, we’ve done that already!’
‘Full co-operation: that was our agreement, wasn’t it?’
‘It would take days!’
‘You know how long it takes a trained assassin to kill someone? I hear an expert can get six shots away in the space of sixty seconds.’
‘You’re wasting your time, Charlie.’
‘It’s my time.’
‘Why not?’ agreed Levy, finally. ‘It’ll take a while to make the copies: I could telephone. While it’s being done we can have another drink.’
‘Why not?’ echoed Charlie. Christ how he hated working with anyone!
Roger Giles picked out his wife as soon as she emerged through the arrival doors but briefly she couldn’t locate him and her face closed at his not getting to the airport to meet her in. And then he called out and she saw him and her face filled with her happiness.
‘I thought …’ she started.
‘I know,’ he said.
‘I was frightened the plane would be delayed.’
‘It wasn’t. Guess we were lucky.’
They stood at arm’s length, each looking shyly and awkwardly at the other, neither knowing what to do. Giles wondered whether to kiss her and decided against it: he didn’t want to rush her.
‘You look great,’ he said.
‘So do you.’
‘I’m glad you came.’
‘I’m glad you asked me.’
There was another silence between them and Giles said: ‘Everything is going to be fine.’
‘I want it to be,’ said Barbara. ‘I want it to be so much.’
‘I’ve got a suite at the hotel. Two bedrooms.’
Barbara paused and said: ‘Yes.’
On the way into Geneva they spoke very little. Barbara said she’d brought three suitcases because he’d made it sound like a long vacation and Giles said that was fine and while he had to hang around at the conference why didn’t she check out the tourist offices and plan an inti-nerary. She asked if he had any preference for the countries they were to visit and he said he’d leave it entirely up to her. It all sounded like the polite conversation of two people who did not know each other particularly well.
The American delegation had taken over an entire floor of the President Hotel and Giles had managed to get a lakeside suite. He had the porter leave her cases in the minute vestibule, avoiding the choice of a bedroom.
Barbara stood at the window of the sitting room and said: ‘It’s absolutely breathtaking.’
‘I wanted everything to be just right.’
‘It is.’
‘I’m going to be tied up while the conference is on but after that we’ll have a month to ourselves.’
‘That’ll be great.’
‘The restaurant here has got a pretty fantastic view, too. Or we could get room service, if you’re tired after the flight.’
Barbara turned away from the window, looking towards the other rooms. She said: ‘I’m not particularly tired but room service sounds good.’
Giles offered her the card but she said: ‘Why don’t you order for me while I freshen up?’
She carried the smallest of the three cases into the bathroom, leaving the other two where they were. The meal had been delivered by the time she came out, wearing a lounging robe he couldn’t remember seeing before: it was made of some filmy material and swept down to the floor.
Giles had the table set up in front of the window: unasked the hotel had provided a single rose in a stem glass.
‘Champagne!’ she said, seeing the ice bucket.
‘French,’ he said. ‘I didn’t order much food; I didn’t think you would be hungry, after eating on the plane.’
‘I’m not.’
’I’m not either.’
Giles poured the wine and handed her the goblet and said: ‘I suppose there should be a toast?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I can’t think of anything that would sound right.’
‘This isn’t proving easy, is it?’
‘Maybe we’re both trying too hard.’
‘I thought that was what we had to do, try hard?’
‘Me more than you,’ he said.
‘I want to say something,’ she said. ‘Get something straight.’
‘What?’
‘Sleeping apart was stupid: it didn’t prove anything.’
‘No,’ he agreed.
She looked away from him, out over the lake. She said: ‘I want to sleep with you tonight … be in the same bed, I mean. But I don’t want … I just want you to hold me, that’s all. You know …’
‘I know,’ he said again.
‘You angry?’
‘No.’
‘Like you, I want everything to be right. And particularly that.’
‘It will be,’ he said. ‘I promise you it will be.’
Chapter Twenty-six
Potma is not a single prison camp, as it is often described, but rather a string of gulags not even given the authority or doubtful dignity of names but designated instead only by numbers, one to thirty-six. They are identical in construction, a series of pebble-in-the-water, concentric, wood-planked and wood-slatted barracks, each block separated from the ripple impression of that next to it by razor wire electrified to an instant-touch lethality. Each of the thirty-six are stitched like buttons on to a shirt along the sluggish, mud-brown Potma river from which the penal colony derives its identity. In the warmth of the brief summer its swamps shroud every camp in a waist-high miasma of mist and fog in which the malaria-carrying mosquito and the poisonous, horse-killing, man-maiming moshky gnats swarm and attack unseen: in the long frigid winter those same swamps turn the entire area into rock-hard tundra so cold that the flesh from a naked foot tears off after less than a minute’s contact. The floors of the unheated barracks are, of course, bare earth. As well as thirty-six gulags there are thirty-six matching cemeteries: over the years the cemeteries have expanded to occupy more land than the camps that they serve on a daily — and sometimes hourly — basis.
Alexei Berenkov decided there could be greater advantage in conducting the initial re-interrogation of Edwin Sampson in the crushing surroundings of Potma Gulag 28, in which the man had been incarcerated for almost three years and in which he would be flinchingly aware of every penalty for every infraction. Berenkov was in a hurry and wanted the Englishman as immediately cooperative as possible: bringing Sampson back to Moscow’s Lefortovo jail or to the Serbsky Institute, where he had originally been broken, was something to be considered later, if he resisted. Berenkov could not image the man resisting, after what had happened in Lefortovo or Serbsky. Not unless his mind had gone, which was always a possibility.
Winter was already waiting, its warnings everywhere, and the helicopter had to fly low over the river to get beneath the cloud base. The machine was heated and in addition Berenkov was wearing a fur-lined topcoat and a momentarily discarded hat with fur-lined earflaps but he still shivered at the unrelieved, brittle-sharp greyness below: it was a monotonous moonscape of sameness, without a single break of colour as far as the eye could see. At the height at which they were fl
ying it was possible to isolate the individual barracks and sheds, each guarded by control towers and additionally patrolled by foot squads with dogs. Occasionally there was a head-bent line of men shuffling automaton-like from one task to another, escorted by more dog-handling warders. Between every camp, virtually the thread through the buttonholes, entwined the river, not mud-brown from where he gazed down but black, the meandering and twisting link between it all.
Berenkov shivered again in horrified revulsion. He had believed English imprisonment appalling but found it difficult to find a word — or group of words — to describe or even compare it with what he was looking down upon. Not difficult, he thought, impossible. No words or phrase could adequately convey the awfulness of it. He thought of moonscape again: a place where life could not exist.
The pilot banked slightly higher and then circled Potma 28 and Berenkov saw the welcoming group already assembled, the helicopter landing cross appearing newly painted on a concrete area in the most outward of the concentric circles. The safest place, Berenkov remembered. The political prisoners were imprisoned in the very centre, with the urkas, the common criminals, terrorizing and raping and virtually acting as additional warders from their outer, encircling areas, in addition to the official guards. The last ring housed the least violent and so the least dangerous: if conditions could be better here they were better, the guard barracks and officers’ quarters more adequately heated, with proper kitchens and proper sanitation. Also — but most importantly — the officers and guards were immediate to the exit for a quick escape in the event of a riot by men too desperate or subhuman to be put down by dogs or machine-guns or flamethrowers or gas.
Berenkov had a confusion of impressions as he stepped down from the helicopter. The first was of the already biting cold and of ground so frozen that it rang strangely like metal beneath his feet. And then almost at once came another sensation, a memory he’d never wanted to recapture but more disgusting than he’d ever known, in Wormwood Scrubs. It was the stench of the worst sort of imprisonment and was no single smell. It was of decay and filth and rot, of animals and excrement and urine, of living things discarded and too long and too badly dying.
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