Charlie’s Apprentice cm-10

by Brian Freemantle

  At last Gower felt a flicker of unease at deceiving her, trying quickly to erase it. He’d had to do it, he tried to convince himself. Nothing he would have to keep from her would affect their personal relationship anyway. Better for her to know virtually nothing than everything and go through hell every time he went off on an assignment. Hadn’t that been another lecture?

  Snow knew that with so much information to pass on and even more to discuss it was essential for there to be a personal meeting between himself and Foster, although there was no close enough event on the British embassy calendar to use to cover the encounter. So it had to be governed by the system for emergency contact established by Foster.

  The marker point was the Taoist temple to the west of the Forbidden City, a run-down area of lean-to food stalls and skeletal flower booths. It was because of the flower-sellers that Foster had selected the spot. The day after his arrival back in Beijing Snow went there to purchase a spray of meagre chrysanthemums, carefully selecting only four orange blooms in the bunch. He arranged the flowers on the far left of the travellers’ shrine outside the temple. He had to pass the shrine on three consecutive days before he saw Foster’s agreement signal, a replacement bouquet in which there were four white chrysanthemums, two already shedding their petals.

  Back at the mission that night Father Robertson said: ‘Nothing happened during the journey that might have upset the authorities?’

  Snow suppressed the exasperation. ‘Nothing. My escort even talked of coming here, to see our work.’

  ‘Why?’ demanded the older man, in immediate concern. ‘There must be a reason!’ By this time in the afternoon the smell of whisky was always strong, the words slipping.

  ‘I don’t expect he will come.’

  ‘We won’t make any more travel applications for a while,’ decided the mission head. ‘It upsets them.’

  Snow released the sigh at last. There was so much more he could achieve, on every level, if this doddering old man were withdrawn.

  Twelve

  The rendezvous was prearranged in the Purple Bamboo Park, triggered by Snow leaving the flower signal at the Taoist temple. Snow went through what he considered the totally unnecessary and ridiculous routine, impatient for Walter Foster to arrive. It was possible the man wouldn’t make the meet at all. Foster only completed an encounter after satisfying himself it was safe to do so. If there was no approach, it would mean Foster was not satisfied: the attempt would have to be tried the following day at a different location.

  Outwardly he was sure he appeared a foreigner relaxing in one of the city’s most attractive public places. To Snow’s right, in the park, there were several pockets of kite-flyers: closer, near the pagoda by a stream, a group of people, all elderly, were going through the tai ji quan dance of meditation, like choreographed, slow-motion boxers. Snow looked from one to the other with apparent interest, in reality seeking Foster, who had to be already there, somewhere, making sure.

  Snow decided he couldn’t go on like this. He had to endure the twitching existence with Father Robertson, because there was no alternative: the Jesuit Curia were prepared to accept the Chinese government retaining the elderly priest as their tame totem, which in turn enabled Snow to take up residence in the city, even though he was not officially recognized as a Jesuit priest, nor at the moment officially permitted to perform or instruct any of their teachings. But he was no longer prepared to endure this arm’s-length existence with Walter Foster. If the man wasn’t agreeable to any improvement, he’d complain directly to London. Snow smiled to himself, the irritation and impatience lessening at a sudden awareness. The ultimate resolve lay entirely with him: if a change wasn’t agreed, he’d refuse to go on. Snow knew he was too good – too useful – for them to lose him like that. Christian or unchristian considerations about Foster’s career didn’t come into it: Foster had made the unacceptable rules.

  And then he saw the man.

  The supposed diplomat was hurrying from the direction of the pagoda, head lowered, eyes to the ground, as if he were trying physically to diminish himself. Getting nearer the bench upon which Snow sat, Foster lifted his head to make a last-minute check before lowering himself on to the adjoining seat. The entire charade had looked absurdly furtive.

  ‘We’re quite clear,’ announced Foster. He was a small man, red hair awry from his hurried walk, red-faced as well from the exertion. The redness accentuated the freckles. The three jacket buttons of his tight, blue-striped suit were all secured: he didn’t undo them when he sat down, straining into tight ridges the cloth around his slightly bulged body. In his lap his hands moved constantly one over the other, as if he were washing them.

  ‘Of course we are!’ said Snow. ‘We could have set up something far more sensible if you’d agreed to see me before I left.’

  ‘It wasn’t possible.’

  ‘It could have been made possible. I’m not prepared to go on like this. If you want me to continue – if London wants me to continue – there must be regular meetings.’

  ‘I could talk with London. They make the rules.’

  Snow sighed, wondering if the man had ever made an independent decision in his life. ‘If there’s no improvement, I want to take it up with London myself.’

  There was another sideways look. ‘Is that a threat?’

  ‘I do not want to do anything to endanger your position here. Or your career. I will show you any letter I wish to be sent on to London.’

  Foster was silent for several moments. ‘You’re being very honest.’

  ‘Priests are supposed to be honest.’ It was not, Snow accepted, a dictum he practised with Father Robertson. He considered the deceit justified. There was a concentrated movement far away to their right, a few people running, and Snow realized that the wind was dropping and the kites with it: two or three seemed to have collided, snarling their lines.

  ‘I was told very specifically in London that there never had to be any official difficulty: since the changes in Moscow, this is the most sensitive posting in the world.’

  Snow sighed again, realizing there was no purpose in taking this up at a local level. ‘Talk to London,’ he urged, but patiently at last. ‘Say – and I really want you to say – that I can’t continue working under this present arrangement.’

  ‘That is a threat!’ insisted the man.

  ‘It’s a choice. Your choice. London’s choice.’ Snow was surprised he didn’t feel more uncomfortable, talking so aggressively: actually browbeating the other man. But was he? Wasn’t he, rather, trying to restore a situation to the proper footing, the way he’d operated with all Foster’s predecessors?

  There was another silence between them, longer this time. Across the park, all the birdlike kites had come home to roost: men were huddled in head-bent intensity, untangling strings. At last Foster said: ‘Tell me about the trip.’

  Well rehearsed, Snow went chronologically through the journey, setting out the successes before reaching Zhengzhou and the less easily documented findings afterwards. He finished by edging along the seat to the other man a brown paper carton containing canisters of all the film he had exposed, his journal of the map coordinates he believed important and his full written account of everything that had happened. Foster became more and more agitated during the narrative, finally twisting directly to face the priest.

  ‘You were suspected!’ declared Foster, at once.

  ‘For being what? Nothing happened to me – no conversation was ever begun with me – that doesn’t happen every day to every waiguoren in every major city in China.’

  ‘No!’ refused Foster. ‘You were under surveillance! Oh my God!’

  ‘Stop it!’ ordered Snow, curtly, unhappy at the other man’s panicked reaction. ‘I’m not under surveillance now. You personally checked it, before making the meeting. So you know you’re safe: that I’m safe.’

  ‘From what you’ve said Li seems far more than an escort. You were targeted.’ He straightened further, lookin
g apprehensively around the grassed area.

  ‘If I was targeted, it failed, didn’t it? I saw every ploy for what it was and refused to respond. Not even Li – for all the effort he put into trying to make me say or do something indiscreet – could make the slightest accusation in any report that I couldn’t refute on every level.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ complained Foster. ‘I’ll have to give a full account to London.’ Again he looked nervously around him.

  ‘I’ve already done that, in my own report.’

  ‘They’ll need my opinion, too.’

  Coloured to maintain the arm’s-length meetings, guessed Snow. ‘We’ll need to meet again for me to get their decision how we’re going to meet in the future.’

  Foster attempted to back off immediately. ‘We could use a normal drop.’

  ‘I want a personal meeting.’

  ‘The same as today,’ insisted Foster. ‘If I am not happy, I won’t make the contact.’

  Something had to be done! ‘Don’t run out on me.’

  ‘What are you accusing me of?’

  ‘I know how sensitive everything is here,’ avoided Snow. ‘Nothing has been endangered. Nor will it be. There’s no reason for anyone to lose their heads.’

  ‘London’s got to decide about all this,’ said Foster. ‘There has been a lot of government-inspired comment in the People’s Daily about foreign intervention and counter-revolution. Something is building up.’

  Snow decided that instead of being his link with London this man was a positive barrier. ‘But not connected with me. So there’s nothing for London to decide: they just have to be told about what happened.’

  ‘You’ve got to take care!’ said the embassy man.

  ‘I always take care,’ sighed Snow, bored with the need for repetition. He’d have to complain, irrespective of any effect it had upon Foster’s career.

  ‘Extra care.’

  Snow felt his chest begin to tighten. He always carried a relieving inhaler, but he was strangely reluctant to ease the asthma by using it in front of the other man. Foster might construe it as being brought on by matching nervousness when in fact it was caused by his angry impotence, at this fool and this meeting.

  ‘You leave first,’ ordered Foster. ‘I’ll watch you out: make sure you’re clear.’

  ‘A week from now. Here,’ repeated Snow. ‘No flower signal nonsense.’

  ‘All right,’ said Foster, uncertainly.

  Snow did feel some apprehension, walking from the park, and his anger at the other man increased for creating the totally unnecessary tension. His discomfort grew, banding tighter, and he began to strain for breath. But still he denied himself the relief until he knew he was well beyond Foster’s view. By which time he had left it too late. The seat was actually filming before his eyes when he reached it, slumping down to fumble the inhaler finally to his mouth. It took a long time for the muscles to relax: even then there was a rasping wheeze which Snow knew would take maybe an hour completely to leave him.

  It was the worst attack he could remember for months and it disturbed him. Foster was a fool, to have caused it: a frightened, stupid fool who was making life intolerable, physically now as in every other way. Snow didn’t see any reason to worry about the man’s career: clearly Foster loathed it and would positively welcome a chance of escape.

  ‘He really is unusual,’ admitted Gower. ‘Not at all what you’d imagine anyone attached to the Foreign Office to be like.’ Very nominally attached, Gower qualified, to himself.

  ‘So what is he like?’ demanded Marcia, sharing the dinner wine evenly between them.

  ‘He complains all the time about bad feet: wears things that look more like snowshoes than proper footwear. I suppose the first impression is that he’s scruffy but he’s really not: that’s the trick. It’s difficult to get a proper picture of him at all, even when you’ve been with him as constantly as I have.’

  ‘I want to meet him!’ declared the girl, at once. ‘Invite him for dinner. That would be all right, wouldn’t it? My meeting your instructor, I mean.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Gower, doubtfully. He’d been reluctant to engage in the conversation with Marcia in the first place: now he regretted it even more.

  ‘Invite him!’ she insisted. ‘I must meet this mystery man!’

  He was a mystery man, accepted Gower. There wasn’t even a name to introduce to Marcia, if the invitation were accepted.

  Fyodor Tudin was a dedicated career officer, an asexual bachelor whose only indulgence was sometimes to drink himself into a stupor in the secure solitude of his Sytinskij Prospekt apartment. The drinking had become more frequent since the changes, which still frustrated and angered him. It was not enough to have survived the KGB restructuring. He should have got the chairmanship of the Directorate, not that icy bitch of a robot Natalia Nikandrova. He’d earned it, for all he’d done in the past: would get it, despite her trying to bury him under the organization of the republic networks.

  He just had to find a way.

  Discovering personal failings – or best of all, personal, discrediting secrets – was the way. Which was why, within a week of his humiliating appointment as her deputy, he had searched her personal file in the archives. He’d been disappointed by the sparseness of what was there, hinting at an existence here in Moscow as empty as his own. A baby had been an intriguing hope, but the record of a woman who lived alone showed the death of a naval officer husband eighteen months earlier, so there had been nothing useful there. He had been equally hopeful of an odd involvement with an Englishman, until he saw it had been considered an operational success, contributing to her promotion.

  Determined to find something, Tudin had initiated a discreet monitor on everything Natalia did, and was therefore curious when he discovered her necessarily recorded official enquiry about the son, Eduard, linked to an apartment at Mytninskaya.

  So curious, in fact, that he extended it with additional enquiries of his own. And kept hoping.

  Thirteen

  Having taught Gower as well as he believed he was able, Charlie set the graduation tests, never once giving the man the slightest warning, even ordering some checks when he was not personally present, the obvious times for Gower to expect something. Others he staged when Gower would have considered himself to be off duty.

  Gower only failed to locate one displaced object in a room-entry check. He picked out every shadowing car, on motorways and minor roads. Without being told, he took to hiring cars on credit cards and driving licences held under false, department-supplied legend names, and by so doing destroyed any paper trail from which it would have been possible to discover his true identity. He extended the hire-car precaution, detecting surveillance during one of the planned observations and lulling the professional department Watchers by constantly using the vehicle to embed his connection with it in their minds before evading them completely by abandoning the car in the most prominent place for them to continue watching while he disappeared. His basic tradecraft proved to be impeccable. Three times he beat professional observers on a ground pursuit by dodging in and out of department stores with front, side and back entrances. On two subsequent occasions, he defeated the same increasingly angry department observers passing in a brush contact an unseen package to another person – a woman – going in the opposite direction on a crowded street. He emptied and filled dead-letter drops faultlessly. He carried out his own surveillance on trained men instructed to lose him, which they did only twice in six different situations, never once establishing identifying eye-contact which would in turn have marked him out to an intelligence professional. There were three separate efforts to photograph him, using a team to appear as holidaymakers posing for a vacation souvenir in such a way as to have put him in the background. These he avoided every time. Under simulated interrogation by department specialists, he obeyed Charlie’s constantly repeated instruction by lying as little as possible – and by always being able to remember the lies
he’d told – and withstood four hours of questioning before being caught out, and then in such a minor mistake that he was able to recover in what Charlie considered a sufficiently convincing way.

  And on every one of those concluding days Charlie stressed it was all building up to an ultimate approval which Gower had to discover and announce, before the end of the session.

  The session that Charlie intended to be their last – although he didn’t declare it as such, still wanting to be satisfied – took place in Charlie’s cramped office where they’d first met. It seemed to Charlie to have been a long time ago. ‘Think you’re ready?’ he demanded.

  ‘Your decision, not mine,’ Gower retorted. He’d weeks before lost the best-boy-in-the-class need.

  So what was his decision, Charlie asked himself. Gower was inestimably improved from the day he’d entered this same office and called him sir, which he didn’t do any longer. But sufficiently? Charlie didn’t know. He’d never had to make this decision about another officer: only about himself, of whom he was supremely confident. Honestly he admitted: ‘I can’t think of anything else to teach you.’

  ‘Now it comes down to my instinct?’

  ‘If it’s possible to instil instinct.’

  ‘Is that the ultimate approval?’

  ‘You have to tell me,’ reminded Charlie.

  ‘I don’t think that’s it.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘What you were trying to make me?’ suggested Gower.

  ‘Go on,’ encouraged Charlie.

  ‘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.’