Charlie’s Apprentice cm-10

by Brian Freemantle

  Charlie followed motorways completely to reach London, connecting with the M4 by the M25 orbital link, beginning, but quickly refusing the recollection, to think of the evasion technique he’d taught John Gower on part of the same route. Just as quickly, refusing the refusal, he forced himself – alarmed – to remember the routine, positively rising more fully in the driving seat, as if coming abruptly awake.

  Which was about bloody right, Charlie decided, horrified. He had been asleep. Not once, since leaving the nursing home almost two hours before, had he once searched around him, which he’d patronizingly lectured Gower it was always essential – ‘until it becomes instinctive’ – to do.

  So much for the conceit of considering himself a good and conscientious intelligence officer! The lapse did more than worry Charlie: it frightened him. It had always been automatic in the past: should still have been, something he never had consciously to think about! So why hadn’t he done it this time? There was no excuse, no explanation. No matter how deeply he’d been preoccupied, part of his concentration should have remained on what was going on around him. It wasn’t an argument – not to Charlie anyway – that it didn’t matter because he was no longer operational. He didn’t want to lose the constant alertness: wouldn’t lose it. If he stopped being alert, aware at all times of what was going on about him, he would start to atrophy: start to sink into mumbling insensitivity, the dinosaur ready for retirement that Patricia Elder clearly considered him to be. Too late, a stupid effort at reassertiveness that didn’t work, Charlie began checking, using all the mirrors, actually gazing around himself on the filled up, six-lane highway. What the fuck was he doing so late: too late? Playing with himself, without any satisfaction at the end of it. No, he rejected at once. He could have still recovered, if he’d found himself in a genuine situation: dodged and weaved, evaded a problem. There was still no satisfaction: failed mental masturbation.

  Charlie remained unsettled after he got back, in good time, to his Primrose Hill apartment after returning the hire car. He confirmed the order in which he’d left the letters on the mat, before picking them up, and checked the traps he’d set in the bedroom and the kitchen by leaving the doors slightly ajar. There had not been any entry. There was still time to shower before meeting Julia.

  In the bar, during the theatre interval, Charlie said: ‘Gower came to see me: said he was going operational.’

  Julia regarded him seriously. ‘Still missing it?’

  ‘Always will,’ said Charlie, shortly.

  ‘Let go!’ she pleaded. ‘Accept it’s over!’

  He couldn’t, Charlie realized. Not yet, though maybe he should after that afternoon’s fuck-up. ‘I guess you’re right.’

  ‘Welcome back!’ greeted the Director-General.

  Walter Foster smiled, although uncertainly, looking between the man and Patricia Elder, unsure what sort of meeting it was going to be. At once he blurted: ‘I believe it was essential I leave: it wasn’t panic or anything like that.’

  ‘We’re sure it wasn’t,’ soothed the woman.

  ‘You said it had to be an on-the-ground decision,’ continued the man, unconvinced by her assurance.

  ‘It’s officially recorded, on file,’ said Miller. ‘We’re glad you’re back. We need your impressions: everything. Far better than written reports.’

  Foster relaxed, very slightly. ‘Quite simple. Snow’s blown: they’re just waiting their time. Maybe waiting for something positively incriminating, although I’m not sure they’ll bother.’

  ‘And Snow himself?’

  Foster, who was perched on the very edge of the visitor’s chair in the Director-General’s office, had finally to look away from their concentrated attention, disguising the avoidance as a moment of head-lowered contemplation, properly to answer the query. Tentatively he said. ‘He is not an easy person. Never has been.’

  ‘Go on,’ urged Patricia Elder.

  Foster hardly needed the prompting. ‘He and I never hit it off: it was always particularly difficult.’

  ‘His last complete report was a refusal to work with you any longer,’ Miller pointed out.

  Instantly Foster inferred criticism. ‘I am extremely sorry about the breakdown. I did everything I believed proper and safe to correct it. Followed your orders from here to the letter. Nothing worked.’

  ‘That becomes clear, from your side of the exchanges,’ said the Director-General.

  Foster relaxed again. ‘He’s extremely arrogant. Refuses to accept that he is under any sort of official scrutiny.’

  ‘What do you think?’ said Patricia Elder.

  ‘He’s unquestionably under suspicion.’

  Miller waved a hand generally towards the folders in their neat order on his desk. ‘There didn’t seem to be any doubt, from what you already provided. So it’s the arrogance that’s preventing his coming out?’

  ‘He insisted it’s the Jesuit Curia that holds the power of withdrawal over him,’ qualified the former liaison man. ‘He won’t accept that he’s been compromised. He thinks there will always be an explanation to satisfy the authorities.’

  ‘We’re having trouble with the Technical Division, over the photographs,’ disclosed Patricia, slightly changing the direction of the debriefing. ‘Zhengzhou is no trouble: they were virtually tourist shots, apart from identifying Li for our records. It’s the Shanghai prints we can’t successfully alter.’

  ‘Not at all?’ queried Foster. He had been right, getting out when there was still the chance: he couldn’t conceive what a Chinese detention centre or prison would be like. Whatever, Foster was sure he could not have survived any term of imprisonment without quickly losing his mind.

  Miller took up the explanation. ‘They can, intentionally, be poorly developed. With two that is very effective: reduces the background virtually to make what is technogically interesting on the warships meaningless …’ He paused. ‘But on two it doesn’t work.’

  ‘What about positively changing the Shanghai background?’

  ‘He was photographing away from the city and the Bund, towards the river. It’s impossible,’ dismissed Miller.

  Foster smiled, pleased as the idea came to him. ‘Why worry about the real photographs at all? Why don’t we send back four completely innocuous photographs of Shanghai that Snow didn’t take?’

  Miller and the woman swapped looks. Patricia said: ‘According to Snow, Li took pictures too. They’ve got a comparison, to put against whatever we provide: every photograph was to be from exactly the same position, with exactly the same climatic conditions, even to the same cloud formations.’

  Beneath his red hair Foster blushed slightly, bringing out the freckles. ‘Can’t we ask the Curia to bring him out?’

  ‘How? And on what grounds?’ demanded the Director-General. ‘We couldn’t explain the reason for our approaching them. Or even how we know a man named Jeremy Snow is a Jesuit priest, in Beijing. Believe me, if that had been a route to follow, we’d have done it weeks ago.’

  Foster flushed further. ‘What then?’

  ‘More persuasion,’ said Patricia Elder.

  There was a brief silence in the room. Then Foster said: ‘By somebody else?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Miller.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Foster, accepting the criticism without it having to be openly made by either of them.

  ‘You were an accredited British diplomat attached to the embassy,’ reminded the woman. ‘You’re out. We’re saved official embarrassment, if Snow gets arrested. The government line will be to deny all knowledge of any Chinese accusation: dismiss the whole thing as nonsense.’

  ‘Which means completely abandoning Snow,’ said Foster.

  ‘He was told to get out,’ said Miller, with a hint of irritability. ‘And we are making another attempt.’

  ‘He won’t come,’ said the liaison man, flatly.

  ‘Then his problems are his own, aren’t they?’ said the Director-General.

  Neither spoke for
several moments after Foster had left. Then Patricia said: ‘He didn’t ask what his next assignment was going to be.’

  ‘Foster’s a fool whose use is over,’ dismissed Miller.

  ‘What are we going to do with him?’

  Miller shrugged. ‘Something internal, I suppose. Nothing we need to decide in a hurry. You ready for Gower?’

  The woman nodded: ‘Ten o’clock tomorrow. His flight leaves in the afternoon.’

  ‘I wonder if it will work,’ said Miller, unexpectedly reflective.

  ‘I wish to Christ I knew,’ said Patricia.

  Twenty-three

  Gower’s final, eve-of-departure briefing was given by Patricia Elder alone. She provided two identifying photographs of Snow, explained he was a priest and described the need to get him out as an operational tragedy. She went carefully through the contact and meeting procedures, making Gower repeat them until she was satisfied he had completely memorized them.

  ‘We couldn’t risk a spy-cell accusation, involving Snow and Foster,’ said the deputy Director. ‘And we still can’t. Don’t set up any contact with Snow outside the embassy, where you’re vulnerable and beyond diplomatic protection. Use the Taoist temple signal to get Snow to a letter drop of your choice. And use the drop to bring him to the embassy. Tell him it’s his last chance. He either comes out, or we’re severing all responsibility: disowning him.’

  ‘What if he goes on refusing?’

  Patricia produced the Shanghai pictures from the folder on her desk. ‘He’ll never even reach the airport unless he hands these over to the Chinese. The top four are quite innocent, but we’ve tricked them, to be slightly different from any copy prints his escort might have taken. It’ll confuse them: occupy their time working that out. The rest are the important ones: they told us a lot about Chinese naval technology. We’ve doctored them, too: as much as our technical people say is possible. But it’ll show, under scientific examination. Make it absolutely clear to Snow that these pictures give him time to run. But that’s all. If he doesn’t come out with you, they’ll be used against him to prove he’s an agent. If he accuses us of blackmailing him, tell him he’s damned right: that’s exactly what we’re doing.’

  ‘You’re showing a lot of loyalty,’ admired Gower.

  ‘Mutual protection,’ said Patricia Elder.

  Natalia Fedova was far too professional to be panicked by the discovery of Fyodor Tudin’s surreptitious interest in her. She was forewarned: now she had to find some way of being forearmed. Which presented problems of differing urgency.

  She had every right to consult her own records: so an explanation would be easy to provide, if one were officially sought. Not so if she were asked why, from among the thousands of still retained former KGB files on foreign intelligence officers, she had withdrawn the one upon a man with whom she had provable links in the past. She’d have to find a justification to protect herself there. Which still left the biggest problem of all: not knowing if consulting the files was all that Tudin was doing. And what she didn’t know, she couldn’t guard against.

  Very quickly Natalia contradicted herself. That wasn’t the biggest problem. The biggest problem was that now she was aware of being spied upon, she would have to abandon any hope of locating Charlie Muffin to tell him he was a father.

  Twenty-four

  The apprehension settled deep within him during the long outward flight. Gower went through the pretence of trying to sleep but couldn’t, lying cocooned in an airline blanket for hours in the darkened, droning aircraft, trying instead to exorcize the unformed ghosts: to put everything in order in his mind and anticipate what he was likely to encounter. Had he been told to do that, or not to do that, during the final, street-wise training sessions? He couldn’t remember. At once fresh anxiety flared, because that had certainly been one of the edicts, always to remember, always to be aware. The scruffy man who’d refused to be identified had told him it was all right to feel nervous. But how nervous?

  Nothing in the training had equipped him to work in Beijing. Apart from the two inadequate briefing sessions with the deputy Director-General and from what he’d learned from the equally inadequate file in the few days prior to his visa approval, there’d been no preparation or guidance whatsoever.

  He had to take hold of himself: accept the nervousness but not the panic. It could, in fact, be an easy operation. Certainly one upon which, by specifically obeying London’s instructions, he was always going to be protected, beyond the reach of Chinese seizure.

  He wasn’t bringing anything dangerous into China: the incriminating photographs of Shanghai and all the file material and the methods and locations for clandestine contact were arriving in the untouchable diplomatic bag.

  And again following London’s instructions, he was forbidden to make any contact with the Jesuit priest outside the diplomatically secure embassy compound. Safe again. So why the stomach-emptying fear? Twenty per cent first-time nerves, eighty per cent uncertainty at being in Beijing, Gower decided.

  It wasn’t going to be a difficult operation, he determined, positively. He would always have the protection of the embassy, literally all around him. And the awkward priest – confronted with the ultimatum of the photographs – had no alternative but finally to get out, as he should have done weeks earlier.

  Beijing airport was a maelstrom of people and noise and confusions: Gower thought it was like being in the middle of a river full of debris constantly colliding and bruising into him. Only occasionally did the flow slacken, as people swirled off at the last moment, not to avoid bumping against him but to regard him curiously, as an oddity. As he queued through immigration and Customs control, Gower thought wryly back to another lecture in those final sessions, about awareness of people surrounding him. Recognizing the colonial cliché before it completely formed, he decided it was another lesson difficult to follow here: in a crowd in which there were perhaps only another twenty or thirty Westerners, everyone else did look identical to his unaccustomed eye, making it impossible to isolate one from another.

  Gower had been told he would be met but not precisely how. He stopped and looked uncertainly around him directly outside the official arrival area. At once he saw an almost unnaturally tall, sharp-edged man moving easily through the crowd that still bewildered and jostled him.

  ‘Peter Samuels,’ introduced the man. ‘Political officer. Your photograph’s a good likeness. Good flight? Goes on forever, doesn’t it? Car’s outside. Come on.’ The man was turning practically before the handshake was completed, uninterested in any reply: Samuels loped rather than walked and Gower had difficulty keeping up, constantly obstructed by people.

  Gower was caught by the oddness of the other man’s speech. It was as if the words were glued together and had to be prised apart at the moment of delivery.

  The car, an English Ford, was parked almost directly outside. Samuels left Gower to open the boot himself to dump his suitcase, continuing on around to the driver’s side. There were a reasonable number of cars in the immediate vicinity of the airport, but almost as soon as they got out upon the road they became immersed in bicycles, some engulfed in produce or wrapped bundles. Curiously Gower turned, to look behind them. Another gap in the training, he reflected, remembering the motorway avoidance trick: how was he supposed to identify a bicycle that looked the same as every other bicycle ridden by a man who looked the same as every other rider?

  ‘According to what we’ve been told from London, you’re not going to be here very long?’ said Samuels.

  ‘No,’ agreed Gower, shortly, letting the other man lead.

  ‘Meeting new arrivals is the usual custom,’ announced Samuels. ‘But normally by a chauffeur.’

  Gower began to concentrate inside the car. ‘Yes?’

  Samuels jabbed his finger impatiently on the horn, staring directly ahead at the two-wheeled melee through which he was manoeuvring. ‘Important to understand the way things are here.’

  ‘I’d welcome a
ny guidance,’ said Gower, politely but still cautious.

  ‘Probably the most difficult diplomatic posting in the world,’ said Samuels. ‘But it is opening up. Very slowly. There was a trade delegation here recently that could bring in orders to Britain well in excess of £300,000,000.’

  ‘That’s impressive,’ agreed Gower. Despite his concentration on the other man, he found himself looking curiously at the wooden houses with their curled roof corners by which they were driving. He thought of fairy tales and gingerbread houses.

  For the first time Samuels turned briefly but directly to Gower. ‘Important nothing is done to upset relationships.’

  Gower supposed the political officer would be one of the diplomats aware of his true function. Trust no one, he remembered. And then another edict: In an unknown situation, you take, never give. ‘I understand the point.’

  There was another snatched look. ‘We don’t want anything to sour relations.’

  ‘I can understand that, too.’ He wished he’d managed to sleep on the plane, to avoid the tiredness dragging at him. There was no sun getting through the low, sullen yellow clouds but it was very hot, his shirt already clinging.

  ‘The ambassador wants to see you as soon as you’ve settled in.’

  ‘Entirely at his convenience,’ said Gower.

  They drove carefully, slowed by the unrelieved congestion, for several moments in complete silence. Abruptly Samuels said: ‘Your first overseas assignment?’

  Gower considered lying, not wanting to concede his inexperience, but he didn’t. ‘Yes.’

  Samuels nodded, an impression confirmed. ‘Very necessary you know exactly how people feel.’

  Gower had expected the distancing attitude – could recall the actual warning – but he hadn’t anticipated being confronted by it literally within an hour of getting off the plane. He felt an edge of temper but quickly curbed it. There was still no reason for him to be cowed by the overbearing manner of a man who rolled words around in his mouth. Intentionally difficult, Gower said: ‘Feel about what?’