The Blind Run
Page 26
‘Christ!’ said Charlie.
‘He won’t be able to go on forever, of course,’ said Wilson. ‘The same murder warrant exists against him. The understanding is that he can run whenever he wants. Knowing Sampson, I expect him to stay for the agreed period. Five years. For five years he’s going to feed us everything he can. And when he gets back here I’m personally going to see that he gets every reward and honour it’s possible for him to have.’
‘You should have told me,’ insisted Charlie, flat-voiced. ‘You really should have told me.’
The relevant times were logged and the evidence was in her favour and Kalenin decided the woman had made a desperate attempt to stop the escape. It had been his mistake wrongly to send the seizure squads to the spy school and to Charlie Muffin’s apartment. Only later – too late – did he identify from photographs the stranger whose abrupt entry into the British embassy was probably timed thirty minutes after Natalia Fedova’s attempted approach to him, an approach Kalenin now realised he should have responded to earlier. By the time the photograph had been identified as that of Charlie Muffin the damned man was already aboard the aircraft at Sheremetyevo. Kalenin had been halfway to the airport when the report came in on the car radio that the aircraft had taken off. They were fools, not to have stormed it; or to have shot the tyres out instead of standing helplessly around waiting for orders from higher authority. In his fury, Kalenin determined they would regret that indecision for the rest of their imprisoned days. The KGB chairman stopped the reflection, coming back to the woman sitting nervously in front of him.
‘Again,’ insisted Kalenin. ‘Tell me the salient points again.’
‘I encouraged the affair between us,’ repeated Natalia. ‘Without having any evidence I could bring before you or anyone else I was unhappy with the initial interviews and again with his performance at Balashikha.’ Natalia paused, unsure if she were fully expressing herself as she intended. ‘Never any evidence; no proof. Just a feeling. When we were together there was always an attitude, an uncertainty. Again, only a feeling. I started to follow him. Twice it was the same rendezvous, the GUM department store. It was obviously a point of contact. I followed him there again today, because I wanted positive proof that something was not as we suspected it. I knew he saw me. There was no obvious indication, but I knew I had been identified.’
‘So he fled,’ said Kalenin, reflectively. ‘He penetrated us, because of the stupidity of someone who should have known better. Damn Alexei Berenkov!’ He looked up at Natalia. ‘You’ve no doubt at all about the person you saw him meet on every occasion?’
‘None,’ said Natalia. ‘I knew, of course, why my debriefing was cut short. Knew what Edwin Sampson was being called upon to do. It was definitely Sampson, at every meeting. Despite all the indications to the contrary, that they disliked each other, they retained contact.’
‘Charlie Muffin is a survivor,’ mused Kalenin. ‘A professional survivor. Knowing you’d identified him, he’d have cut his losses and abandoned everything: better to save part of an operation than nothing at all.’
‘There’s still Sampson.’
‘Yes,’ said Kalenin, his fury returning. ‘There’s still Sampson and by the time his interrogation is over there is absolutely nothing that Sampson will not have told us.’
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 work 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 persecution during the English Reformation.
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al 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 © 1985 by Brian Freemantle
cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
A Biography of Brian Freemantle
Copyright Page