Charlie’s Apprentice Page 3

  Natalia supposed there was a supreme irony that with her elevated rank of Major-General she now occupied the position once held – and finally abused – by Alexei Berenkov, who had been prepared to sacrifice her in his personal vendetta against Charlie Muffin, an adversary for whom one-time admiration became unreasoning competitiveness. Now Berenkov was disgraced, dismissed and stripped of all rank and privilege. And Charlie, who’d beaten Berenkov first with a phoney defection to Moscow and then again by refusing to fall into the London trap as a supposed Russian agent, was … was where? She wished, how very much she wished, that she knew. Whatever and wherever, he would still be in intelligence. He was too good to dump.

  Natalia slowed the car at the traffic intersection at what she still thought of as Marx Prospekt, despite the Communist-cleansing name change which had altered the street maps of Moscow. She turned almost instinctively at the pause, looking into the rear of the car, annoyed with herself for forgetting to leave the bag with the clothes change and fresh nappies at the crèche: she knew there would be spare things available at the nursery but she’d still telephone as soon as she got to the office.

  Was it allowing too much self-pity for her to think she had been sacrificed, personally? Yes, she decided at once. Charlie had acted the only way possible – the only way he knew – as a professional intelligence officer. The setup was wrong and they’d both known it. She’d decided to take the chance. He hadn’t. And in the event she’d managed to rejoin the Soviet visiting group from which she had been prepared to defect without being missed, so there had been no inquiry or punishment.

  The traffic began to move and Natalia looked away from the back of the car. Sasha couldn’t be considered a factor: neither had known then. Would it have made a difference, if Charlie had known? Perhaps. She liked to think it would. But she could never be sure. Determinedly Natalia rejected another reflection, this one probably more pointless than the rest. Whatever there might have been – could have been – for her and Charlie Muffin had ended: closed off forever, with no possibility of ever being opened or restored.

  She had a baby whom she adored. A privileged life, despite the democratization which was supposed to have swept privilege away. And a high executive position, providing everything she could conceivably need, in addition to privilege. She was a lucky woman.

  But not complacent. She could not afford to be, with Fyodor Tudin at her back. She’d made a mistake, agreeing to Tudin remaining as her immediate deputy. He was an old-timer, a relic of as far back as the Brezhnev era. Natalia knew she would always have to be wary of the depths of Tudin’s resentment of her being the Directorate chairman, rather than him.

  As Natalia edged off the ring road at Yasenevo, into the skyscraper block of the original and still retained First Chief Directorate, she wondered if Charlie was as fortunate. She hope so.

  Just over fifteen hundred miles away, Charlie Muffin stared down at the summons that had finally arrived from the deputy Director-General and hoped exactly the same thing.

  Four

  Patricia Elder’s suite came off the second arm of the new triangular ninth-floor layout at the centre of which reigned the starchily formal Julia Robb.

  But the deputy Director’s room had none of the sterility of Miller’s. There were two flower arrangements, one on a small, elaborately carved cabinet of a sort that Charlie had never seen before in a government office. There was a display of art deco figures on the same cabinet and on a mantelpiece in the centre of which was a gold filigree and ormolu clock. There were screening curtains of festooned lace at the window, which had a partial view of the Big Ben clock and the crenellated roofing of the Parliament buildings. The deputy Director sat in front of the window, at a proper wooden and leather desk, not something fashioned from metal and plastic which looked as if it had popped out of a middle-price Christmas cracker. The only similarity Charlie could find with Miller’s quarters was the complete absence of any personal photographs. There would have hardly been room on the desk anyway: there were two red box containers and a string-secured manila folder Charlie recognized from the three – or was it four? – disciplinary hearings he’d endured over the years.

  The woman’s suit was as formal as that of their initial meeting: today’s was grey, high-collared and as figure-concealing as before. Charlie automatically checked her left hand: there was still no wedding ring.

  She studied him just as intently with her black-brown eyes, and at once Charlie felt like a schoolboy called to explain his hand up a knicker leg behind the bicycle sheds.

  Patricia breathed heavily, before she spoke: the sigh, dismissive, remained in her voice. ‘So now we come to talk about Charles Edward Muffin …’

  Charlie easily remembered the last two occasions he’d been addressed with such formality: both times at the Central Criminal Court at London’s Old Bailey. The first a set-up prosecution and an escape-intended imprisonment, all to create a phoney defection to the then Soviet Union: the unsuspected beginning of so many things. The initial encounter – his debriefing – with Natalia that had led to a love neither of them had foreseen and which he, ultimately, had ruined by not going to her in London. The operation – the purpose of which he’d never known until he’d innovated his own special self-protection – to discredit Alexei Berenkov. Which had nevertheless partially succeeded and led to Berenkov’s close-run retribution, involving a manipulated Natalia again. The second court appearance had been phoney too, like the announced ten year sentence, to convince the Russians his entrapment had succeeded in part. It should have protected Natalia, as well. There was no way of knowing if it had. Double disaster. Double abandonment. Belated double despair. So many things … Charlie stopped the nostalgia, forcing himself to concentrate, although the recollection of the trial stayed with him. ‘That sounds very official: should I stand to receive my sentence?’

  There was no facial relaxation. She patted the box files and said: ‘There’s enough to merit a sentence.’

  ‘A man is always presumed innocent until proven guilty by the weight of evidence. I was always innocent!’ said Charlie, brightly, trying to build bridges between himself and his new Controller.

  ‘There are parts that are impressive,’ she said. ‘But the bad outweighs the good: Charlie Muffin, forever making up his own rules but to whom no rules ever need apply.’ She paused. ‘Right?’

  ‘I’ve never failed, when it mattered,’ Charlie fought back. ‘When operations went wrong, it’s because they would have gone wrong anyway: they were impractical or incorrectly planned. Or I needed to innovate to survive, not having been properly briefed.’ What the fuck was this? It was like having to explain himself for being caught behind the bicycle sheds!

  ‘One of the central themes,’ isolated the deputy Director. ‘Your personal survival.’

  A poor shot, seized Charlie. ‘I’ve always thought personal survival is a fairly basic principle; a blown intelligence officer is a failed operation and invariably an embarrassment, to be explained away. There aren’t any embarrassments in those files to be explained away.’

  ‘Not publicly.’

  ‘All that matters,’ insisted Charlie. ‘What the public don’t know doesn’t concern them. They can just go on sleeping safely in their beds while the shadowy people clean up the shit.’

  She nodded, seemingly conceding the argument and giving no reaction to his swearing. ‘What comes first, for you? Personal survival? Or the operation?’

  He didn’t have to be defensive about that. Charlie nodded to the files. ‘If you’ve read those thoroughly you don’t have to ask me that!’ The indignation was genuine.

  ‘You’re offended?’

  ‘With justification.’ Charlie still wished he didn’t feel as if he were explaining himself to a school principal.

  ‘Maybe it’s all semantics anyway,’ she said, dismissive again. ‘All in the past. The dinosaur age. Cold War, white hats, black hats.’

  Quite a bran tub of mixed metaphors, tho
ught Charlie: he didn’t believe dinosaurs existed in the Ice Age. Expectantly he said: ‘Now we’re looking into the new and different future I’ve been reading so much about in the last few months?’

  ‘Some of us are,’ she said, heavily. She extracted some obviously new and therefore recent sheets from the manila file. ‘You don’t seem to agree with a lot of what you’ve been asked to comment upon.’

  Charlie regarded her cautiously. Again he’d tried to avoid anticipating this encounter, but he had not expected it to be like this, so openly and consistently hostile. ‘In a Europe more unstable than it has been for fifty years, I considered many of the opinions naïve.’

  ‘Explain naïve!’

  ‘There were suggestions, in at least three theses, that because of the end of the Cold War – whatever that was – intelligence services could be scaled down.’

  ‘“Whatever that was”,’ she quoted, questioningly.

  Quick on her feet, judged Charlie. ‘Why don’t you define the Cold War for me?’

  ‘Why don’t you define it for me?’ she came back, easily.

  Shit, thought Charlie. ‘Simplistic, because there was a Wall dividing Berlin and physical barriers between Eastern and Western Europe. Newspaper shorthand: spy-writers’ cliché.’

  ‘What did you think it was?’

  Shouldn’t have let her be the first to speak. ‘I didn’t think it was anything,’ said Charlie, lobbing a difficult return.

  She frowned and he was glad. ‘You’re not making sense.’

  ‘You know I am,’ insisted Charlie. He’d had her running about: not exactly broken her serve but getting some of the difficult returns back over the net.

  ‘The coming down of the barriers doesn’t matter, in reality?’ There was an uncertainty in her voice, beyond it being a question.

  ‘Not our reality.’

  ‘Tell me what our reality is,’ she demanded, gaining confidence.

  ‘What it has always been,’ said Charlie. ‘Finding out the intention of other governments and other world leaders, in advance of it becoming obvious, so that our leaders are not wrong-footed. Which means we now have to learn the intentions of more than a dozen separate governments of countries that used to be the Soviet Union but now consider themselves independent: the Russian Federation – which is also splitting up internally – most of all. And Czechoslovakia. And Poland. And Hungry. And Bulgaria. And how East is really going to integrate with West Germany. And whether communism is going to collapse in China, as it’s collapsed everywhere else. And what a close-to-bankruptcy America that thought it was the world’s policeman until Vietnam is going to do, now that it’s lost the black hat, white hat simplicity. And which bulging-eyed, Third World despot is going to channel the four or five million he hasn’t already put into his Swiss bank account into buying a nuclear device to threaten the next door neighbour Third World despot too busy at the time putting United Nations and pop concert famine aid money into another Swiss account. And then there’s the Middle East …’

  She didn’t bother with an answer. Her sigh was dismissive enough. ‘The Director told you there were to be changes? That there was no longer room – nor intention – for special relationships?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘So this is reorganization time.’

  Charlie abruptly felt a deep, gouging hollowness. ‘Am I being retired?’

  Patricia Elder held his look for several seconds before lowering her head over the written account of Charlie Muffin’s entire career as an intelligence officer. Remaining head-bent, she said: ‘We couldn’t risk your being retired. Beyond our control, until it was too late.’

  There was a distant snap of hope, a spark in the darkness. ‘What then?’

  The dossiers got another momentary pat. ‘You were good: bloody good.’

  Past tense, Charlie noted. ‘So?’

  ‘You’ve still got something to contribute. By teaching others.’

  ‘Teaching!’

  ‘Not the manual stuff: there are staff colleges for that. Or your insubordination, either. There’s no place for that in the sort of service the Director-General and I envisage. I want you to teach selected officers what isn’t in the manuals …’ She allowed herself a smile: one tooth crossed slightly over the other in the front. ‘You’re so very proud of being a survivor. Instruct the new people how to survive, as you did for so long.’

  Charlie was listening, of course – to every word – but his mind was way ahead of what she was saying. Over, he realized: his operational life was over, being ended right here with matter-of-fact efficiency by a woman who considered him an anachronism. A dinosaur. The hollowness was still there but different now: it was an empty helplessness, at having taken away from him something he never thought he’d lose. Charlie had never liked feeling helpless.

  ‘I’m not sure I’d be any good at it.’

  ‘You’ll have to learn,’ she said, impatiently.

  ‘I could decline?’ suggested Charlie, who never in his life had refused any assignment, because the job was not one in which a person could refuse.

  She pushed the files to one side of the desk, with further impatience. ‘In which case you could be assigned to Records: see a lot of boxes and folders like these. Or Archives. Same job except that the boxes and folders are older. Or department or safe-house security, the sort of thing usually allocated to retired military personnel. You’ve probably met a few of them in the past.’

  He had, Charlie remembered. Upright, polished-booted men in gate-houses or hallway cubby-holes, trying to imbue a meaningless existence with a sense of urgency, automatically calling everyone ‘sir’ and standing to attention. Charlie had actually thought of them as dinosaurs. ‘Or I could retire, if you’ve no further use for me.’

  ‘You haven’t been listening!’ she said, curtly. ‘I didn’t say we’ve no further use for you. The opposite. I said you still had something to contribute. You’re not eligible for retirement, which we wouldn’t accept in any case. I also said I want you in a position I can control. I’m not risking you as a wild card: offering yourself as some sort of commentator on intelligence on television or in newspapers, like all those supposed experts who emerge whenever espionage becomes newsworthy and don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.’

  Charlie opened his mouth to argue her wild-card nonsense, but changed his mind because there wasn’t any point: she wasn’t going to be persuaded to any opinion other than her own. Instead he said: ‘I thought Henry Wilberforce got slavery abolished in the 1800s.’

  Patricia Elder gave another of her heavy sighs. ‘I’ve told you what your new role is to be in this department.’

  There was no point in arguing. He had to take it: give himself time to think. It didn’t necessarily have to be permanent: Director-Generals and deputies with new-born theories came and went, so there was always the chance of recovering. ‘Selected officers?’

  She nodded. ‘On a one-to-one basis. They will have graduated from all the usual instructional courses: this is going to be something beyond the normal …’ There was another frigid smile. ‘You tell me how long it will take to pass on your particularly special expertise.’

  He couldn’t teach instinct: how to know that something was wrong, without anything apart from a feeling on which to base that judgement. ‘It’ll depend, upon your selected officers.’

  ‘You’ll like your first apprentice. He’s good.’

  ‘I wouldn’t consider liking him!’ said Charlie, instantly.

  ‘That was thoughtless,’ she apologized at once. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘I’ll operate from here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let’s hope it works,’ said Charlie, rising to leave.

  ‘It’s got to work,’ said the woman, as if she were affronted by the suggestion of failure. ‘And it was William.’

  Charlie stopped at the door. ‘What?’

  ‘The Member of Parliament who campaign
ed against slavery in the 1800s. It was William Wilberforce. Not Henry.’

  Charlie had been worried she wouldn’t respond. He smiled and said: ‘Well done.’ Her face tightened, in belated realization. Not much of a victory, decided Charlie. But something at least. He was a schoolmaster now: schoolmasters knew things like that.

  At her control post at the apex of the triangle Julia Robb scarcely looked up as he left. Bugger you, too, thought Charlie.

  Miller personally poured the tea, offering it across his desk to the woman. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘As I intended,’ she said, which was a slight exaggeration.

  ‘He’s got to do the job properly. Believe in its importance.’

  Patricia Elder shook her head. ‘His feeling is against me. I’ve read everything that’s ever been written about the man. Know him. He’ll do the job, to the very best of his ability. And it’s a pretty damned good ability. He out-argued me, a couple of times.’

  ‘Everything set up with Gower?’

  The woman nodded this time. ‘I’ve fixed the meeting.’

  ‘Let’s hope it works,’ said the Director.

  Patricia Elder laughed, abruptly. ‘That’s what Charlie said. It was interesting, listening to him. His views about the future of intelligence are exactly the same as ours.’

  ‘I hope he doesn’t think we’re fools.’