Charlie’s Apprentice (27 page)

‘If, in the interim, you come to believe you cannot fulfil that schedule I expect you to advise me. In any event, I would like weekly progress reports.’ Natalia did not think she had left any avenue for escape or evasion: three months was an impossible time-frame and Tudin was going to be racked twenty-four hours a day even to attempt it, before finally having, in the recordable written form she had stipulated, to admit he had failed. And still she wasn’t finished with the man.

Once more Natalia turned back to the other men assembled in front of her. While none of them was betraying any readable reaction, Natalia believed she could discern a respectful wariness from some of them: maybe even fear. ‘We have considered the immediate past, and to an extent what we hope to create, to make our reorganization complete. To give all of you an indication of how full I want the exchange of information to be at future conferences like this, I want briefly to talk of an active operation I have already initiated, among certain overseas
rezidentura
.’

She watched several of the division chiefs prepare to take notes.

‘Some years ago, I was involved in a specific operation to identify a member of the British external service,’ continued the woman. ‘For reasons that do not concern this conference, the operation was not a complete success. But recently I consulted the file to remind myself of it, because of official appointments that have been made in the British SIS, MI5 and the American Central Intelligence Agency. Learning from the mistakes of that earlier failed attempt, I have ordered London and Washington to create the most definitive and exhaustive records in all the past and recent history of this Directorate, not just upon the Director-Generals and Director of the British and American organizations, but upon as many division heads and active serving officers as it is possible to identify …’

Natalia looked briefly sideways, to Tudin. He was sitting with his mouth slightly open and staring not at the table before him but at some spot on the floor beyond. Natalia’s impression was of someone absolutely stunned. To account for the brief attention upon her deputy, she said: ‘I have initiated the programme in those two countries because of the recently announced appointments to which I have referred and because
rezidentura
are fully in place and operational in embassies there. When we are properly organized in the former satellites and republics, I want similar tracing programmes conducted there. As I said at the very beginning, this new Directorate is being invested practically with the status of a ministry. I intend it always to qualify as such, if not actually in name.’

Natalia stared around the room, beginning to feel the strain of her performance. ‘Any questions?’

No one spoke.

She’d done it! Natalia decided, exultantly. She’d devastatingly reversed any threat from Fyodor Tudin, virtually making his future in the Directorate impossible. And she had evolved a foolproof way to locate Charlie Muffin by openly using the entire resources of the Russian Federation’s intelligence service. Indulging herself, Natalia decided she had managed the sort of Machiavellian manipulation of which Charlie himself would have been proud. Abruptly, quite unprompted, the sort of recollection she had been seeking for so long came with that idle reflection. It was incomplete and hazy but she was sure it could be important: a long-ago conversation, when he had been here in Moscow. Something about his having a bedridden mother, who at that time would be missing the regular visits he made. He’d talked about the home she was in: described something particular about the part of England where it was situated. But what, she asked herself, desperately: a half-memory wasn’t any good. No good at all.

Within an hour of returning to her office, the satisfaction at defeating Tudin and the hope that the long-sought recollection was coming at last were washed away by a new and far more immediate crisis.

Natalia realized that the tempo at which the demand was channelled to her was clearly speeded by the official enquiry she had earlier made at Mytninskaya, coupled obviously with her rank: the delay, from the initial approach, was less than two days, which for Russia was amazingly fast.

What she expected was to be told by an aide that Eduard had finally tried to find her at the old apartment. She was even beginning to consider how to react to an approach she had already decided she did not want, so that in her distracted surprise she echoed what the secretariat aide had really said. ‘The Militia!’

‘From headquarters, at Petrovka,’ confirmed the man. ‘The message says it’s urgent.’

Because of the monitor he had established, Fyodor Tudin also learned very fast of the Militia enquiry, within an hour of Natalia being told. He’d already decided in the brief but stomach-opening interval since their public confrontation that the only way to save himself was to destroy Natalia Nikandrova Fedova before she succeeded in destroying him, which she had come close to doing that day.

Actually squeezing his eyes shut, he thought: dear God – or whoever it is who controls people’s destinies – let this be the way to defeat her.

Twenty-eight

Gower awoke within thirty minutes of his usual time, pleased at the apparent recovery from jetlag. As he made instant coffee, he planned his day: he’d climb Coal Hill to explore the drops there, revisit the Forbidden City to get the necessary places marked indelibly in his mind, and in the afternoon pick a route to take him past the Taoist temple where the routine to bring Jeremy Snow to the embassy had to begin.

Begin today? Gower sat with his elbows on the narrow kitchen table, both hands around his cup, considering his own question. It was still too soon. He hadn’t yet visited two of the three places with which he had to familiarize himself. And there was that much-repeated insistence from his last, unnamed teacher always to set up an escape route before ever thinking of beginning anything. At that moment he hadn’t started to consider how he and the priest were going to get out. But what was there to consider? There was only one conceivable way: by air. So there were air guides to be consulted, reservations to be made, routes to be chosen.

Ridiculous, then, to think of leaving a signal and filling a drop today. It would have to be spread over several days, at least. Certainly a week. Not a delay of nervous reluctance, Gower assured himself: anything but. It was a professionally required period in which to work properly to guarantee the demands imposed from London and from here. He
needed
that amount of time – might need more – to get an awkward priest to safety and remove any risk of exposure and political embarrassment. And to remove also, of course, the risk of harm to the priest.

Gower wished the self-doubt was not so readily there, always waiting on the sidelines of his mind, too swift to intrude itself into any uncertain thought.

He tried mundane activity to slough off the introspection, tidying the kitchen and making his own bed in advance of the room-boy’s attendance. He had just finished setting his snares when there was a peremptory rap on the door, startling him.

‘You were away from the embassy all day yesterday, apart from the time you spent with Nicholson,’ declared Samuels, scarcely bothering with any greeting. ‘Have you forgotten what the ambassador said he wanted?’

Gower had. ‘Sorry?’ he queried, hopefully.

Samuels sighed, with predictable condescension. ‘You are supposed to be surveying the facilities of the embassy.’

‘And also concluding what I’ve been sent here to do as quickly as possible,’ countered Gower, ignoring his earlier reflections.

‘We have Chinese staff: gardeners and cleaners. And security officers we know about on the gates as well as those we don’t know about, elsewhere,’ said Samuels. ‘It is important you visibly appear to be fulfilling a proper function.’

After the specific London instructions about protocol and the avoidance of offence, Gower accepted he had to defer to what amounted to an order, although he didn’t enjoy taking orders from a man like Peter Samuels. ‘Nicholson said he expected to spend some time with me.’

‘He’s your man,’ agreed the political officer. At once there was the reversal of attitude that had occurred the previous day. Samuels smiled and said: ‘Everything OK?’

‘The map was useful: thanks for the suggestion,’ said Gower. ‘I …’ he stopped, realizing what he was going to say, then decided he wasn’t disclosing anything. ‘I had a look around the Forbidden City. Might go again, later.’

‘Fascinating,’ agreed Samuels, seeming positively friendly. ‘You could spend a month there and still not see all of it.’

Taking advantage of an encounter he hadn’t expected, Gower said: ‘I might want to look at what was pouched to me from London.’ Conscious of the wariness that instantly came to the other man, Gower hurried on: ‘Not to keep here, in these quarters. I just want to check it through.’

Samuels nodded, slowly. ‘I’m going to be in my office all day. Come there when you’re ready. Let’s go and find Nicholson, shall we?’

The gabbling Scotsman, whose appointed position emerged as the junior lawyer in the embassy’s legal department, was as effusively affable as the previous day. Totally unprepared for what he was being called upon to do, which he acknowledged to be an oversight, Gower asked Nicholson, with the experience of a resident, to decide the inspection by taking him to those facilities in the embassy the man believed most in need of improvement. That brought them back at once to the accommodation wing, for which Gower was grateful, reckoning he could prolong the charade in that one section for enough of that day to comply with Samuels’ insistence, without needing to spend any longer in the embassy itself. He trailed behind Nicholson, genuinely agreeing that the majority of the fittings and furnishings were out of date and inadequate, apologizing to the wives upon whom they intruded in some of the occupied flats. He listened patiently to their more forceful complaints after he was introduced as a Foreign Office inspector: in two flats he dutifully sat and drank the offered coffee, sympathetically nodded and tut-tutting, all the while feeling the fraud that he was.

It was close to noon when they recrossed the forecourt to the main building, and with the morning wasted Gower agreed to lunch with Nicholson in the embassy mess. On their way there the persistent lawyer-diplomat detoured to enrol Gower as a temporary member of the social club. Inside the dining-room there was virtually a moving line of introductions: when Nicholson announced Gower’s proclaimed purpose for being there nearly everyone grumbled that the survey was long overdue. As he had that morning with the aggrieved wives, Gower felt vaguely disconcerted at deceiving so many people so obviously, but supposed he shouldn’t: it had to be all part of the job to which he was still adjusting. Halfway through the meal, he saw Samuels enter and take a seat at the far side of the room. The political officer ignored him. Gower guessed the mood pendulum had swung back in the opposite direction.

Gower pleaded the need to get the problems he’d discovered that morning into a preliminary report to avoid continuing the pointless exercise in the afternoon. They made arrangements to resume the following morning. Gower declined the offer to eat again with the Nicholsons that night.

Remembering his protective idea of the previous day, believing it showed he was thinking and acting as he should, Gower went back to his quarters to collect his camera before setting out for the second time. Sure of the direction from his earlier excursion and knowing, too, that he would not be able to pick up any follower directly outside the legation, Gower moved off without pause towards the Forbidden City. He measured his pace today and once away from the embassy repeated the attempt to discover company, deviating from the shortest route and then suddenly backtracking on himself. Yet again no one reversed direction in obvious pursuit. Close to the square he tried again, halting abruptly at a street-stall he had already isolated, using sign language to buy a covered carton of yoghurt and staying there to drink it, able while he was doing so to turn this way and that like the interested first-time visitor he was, surveying everyone around him. He could recognize no one drinking or loitering around the stall whom he had seen before, closer to the embassy. No one moved off when he finished his drink to continue towards the square. All around him, the steel-tipped shoes tapped and chattered, like pavement cicadas.

Today Gower ignored the Great Hall, immediately re-entering the Forbidden City. He checked himself just in time from taking the same route as before, instead following different paths and alleys and carefully not stopping at two of the designated message spots. At the others he used the convenient camera as an excuse to stop and study them in detail: remembering the incriminating problem of the pictures the priest had taken, Gower was careful with the exposures it was protectively necessary to take, each time shooting so that the concealment he was detailing in his mind was on the peripheral edge of every frame. He spent longer in the City than he had on the first occasion, lingering and photographing a lot of other locations with apparently more concentrated interest than he’d shown in the places for which he was really visiting the site.

Coal Hill, built from the earth dug out to make the moat for the Forbidden City, was a rolling hump conveniently covered with trees and shrubs and close-knit bushes, surmounted at its very top by a traditional pagoda with three tip-cornered roofs, one on top of the other, like a nipple on a breast. It was laced by paved walkways and in places guarded, like the Forbidden City, by armoured lion figures and hard-shelled monsters from myths he did not know.

Gower climbed steadily towards the top, but not directly, meandering from path to path to find his drops, turning frequently not just to search behind him but using the always pointless check to gaze out from the elevation afforded by the hill out over the ancient city spread out below.

There were two places established on the hill. One was by a tulip-lamped light standard, where a message could be slipped beneath the rotund bottom of a permanently fixed rubbish bin. The other was just two paths to the left, on one of the statues, where the right front paw of one of the snarling lions had lifted slightly with the aged distortion of the metal, creating a barely visible but very usable crack into which a single stiff card could be inserted.