Charlie’s Apprentice (13 page)

In a country where termination is quite casually used as a method of birth-control, it would have been extremely easy for Natalia to have had an abortion. She had scarcely considered it. It was just as easy, at the echelon she now occupied, to have and to keep a baby: not that there would have been any stigma attached – and with so few friends, even acquaintances, that hardly mattered anyway – but she had still been officially a married woman within a satisfactory time-frame of the birth, with no cause to justify or explain.

It was during her confinement, with the opportunity to think of little else, that she confronted the impossibility of hating Charlie: of
ever
hating him. Alone in the privileged private ward of the privileged security agency hospital, the perfectly born, beautifully formed Alexandra beside her, Natalia finally tried to come to terms with how she truly felt. Huge sadness, the most obvious. Bitter disappointment that would always be there. But most of all,
above
all, the love: a love that overwhelmed everything, consumed everything.

Which gave her the strongest reason possible for not going to the archives. Having acknowledged her true feelings, Natalia equally recognized that she had to find some way of compartmenting the emotion, locking it securely inside her, like a miser hoarding the most precious treasure. Because unlike a gloating miser, she could never retrieve that lost treasure: never again know the pleasure or the beauty. It was difficult, but Natalia grew to think she could make the sadness and the disappointment bearable, as the weeks went into months and Alexandra became the focus of her entire existence: someone upon whom Natalia could lavish the love she could give to no one else, someone who would always be her unbreakable link to the man she would never see again.

In the final analysis there was no useful, sensible reason to recover Charlie’s private records, to disturb from the securely locked emotional compartments all the heartache Natalia hoped she now had under unshakeable control.

Or was there?

The reflective question – after the other reflective question when she’d failed to discover the whereabouts of Eduard – did not come simply or without contradiction, because nothing came simply or without contradiction when she thought about Charlie Muffin. But Natalia knew she
did
now have her feelings locked, bolted and barred forever.

It wouldn’t be trying to find him, wherever he was, whatever he was doing. That would have been preposterous. It would be finding out as much as she could about the father of her child. One day, inevitably, Alexandra would want to know. Natalia was not sure, at this stage, how or whether she would be able to tell their daughter the truth. Almost certainly not. But at least she owed it to the child to be
able
to answer the questions that might be asked.

The red-starred, Top Priority designation on the bulky, concertina-sectioned folder was overstamped with a discarding ‘Erase – Grade IV marking, indicating minimal remaining importance. Only important to me, thought Natalia. She realized, with surprise, that she was frightened, without knowing what to be apprehensive about.

The moment she opened the file Natalia was aware her emotions were
not
that tightly controlled and that the mere sight of him, even in snatched and grainily blurred photographs, was enough to jar her composure. It was the standard assembly, with photographs in the first section. There was a total of five, arranged in dated sequence, the final two far better quality than the others: she didn’t need the dates to know they had been taken when they had been reunited in London, when she had become unknowingly pregnant. In one of the other, earlier pictures Charlie was actually bending, soothing fingers inside the heel of a sagging left shoe. Natalia began to hurry the photographs back into their pocket, not needing any physical reminder of how he’d looked. But then stopped, expertise taking over from emotion. The pictures were unquestionably of Charlie Muffin, whom she believed she would have known and recognized anywhere. Unquestionably identified, in addition, by their being in an officially created file designated by the man’s name and description. Yet none, not even the later ones, were by themselves sufficient definitely to identify him: simply by the way he was standing or holding himself or half-concealing his face in a head-twisted posture, two could arguably and easily have been of quite a different man.

The first written material was almost twenty years old, paper already yellowed and brittle at the edges.

Charlie had told her of this first episode, but not in detail: the Cold War at its most frigid, Alexei Berenkov already suspected as the London-based Control for one of the most successful Soviet cells in Europe in the late 1960s. Now here, before her,
were
the details. All of them, chronologically set out, easy to comprehend. It had been a Berlin Wall crossing by Charlie and two other SIS officers, to collect the proof legally to bring Berenkov to trial: proof they’d got, because there was a full transcript of the interrogation of the later discovered East German double who’d passed it all over. The next documents in the bundle were the flimsy paper cables, setting out the time – even the vehicle – in which the then unknown Charlie would be making the return, a return that British intelligence and the American CIA had sacrificially leaked to distract from the coordinated crossing back of his two colleagues, with the evidential proof. But it hadn’t been the always cautious, always self-protective Charlie who’d driven the car: it had blown up in the Border Guard crossfire, destroying the identity of whoever the driver had been, providing the diversion for Charlie also safely to cross back to the West by U-Bahn. According to the archive, Charlie had been asked, subsequently, but always refused to supply the name of who he had duped to protect himself.

There was a gap here in the chronology: an actual notation, attested by a signature Natalia could not read, conceding that the interception had been a failure and that the London cell had been wrapped up, Alexei Berenkov with it. The sparse details of Berenkov’s in-camera trial was just a single page concluding with the forty-year sentence.

And then more cable flimsies, from the Soviet embassies in London and Vienna, at first highly suspect but anonymous approaches finally confirmed to be from a man called Charlie Muffin who wasn’t offering secrets or defection. Just a way to wreak retribution upon those prepared to let him be captured or killed, a scheme that eventually enabled Berenkov to be swapped in exchange for the SIS and CIA Directors held in humiliating Soviet detention.

It had meant personal contact, between Charlie and the then head of the First Chief Directorate, General Valery Kalenin, someone else whom she had known but who had long since disappeared into oblivion through KGB changes. Natalia was caught by the assessments that Kalenin had recorded about Charlie.
Absolute professional
was a frequent phrase. Twice the exchange scheme was qualified as being in no way a defection by the Englishman. Kalenin had written:
This is a man believing himself betrayed and vindictively intent upon creating the maximum embarrassment for men who planned to abandon him. I consider it extremely unlikely this man could ever be turned: throughout our meetings he has – although illogically – consistently presented himself as a loyal British intelligence officer. It is a morality difficult to understand but obviously a situation of which we have to take the utmost advantage
.

There was another gap in the timetable, but here again Natalia was able to fill it in for herself, from what Charlie had told her. Of months stretching into more than a year of endless running, dragging the hapless Edith from country to country while he was hunted by the British and American agencies: of his wife’s death, intentionally putting herself in the path of a bullet meant for him: an even greater retribution, against her murderer: of eventual capture, treason trial and British imprisonment with a believed KGB agent, and the phoney jailbreak and defection, to Moscow.

The moment of their meeting, reflected Natalia, enveloped now in smothering recollection. She hardly needed any reminders from the file but she read on, actually studying after the gap of almost six years her own reports of debriefing Charlie Muffin. He’d deceived her, Natalia conceded: just as he’d deceived the repatriated Berenkov and even Valery Kalenin, the man who had earlier decided Charlie would never become a traitor. At once Natalia found the personal contradiction. He’d deceived her professionally, convincing her his defection was genuine, so that she never once suspected the entire exercise to be a discrediting operation against Berenkov. But he’d never deceived her personally. Theirs had been a genuine love – still was on her part – and when, finally, he’d triggered the trap for Berenkov he’d done it in a way that kept her beyond any danger from their intimate relationship.

Now, before her on the desk in black and white, she finally had the confirmation of how successfully he had shielded her. General Kalenin had conducted the inquiry, extending to the absolute limit the friendship that existed between the two men to minimize the harm to Berenkov’s career. And exonerating her completely.

Comrade Colonel Natalia Nikandrova Fedova at all times conducted herself in an exemplary manner
, the General had recorded.
It
was she who finally alerted senior officers that the Englishman’s defection was, after all, a false one. The failure to affect an arrest was that of counter-intelligence not reacting quickly enough upon information supplied by Comrade Fedova
.

Natalia stretched up from the dossier, needing a moment’s break from the jumble of words, passingly amused now at being referred to as ‘Comrade’, which seemed so archaic after all the changes. She remained scarcely conscious of her official surroundings, still wrapped in long-ago memories. She’d believed she would never see Charlie again, after his escape back to England. But the hurt had not been so bad that time. She’d been more easily able to accept the division between their personal, impossible dilemma and what he had to do operationally.

Natalia hunched over the file again, reaching the second inquiry upon Alexei Berenkov, the one from which the man had
not
escaped. Nor deserved to escape. It was not difficult, even in the stilted official language of what virtually amounted to a trial without judge or jury, to gauge Berenkov’s megalomania: the man’s unshakeable belief, even under interrogation, that he was justified to carry on a personal vendetta operation to discredit Charlie Muffin as Charlie Muffin had -minimally because of Kalenin’s intervention – discredited him. It was, she supposed, the dread of every organization such as theirs: that someone with enormous power would become mentally unstable and start abusing it to satisfy private ambitions.

Natalia closed the file, trying to form judgements on the necessarily separate levels, as always finding one overlapping on to the other.

By staying away from the final London rendezvous – the meeting she’d kept, finally deciding to abandon everything and everybody – Charlie had avoided being discredited as a Soviet sympathizer, to prove which Berenkov had created a miasma of additional disinformation material. So yet again – as always – Charlie had proved himself the ultimate survivor.

And by doing so destroyed whatever there could have been between them, personally.

Natalia believed she could have settled with Charlie, in England: certainly now, with the baby. It would have been difficult at first, of course: horrendously so, because she would never have been a defector, never prepared to disclose any secrets from her organization, any more than Charlie had ever been prepared – truthfully – to disclose anything from his side. So the official pressure upon her – upon both of them – would have been staggering. But
with
Charlie she could have endured it, eventually for them to have been together.

In the solitude of her Yasenevo office, Natalia shook her head, as if trying physically to throw off the reminiscence. What might have been could never be: so why had she bothered to go through the charade she had for so long denied herself?

Having at last posed herself the question, Natalia forced herself to answer it, properly for the first time. Because she hadn’t embarked upon it as a meaningless routine, unnecessarily stirring old memories better left undisturbed. She’d studied the dossier with a very determined objective, and the disappointment she felt now was not that of lost chances in the past but of not finding what she had been looking for, in the future.

She’d been seeking the slightest clue from which she might have been able once more to find Charlie. But hadn’t found it.

Within twenty-four hours, in another part of the same building, Fyodor Tudin wondered if he had found the indication he had been seeking, when he learned from her signature against the withdrawal authority that Natalia had studied the file on the Englishman with whom she was linked, in her own personal files.

Was there a weak spot there after all, he wondered.

They’d considered all of Jeremy Snow’s material, working on Miller’s side of the desk with their chairs familiarly together but without any physical contact or even conversation as they went through each report and each photograph. Finally the Director-General said: ‘He did well: damn well.’

‘It’s unfortunate it has to turn out like this,’ agreed Patricia Elder.

‘Never forget the cardinal principle,’ reminded Miller. ‘The means always justifies the end.’

‘Let’s hope it does,’ said the woman.

Fifteen

‘Their separate accounts contradict each other, to a large degree, but it’s fairly obvious there is
some
suspicion.’ As he talked Peter Miller, who was concerned with neatness and order in all things, assembled in edge-to-edge stacks on his desk what had arrived overnight from Beijing. Snow’s information and opinion formed the larger pile, then the photographs, and finally Walter Foster’s account. The Director-General did so with his head habitually to the right, to benefit his better vision from that side.