Charlie’s Apprentice (38 page)

Tudin was floundering. Natalia didn’t think she’d won yet, not as absolutely as she intended, but the hostility from the panel wasn’t so easy to discern any more. She said: ‘The distortion of this matter is not mine. It’s that of Colonel Tudin, for the reasons I have already brought before you. I ask you to insist my question is answered.’

‘Well?’ demanded Lestov, of Eduard.

‘Colonel Tudin promised to recommend leniency,’ said Eduard, doggedly. ‘There was always an understanding between my mother and me prior to any undertaking from Colonel Tudin.’

Natalia risked the silence that lasted until there was a positive shift from the men at the table before saying: ‘So what happened to our understanding? Why did you have to wait another six days in custody after I had been to Petrovka before you were released, to come here? Released upon the instructions of Colonel Tudin?’

Before Eduard could respond to a question she didn’t want answered anyway – believing her intended effect was best achieved
without
an answer – Natalia sat down. The gesture left her son standing as ineffectually as she wanted him to appear and Tudin having to grope to his feet, to indicate that Eduard’s testimony was finished. But Natalia remained ready, believing that the inquiry was swinging in her favour, and when Tudin moved to call the Militia investigator she rose up, stopping him in mid-sentence, asking if she could recall the lawyer. The agreement from Lestov was immediate, which she took to be a good omen.

Alipov rose, as demanded, and Natalia said: ‘You were present at Petrovka when the affidavit was taken?’

‘Of course. That’s why I was there.’

‘At that meeting what promise or undertaking was given to Eduard Igorevich Fedova?’

The lawyer hesitated, looking momentarily at Tudin’s unresponsive slumped back. Then, visibly, he straightened as someone straightens having made a decision. ‘That there would be no prosecution.’

‘By whom was that assurance given?’

‘Colonel Tudin.’

‘Had there at that time – or at any time up until this moment – been any consultation or approval of that amnesty from the Federal Prosecutor?’

‘Not as far as I am aware.’

‘It was given entirely upon the authority of Colonel Tudin?’

‘Yes.’

‘Before or after the taking of the affidavit?’

‘Before.’

‘So the amnesty was an inducement for the testimony?’

Tudin moved to rise, but before he could do so Lestov waved the man down, refusing the interruption.

‘I do not believe there would have been a deposition without such a promise,’ capitulated the lawyer.

As she sat to end the re-examination, Natalia was sure that at least one person had abandoned Tudin. Surely the investigator would have realized by now which was going to be the winning side and be anxious to join it. All he had to do was tell the truth.

Very soon after Kapitsa began to talk Natalia decided there
had
been an attempt at a slanted rehearsal but that it was failing because of the Militia investigator’s effort to distance himself from this unofficial prosecution which was so obviously going wrong.

Kapitsa’s nerves were clearly stretched by his enforced deprivation of nicotine. His hands fluttered in constant movement over the chair-backs and he kept squeezing his eyes shut, in an exaggerated blinking expression. He exposed himself as someone prepared to compromise and bend any legality in a stumbling effort to explain why he had contacted Natalia, openly saying that Eduard – and the men arrested with him – clearly expected Natalia’s intercession to block any prosecution. The admission opened the way for Kapitsa to insist that throughout his discussions with Natalia he had always asserted the need for a prosecution.

‘Did you expect General Fedova to remove her son from any proceedings?’ demanded Tudin.

‘I felt I should discuss the matter with her before formulating any charges,’ allowed Kapitsa, miserably.

‘To what purpose?’ pressed Tudin.

‘I left General Fedova to decide that.’

‘Have you ever brought prosecutions against a high-ranking official – or any member of the family of a high-ranking official – in the State security service?’

‘No.’

‘Do you expect to?’

Kapitsa looked forlornly towards Natalia. ‘No.’

‘Did you expect Eduard Igorevich Fedova to be removed from the situation in which he found himself?’

‘Yes,’ said Kapitsa. His voice was barely above a whisper.

‘What, exactly, did General Fedova say to you after she left the detention cell at Petrovka?’

Kapitsa did not reply at once, and Natalia hoped he was searching for the most innocuous remark she might have made.

‘That she would be in touch very soon,’ he recorded accurately.

It was the ideal moment for Natalia to come into the examination, and she seized it when Tudin sat down, apparently satisfied. ‘Did I get in touch with you very quickly?’

‘No.’

‘Have we met at all from that moment, until today.’

‘No.’

It was not Kapitsa’s fault he was appearing so ineffectual. It was the fault of a far too recent favour-for-favour system and the blind jealousy of a man like Fyodor Tudin, and of no one being really sure whether Russia was going to go forward into new ways, in all things, or fall backwards into the familiar mire of the past. Natalia felt a surge of sympathy for the man who’d acted in the only manner he knew. She said: ‘There was more discussion between us, after I had been to the cells, wasn’t there?’

Kapitsa’s face furrowed, in the effort for recall. ‘Yes.’

‘Did I not say that my son’s arrest – and the interception of the convoy – had to be handled properly, to everyone’s satisfaction?’

Kapitsa nodded, eagerly. ‘Yes. And I said that was what I wanted.’

Natalia was glad the man had picked up on her offer, recognizing at the same time how he had sanitized his original reply. ‘So we were discussing a prosecution?’

She wondered if Kapitsa’s search for a reply she wanted was as obvious to the panel as it was to her. ‘Yes. That’s what I understood.’

‘Did I
ever
, at any time, say or indicate to you that I was going to prevent or stop a prosecution of my son?’

Kapitsa’s hesitation was greater than before. ‘No.’

‘I will not lead you on this question,’ warned Natalia. ‘I want you to recall, as precisely as possible, the remark my son made about embarrassment.’ You’re a detective, trained to remember things, thought Natalia: for God’s sake remember this!

There was a long silence. The man’s hands fluttered for things to do and touch. ‘He was talking about telling me your name and position …’ groped Kapitsa. ‘You agreed, when he guessed, that you had a higher rank than the one he knew …’ The investigator straggled to a halt.

Go on, go on, thought Natalia: she wanted it all. ‘Yes?’ she encouraged.

‘… He said something about there being much more openness in Moscow …’ Kapitsa’s face cleared. ‘And then he went on that it was very easy for people in important positions to be embarrassed: damaged by embarrassment even … and that we didn’t want any embarrassment …’

Natalia gave no outward signal of her relief. She had to risk leading now, to ensure the man answered correctly. ‘Did you interpret that remark as a threat?’

Seizing her guidance, he said: ‘Yes. It was clearly that.’

Enough, decided Natalia. She believed she had weakened Tudin’s attack sufficiently. Now there had to be the
coup de grâce
. She thanked Kapitsa, dismissing him, but remained standing to avoid losing the momentum. Addressing Lestov, she said: ‘If this is the end of what amounts to a prosecution against me, I ask the committee’s permission to call evidence of my own.’

‘A witness?’ queried Lestov.

‘The Federal Prosecutor, Petr Borisovich Korolov,’ confirmed Natalia, formally. The stir went through everybody in the room.

The publicity over John Gower’s arrest was greater in the
People’s Daily
than in the Western media – most of the front page was devoted to it, with a government statement about foreign conspiracies and counter-revolutionary crimes published verbatim – so Jeremy Snow learned of the seizure within forty-eight hours of it happening.

The Taoist temple was not named, but the district of Beijing was, which was sufficient for Snow to realize that he had not been abandoned and that an effort was being made to reach him through the prearranged system.

The priest’s satisfaction was momentary. Not
was
being, he told himself:
had
been. By someone now in custody. Which left him as stranded as ever. It was obviously pointless – dangerous, in fact – to go anywhere near the shrine again, for any other signal, which he had intended to do that day, maintaining the imposed three-day timetable. Or to any of the message drops, which might have been filled and be waiting for him. And anyone going to the British embassy now would risk automatic association in the minds of the permanently watching Public Security Bureau.

With a stab of helplessness, Snow accepted that he didn’t know what to do.

And then, quickly enough for him to have considered it some kind of superior guidance, which he refused to countenance because it would have been an ultimate blasphemy, he did see a way. Partially, perhaps: but still a way. The final inevitable, irrevocable blurring of everything, he recognized at once. So he wouldn’t do it: couldn’t do it. Not inevitable and therefore not irrevocable. He couldn’t prostitute his faith and its tenets.
Wouldn’t
do it.

It would still be a way out, though, partial or not. Once he pacified – perhaps deflected was a better word – Li Dong Ming. He’d try to think of something else: anything else first. Didn’t want to sacrifice ail integrity.

Appropriately Snow’s prayer came from the Book of Lamentations.
Oh Lord
, he thought,
thou hast seen my wrong: judge thou my cause
. Blasphemy, he thought again: therefore utterly inappropriate.

Thirty-eight

‘You’ve seen the newspapers? And television?’ greeted Patricia Elder. She was not sitting at her desk but standing before the window with its distant view of the Houses of Parliament. She was wearing the high-necked, dark green coat dress she had been wearing the morning Charlie had seen her leaving the Regent’s Park penthouse with Miller. It was difficult to imagine her without it, with her legs in the air. But perhaps they didn’t do it with her legs in the air. Miller looked a prosaic, missionary-position player.

‘Of course,’ said Charlie. A time to listen and a time to question, he thought. For the moment, it was the mouth shut, ears open routine, but the question was burning to be asked. What was he doing here on the ninth floor, practically as soon as a crisis had erupted on the other side of the world? Julia didn’t know either, not even when he’d arrived minutes earlier. To his enquiring look she’d simply shaken her head. She’d gestured towards the intercom, too, to warn him it was on.

‘It’s a disaster,’ declared Patricia.

How much of a disaster was it being for John Gower? ‘I only know what I
have
read in the newspapers,’ he prompted.

‘We don’t know much else. As far as we can gather he was picked up three days ago. The Chinese announcement gave no details apart from the accusation. We aren’t being allowed access.’

Was it reassurance she wanted? ‘His interrogation resistance was supposed to be good: we touched upon it but not in any situation of duress. Which is the only real test.’

‘How long?’ she demanded, brutally objective.

Charlie turned down the corners of his mouth. ‘Impossible to estimate, without knowing what they’re doing to him: without knowing
how
they caught him and if he was doing anything to make his guilt obvious and undermine any denial. The more innocent the circumstances of the seizure the easier, obviously, it’ll be for him to hold out.’

‘Maximum?’ she persisted.

‘It’s a pointless exercise,’ refused Charlie. ‘If he feels he can resist because they don’t have enough, maybe two weeks. Three at the very outside. If he was compromised at the moment of detention, far less: he might be breaking already …’ Charlie hesitated. ‘I still don’t know what he was doing there?’ It was a testing invitation, to tell him far more than the simple answer, which he already knew anyway.

Patricia moved away from the window, sitting at last at her desk and looking down at it for several moments, as if reaching a decision. And then she told him, disclosing Jeremy Snow as a priest and talking of the man’s refusal to accept he was compromised and of the incriminating photographs. She even identified Li, not simply by his family name but in full, as Li Dong Ming.

Charlie listened intently to every word, analysing every word, unasked queries flooding into his mind, but he was always ahead of what she was saying, the one query above all the others echoing in his head. Why? Why was she giving him details of an active operation he had no right to know about under the compartmenting system by which every intelligence agency operated? It wasn’t enough that the person swept up had been someone he’d supposedly trained: not enough by half. So why?

‘That’s the catastrophe,’ the deputy Director concluded.

‘Do we know enough to consider it that?’

She frowned at him. ‘In the last few months the Chinese have rounded up at least twenty dissidents: it’s probably more. One was once Snow’s source: perhaps the best one he ever had. How’s it going to look with an English Jesuit who’s acted for us as a freelance for three years and John Gower, someone officially attached to the British embassy, in the dock there with them?’

‘Are you sure it’s going to get as bad as that?’

‘It can’t,’ insisted Patricia, autocratically. ‘A way has got to be found.’

Now it was Charlie who frowned, wanting the remark straightened out. ‘A way has got to be found to do what?’

The deputy Director stood suddenly from her desk, resuming her position in front of the window. ‘Gower went to Beijing with instructions to make one last attempt to get the priest out. If Snow went on refusing, he was to be abandoned: he was freelance and deniable. Gower isn’t. Any more than William Foster was deniable, which was why we withdrew him, to break the link in the chain to the embassy.’