Charlie’s Apprentice (4 page)

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, thought 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 campaigned 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.’

‘Of course he does! How can he think otherwise?’ She paused. The conversation about Charlie Muffin was over. ‘Is Ann coming up from the country?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘So am I.’ Increasingly Patricia Elder was regretting the absolute commitment she’d made to their relationship, neglecting and finally abandoning other friends and acquaintances until Peter was the only person she had now. There was nothing she could do about it: nothing she wanted to do about it. He’d make the decision. She was sure he would. Dear God how much she wished he’d make it soon.

Five

John Gower bet himself she’d say something by the third crossroad and lost, because they’d gone through the frustration of hay-hauling tractors and school-pool Volvos and were five miles up the motorway towards London before Marcia finally spluttered and broke into laughter. ‘I just couldn’t believe it!’

‘She’s old-fashioned!’ Gower said, defensively. He didn’t really think of his mother as old-fashioned. Not
old
at all.

‘It was like something out of a Noel Coward play, creeping from bedroom to bedroom!’ Marcia protested.