Charlie’s Apprentice (24 page)

‘I won’t,’ repeated Gower.

‘Some material has arrived for you, in the pouch,’ announced Samuels. ‘It’s in the safe, in the embassy vault.’

‘I’d appreciate it remaining there, until I might need it.’

‘Not for too long,’ said Samuels.

‘It’s not causing any inconvenience, is it?’

Samuels didn’t reply.

The residential compound was at the rear but separate from the legation itself, a range of low, barrack-type buildings. The quarters allocated to Gower were at the end of an apparently empty wing. It consisted of a living area furnished with a basic three-piece suite, very old-fashioned in style and hung in Paisley-patterned loose covers. An unsteady-looking table with four chairs stood in a dining annex with one wall almost completely occupied by a dresser-type piece of furniture with drawers and cupboards below and a latticework of shelves and standing places above a long, flat display surface. There was a television, with compatible video-playing equipment beneath, on a fitted television table. The carpet directly in front was oddly threadbare in one place, as if someone had intentionally rubbed away the weave. Everything was covered with a faint layer of dust. The dust continued in the bedroom, with just a bed, a bare dressing-table and fitted wardrobes along one wall and a strangely sized bed, wider than a single but not big enough to be considered a double. The kitchen was narrow, without any appliances on the Formica working tops. The kettle was an old metal type that had to be placed on heat to boil, and the refrigerator was small and bow-fronted, from the same era as the suite in the outside living-room. Gower thought it looked like a forgotten furniture repository rather than a place to be lived in.

‘Temporary accommodation; that’s all you’ll need, after all,’ said Samuels, defensively.

‘It looks very comfortable,’ lied Gower.

‘Be pointless your trying to watch Chinese television,’ said the political officer. ‘Rubbish anyway. There’s a video selection in the embassy library: pretty old stuff, though.’

‘I’ll remember that.’

‘Ian Nicholson’s the official housing and hospitality officer. Anything else you need to know, ask him.’ He paused. ‘An hour, for the ambassador?’

‘I’ll be waiting.’

The shower was hot, although the water came unevenly and in spurts, juddering loudly through the pipes: Gower forgot to wipe the dust from the bottom of the stall and initially, mixed with water, it formed a faint mud scum. As he dressed, Gower made a mental note to ask Ian Nicholson about clothes-washing facilities, which shouldn’t be a problem in a country that had given the world the Chinese laundry. All the hangers in the wardrobe were metal wire. Remembering the instruction to trust no one, wherever he was, Gower set his traps. He put one jacket away in the wardrobe facing in the opposite direction to the other three, fastened the right clasp of his suitcase but not the left, and closed the bottom drawer of the dressing-table with just an inch protruding.

Samuels telephoned precisely on the hour.

The interior of the embassy was a marked contrast to the barely functional sparseness of the living accommodation. Everything gleamed from polish and attention: there were Chinese carpet wall hangings and a lot of Chinese carvings and sculptures in niches and on display pedestals. There were revolving fans in the ceilings of all the rooms and corridors through which Gower passed, but he guessed at additional air-conditioning from the coolness, which was practically chilling compared to the outside courtyard across which he had walked, with worsening perspiration, to reach the main building.

Peter Samuels was standing beside Sir Timothy Railton when Gower entered the ambassador’s office. The man nodded to the formal introductions but offered no handshake. It was Samuels who gestured to an already positioned chair: the political officer remained standing.

The ambassador nodded sideways to the other diplomat and said: ‘You’ve talked? So there’s no misunderstandings? You know your position here?’

‘I did, before I left England,’ said Gower, surprised both by the staccato questioning and by the man himself. The ambassador was immaculately dressed, although the suit was light grey and discreetly checked, and with a waistcoat, despite the outside heat. The tie was Stowe, the shirt-collar hard and starched. Gower couldn’t see but he guessed there was a monogram somewhere. There was a signet ring, although he was too far away to see if it carried a crest. Railton was a very smooth-faced, narrow-lipped man, his hair black but thinning and combed directly back from his forehead, flat against his skull. Although the ambassador was so much smaller in stature, Gower decided at once from their demeanour and attitude that he and his political officer were very much a matching pair. Gilbert and Sullivan could probably have written a convincing duet for them.

‘Most ambassadors choose not to be aware of you people in their embassies,’ declared Railton. ‘I’m not one of them.’

Gower couldn’t think of a reply.

‘I regard you as a questionable but not a necessary evil,’ declared Railton. ‘Don’t want you thinking, no matter how little time you’re here, that you’re welcome. You’re not. Don’t want any nonsense, any difficulties, while you
are
here. Am I making myself clear?’

Gower hesitated. ‘I have already assured Mr Samuels that I am fully aware of the sensitivity of this embassy.’

Railton gazed unconvinced across the heavy, inlaid desk. Decorative carpets hung from two of the walls and on a display stand to the left of the desk was a stampede of high-necked Chinese horses. Behind the man, through an expansive window, Gower could see three conical-hatted Chinese bent over ornately created, almost barbered lawns and flowerbeds. Railton said: ‘I’ve no intention of having this embassy compromised. Any nonsense and I shall complain to London. And I want you to carry out your supposed function here: don’t want staff gossip about what you’re supposed to be doing. Certainly not gossip spreading outside the embassy.’

‘I will do everything I have to do as discreetly as possible,’ guaranteed Gower.

‘The sooner you’re gone, the better,’ insisted Railton.

‘I agree,’ said Gower, sincerely. Whatever happened to diplomatic niceties?

‘Nothing more to say,’ dismissed Railton. He nodded sideways again. ‘Anything you’re not sure about, don’t decide for yourself. Talk with Samuels.’

‘Thank you,’ said Gower, unsure precisely for what he was expressing gratitude. Taking his guidance from the political officer, who started forward, Gower stood to follow from the room.

In the corridor outside Samuels said: ‘Sorry about that.’

Gower was intrigued by the sudden change of attitude and at once further confused when the political officer went on: ‘Expressed what we all feel, of course: but I think he went much too far.’

‘He was certainly very direct,’ said Gower, curiously, hurrying as he’d had to at the airport to keep up with the striding diplomat.

‘It’s his first ambassadorial appointment. Father was an ambassador before him: four prestige embassies. So Railton sees himself having to keep up a family tradition. Makes him naturally nervous of any problems.’

They halted at a side entrance but still behind the closed doors, within the fan and air-conditioning coolness.

‘I can’t get involved in whatever you’re going to do,’ said Samuels. ‘Know you wouldn’t let me, even if I asked. But if there is anything I can do other than that, then of course I will. Just ask.’

‘That’s very good of you,’ said Gower, at last genuinely grateful. ‘All I want to do at the moment is sleep.’

‘Don’t forget an orientation map, when you first go outside the compound. The city is like a maze: certainly if you haven’t got the language. I’ll ask Ian Nicholson to contact you in the morning.’

‘I hardly need another diplomatic lecture,’ said Gower.

For the first time since they’d met, Samuels smiled, a strained, difficult expression. ‘Just to see if you need any help settling in.’

The air-conditioning was much less effective back in the residential section. Gower was aching with exhaustion but still did not fall immediately to sleep. He wasn’t gripped by the nervousness he’d known throughout the flight, but supposed it would come back when he actually started working. The only feeling he had at the moment was disappointment. He hadn’t expected friendship but he hadn’t anticipated openly being denounced as a pariah, either. Which
did
make genuine his parting remark to Sir Timothy Railton: he was probably more anxious to get out than the ambassador was to see him go.

Marcia Leyton wanted everything about the wedding to be perfect and was determined to make it so: even though they hadn’t fixed a date and it was clearly some months off she wanted to have most of the arrangements made by the time Gower got back from Beijing. On the day he left London, she surrendered the lease to her flat and that night drove to Bedfordshire, arriving with champagne to break the news to her parents. Her mother cried and her father said he’d begin a cost assessment that could be updated as the details were fixed. He insisted on making notes, although Marcia said it was far too early. Her mother wanted to know how many of John’s titled relations would be attending. Marcia said she didn’t know if any of his relations were titled.

The following day she visited the local vicar by whom she had been both christened and confirmed to learn the procedure for calling the banns, promising to introduce her fiancé as soon as he returned from a trip abroad.

Marcia had spoken to Gower’s mother in Gloucestershire when he’d telephoned to break the news, but she called again, saying what she was doing and promising they would both come down for another weekend when John got back.

‘I’m very happy for you,’ said the elderly woman. ‘Very happy that it’s you he’s going to marry, too. I know you’re going to be wonderfully happy.’

‘I know it, too,’ said Marcia.

Twenty-five

The paramount consideration in everything she did was always to be able to protect and care for Sasha, and with brutal honesty Natalia confronted the fact that she had put that at risk by fantasizing about locating Charlie Muffin. It was the sort of stupidity that had destroyed Alexei Berenkov, and with further brutal honesty she acknowledged that trying to find Charlie through old records had only ever been the remotest of outside possibilities, which she’d always known but chosen to disregard. And now, because of that stupidity, Fyodor Tudin was pursuing her. Pursuing Sasha, too.

For several days her mind remained blocked by conflicting arguments of self-recrimination until she consciously brought the confusion to a halt, forcing herself to separate the different factors, to find a way to safety.

What, then, was there to learn from the débâcle of Alexei Berenkov? On the face of it, nothing more than she knew already. The man had virtually committed suicide by mixing personal feelings with professional activities, welding his pursuit of Charlie Muffin
unofficially
on to the back of a quite separate
official
operation in England. And been discovered doing it. As Tudin could be on the point of discovering her doing, now.

Alone at her desk in the Yasenevo office, Natalia scribbled the two words – unofficially and official – on the pad before her, underlining each several times.

And at last the idea began to harden.

The danger was in using the long-standing resources of the former KGB
unofficially
. But why did she have to do that? Why couldn’t she make it perfectly acceptable to any investigation and still hopefully locate Charlie Muffin?

No reason at all, she decided, warming to the idea. She’d actually be doing the job to which she had been appointed!

Under the division of responsibility between herself and Tudin, she controlled intelligence activities in the former satellite countries as well as in the traditional, long-established Western targets. Where it was known, because the London embassy
rezidentura
had reported it, that there was a new Director and deputy Director-General of the British external service, just as it was known because it had been publicly announced that British counter-intelligence now had its first woman Director-General. And in the United States the Senate confirmation hearings of the new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency had been publicly televised.

She had every professional reason – a definite requirement, in fact – to order the most exhaustive updating of each organization: so exhaustive that it would be extended to include serving officers. One of whom, she hoped, would be Charlie Muffin.

Unembarrassed, Natalia laughed openly and aloud as the final part of the idea slipped into place, the perfect way to nullify Fyodor Tudin. She immediately summoned secretaries, dictating a shoal of memoranda convening a conference of all the heads of divisions and departments throughout her Directorate. She ensured that the summons to Tudin was the first to be dispatched.

Li arrived at the moment the class was dispersing, causing the same nervous reaction among the students as before: two, both men, whom Snow had regarded as regulars hadn’t been back to a lesson after Li’s earlier unexpected second visit.

‘Nothing’s arrived,’ said Snow at once. He had planned the encounter: there was something approaching relief that the Chinese had finally come.

‘After so long!’ frowned Li, stressing the disappointment. ‘It’s been weeks now!’

‘I intended sending a reminder to England but my colleague has been ill.’ He wouldn’t rush it.

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘He’s better now.’ During each of the past three days Father Robertson had gone out of the mission, insisting he needed fresh air. Snow had accompanied him on the first outing. Ironically they had gone as far as the Purple Bamboo Park. Father Robertson had said he didn’t need a nurse after that first day.

‘So you can send the reminder now?’

Time to begin his own confrontation, decided Snow. ‘The photographs seem very important to you.’

Li shrugged. ‘It is pleasant to keep souvenirs.’

‘I agree,’ said Snow, pleased with the other man’s response. ‘I would like copies of those
you
took, during the trip.’ Snow smiled. ‘A mutual exchange, in fact.’