Charlie Muffin U.S.A.

by Brian Freemantle

  Charlie remembered how he’d lost his last encounter with the man. Then he had a recollection of the unsuspecting F.B.I. agent getting out of the radio car in the private roadway and the fleeting second of shocked surprise as the Cuban had shot him, and then of the destroyed gatehouse, and he wondered for the first time how many men had died.

  ‘Terrific,’ he assured the senator. ‘Couldn’t have been better.’

  Cosgrove smiled, looking past the waiting policemen. Charlie became aware for the first time of technicians assembling television lights and of cameramen.

  Cosgrove hurried back towards the exhibition entrance, but before he got there called out, so that the journalists as well as the police would hear. ‘Excuse me … I’ve an announcement …’

  The noise in the foyer subsided.

  Cosgrove spoke directly to the reporters now.

  ‘There’ll be a statement almost immediately,’ he promised. ‘First I must discuss some developments with the detectives in charge of this case and then I’ll address you. Just a few minutes, please.’

  Charlie pushed his way politely through towards the lift, suddenly feeling very tired. He was too old to spend nights running up and down ditches, he thought.

  The idea came to him upon impulse when he got to his suite. For a moment he considered it, then picked up the telephone, dialled Clarissa’s number and asked for her extension.

  It rang several times, and Charlie realised that it was past one o’clock and began regretting the call. Then the receiver was lifted at the other end.

  ‘Who is it?’ demanded a man’s voice.

  There was the briefest of pauses from Charlie. ‘Wrong number,’ he said, putting down the telephone. Which it was, but he was never to know it.

  28

  Bowler had stationed his secretary in the corridor to learn when Warburger returned from his conference with the Attorney-General and had wondered at the hour it had taken for the summons to the Director’s office. As soon as he entered he guessed the reason. Warburger sat hunched behind his desk as if he were in physical pain and when he looked up at his deputy, the man’s face was colourless and ill-looking.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, flatly.

  ‘There must be something!’ insisted Bowler.

  Warburger shook his head. ‘Terrilli’s lawyers are claiming entrapment and the ruling is that they’re right. We’ve got nothing we could bring before a Grand Jury.’

  ‘Son-of-a-bitch,’ said Bowler, bitterly.

  ‘Everything is in Terrilli’s favour,’ said the Director. ‘Cosgrove really ruined it with that god-damned press conference at the Breakers. If he’d kept his mouth shut until he’d known what was happening, we might have stood a chance. But that gave Terrilli the complete let-out. Then there was his own call to the police. And the mayor …’

  ‘What about Cosgrove?’

  ‘Terrilli is threatening to sue in a civil court.’

  ‘Could he win?’

  ‘Easily, if Terrilli wants to press the case. His only hope is that Terrilli will hold back because of awkward questioning.’

  ‘Think we’ve frightened the bastard?’

  Warburger spread his hands in an unknowing gesture. ‘May have fouled him with the organisation for a while, but it won’t be permanent. He’s too good. He’ll be careful, obviously, but within a year everything will be back like it was before.’

  ‘Son-of-a-bitch,’ said Bowler again. He hesitated at the question, then asked, ‘What about the C.I.A.?’

  ‘They won’t admit a damned thing,’ said Warburger. ‘But they screwed it: sure as hell they screwed it. At least they got the shit in their own laps.’

  ‘What were they doing, moving in on a thing like this? It was our operation … an internal thing, for God’s sake.’

  Warburger laughed, a sneering sound. ‘Know what they say? They say it wasn’t them … that they know nothing about it and that they thought the Cubans had been killed in the Bay of Pigs invasion.’

  ‘Do they think we’re stupid?’

  ‘I don’t know what they’re trying to prove,’ said Warburger, ‘but if it’s a war they want, it’s all right with me. A lot has been leaked already, but I want every file detail that’s known about those Cubans released to the media. I want it to stink worse than a skunk on heat.’

  Bowler nodded, accepting the instruction. ‘Saw Mrs Pendlebury,’ he said.

  ‘How was she?’

  ‘Broken up,’ said Bowler. ‘Apparently they didn’t have any savings. She’ll have to let the house go … asked if we could help.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘That there’d be a pension, of course. But that we couldn’t make any ex-gratia payments.’

  ‘Right!’ agreed Warburger immediately. ‘Do it once and there’d be a queue a mile long.’

  ‘There are the expenses,’ Bowler reminded him. ‘I suppose she’s entitled to them. You held them all back.’

  The Director nodded in recollection. ‘They were very high,’ he said, defensively. ‘I was going to have him cut them by at least twenty-live per cent. In the first week, the cocky bastard charged eight lunches, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘He’s dead,’ pointed out the deputy.

  Warburger hesitated. ‘We’ll compromise,’ he said. ‘Reduce them by ten per cent.’

  ‘Pity about Jack,’ said Bowler reflectively.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Warburger. ‘Good man …’ He looked up. ‘They were all good men,’ he said, suddenly angry. ‘I’m damned if I’ll let Langley get away with it. I want them fixed. Do you hear me? Fixed!’

  ‘I hear you,’ said Bowler.

  The two men were silent for a long time. Then Warburger said, ‘We’ve come out of this badly, even though all the blame is on the C.I.A.’

  ‘I know,’ said Bowler.

  ‘It’ll take a long time to recover.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the other man.

  There was another silence, but this time Warburger remained staring at his deputy. ‘He showed me,’ said Warburger at last.

  ‘Showed you?’

  ‘The Attorney-General. He showed me your report saying that you opposed the operation from the start.’

  ‘He demanded it,’ blurted Bowler anxiously. ‘He said he wanted personal reactions throughout the executive.’

  ‘I know,’ said Warburger. ‘It wasn’t loyal though, was it?’

  ‘I said I came around to supporting the operation,’ began Bowler.

  ‘Under pressure,’ qualified Warburger. ‘And because you hadn’t much of an alternative.’

  ‘I didn’t intend any disloyalty,’ insisted Bowler.

  ‘I know you didn’t. You intended to guard your own back. I understand that, Peter. It’s a natural enough reaction. I’m still disappointed.’

  Bowler realised that if the Attorney-General had shown Warburger the file, the man had talked his way out of any personal blame. He wondered upon whom the Director had managed to shift the responsibility.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘So am I, Peter. Very sorry. I’ll expect a change in future.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bowler. Desperate to move Warburger on, he said, ‘Do you want men assigned to this Cuban thing?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Director. ‘And I don’t give a damn if Langley discovers it, either.’

  ‘What about Terrilli?’

  Warburger leaned back in his chair, head tilted upwards, considering an answer. It was several minutes before he sat forward, reluctantly shaking his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We daren’t try anything more.’

  ‘So we failed?’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Warburger, ‘we failed.’

  It was several seconds before Bowler realised that the Director had spoken looking directly at him and at that moment Bowler answered his own question. He knew exactly who had been blamed for the disaster.

  Williamson had known that if Ramirez had been captured he risked identification and so he
had lingered in the foyer, anonymous among the other hotel residents, trying to discover what had happened. He had listened to Cosgrove’s impromptu press conference, devoted almost entirely to the man’s boasts of involvement and commitment against organised crime, then actually risked asking one of the reporters, who hadn’t known any more than he did.

  Sleep had been impossible, of course. Williamson had sat in his room fully clothed, alert for any sound in the corridor outside, suppressing the desire to run because of the attention it might draw from any investigation. It wasn’t until the early radio bulletin the following morning that he learned that all the Cubans had been killed and so finally knew that he was safe. Relief had trembled through him and with it came the awareness that Moscow would regard this as a completely successful mission.

  He had slept at last and by the time he had awakened, at midday, the radio, television and newspapers had the C.I.A. connection, and Williamson smiled, admiring the speed at which Kalenin had moved.

  There was still a great deal of police activity. By mid-afternoon they had reached him, working on a floor by floor check of the rooms. A fresh-faced uniformed policeman politely asked him if he had been aware of anything unusual around the exhibition the previous night, and equally politely Williamson assured him he had not. The policeman thanked him, drew a line through his name and moved on to the adjoining room, and Williamson realised the wisdom of not panicking.

  It was five o’clock when Williamson went down to the foyer to make his booking for San Diego, wondering about Pendlebury. He found the man’s name in the official list of F.B.I. dead in a late edition of the Miami Herald. There was an officially released picture, which must have been taken soon after Pendlebury joined the Bureau. He hadn’t been as fat then and his clothes seemed neater. The newspaper said he was forty-two. Williamson would have guessed at another five years, at least.

  While he was making his reservation, he became aware of Cosgrove’s flustered departure. There seemed to be a dispute about the responsibility for a cancelled party, ending with the senator’s shouted insistence that the account be sent to his Washington office. The man’s wife seemed tight-lipped and angry too, Williamson thought. Their attitude towards the surrounding reporters had changed overnight.

  Williamson caught the early plane to San Diego on the Thursday, reported his return to his employers, who were still sympathetic over the death of his father, and with three days’ leave before he had to return to work, decided to make a weekend of it. He drove up to Los Angeles. The Rams beat the Rowdies three goals to nil in one of the best games he had seen that season.

  29

  Rupert Willoughby had sat unspcaking and motionless as Charlie had recounted the story, and even when Charlie stopped talking there was no immediate response. Then he breathed out noisily, an almost disbelieving sound.

  ‘Good God!’he said.

  ‘It almost worked,’ said Charlie.

  ‘So Terrilli escaped?’

  ‘It might appear so, from the outside. I suspect he’ll be handled by his own people.’

  ‘But that won’t stop the drug running?’

  ‘No,’ agreed Charlie. ‘It won’t stop that. It might hinder it for a while, that’s all.’

  ‘Thank you for keeping Clarissa out of it,’ said the underwriter unexpectedly.

  ‘She seemed annoyed.’

  ‘Did she?’ said Willoughby. ‘She’s got over it, if she was.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘She wants you to come to dinner. Asked me to make arrangements with you today.’

  Charlie stretched elaborately. ‘I’m still jet-lagged,’ he said.

  ‘Wednesday?’

  ‘I’ll call you,’ replied Charlie doubtfully.

  ‘Make sure you do,’ urged Willoughby. ‘I’d love her to hear what really went on … as much as she could be told, anyway. And she seems to have helped, even though she didn’t realise fully what she was being asked to do.’

  ‘You tell her,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Something wrong?’ asked Willoughby, frowning.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Charlie. He had not expected to feel this degree of guilt, confronting Willoughby for the first time.

  ‘Will you telephone tomorrow?’

  ‘All right,’ agreed Charlie.

  Since his return from America, Charlie had been more alert than normal for any surveillance, fully aware in retrospect of the risk he had taken involving the Russians. He changed Underground trains three times after leaving Willoughby’s City office before he was finally satisfied, at last getting out at Oxford Circus for the Victoria Line connections to take him to Vauxhall. The evening rush hour was over and the crowd was thinning, making his checks easy. He approached the anonymous tower block confidently, convinced that his anxiety was unfounded and thinking back to Willoughby. He wondered how Clarissa would behave when they were both in her husband’s presence. She would be quite relaxed, he guessed. She’d be more used to it than he was. He realised with surprise that he wanted to see her again.

  A graffiti artist had been busy in the lift, warning of God’s impending arrival to purge the earth of sinners, Jews, blacks and homosexuals. Charlie was glad he wouldn’t be around; whoever was left would bore the ass off him.

  He stopped short immediately outside the elevator. The package was tight against the door of his flat. The corridor was deserted. The only noise was the distant sound of music from one of the apartments. Debussy, he thought.

  He moved carefully forward, holding himself to the wall opposite the parcel. The shape was oddly familiar and Charlie frowned at it. He remained about two yards away for a long time, crouching twice in an effort to detect any wire leads. Then he went nearer, taking a pen from his pocket and gently tilting the parcel, trying to discover any connections at the bottom. At last he reached out, recognising the outline and smiling tentatively.

  Unmarked brown paper was taped tightly around it. Still gently, Charlie peeled away the sealing, then cautiously unwrapped the paper. As the bottle was revealed, a small square of card slipped out and fluttered to the ground. He bent and picked it up.

  GLAD TO LEARN YOU SURVIVED was printed in block capitals.

  Charlie took the last of the paper away, cupped the bottle in his hand and saw it was vintage Aloxe-Corton.

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  A Biography of Brian Freemantle

  Brian Freemantle (b. 1936) is one of Britain’s most prolific and accomplished authors of spy fiction. His novels have sold more than ten million copies worldwide, and have been optioned for numerous film and television adaptations.

  Born in Southampton, on the southern coast of England, Freemantle began his career as a journalist. In 1975, as the foreign editor at the Daily Mail, he made headlines during the American evacuation of Saigon: As the North Vietnamese closed in on the city, Freemantle became worried about the future of the city’s orphans. He lobbied his superiors at the paper to take action, and they agreed to fund an evacuation for the children. In three days, Freemantle organized a thirty-six-hour helicopter airlift for ninety-nine children, who were transported to Britain. In a flash of dramatic inspiration, he changed nearly one hundred lives—and sold a bundle of newspapers.

  Although he began writing espionage fiction in the late 1960s, he first won fame in 1977, with Charlie M. That book introduced the world to Charlie Muffin—a disheveled spy with a skill set more bureaucratic than Bond-like. The novel, which drew favorable comparisons to the work of John Le Carré, was a hit, and Freemantle began writing sequels. The sixth in the series, The Blind Run, was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel. To date, Freemantle has penned fourteen titles in the Charlie Muffin series, the most recent of which is Red Star Rising (2010), which brought back the popular spy after a nine-year absence.

  In addition to the stories of Charlie Muffin, Freemantle has written more than two dozen standalone novels, many of them under pseudonyms including Jonathan Evans and Andrea Hart. Freemantle’s other s
eries include two books about Sebastian Holmes, an illegitimate son of Sherlock Holmes, and the four Cowley and Danilov books, which were written in the years after the end of the Cold War and follow an odd pair of detectives—an FBI operative and the head of Russia’s organized crime bureau.

  Freemantle lives and works in London, England.

  A school photograph of Brian Freemantle at age twelve.

  Brian Freemantle, at age fourteen, with his mother, Violet, at the country estate of a family acquaintance, Major Mears.

  Freemantle’s parents, Harold and Violet Freemantle, at the country estate of Major Mears.

  Brian Freemantle and his wife, Maureen, on their wedding day. They were married on December 8, 1956, in Southampton, where both were born and spent their childhoods. Although they attended the same schools, they did not meet until after they had both left Southampton.

  Brian Freemantle (right) with photographer Bob Lowry in 1959. Freemantle and Lowry opened a branch office of the Bristol Evening World together in Trowbridge, in Wiltshire, England.

  A bearded Freemantle with his wife, Maureen, circa 1971. He grew the beard for an undercover newspaper assignment in what was then known as Czechoslovakia.

  Freemantle (left) with Lady and Sir David English, the editors of the Daily Mail, on Freemantle’s fiftieth birthday. Freemantle was foreign editor of the Daily Mail, and with the backing of Sir David and the newspaper, he organized the airlift rescue of nearly one hundred Vietnamese orphans from Saigon in 1975.

  Freemantle working on a novel before beginning his daily newspaper assignments. His wife, Maureen, looks over his shoulder.

  Brian Freemantle says good-bye to Fleet Street and the Daily Mail to take up a fulltime career as a writer in 1975. The editor’s office was turned into a replica of a railway carriage to represent the fact that Freemantle had written eight books while commuting—when he wasn’t abroad as a foreign correspondent.