Comrade Charlie cm-9

by Brian Freemantle

  When Petrin approached it was from the direction of the course. Krogh saw the man early, walking without any apparent urgency or recognition, not even when he got quite close. When Petrin reached the bench he sat with his legs thrust out and head tilted slightly back, so that his face was to the sun.

  ‘This is the sort of day that makes you feel good to be alive, isn’t it?’ cliched the Russian.

  ‘I guess so,’ said Krogh. It was a good day but Krogh knew the way he felt came more from this being the last meeting between them. He hadn’t warned the other man and was looking forward to making the announcement.

  ‘So how are things?’ said Petrin conversationally.

  ‘From today they’re going to be terrific,’ said Krogh.

  Petrin straightened slightly, looking sideways at the American. ‘How’s that?’

  Instead of replying Krogh took the package from inside his jacket and handed it along the bench. He said: ‘Here it is. The last one.’ There was a feeling of satisfaction, but not as much as he’d expected.

  Petrin came fully upright now. ‘You mean I’ve got’ it all! There’s no more?’

  ‘Nothing,’ declared Krogh. ‘We’re through.’ He had a sudden urge to give Petrin some idea of how he felt towards him, like telling the man to kiss his ass or go fuck himself or something.

  ‘Ah!’ exclaimed Petrin, a strange sound of contentment. He pocketed the envelope and said: ‘I’ve been waiting for this moment.’

  ‘Not as much as I have,’ said Krogh. He wouldn’t foul-mouth the man. He just wanted to get away, end it. He actually started to move but Petrin reached out, putting a restraining hand on his arm.

  ‘Wait a moment, Emil,’ said the Russian. ‘There’s something we have to talk about.’

  ‘No there’s not,’ insisted Krogh. ‘I’ve told you. You’ve got it all.’

  ‘But that’s the problem, you see? We haven’t,’ smiled Petrin.

  Krogh settled back on the bench, looking nervously at the other man. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Exactly what you told me, all those weeks back. That we don’t have it all, not without the British contribution.’

  ‘I can’t do anything about that: I gave you all that I had from Britain.’

  ‘We’ve been thinking about that,’ said Petrin easily. ‘And we decided there is something you can do. Quite a lot, in fact. We want you to go to England and get all the stuff we’re missing. You can do that for us, can’t you, Emil?’

  Krogh stared along the park bench, his mouth hanging open, unable to form any coherent thought. When he spoke it was weakly, like a sick man still not recovered from his illness. ‘No!’ he said, a mixture of fear and incredulity in his voice. ‘No, I can’t do that! That’s stupid! Impossible.’

  ‘No it isn’t,’ soothed Petrin. ‘We’ve worked it all out: decided exactly how it will be done. You’re a trained draughtsman, so you can understand drawings. And you can reproduce them. You’re the chairman of the major manufacturing company here, in America. So you’ve every right to ask to see whatever is being done in England. And you’ve got the highest security clearance, so there can’t be any difficulty with access. It’s really childishly simple. Perfect.’

  ‘No,’ said Krogh, a man backing away. ‘Please, no.’

  ‘There’s no other way,’ insisted Petrin.

  ‘I won’t do it!’ said Krogh in a pitiful attempt at belated bravery. ‘I’ve finished! Done all I’m going to do! Finished!’

  ‘Let’s not get into a dispute,’ sighed Petrin.

  ‘Go to hell.’

  ‘You can’t refuse, Emil. You know that.’

  ‘I don’t care about all you’ve got on the girls,’ lied Krogh.

  Petrin sighed again. ‘You know something, Emil? I really don’t want to go back to Russia: to leave California, where you get days like this, when you feel good to be alive.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about now?’

  ‘Got something else to show you,’ said Petrin, taking a wad of photographs from an outer pocket of his jacket. ‘Good selection, don’t you think?’

  Krogh stared down, shuffling with shaking hands through the photographs of himself and Petrin at their various hand-over meetings in and around San Francisco. At every location there was at least one shot of Krogh clearly passing across a package, just like he had that morning. ‘What’s this?’ he said, groping for understanding.

  ‘What do you think it is?’

  ‘I know what it is: what they show. What’s the point you’re trying to make?’

  ‘Not trying, Emil. Making,’ stressed Petrin. ‘You really see what they show? These are photographs of one of America’s leading defence contractors, a man who made the cover of Newsweek, passing to an identifiable KGB officer all the details of America’s intended Strategic Defence Initiative. You any idea how embarrassing it could be, if the authorities ever had access to these! They make whatever there was with Barbara and Cindy look like kid’s stuff. Think of it, Emil. Think of the arrest and the trial and being put into some jail for about a thousand years. And it would be about a thousand years, wouldn’t you say? Because if Washington knew the Soviet Union had the details then the Strategic Defence Initiative would be dead, wouldn’t it? They’d have to start all over again. And that just wouldn’t cost billions: that would cost tens of billions. I’d bet you that the President and the Administration would be so mad their eyes would pop. I know all about the judiciary being independent of the government but don’t you think a word would be dropped here and there to the judges, to make sure an example was made …’

  ‘Stop it!’ tried Krogh desperately.

  ‘Not just yet,’ refused Petrin. ‘I want you to think it through very fully. Can you conceive what it would be like, in a jail? All the violence? The homosexuality: male rapes, things like that? The filth and the stink? Everything sub-human.’

  ‘I said stop it!’

  ‘That’s what I mean about not wanting to go back to Russia,’ carried on Petrin, as if the other man hadn’t spoken. ‘If we can’t get what we want and decide to wreck the Star Wars programme a different way, letting Washington know what we’ve got and who we got it from, it means I’d have to be safely returned to Moscow ahead of the revelation, so I couldn’t be arrested…’ Artificially the Russian stretched his legs and put his face to the sun again. ‘You any idea what the Russian winters are like, Emil? It gets cold enough there to freeze the balls off a statue. Much nicer here.’

  ‘It won’t work!’

  ‘Yes it will.’

  ‘It’s the whole point of splitting the project up: a part of the security, to avoid anyone knowing the full picture!’

  ‘But not to keep it from you, because you’re special: you’re the man who negotiated everything with the Pentagon. Who’s every right to know all that’s going on.’

  Krogh, a drowning man snatching for straws, imagined he saw a passing, drifting chance of survival. ‘It won’t be my fault if I make the approach and I’m refused.’ He wouldn’t even bother, he decided. He’d let some time pass and tell Petrin he’d been denied access.

  ‘It would be sad though, wouldn’t it?’ suggested Petrin mildly. ‘We wouldn’t have any choice then, would we? We’d have to disclose these photographs anyway to ensure Washington knew the programme was compromised and force them to rethink the whole thing. Billions, like I said: tens of billions.’

  ‘Oh Jesus!’ said Krogh despairingly.

  ‘So you will do it, won’t you Emil?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘No,’ lectured Petrin. ‘You won’t try: you’ll do it. You understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Krogh numbly.

  ‘I knew you would,’ said Petrin encouragingly. ‘You want to take those photographs as a reminder, like the stuff involving Barbara and Cindy?’

  ‘Get them away from me!’

  ‘I’ve never been to England, although I hear the weather won’t be like it is here.
’

  ‘What?’

  ‘England,’ said Petrin. ‘I’ll be coming with you. Not on the same aircraft or anything like that, but I’ll be in England while you’re there, so you’ll have a friend all the time. We think it’s best to keep liaison with someone you know: you’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘You’re a shit!’ erupted Krogh. ‘A complete and utter shit.’

  ‘No I’m not,’ disputed Petrin unoffended. ‘I’m a Soviet intelligence officer successfully carrying out an important assignment.’

  ‘You know what I’d like to do to you!’

  ‘Forget it, Emil,’ cautioned Petrin, still unperturbed. ‘You’re too old and too slow. And what would it prove anyway? Stop trying to behave like someone in those old black and white movies they show on late-night television.’

  ‘Bastard!’

  ‘There’s something else I’ve got to tell you,’ said Petrin, proving the accusation. ‘You certainly can pick a piece of ass. That Barbara was the best fuck I’ve had for ages…much better than Cindy, I thought. Did I ever tell you that Cindy calls you her Daddy?’

  When Krogh returned to his car there was a parking ticket fluttering from the windscreen wiper. It was white, like a flag of surrender.

  There was the backlog of In-Tray traffic, as there always was after an absence from the office, and it built up for a further two days while Charlie did what he considered necessary after the Isle of Wight investigation. Which involved invoking special friendships. The man’s name was William French. He was an electronics expert in the department’s Technical Division and he owed Charlie for covering up a bungled radio interception during a Soviet Foreign Ministry visit to London a year before. The man complained it wasn’t going to be easy, and Charlie said nothing was. Then he said that because of the personal approach he assumed it was unofficial and Charlie agreed that it was, for the moment. French said he would do his best and Charlie said he was grateful. Only then, with meticulous care, did Charlie get around to composing the report to comply with Harkness’ regulations.

  It was not until the third day of his return to the London office that Charlie began on the official publications, but because it was quite close to the top of the pile he found the reference to Natalia’s forthcoming visit to England within the first hour. It was in the English-language Morning Star, with a photograph of the entire Soviet delegation. Natalia was wearing a suit she’d worn in an earlier photograph of the Canadian trip, severe and businesslike, with her hair different from the earlier photographs, lighter against her head this time. Charlie thought she looked wonderful.

  Charlie knew at once what he was going to do. He was going to be with Natalia again!

  Chapter 23

  Vitali Losev was a greatly disappointed man. From being at the very centre of a major assignment, with all the personal benefits emanating from it, he now believed himself shunted aside on to its periphery, relegated to the role of a messenger boy. Certainly there’d been the congratulatory cable from Berenkov in Moscow, praising him for locating someone called Charlie Muffin. And there seemed to be some importance attached to the identification, from the activity that had followed. But Losev knew that obtaining the space information had been what really mattered: that would have been the prize to earn the recorded commendations. The prize and commendations denied him because of the idiotic Blackstone, an idiot he still had to humour and befriend, according to the inexplicable instructions from Moscow.

  Losev bitterly accepted he had lost out completely to Alexandr Petrin, who was flying in triumphantly from the United States to remain the case officer on everything: case officer on the American and case officer responsible for the missing material. Leaving him on the sidelines. A support function. Those were the precise words in the instructions from Dzerzhinsky Square. What did a support function and all the other chores accompanying it mean other than he was a messenger boy!

  Losev felt a burn of frustration. A messenger boy, and there was nothing he could do to reverse or change the position. Worse, he guessed he could be relieved even of that menial role — although he was head of the London rezidentura — if he made the slightest mistake, because Moscow had made it frighteningly clear that no error or oversight would be permitted. So he had to continue obediently in his subsidiary support position, a bystander to others gaining the glory he’d once seen to be his. Deserved to be his.

  Dismayed though he was by the twist of events, Losev remained too professional to allow his despair to affect what he had to do, peripheral or lowly though he considered it to be. He personally supervised the imposed surveillance upon Charlie Muffin, monitoring the Vauxhall apartment and the journeys to and from Westminster Bridge Road and to a pub on the Thames embankment called The Pheasant and to a mews house in Chelsea which the convenient Voters’ Register showed to be owned by a Mr and Mrs Paul Nolan.

  And when Berenkov’s specific instructions arrived, Losev again took personal charge, rehearsing everything that had to be accomplished before moving.

  The entry into the Vauxhall flat and what had to be deposited there was obviously the essential part of the operation so Losev decided that was where his presence had to be. He divided the operatives into two groups, himself with the KGB break-in team in one, six field officers in the other. They stayed together on the Thursday morning outside the Vauxhall block until Charlie left, to be picked up at once by the field officers. They, in turn, divided again. Three rotated foot surveillance on Charlie while the others followed to Westminster Bridge Road in a radio-transmitter-equipped car from which they could warn Losev, wearing an ear-piece receiver, if Charlie left the headquarters building with the possibility of returning to Vauxhall before the break-in squad completed what they had to do.

  Such was the degree of caution Losev observed, although what had to be accomplished inside Charlie’s flat was not going to take a great deal of time, because like everything else Losev had planned ahead.

  Losev insisted his team remain in their cars until he got the message that Charlie had entered the office building. And then initially he dispatched only one lock-picking expert into the apartment block, unwilling to risk arousing the suspicion of another resident or a caretaker with the entry of any larger group. The rest entered at staged, five-minute intervals: Losev was the first, so he could supervise everything when they arrived inside the flat to ensure their entry and departure remained completely undetected.

  Individual responsibilities had been assigned before they’d left the embassy. The locksmith’s function finished with the actual entry, although the man remained just inside the door and alert for any outside activity, like an attempted entry by a cleaner or a services inspector, such as a meter reader. Against any such surprise the man began fitting rubber wedges beneath the door and rubber-cushioned clamps at the two top corners. Another positioned himself at once at the window overlooking the street, a guard against the unexpected return of Charlie Muffin if the man succeeded in leaving Westminster Bridge Road unseen by the observers in the radio car. The third man, Andrei Aistov, was to work with Losev. Before they began Losev warned the inside group not to touch or disturb anything that didn’t need to be touched.

  ‘Although it would hardly matter,’ he said, gazing around the disordered room. ‘This place is more like some sort of nest than a home.’

  ‘What’s so important about this man?’ queried Aistov.

  Losev shrugged. ‘Something we haven’t been told.’ Messenger boy, he thought again bitterly. ‘Let’s get started.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Aistev.

  ‘The bedroom,’ said Losev at once. ‘That’s where people hide money they shouldn’t have.’

  The station chief followed Aistov from the living room. It was Aistov who found the place in the skirting board, a break in the panelling where an additional piece of wood had been inserted to complete the length running along the wall against which the bed and a small dressing table abutted.

  ‘I don’t want the slig
htest mark.’

  Aistov looked up sourly. ‘There aren’t going to be any.’

  The man lay full length on the floor, the bed eased carefully away to allow him room to work. The fill-in boarding was held in place by four screws. Aistov worked patiently but surely, testing the resistance of each fastening before unscrewing it, not wanting the screwdriver to slip and noticeably score the screwhead. He had trouble with only one screw but he was able to release it by gently tapping the screwdriver handle, jarring it loose. Behind, when the panel came free, there was a hollowed gap about six inches deep.

  ‘Perfect,’ assessed Aistov. From his pocket he took?1,000, all in?50 notes and all contained in a Russian-manufactured envelope, together with one of the keys to the safe-custody facility in King William Street. After feeling around, to guarantee there were no unseen holes or spaces down which the cache could drop and be lost, he placed everything carefully inside. He said: ‘It could be a terrible waste of money.’

  ‘Moscow’s loss,’ reminded Losev.

  Aistov replaced the panelling with the care with which he’d taken it out and stood back for Losev’s examination. The man lay as close as Aistov had, gazing intently not just at the metal screws but at the disturbed wood, finally straightening up and nodding. ‘A good job,’ he praised.