Comrade Charlie

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘I see,’ said Charlie doubtfully.

  ‘I hope you do.’

  ‘There’ll be pressure.’

  ‘I won’t need to apply for asylum, if I’m your wife,’ pointed out Natalia.

  ‘No,’ Charlie agreed, but still doubtfully. Professional decision time for him as well, he realized. There was no point in discussing it with her now, overcrowding her with ideas of change and sacrifice.

  ‘I can’t avoid the way I feel,’ offered the woman.

  ‘I said I understood.’

  ‘When?’

  The decisive question surprised Charlie. Even more surprising – astonishing – he realized that although he’d been consumed with her staying with him he hadn’t given any thought to the mechanics of achieving it. He said: ‘I’ll need to think. To sort it out.’

  ‘It can work, can’t it?’ Natalia demanded, doubtful herself now.

  ‘Of course it can,’ said Charlie encouragingly.

  ‘We are going to be happy, aren’t we?’

  Charlie leaned across the narrow space separating them and pulled her to him, on the bed. ‘I don’t have to tell you that.’

  ‘I want to hear you say it.’

  ‘We’re going to be happy,’ said Charlie obediently. ‘It’s going to be difficult and involve a lot of adjustments and there are going to be disputes and arguments but mostly we’re going to be happy.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Natalia. ‘I’m prepared for it: all of it.’

  Was she, wondered Charlie. He said: ‘How closely are you watched?’

  Natalia hesitated. ‘Fairly closely,’ she conceded. She felt enormous relief at having committed herself. And anxiety, too. Anxiousness to do it: positively to flee and set up home with him. For the first time Natalia realized that in Moscow she’d never thought of their relationship as being properly settled and established: that it was as transitory as it had proved to be.

  ‘Is there the possibility of your getting away from the group to be completely by yourself?’

  Again there was not an immediate reply. Then she said: ‘I’ve never actually tried it, not here. On the other trips there were shopping expeditions but everyone had to go in parties of three or four. And there always seemed to be someone from the local embassy, ostensibly to help with any language difficulties.’

  ‘When do you think you’ll have most time?’

  Natalia considered once more. Then she said: ‘Towards the end, I suppose. The days we go to the air show are fairly regimented.’

  ‘What about feigning illness? Staying behind one day?’

  She shook her head at once. ‘They’d call the embassy doctor. Even if I managed to fool him someone from the embassy would stay with me. I might attract attention to myself, trying to do that.’

  ‘The end then,’ agreed Charlie.

  ‘How will we do it?’

  Something else he had not properly formulated in his mind. ‘The simpler the better,’ said Charlie. ‘I’ll fix it.’

  ‘Take me to bed, Charlie.’

  He did and it was better than before because neither of them was as anxious to prove anything. Afterwards Charlie said: ‘In a few days we’ll be together all the time.’

  Beside him he felt Natalia suddenly shiver, as if she were cold. She said: ‘Make it happen: please make it happen.’

  Richard Harkness’ emotions were mixed. There was immense satisfaction, at being named controller of the special, inter-agency task force to combat whatever the Soviets were evolving, because he saw that as the surest indicator yet of his inevitably getting the permanent, more important appointment. But there was also some caution. There unquestionably was an operation under way and they had cable exchanges to prove it. But not the slightest evidence yet what it was. Which created the dilemma for Harkness. Precisely because his task force was inter-agency whatever he did now would make him the focus of those agencies, particularly Ml5 who would regard the matter rightfully theirs as internal counter-intelligence and resent his usurping their authority and responsibility. If he got it right – he had to get it right – the prestige and the accolades would be his. But if there were a mistake and things went wrong, the backbiting and sniping would start at once, ridiculing and denigrating him. So as well as being a satisfied man Richard Harkness was a worried one.

  Within an hour of his return from the Joint Intelligence Committee meeting at which the task force had been created with him in charge Harkness summoned Witherspoon, who immediately responded with congratulations, through which Harkness sat patiently, nodding and smiling. Then he said: ‘But we haven’t got one definite fact to guide us!’

  ‘Yes we have,’ challenged Witherspoon at once. ‘And so far we’ve overlooked it.’

  ‘What?’ demanded Harkness. The other man was young, much younger than officers were normally considered for promotion, but Harkness was thinking increasingly of elevating Witherspoon when he himself got the full director generalship. These past few months Witherspoon had proven himself an invaluable sounding board.

  ‘The embassy itself!’ insisted Witherspoon. ‘That’s where the Moscow messages are going to. And from which they’re being answered.’

  ‘And upon which there is a permanent watch!’ accepted Harkness.

  ‘Recorded observation which you’ve now got authority to call for,’ reminded Witherspoon. ‘The surveillance reports could take us to the next link in the chain.’

  ‘I’ll demand them,’ said Harkness at once. ‘And I want you to take control of the search: it should be fairly concentrated because we’ve got the date of the first intercepted message. There wouldn’t seem to be any point in going back further than that.’

  ‘Thank you for the confidence,’ said Witherspoon.

  ‘Still nothing from King William Street?’

  Witherspoon shook his head. ‘At least we’ve now got more manpower to carry on the observation.’

  ‘Visitor and guest,’ mused Harkness. ‘Who’s the visitor and who’s the guest?’

  ‘And who or what has been reactivated!’ added Witherspoon.

  ‘That could be another pointer,’ seized Harkness at once. ‘Let’s widen the search of the other agency files. Find out if there’s been an inquiry that ended inconclusively, with no action taken.’

  ‘What about our own records?’ queried Witherspoon.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Harkness, although doubtfully. ‘I suppose we should.’

  ‘It’ll come,’ said Witherspoon confidently. ‘I’m sure the breakthrough will come.’

  Five miles away, in the Kensington safe house, Vitali Losev held the telephone loosely, keeping any impatience from his voice at the repeated and obvious attempt by Henry Blackstone to protract what he was saying and make it sound important.

  ‘I thought you’d like to know that the American has gone,’ said Blackstone.

  ‘I do,’ said Losev, forcing the enthusiasm. ‘That’s very useful.’

  ‘And I’m expecting to hear any day about my reapplication,’ lied Blackstone.

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you at last,’ announced Losev, following the newly arrived orders from Moscow. ‘You’re going to get your retainer. And soon someone other than myself to deal with. He’ll be known to you as Visitor.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Blackstone. ‘For the retainer I mean. Thank you.’

  ‘We regard you as important,’ mouthed Losev.

  ‘How will I recognize him, this new man?’

  ‘I’m coming to explain it to you,’ promised Losev. ‘And you’ll recognize him well enough.’

  37

  Hubert Witherspoon had begun that evening, within an hour of his briefing from Harkness. And very quickly found that with such extensive facilities at his instant disposal his role as overall coordinator was not going to be as difficult as he’d initially believed it would be. At no time, however, did he imagine the break coming as quickly as it did.

  That first night he requisitioned a conference room on the nint
h floor, deciding he needed more room than there was in his cramped offices adjoining Charlie’s and because the move brought him closer, with immediate access, to Richard Harkness. He ordered the photographic surveillance in King William Street increased and called for the observation reports of all the other agencies – but particularly Ml5 – over the previous month upon every Soviet and Eastern bloc installation, not just embassies and consulates but trade missions, tourist offices and national airline buildings. He demanded, for comparison, all cable and radio traffic intercepts and asked for a squad of four cryptologists to do nothing but run those comparisons against what they had obtained via the Soviet number-for-letter code. To speed that process he overnight asked scientists at Britain’s worldwide listening facility, the Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, to programme a computer to respond to trigger words and to feed in each – and then a combination of each – from the cables they had been reading in the hope of some earlier recognition. Gathering together the cryptologists gave Witherspoon the idea and he extended it, ordering the formation of small groups of men – never more than four or five – specifically to monitor and backcheck every suspicious report or inexplicable event involving Eastern bloc activity over the period being investigated. Again, for speed, Witherspoon requested a computer be programmed to throw up any connection with the Soviet code. He further had a physiognomy programme created for tell-in-seconds computer analysis of all surveillance photographs against known or suspected Eastern bloc officers operating in Britain.

  The intended organization was as comprehensive as Witherspoon could conceive, although issuing the encompassing orders for its creation by others was completed comparatively quickly, before midnight. Fuelled by adrenaline, Witherspoon was back in his elevated ninth-floor room, high above all the activity he had initiated, soon after dawn, running it all through his mind in a search for anything he might have forgotten. It was all-encompassing, he assured himself. Yet the need was for a positive target, a way forward, and he hadn’t been able to isolate that. The Soviet embassy, he thought, remembering the previous day’s conversation with the acting Director General. They had agreed that was the conduit so it was upon the embassy that he had to concentrate. Witherspoon reviewed the requests and instructions he had already sent out covering the Kensington Palace Gardens building, looking for gaps and not finding them. He was sure he had covered everything. He’d demanded biographies upon the entire diplomatic staff, with the known and therefore more easily monitored rezidentura, and all available details of movements in and out, and the Foreign Office were checking visa applications, to show up any changes in the last month. A new arrival could fit the cable words, reflected Witherspoon: visitor or guest. How ironic it could be if the lead came as easily as that, without the necessity of everything else he had set up. The reflection ran on. Visitor and guest, thought Witherspoon, actually writing the words down on a reminder pad in front of him. Who in God’s name was Visitor and who was Guest! Who…he began again and then halted. Who indeed! Were there visitors: guests? Witherspoon felt a lurch of anxiety because it was obvious – blatantly, absurdly obvious – and he hadn’t thought of it! They hadn’t thought of it! Maybe he’d been wise, calling upon God in time. It wasn’t too late to recover, to add this demand to all the rest. It wouldn’t appear an oversight, even, because it could be argued that the orders he’d already given covered parties of visiting Russians. What he now had to do was focus the demand, with a direct reference and connection to the embassy.

  The resentment was obvious from the counterintelligence contingent now under his jurisdiction but Witherspoon was peremptory with it, insisting upon a quick response because it was an easily answered question. Which indeed it proved to be. Within an hour there was confirmation of a delegation of visiting Russians in the country – attending the Farnborough Air Show – that they were staying at a monitored hotel and that there had been reasonably continuous but entirely understandable contact between it and the Russian embassy, less than a mile away down the Bayswater Road.

  It was still, at that stage, nothing to become unduly excited about although Witherspoon was excited, exaggerating in his mind a possible connection. The expression ‘monitored’ meant a photographic record had been maintained and Witherspoon instructed that a picture of every member of the Russian delegation be run through the nowestablished physiognomy check. He also extended the profile comparison to include every supposed diplomat who had maintained contact from the embassy. Additionally, with no conscious forethought and certainly with no scientific facility for comparison, Witherspoon asked for a complete set of the photographs to be sent up for him to examine on the ninth floor.

  It formed a fairly bulky dossier and was not confined to the hotel. From the different backgrounds as he flicked through Witherspoon realized that some of the snatched, concealed-camera photographs had been taken not in London but at the air show itself, where a man – or several men – with a camera would not have aroused any suspicion.

  Witherspoon almost missed it, although he was never to admit it. He’d put the picture aside and had finished considering another and was about to place that upon the discard pile when he hesitated, recognition coming belatedly, and returned to the earlier one. He gazed down, bringing his head close over the print in astonishment, and openly giggled, loudly, in incredulous disbelief. He started instinctively to move but stopped himself, wanting to be sure because it wasn’t absolutely clear. Witherspoon went back to the very beginning and studied again all the photographs he had already examined, although not this time concentrating upon the obvious subject but upon the background and people in that background. The picture at which he’d initially stopped was the first shot of Charlie Muffin, partially obscured by the door of a van or minibus. But there was a much clearer photograph further on in the selection, probably taken on a different day because the van or bus wasn’t there any more. It was full face and unmistakable and Witherspoon sat back in his chair positively trembling at a discovery he did not have the slightest idea how to interpret. Only that it was enormous: utterly staggering. And he’d been the man to make it!

  The access to Harkness was immediate. The pastel-shirted acting Director General – the suit was brown today – smiled up at Witherspoon’s entry and said inquiringly: ‘I wasn’t expecting to hear from you this soon?’

  Witherspoon wanted very much to make the announcement dramatic but couldn’t find the appropriate words. So without saying anything he laid the two prints on the desk in front of Harkness, deciding, relieved, that the gesture was fairly dramatic as it was.

  The acting Director General remained staring down at them for several moments. When, finally, he raised his head his pink face was already flushing red as it did when he was excited or angry or both. ‘Why are these important?’ he demanded, his voice tightly controlled.

  ‘They are taken at a Bayswater hotel at which an official Soviet delegation is staying. They’re attending the Farnborough Air Show.’

  Harkness could not curb the start of a smile. ‘When?’

  ‘Two days ago.’

  Harkness nodded, as if he were receiving confirmation of an already known fact. ‘Right,’ he said, softly and to himself. ‘I’ve always been right. Known I was right.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ asked Witherspoon. This was too important for him to volunteer suggestions and ideas this early anyway.

  ‘Guard against the slightest error,’ warned Harkness cautiously. He sat back in his too-large chair, making a tower from his put-together fingertips. ‘Our earlier investigations – the investigations he thought he’d turned back upon us – will show we were quite correct to be suspicious. But he’s still a serving officer in this organization: some opprobrium is unavoidable.’

  ‘He was not your appointee,’ said Witherspoon sycophantically. ‘Neither was it your decision to re-admit him into the service, after his apparently proving his loyalty in Moscow.’

  Hark
ness nodded gratefully, and smiled more fully, ‘All the more reason for taking care now, when we’ve got him in circumstances that are indefensible. He’s got a gutter cunning: let’s never forget that’.

  ‘But what is it?’ pressed Witherspoon. ‘Is our finding him like this an entire coincidence? Or is there a connection, a link, to the other business? Some of the intercepted messages could seem to fit.’

  Harkness shook his head positively. ‘Too soon for any conjecture,’ he insisted. ‘At the moment we proceed in the belief that it is a coincidence, one quite apart from the other.’

  ‘A separate investigation then?’ accepted Witherspoon.

  ‘But which I want you to supervise,’ insisted the acting Director General. ‘You know all the facts, everything. It can only be you.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Witherspoon. There could be no explanation Charlie Muffin could make, so the outcome was inevitable. Just as, Witherspoon determined, his own gaining of further and increased credibility in Harkness’ opinion was inevitable.

  ‘It has to be as thorough as it’s possible to be: I’m not having the confounded man slip off the hook again. I want every case he’s ever been engaged upon examined…’ Harkness smiled in recollection. ‘Which will be easy because the arrogant swine gave me permission to access his personnel file at the assessment school. Tear his office apart. And the place where he lives. I want that stripped, taken apart by experts, by the best people we’ve got. And the maximum observation, of course. We’re to know what he’s doing, every minute of the day. And night.’