Charlie M

(2)

The grilled, narrow windows of the special interview room at Wormwood Scrubs were set high into the wall, making it impossible to see anything but a rectangle of grey sky.

Charlie gazed up, trying to determine whether it had started raining. He could feel the edge of the matting through the sole of his left shoe; if the weather broke, he’d get wet going back to Whitehall.

He turned back into the room, studying it expertly. The camera was set into the ventilation grid behind him, he knew. Then there’d be a microphone in the light socket. And another concealed in the over-large locking mechanism on the door. And it would be easy to have inserted another monitor in the edging around the table at which they would sit. Cuthbertson would have had it done, he guessed. The man liked electronic gadgetry.

Welcome the invention of the tape recorder, mused Charlie, his interest waning. He could still remember the days of silent note-takers and the irritable disagreements after a six-hour debriefing between operatives trying to remember precisely what had been said.

He heard footsteps and turned to the door expectantly, looking forward to the meeting with the Russian.

He liked Alexei Berenkov, he decided.

The Russian entered smiling, a shambling man with a bulging stomach, a tumble of coal-black hair and ready-to-laugh eyes set in a florid, over-indulged face. The cover of a wine importer, which had allowed frequent trips abroad, was well chosen, thought Charlie. Berenkov had had his own private wine bin at the Ritz and Claridge’s and a permanent box at Ascot.

‘Charlie!’ greeted the Russian, expansively. He spread his arms and moved forward. Muffin made to shake hands, but Berenkov swept on, enveloping him in a hug. It wasn’t a sham, remembered Charlie. They’d kept the man under observation for six months, before even beginning the concentrated investigation. Berenkov was a naturally exuberant extrovert, using the very attention he constantly attracted as a shield behind which to hide. Charlie stood with the man’s arms around him, feeling foolish.

Thank God Snare and Harrison weren’t there.

‘It’s good to see you, Alexei,’ he said, disentangling himself. He looked beyond, to the warder who stood uncertainly inside the door, frowning at the greeting.

‘You can go,’ dismissed Charlie. Cuthbertson had arranged the meeting with his child-like interpretation of psychology and insisted just the two of them be in the room.

‘I’m quite safe,’ Berenkov told the official. He thought the assurance amusing and shouted with laughter, slapping Charlie’s shoulder. The warder hesitated, uncertainly. After several minutes, he shuffled away, flat-footedly. He’d stay very close, guessed Charlie. Cuthbertson would insist on a report from the man, despite all the recording apparatus.

Berenkov turned back, still smiling.

‘The only thing missing is some wine,’ apologised the Russian, playing the host. ‘It’s a pity. This year I’d selected some really sensational Aloxe Corton.’

Charlie smiled back, enjoying the performance.

‘So they’ve sent you to find out what you can, thinking I’ll be off-guard after the trial. And probably shocked by the sentence,’ attacked the Russian, suddenly. The smile had gone, like a light being extinguished.

Charlie shrugged, sitting in one of the padded chairs by the table. Berenkov was very clever, he decided.

‘T’m sorry,’ said Charlie, in genuine embarrassment. ‘I know it’s bloody ridiculous. But they wouldn’t listen.’

Berenkov moved to the table, glancing up at the heavy light fitting.

‘Probably,’ agreed Charlie, following Berenkov’s look and recalling his earlier thoughts. ‘It’s the most obvious place.’

‘Who are they, these fools who employ you?’ demanded Berenkov.

Charlie settled comfortably. This was going to be enjoyable, he decided.

‘It’s no good, Alexei,’ he said, wanting to prolong it. ‘I made the point, saying you were obviously a professional who wouldn’t break, even now. But they insisted. I’ve said I’m sorry.’

Berenkov puffed his cheeks, indignantly. Aware every remark was being relayed, he rose to the meeting, like the actor he was.

‘They’re cunts,’ he said, offended. ‘I’m a loyal Russian.’

‘I know,’ agreed Charlie, sincerely. ‘But it was easier to come than to argue that you wouldn’t give anything away about your system …’

He smiled, genuinely. ‘Anyway,’ he added, ‘I wanted to see you again.’

It was an odd relationship between them, reflected Charlie. It was basically deep admiration from one professional to another, he supposed. Berenkov had realised, months before his arrest, that he was under observation. Charlie had made it obvious, in the end, hoping to frighten the man into an ill-considered move. Berenkov hadn’t made one, of course. Instead, the knowledge had piqued his conceit and it had become a battle between them, an exercise in wits, like a game of postal chess. And Charlie had won, proving he was slightly the better of the two. So, added to Berenkov’s admiration was an attitude of respect.

‘Why weren’t you at the trial?’ Berenkov asked, settling at the table and taking, uninvited, one of Charlie’s cigarettes.

‘It was decided it was too dangerous,’ said Charlie, un-convincingly repeating Cuthbertson’s explanation. ‘We didn’t want to risk identification. Your people would have photographed everyone going into the Old Bailey, wouldn’t they?’

Berenkov frowned for a moment, then smiled at Charlie’s lead, looking up at the light.

‘Oh yes,’ he agreed. ‘Every picture will be in Moscow by now.’

That would put the fear of Christ up the Special Branch and Cuthbertson, Charlie knew. They’d had four men of their own photographing everyone within a quarter of a mile vicinity during the week-long trial. It would take them months to identify every face; but Cuthbertson would insist upon it — ‘mountains are just pieces of dust, all gathered together’ was a new catch phrase from the department controller. Now he’d be shit scared there was the risk of his own men being identified.

‘So Snare and Harrison got all the credit,’ jabbed Berenkov.

The Russian was bloody good, thought Charlie. It was not surprising he’d held the rank of General in the K.G.B. for the twenty years he’d operated in the West. His capture would be an enormous blow to Russia: perhaps even greater than they had realised.

‘Something like that,’ agreed Charlie.

‘They’re no good,’ dismissed the prisoner. ‘Too smart … too keen to shine and impress people. Their performance in court was more like Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Send them on a field operation and we’d use it as a training exercise.’

Oh God, how I’d like to be with Cuthbertson when the tapes are played back, thought Charlie. Please God let Snare and Harrison be there.

The Briton thought again of the life style that Berenkov had followed until his arrest six months earlier: despite the apparent bonhomie, the man must be suffering, he decided.

‘What’s it like here?’ asked Charlie, curiously, gesturing to the prison around them.

‘Known worse,’ replied Berenkov, lightly.

And he would have done, Charlie knew. The Russian admitted to being fifty, but Charlie assessed him ten years older. He’d have served in the Russian army during the war, probably as a field officer on the German Front. Certainly it was from Germany that he had appeared, posing as a refugee displaced by the division of his country, to enter Britain.

‘But forty years!’ reminded Charlie.

Berenkov stared at him, frowning, imagining for a moment that the Briton was serious. He shrugged, agreeing to whatever Charlie wanted to achieve.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ he answered. ‘I won’t serve forty years and we all know it. I guess two, but it might be shorter: I’m very highly regarded in the Soviet Union. They’ll arrange an exchange. All they need is a body.’

And they almost had one four months ago at Checkpoint Charlie, remembered the Briton.

The K.G.B. general leaned back, reflectively.

‘I tried to outwit you, Charlie. You know I did,’ he began, unexpectedly. ‘But more to cover up my network than for myself.’

He was being truthful now, realised Charlie, the recording apparatus disregarded.

‘You know what my feelings were, realising you were after me?’ Berenkov stared across the table, intently.

‘What?’ prompted Charlie.

‘Relief,’ answered Berenkov, simply. He leaned forward, arms on the table, gazing straight at the other man.

‘You know what I mean, Charlie,’ he said, urgently. ‘Look at us. Apart from being born in different countries and being absolutely committed to opposite sides, we’re practically identical. And we’re freaks, Charlie. Whoever heard of two spies, both out in the field, alive and nudging fifty?’

Charlie shrugged, uncomfortably.

‘I know,’ he agreed.

‘I was losing my grip, Charlie,’ admitted Berenkov. ‘And I think Moscow was beginning to realise it. I’ve been scared for the last two years. But now everything is all right.’

‘Sure?’ questioned Charlie.

‘Positive,’ insisted Berenkov, with his usual confidence. ‘Look at the facts. I’ll spend a couple of years here, warm, safe and comfortable as a guest of Her Majesty’s Government, then be exchanged …’

He leaned back, eyes distant, reflecting his future.

‘I’ve retired, Charlie,’ he said. ‘Waiting for me in Moscow is a wife I’ve only ever seen for two or three weeks a year, on phoney wine-buying trips to Europe. And a son of eighteen I’ve met just once …’

He came back to the Briton.

‘… he’s studying engineering at Moscow University,’ continued Berenkov. ‘He’ll pass with a First. I’m very proud.’

Charlie nodded, knowing it would be wrong to interrupt the reminiscence.

‘I shall go back to full honours, fêted as a hero. I’ve a government apartment I’ve never seen and a dacha in the hills outside Moscow. I’ll teach at the spy college and spend the summers in the sun at Sochi. Think of it, Charlie – won’t it be wonderful!’

‘Wonderful,’ said Charlie.

The Russian hesitated, appearing uncertain. The need to hit back at someone who had proved himself superior surfaced.

‘What about you, Charlie?’ worried the Russian. ‘What’s your future … where’s your sunshine …?’

Outside, the rain finally broke, driven against the windows with sharp, hissing sounds by the growing wind. Charlie moved his foot inside the worn-out shoe. Bugger it, he thought.

‘If I hadn’t been caught, Charlie, I’d have been withdrawn. Operatives our age are expendable.’

The memory of the exploding Volkswagen and the way it had ignited the body of Günther Bayer pushed itself into Charlie’s mind.

‘I know,’ he said, softly.

‘But there is a difference,’ said Berenkov, scoring still. ‘Russia never forgets a spy … my release is guaranteed …’

He paused, allowing the point to register.

‘… but Britain couldn’t give a bugger,’ he sneered. ‘I’d hate to work in your service, Charlie.’

The man was right, accepted the Briton. The eagerness of the British Government to dissociate itself from a captured operative had always been obscene. How much enjoyment Cuthbertson and Wilberforce would get, cutting him off, thought Charlie, bitterly.

‘It’s a great incentive not to get caught,’ said Charlie, hollowly.

‘Bullshit,’ replied Berenkov quickly. ‘How your people can ever expect anyone to work for them I’ll never understand. Russia might have its faults … and it’s got them, millions of them. But at least it’s got loyalty.’

‘Moscow will be very strange to you, after so long,’ Charlie tried to recover.

Berenkov shrugged, uncaring.

‘But I’ll be able to wake up in the morning without those sixty seconds of gut-churning fear while you wait to see if you’re alone … without having to turn immediately, to ensure that the pistol is still under the pillow and hasn’t been taken by the man you always expect to be waiting at the end of the bed.’

It was as if the other man were dictating the fears that he was daily experiencing, thought Charlie.

‘How many more jobs will there be, Charlie?’ pressed the Russian. ‘Will we get you next time? Or will you be lucky and survive a little longer?’

Charlie sighed, unable to answer.

‘Perhaps I’ll get a Whitehall desk and a travel organiser’s job.’

Berenkov shook his head.

‘That’s not the way your people work, Charlie,’ he replied, correctly. ‘You’ll be for the dump.’

Cuthbertson had been prepared to sacrifice him, Charlie knew. Ordering the three of them to return from East Berlin separately, then leaking the number of the Volkswagen that would be crossing last, had been a brilliant manœuvre, guaranteeing that two operatives crossed ahead of it with the complete list of all Berenkov’s East European contacts to make the Old Bailey prosecution foolproof.

It had just meant the demise of Charlie Muffin, that’s all. Expendable, like Berenkov said.

‘Worried about your network?’ tried Charlie.

Berenkov smiled. ‘Of course not.’

‘So it hasn’t been closed down,’ snatched Charlie.

Berenkov’s smile faltered.

‘How would I know?’ he said. ‘I’ve been in custody for seven months already.’

‘We managed to get five,’ revealed Charlie.

The expression barely reached Berenkov’s face. So there were more, discerned Charlie.

‘Well, they had a good run and made some money,’ dismissed the Russian, lightly. ‘And I always let them have their wine wholesale.’

Charlie wondered the price of Aloxe Corton. It would be nice to take a bottle to Janet’s flat. He had £5 and might be able to get some expenses from Cuthbertson. Then again, he contradicted, he might not. Accounts claimed he was £60 overdrawn and Cuthbertson had sent him two memoranda about getting the debt cleared before the end of the financial year. Bloody clerk.

‘Will you come to see me?’ asked the Russian. Quickly he added: ‘Socially, I mean.’

‘I’ll try,’ promised Charlie.

‘I’d appreciate it,’ replied Berenkov, honestly. ‘They have given me a job in the library, so I’ll have books. But I’ll need conversation.’

The Russian would suffer, thought Charlie, looking around the prison room: the whole place had the institutionalised smell of dust, urine and paraffin heaters. It was a frightening contrast to the life he had known for so long. Charlie heard the scuff of the hovering warder outside the door. It had been a useful meeting, he decided. He wondered if Cuthbertson would realise it.

He rose, stretching.

‘I really will try,’ he undertook.

Again there was the bear-hug of departure: the man still retained the odour of expensive cologne.

‘Remember what I said, Charlie,’ warned Berenkov. ‘Be careful.’

‘Sure,’ agreed Charlie, easily.

Berenkov held him, refusing to let him turn away.

‘I mean it, Charlie …’

He dropped his restraining hands, almost embarrassed.

‘… You’ve got a feel about you, Charlie … the feel of a loser …’

General Valery Kalenin was a short, square-bodied Georgian who regarded Alexei Berenkov as the best friend he had ever known, and recognised with complete honesty that the reason for this was that the other man had spent so much time away from Russia that it had been impossible for him to tire of the association, like everyone else did.

General Kalenin was a man with a brilliant, calculating mind and absolutely no social ability, which he accepted, like a person aware of bad breath or offensive perspiration. Because of a psychological quirk, which had long ceased bothering him, he had no sexual inclination, either male or female. The lack of interest was immediately detected by women, who resented it, and by men, who usually misinterpreted it, and were offended by what they regarded as hostile coldness, verging on contempt for their shortcomings compared to his intellect.

With virtually nothing to distract him apart from his absorption in the history of tank warfare, in which he was an acknowledged expert, Kalenin’s entire existence was devoted to the Komitet Gosudarsivennoy Bezopasnosti and he had become a revered figure in the K.G.B. of which he was now chief tactician and planner.

Utterly dedicated, he worked sixteen hours a day in Dzerzhinsky Square or in any of the capitals of the Warsaw Pact, of which he was over-all intelligence commander. Any surplus time was spent organising solitary war games with his toy tanks on the kitchen floor of his apartment in Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Only during the war games did General Kalenin feel his loneliness and regret his inability to make friends: it was always difficult to perform as the leader of both sides, even though he was scrupulously fair, never cheating with the dice.

The arrest of Berenkov had affected him deeply, although it would have been impossible for anyone to have realised it from his composure in the small conference chamber in the Kremlin complex.

‘Berenkov must be exchanged,’ said the committee chairman, Boris Kastanazy, breaking into the General’s reflections.

Kalenin looked warily at the man who formed the link between the Praesidium and the K.G.B. It was the fourth occasion he’d uttered the same sentence. Kalenin wondered if he were completely secure or whether he should be worried by this man.

‘I know,’ responded Kalenin. There was no trace of irritation in his voice.

‘And will be,’ he added. He wasn’t frightened, he decided. And Kastanazy knew it. The man would be annoyed. He enjoyed scaring people.

‘Not if the attempt to ensnare a British operative is handled with the stupidity surrounding the East Berlin border crossing.’

‘The officers who reacted prematurely have been reprimanded,’ reminded Kalenin.

Kastanazy moved, irritably.

‘That’s a stupid gesture; it wasn’t the right man, so what does it matter? The important thing is that one of the best operatives the service ever had is rotting in a filthy jail and we’re doing nothing about it.’

Kastanazy was a pinch-faced, expressionless man who wore spectacles with which he fidgeted constantly, like some men use worry beads.

‘At the last full session of the Praesidium,’ said the chairman, slowly, gazing down at the revolving spectacles, ‘a lengthy discussion was held on the matter.’

‘I am aware how this committee was formed,’ said Kalenin. He would not be intimidated by the man, he decided.

‘But I don’t get the impression, Comrade General, that you fully appreciate the determination to retrieve General Berenkov.’

‘I assure you, Comrade Chairman,’ retorted the tiny K.G.B. chief, ‘that I do.’

‘Have plans been made?’

‘I am in the course of formulating proposals,’ Kalenin tried to avoid.

‘You mean you’ve done nothing?’ demanded Kastanazy, sharply.

‘I mean I do not intend embarking on anything that will worsen, rather than improve, the position of General Berenkov.’

Kastanazy sighed, noisily, staring directly at the other man. When he spoke, he did so with, care, wanting the words to register. He talked directly to the secretary sitting alongside, ensuring everything was correctly recorded for later submission to the Praesidium.

‘I want you to leave the meeting understanding one thing …’

He paused, but Kalenin refused to prompt him, knowing it would show nervousness.

‘I want you to fully appreciate,’ said Kastanazy, ‘that if General Berenkov isn’t being received with full honours at Sheremetyevo airport reasonably soon, the most stringent enquiry will be held …’

He hesitated again and Kalenin knew he had not finished.

‘… an enquiry, Comrade General, in which you will be the central character …’