Charlie’s Apprentice

Forty-three

With convoluted but personally adjusted logic, Charlie decided early the next day that what he had to do was comparatively simple because it was so difficult. Impossible, in fact, without unacceptable risks. And Charlie Muffin never took unacceptable risks.

Had Gower? There could be a logic to that, too: an over-ambitious officer on his first foreign assignment, taking too few precautions in an eagerness to prove himself. Charlie wouldn’t have thought Gower would do that. But the further, unarguable logic was that John Gower had done something wrong. And was now in jail because of it. Not just Gower’s failure, Charlie corrected. He himself surely had to share in whatever had happened? He’d been the graduation teacher, the supposed expert: Mr Never-Been-Caught, according to Patricia Elder’s well deserved sneer. So why had Gower – his apprentice, according to another sneer – been caught? Maybe easier here to come some way towards an understanding, by examining more inconsistencies. He’d certainly tried to teach Gower never to take unacceptable risks, and he’d preached about over-eagerness, but what else had there been that was applicable here? Bugger-all, decided Charlie, never to know how close his reflections were now to those of John Gower, so very recently. What benefit was learning about vehicle evasion in a city of bicycles? Bugger-all, he thought again. What could a Caucasian do to watch – or to avoid being watched – in a country of such different physiognomy? Once more, bugger-all.

Gower had come to him green and left him green, to come here. It didn’t make operational sense. What did then?

The impossibility of working safely outside the embassy, he recognized, reluctantly conceding that the iron-drawered deputy Director-General had been right. That morning he’d gone back to the main approach road, near the silk shop, and seen the rare and therefore recognizable cars repeat their up-and-down journeys of the previous day. Once more the second vehicle had discharged two men, and one had carried the same brown briefcase and the tightly furled umbrella of yesterday.

If he couldn’t approach Snow, then Snow had to approach him. But how? And where?

Charlie had the mission telephone number and could have dialled from an untraceable outside kiosk or stand, but the intercept would be on the mission line. And Snow anyway would have been followed to any outside rendezvous. So how… Charlie stopped, his mind snagging but unable to recognize upon what. Something else that didn’t make sense. Why? he demanded of himself. Why, trying to work out how to make contact with a sealed off priest in a much watched Jesuit mission, had his train of thought suddenly been derailed by something he couldn’t identify? He ran the reflection he had been having back and forth but still nothing came. It had to remain another question without a proper answer.

So how and where? The second query was easy. It had to be in the unapproachable security of the embassy. But how to get the priest there?

They wouldn’t like it, Charlie knew, when the idea came to him. The man would probably refuse and be quite entitled to do so, and if he did Charlie had no better suggestion at that time. But it was the best he could come up with at the moment and it was a relief to think of something that had a chance of working. It was his partially simple way out of the initially difficult situation. But still with a long way to go. Like how to get a followed and watched suspect priest out of a watched British embassy and on to a plane away from the country, without detection or interception.

One problem at a time, decided Charlie: until he won friends and influenced people he hadn’t solved the first one yet.

The receptionist at the embassy looked up enquiringly when Charlie reached her desk in the vestibule.

‘I think some people are expecting me,’ he said, smiling to ingratiate himself. He usually tried at the beginning.

It wasn’t dysentery but it was bad enough, and instead of throwing most of the water away Gower used it to keep himself as clean as possible. He tried to cleanse his hands as best he could, too. He was still managing to restrict himself to the four sips of water at a time, hovering on the brink of dehydration, and his lips had begun to crack, widening into painful sores risking further infection through their being open. He hadn’t eaten the food.

He hadn’t been taken for any further interrogation, and without being able to count whether it was night or day, from seeing sunlight or darkness, he had completely lost track of time. He guessed he had been in custody for more than a week – it certainly couldn’t have been any less – but it could have easily been longer, nearer two. He was expecting another questioning session soon: the constant noise had erupted again, as well as the perpetual rattle of peep-hole surveys to which he performed. Gower believed he had restored a lot of his sleep bank, and even though the noise had been resumed he still found it possible to close much of it out, suspending himself into something approaching rest.

It was night when he was taken from his cell again. Gower had tried to exercise, in between door-hole inspections, but out of the restricted cell he had great difficulty walking properly. It seemed impossible for him to retain a straight line, wavering from side to side and twice colliding with the escorting soldiers. It was hard for him to lift his feet, as well; he tried at first but then relapsed back to shuffling, hoping it would help maintain a better direction, but it didn’t.

‘It’s all over!’ announced Chen. He was smiling, triumphant.

Nothing to which he should respond, Gower told himself. Keep everything to the minimum.

‘We’ve arrested him!’

‘Him’, isolated Gower: no longer the mistake of ‘them’. So it could be Snow, picked up at the shrine. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He lisped because of the cracks in his lips.

‘Just a few hours ago. And already he’s confessed. Admitted everything. Hardly worth protecting, was he? You’ve lost.’

Still no response. Worryingly, Gower was hearing the Chinese oddly, the words loud and then receding, although the man was remaining in the same position directly in front of him.

Chen nodded to the waiting note-takers at the side of the room. ‘They’re waiting.’

Something to which he could reply. ‘What for?’

‘Your denials are ridiculous!’

‘Nothing to deny.’

‘Exactly! It’s all written down, elsewhere.’

‘Not guilty of anything.’

‘You’ll be treated better when you confess: give up this nonsense. Be allowed to bathe. Eat better food.’

‘I want contact with my embassy.’

‘They’ve been told.’

Momentarily the reply off-balanced Gower. ‘Why haven’t I seen anybody?’

‘You will see somebody when you’ve told us the truth.’

‘I have told you the truth.’

‘We can hold you for as long as we like,’ threatened Chen. ‘Weeks if we want to.’

Gower wished the voice did not keep ebbing and flowing. It was becoming difficult for him to remember everything that was being said. There’d been a lecture about that: always vital to recall every word. And then he did remember. We’ve arrested him, Chen had said. And then: Just a few hours ago. That wasn’t possible! Despite the time loss, he had to have been in custody for more than a week: more than seven days. And the arrangement was for Snow to check the signal spot every three days. Any arrest would not have been just a few hours before. It would have been days before. So they still didn’t have the priest: suspected him but still hadn’t seized him. And all this was still a bluff, to get a confession. ‘You are holding me illegally. With no justification.’

‘You are subject to our laws,’ said Chen. ‘You will tell us what we want to know.’

Not yet, thought Gower: not for a very long time yet. If ever.

‘Why the hell wasn’t he on the plane he was supposed to be on?’ demanded the enraged Miller.

‘It’s typical,’ said Patricia. She hadn’t anticipated Charlie’s manoeuvre and it irritated her, although not as much as Miller. ‘At least we know it’s not sinister. Special Branch got a definitive photo identification from the Pakistan Airlines desk.’

‘Why does the bloody man do things like this?’

‘I don’t think he knows himself a lot of the time.’