Charlie’s Apprentice

Thirteen

Having taught Gower as well as he believed he was able, Charlie set the graduation tests, never once giving the man the slightest warning, even ordering some checks when he was not personally present, the obvious times for Gower to expect something. Others he staged when Gower would have considered himself to be off duty.

Gower only failed to locate one displaced object in a room-entry check. He picked out every shadowing car, on motorways and minor roads. Without being told, he took to hiring cars on credit cards and driving licences held under false, department-supplied legend names, and by so doing destroyed any paper trail from which it would have been possible to discover his true identity. He extended the hire-car precaution, detecting surveillance during one of the planned observations and lulling the professional department Watchers by constantly using the vehicle to embed his connection with it in their minds before evading them completely by abandoning the car in the most prominent place for them to continue watching while he disappeared. His basic tradecraft proved to be impeccable. Three times he beat professional observers on a ground pursuit by dodging in and out of department stores with front, side and back entrances. On two subsequent occasions, he defeated the same increasingly angry department observers passing in a brush contact an unseen package to another person – a woman – going in the opposite direction on a crowded street. He emptied and filled dead-letter drops faultlessly. He carried out his own surveillance on trained men instructed to lose him, which they did only twice in six different situations, never once establishing identifying eye-contact which would in turn have marked him out to an intelligence professional. There were three separate efforts to photograph him, using a team to appear as holidaymakers posing for a vacation souvenir in such a way as to have put him in the background. These he avoided every time. Under simulated interrogation by department specialists, he obeyed Charlie’s constantly repeated instruction by lying as little as possible – and by always being able to remember the lies he’d told – and withstood four hours of questioning before being caught out, and then in such a minor mistake that he was able to recover in what Charlie considered a sufficiently convincing way.

And on every one of those concluding days Charlie stressed it was all building up to an ultimate approval which Gower had to discover and announce, before the end of the session.

The session that Charlie intended to be their last – although he didn’t declare it as such, still wanting to be satisfied – took place in Charlie’s cramped office where they’d first met. It seemed to Charlie to have been a long time ago. ‘Think you’re ready?’ he demanded.

‘Your decision, not mine,’ Gower retorted. He’d weeks before lost the best-boy-in-the-class need.

So what was his decision, Charlie asked himself. Gower was inestimably improved from the day he’d entered this same office and called him sir, which he didn’t do any longer. But sufficiently? Charlie didn’t know. He’d never had to make this decision about another officer: only about himself, of whom he was supremely confident. Honestly he admitted: ‘I can’t think of anything else to teach you.’

‘Now it comes down to my instinct?’

‘If it’s possible to instil instinct.’

‘Is that the ultimate approval?’

‘You have to tell me,’ reminded Charlie.

‘I don’t think that’s it.’

‘What then?’

‘What you were trying to make me?’ suggested Gower.

‘Go on,’ encouraged Charlie.

‘Aware, all the time. Of all and everything around me. That was it, wasn’t it?’

Charlie nodded hopefully. ‘So! Do you think you are ready?’

‘I hope so.’

‘There’s no such thing as hope in an operational situation,’ lectured Charlie. ‘Or luck. It’s just down to you: how good you are.’

‘Yes,’ said the corrected Gower. ‘I’ve learned. I’m ready.’

‘You sure?’ Charlie feared he was going to be disappointed.

‘Our flat was entered four nights ago, while Marcia and I were at the theatre,’ said Gower, evenly. ‘The cupboard beneath the sink in the kitchen was open when we got back. It hadn’t been, when we left. My clothes drawers had been gone through, papers in the bureau put back in a different order. The night before last there was another entry: there were even slight score marks where the lock had been picked. We’ve got a rack, for unanswered mail: it’s dreadful but Marcia keeps it because it was a present from her mother. The letters were replaced in the wrong sequence.’

‘I was worried,’ admitted Charlie, finally relieved.

‘I was waiting, in case you’d tried something else. I couldn’t think of anything, apart from that.’

‘The people who went in weren’t told to be obvious. It was supposed to be completely professional.’

‘Will you file a critical report?’

‘Yes,’ said Charlie. ‘And you were quite right, after our first meeting, to put in a memorandum criticizing as bad security my advice about naming instructors and the deputy Director-General.’

Gower shook his head, in mock weariness. ‘So that was another test!’

‘You can never relax,’ insisted Charlie.

‘Your name isn’t James Harrison, is it?’ challenged Gower, enjoying the chance to prove himself.

‘No,’ said Charlie. ‘I didn’t see you check the register of the safe house in Berkshire: that was good.’

‘You knew I’d try to read it?’

‘I would have been unhappy if you hadn’t.’ Charlie spread his hands before him, satisfied. ‘I think we’ve finished.’

‘How did I do?’

‘Well enough.’

‘But not one hundred per cent?’ Gower sounded hopeful.

‘No one ever gets one hundred per cent,’ said Charlie. ‘Two final pieces of advice, as important as always securing an escape route. Never trust anybody. Not me, not this department, not even Marcia. Just trust yourself

‘That sounds bloody cynical! How can I not trust people I work for here? Marcia! We’ll probably get married, for Christ’s sake!’

‘You find your own definition,’ said Charlie. ‘The other rule is don’t ever follow rule or regulation. Not what you were told before we met, or what you’ll find in all the manuals, and not even what you think you’ve learned from me. And I’m not talking insubordination. It’s mixed up with not trusting. Adapt any instruction: go very slightly off course, so that you can’t be anticipated.’

The two men sat without speaking for several moments, neither sure how to end the encounter. Eventually Gower said: ‘I have learned.’ He hesitated, then blurted: ‘I’ve told Marcia about you. She wants you to come to dinner. I do, too. I reckon I owe you dinner, for these last few weeks.’

How pleasant that would be, thought Charlie: a civilized dinner with civilized people. ‘No,’ he said, bluntly.

‘Oh.’ Gower looked nonplussed.

‘And it is personal,’ said Charlie. ‘I have refused to let myself think of you in any terms of liking or disliking. Of forming any personal opinion, apart from a strictly professional one. I don’t want to become your friend. To meet and like Marcia …’

Gower’s face creased in confusion. ‘… What the hell …?’

‘… This way there will only ever be the minimal professional regret if I hear, later, that something’s gone wrong,’ finished Charlie, even more bluntly.

‘Jesus!’ protested Gower.

‘Didn’t I also tell you once this wasn’t a game?’

‘Not as clearly as you just have.’

‘So it’s a third thing always to remember.’

There was a further silence. Gower stood awkwardly, not appearing to know what to do. Then he thrust his hand forward. Charlie scuffed to his stockinged feet to respond.

‘I’m still nervous,’ said Gower.

‘Don’t ever be otherwise,’ advised Charlie.

‘We could have made it to fit in any time with his schedule,’ Marcia pointed out.

‘He said he was sorry,’ repeated Gower. ‘His diary was tight as hell, for weeks. And there was some course or other he was committed to attend.’

‘I wanted to compare,’ she disclosed.

‘Compare?’

‘How close you’d come to making yourself like him: all those outward changes.’

Gower moved to make the denial but didn’t. ‘I don’t think I’m even close,’ he admitted.

*

Liu Yin was acknowledged in the West to be one of the strongest critics of the Beijing government, one of the protesters in Tiananmen Square who survived the massacre and who ever since had lived underground, refusing to leave China. Her escape into Hong Kong therefore received widespread publicity. She had had to flee, she insisted, at an arrival press conference. The Public Security Bureau was moving throughout the country, making widespread but totally unpublicized arrests of people they regarded as dissidents. According to her understanding, at least fifty were already under detention. She believed there might even be show trials, sometime in the future.

Snow heard scraps of the conference on the BBC World Service, recognizing the name and the person. She had been a friend of Zhang Su Lin. It had never been admitted openly, but Snow had guessed the couple lived together during the time Zhang had been his student.