Charlie’s Apprentice

Twenty-five

The paramount consideration in everything she did was always to be able to protect and care for Sasha, and with brutal honesty Natalia confronted the fact that she had put that at risk by fantasizing about locating Charlie Muffin. It was the sort of stupidity that had destroyed Alexei Berenkov, and with further brutal honesty she acknowledged that trying to find Charlie through old records had only ever been the remotest of outside possibilities, which she’d always known but chosen to disregard. And now, because of that stupidity, Fyodor Tudin was pursuing her. Pursuing Sasha, too.

For several days her mind remained blocked by conflicting arguments of self-recrimination until she consciously brought the confusion to a halt, forcing herself to separate the different factors, to find a way to safety.

What, then, was there to learn from the débâcle of Alexei Berenkov? On the face of it, nothing more than she knew already. The man had virtually committed suicide by mixing personal feelings with professional activities, welding his pursuit of Charlie Muffin unofficially on to the back of a quite separate official operation in England. And been discovered doing it. As Tudin could be on the point of discovering her doing, now.

Alone at her desk in the Yasenevo office, Natalia scribbled the two words – unofficially and official – on the pad before her, underlining each several times.

And at last the idea began to harden.

The danger was in using the long-standing resources of the former KGB unofficially. But why did she have to do that? Why couldn’t she make it perfectly acceptable to any investigation and still hopefully locate Charlie Muffin?

No reason at all, she decided, warming to the idea. She’d actually be doing the job to which she had been appointed!

Under the division of responsibility between herself and Tudin, she controlled intelligence activities in the former satellite countries as well as in the traditional, long-established Western targets. Where it was known, because the London embassy rezidentura had reported it, that there was a new Director and deputy Director-General of the British external service, just as it was known because it had been publicly announced that British counter-intelligence now had its first woman Director-General. And in the United States the Senate confirmation hearings of the new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency had been publicly televised.

She had every professional reason – a definite requirement, in fact – to order the most exhaustive updating of each organization: so exhaustive that it would be extended to include serving officers. One of whom, she hoped, would be Charlie Muffin.

Unembarrassed, Natalia laughed openly and aloud as the final part of the idea slipped into place, the perfect way to nullify Fyodor Tudin. She immediately summoned secretaries, dictating a shoal of memoranda convening a conference of all the heads of divisions and departments throughout her Directorate. She ensured that the summons to Tudin was the first to be dispatched.

Li arrived at the moment the class was dispersing, causing the same nervous reaction among the students as before: two, both men, whom Snow had regarded as regulars hadn’t been back to a lesson after Li’s earlier unexpected second visit.

‘Nothing’s arrived,’ said Snow at once. He had planned the encounter: there was something approaching relief that the Chinese had finally come.

‘After so long!’ frowned Li, stressing the disappointment. ‘It’s been weeks now!’

‘I intended sending a reminder to England but my colleague has been ill.’ He wouldn’t rush it.

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘He’s better now.’ During each of the past three days Father Robertson had gone out of the mission, insisting he needed fresh air. Snow had accompanied him on the first outing. Ironically they had gone as far as the Purple Bamboo Park. Father Robertson had said he didn’t need a nurse after that first day.

‘So you can send the reminder now?’

Time to begin his own confrontation, decided Snow. ‘The photographs seem very important to you.’

Li shrugged. ‘It is pleasant to keep souvenirs.’

‘I agree,’ said Snow, pleased with the other man’s response. ‘I would like copies of those you took, during the trip.’ Snow smiled. ‘A mutual exchange, in fact.’

Momentarily Li faltered. ‘Is one conditional upon the other?’

Snow decided, even more pleased, that he’d rattled the man. ‘Of course not. But there is no reason why I can’t have copies, is there?’

‘None at all,’ said Li, tightly.

Snow was determined that conditional was exactly what the exchange would be: he wouldn’t offer anything until he’d seen Li’s pictures, and only then match the man, print for print, each tallying with the other, which removed any danger, remote though he’d always regarded it to be. Li couldn’t swap the Shanghai pictures because he would actually be providing material the Chinese would regard as sensitive. Snow was sorry the escape hadn’t occurred to him before. At least it had, at last: so he didn’t have anything to worry about any more.

*

The round-up of students publicly labelled counter-revolutionaries by the Chinese government began in Xingtai and was followed within a day by arrests in Jining and Huaibei. The People’s Daily carried photographs of two separate groups of head-bowed detainees, all manacled, together with an official statement that more seizures would be carried out to protect the country from civil unrest fomented by foreign imperialists.

Contacted in Paris, where she had been granted temporary political asylum, Liu Yin said it was the purge she had fled from and warned about at her Hong Kong press conference. It would be, she insisted, one of the most extensive and brutal political repressions in the People’s Republic for many years.

Statements expressing concern at a threatened suppression of human rights were issued by various foreign ministries in Europe and by the State Department in the United States.