Charlie’s Apprentice

Twenty-eight

Gower awoke within thirty minutes of his usual time, pleased at the apparent recovery from jetlag. As he made instant coffee, he planned his day: he’d climb Coal Hill to explore the drops there, revisit the Forbidden City to get the necessary places marked indelibly in his mind, and in the afternoon pick a route to take him past the Taoist temple where the routine to bring Jeremy Snow to the embassy had to begin.

Begin today? Gower sat with his elbows on the narrow kitchen table, both hands around his cup, considering his own question. It was still too soon. He hadn’t yet visited two of the three places with which he had to familiarize himself. And there was that much-repeated insistence from his last, unnamed teacher always to set up an escape route before ever thinking of beginning anything. At that moment he hadn’t started to consider how he and the priest were going to get out. But what was there to consider? There was only one conceivable way: by air. So there were air guides to be consulted, reservations to be made, routes to be chosen.

Ridiculous, then, to think of leaving a signal and filling a drop today. It would have to be spread over several days, at least. Certainly a week. Not a delay of nervous reluctance, Gower assured himself: anything but. It was a professionally required period in which to work properly to guarantee the demands imposed from London and from here. He needed that amount of time – might need more – to get an awkward priest to safety and remove any risk of exposure and political embarrassment. And to remove also, of course, the risk of harm to the priest.

Gower wished the self-doubt was not so readily there, always waiting on the sidelines of his mind, too swift to intrude itself into any uncertain thought.

He tried mundane activity to slough off the introspection, tidying the kitchen and making his own bed in advance of the room-boy’s attendance. He had just finished setting his snares when there was a peremptory rap on the door, startling him.

‘You were away from the embassy all day yesterday, apart from the time you spent with Nicholson,’ declared Samuels, scarcely bothering with any greeting. ‘Have you forgotten what the ambassador said he wanted?’

Gower had. ‘Sorry?’ he queried, hopefully.

Samuels sighed, with predictable condescension. ‘You are supposed to be surveying the facilities of the embassy.’

‘And also concluding what I’ve been sent here to do as quickly as possible,’ countered Gower, ignoring his earlier reflections.

‘We have Chinese staff: gardeners and cleaners. And security officers we know about on the gates as well as those we don’t know about, elsewhere,’ said Samuels. ‘It is important you visibly appear to be fulfilling a proper function.’

After the specific London instructions about protocol and the avoidance of offence, Gower accepted he had to defer to what amounted to an order, although he didn’t enjoy taking orders from a man like Peter Samuels. ‘Nicholson said he expected to spend some time with me.’

‘He’s your man,’ agreed the political officer. At once there was the reversal of attitude that had occurred the previous day. Samuels smiled and said: ‘Everything OK?’

‘The map was useful: thanks for the suggestion,’ said Gower. ‘I …’ he stopped, realizing what he was going to say, then decided he wasn’t disclosing anything. ‘I had a look around the Forbidden City. Might go again, later.’

‘Fascinating,’ agreed Samuels, seeming positively friendly. ‘You could spend a month there and still not see all of it.’

Taking advantage of an encounter he hadn’t expected, Gower said: ‘I might want to look at what was pouched to me from London.’ Conscious of the wariness that instantly came to the other man, Gower hurried on: ‘Not to keep here, in these quarters. I just want to check it through.’

Samuels nodded, slowly. ‘I’m going to be in my office all day. Come there when you’re ready. Let’s go and find Nicholson, shall we?’

The gabbling Scotsman, whose appointed position emerged as the junior lawyer in the embassy’s legal department, was as effusively affable as the previous day. Totally unprepared for what he was being called upon to do, which he acknowledged to be an oversight, Gower asked Nicholson, with the experience of a resident, to decide the inspection by taking him to those facilities in the embassy the man believed most in need of improvement. That brought them back at once to the accommodation wing, for which Gower was grateful, reckoning he could prolong the charade in that one section for enough of that day to comply with Samuels’ insistence, without needing to spend any longer in the embassy itself. He trailed behind Nicholson, genuinely agreeing that the majority of the fittings and furnishings were out of date and inadequate, apologizing to the wives upon whom they intruded in some of the occupied flats. He listened patiently to their more forceful complaints after he was introduced as a Foreign Office inspector: in two flats he dutifully sat and drank the offered coffee, sympathetically nodded and tut-tutting, all the while feeling the fraud that he was.

It was close to noon when they recrossed the forecourt to the main building, and with the morning wasted Gower agreed to lunch with Nicholson in the embassy mess. On their way there the persistent lawyer-diplomat detoured to enrol Gower as a temporary member of the social club. Inside the dining-room there was virtually a moving line of introductions: when Nicholson announced Gower’s proclaimed purpose for being there nearly everyone grumbled that the survey was long overdue. As he had that morning with the aggrieved wives, Gower felt vaguely disconcerted at deceiving so many people so obviously, but supposed he shouldn’t: it had to be all part of the job to which he was still adjusting. Halfway through the meal, he saw Samuels enter and take a seat at the far side of the room. The political officer ignored him. Gower guessed the mood pendulum had swung back in the opposite direction.

Gower pleaded the need to get the problems he’d discovered that morning into a preliminary report to avoid continuing the pointless exercise in the afternoon. They made arrangements to resume the following morning. Gower declined the offer to eat again with the Nicholsons that night.

Remembering his protective idea of the previous day, believing it showed he was thinking and acting as he should, Gower went back to his quarters to collect his camera before setting out for the second time. Sure of the direction from his earlier excursion and knowing, too, that he would not be able to pick up any follower directly outside the legation, Gower moved off without pause towards the Forbidden City. He measured his pace today and once away from the embassy repeated the attempt to discover company, deviating from the shortest route and then suddenly backtracking on himself. Yet again no one reversed direction in obvious pursuit. Close to the square he tried again, halting abruptly at a street-stall he had already isolated, using sign language to buy a covered carton of yoghurt and staying there to drink it, able while he was doing so to turn this way and that like the interested first-time visitor he was, surveying everyone around him. He could recognize no one drinking or loitering around the stall whom he had seen before, closer to the embassy. No one moved off when he finished his drink to continue towards the square. All around him, the steel-tipped shoes tapped and chattered, like pavement cicadas.

Today Gower ignored the Great Hall, immediately re-entering the Forbidden City. He checked himself just in time from taking the same route as before, instead following different paths and alleys and carefully not stopping at two of the designated message spots. At the others he used the convenient camera as an excuse to stop and study them in detail: remembering the incriminating problem of the pictures the priest had taken, Gower was careful with the exposures it was protectively necessary to take, each time shooting so that the concealment he was detailing in his mind was on the peripheral edge of every frame. He spent longer in the City than he had on the first occasion, lingering and photographing a lot of other locations with apparently more concentrated interest than he’d shown in the places for which he was really visiting the site.

Coal Hill, built from the earth dug out to make the moat for the Forbidden City, was a rolling hump conveniently covered with trees and shrubs and close-knit bushes, surmounted at its very top by a traditional pagoda with three tip-cornered roofs, one on top of the other, like a nipple on a breast. It was laced by paved walkways and in places guarded, like the Forbidden City, by armoured lion figures and hard-shelled monsters from myths he did not know.

Gower climbed steadily towards the top, but not directly, meandering from path to path to find his drops, turning frequently not just to search behind him but using the always pointless check to gaze out from the elevation afforded by the hill out over the ancient city spread out below.

There were two places established on the hill. One was by a tulip-lamped light standard, where a message could be slipped beneath the rotund bottom of a permanently fixed rubbish bin. The other was just two paths to the left, on one of the statues, where the right front paw of one of the snarling lions had lifted slightly with the aged distortion of the metal, creating a barely visible but very usable crack into which a single stiff card could be inserted.

He would use a drop on Coal Hill, Gower determined, positively: perhaps the lion cache or then again maybe the tulip light. He didn’t have to decide until the very moment he left the signal by the temple. Whichever it was, Coal Hill had the better concealment, both hiding places surrounded by shrubbery.

Gower was oddly encouraged by the choice of Coal Hill, seeing it as a further step towards completing his assignment. He had only the temple site to reconnoitre and there couldn’t be any problems there, any more than there had been at the Forbidden City or where he was now. Once he’d positioned the flower alert he could remain within the security of the embassy until he went with the priest to the airport: in his growing confidence, Gower had no doubt Father Snow would at last do what he was told. Incriminated by the photographs he had to produce, the priest had no choice.

His mind upon the pictures, Gower started back down the hill, remembering to keep his pace that of a sightseer leisurely ending a visit, not someone in any sudden hurry. He did not make any attempt to discover if he was under surveillance: he was doing nothing covert, so there was no reason to bother with a pointless exercise. It was a relief to feel as self-assured as he did. He knew everything was going to work out exactly as it should: he’d be back in London very soon, with Marcia. She’d expect a souvenir, he realized abruptly: it would be a mistake if he did not take her back a present. Easily achieved, though, without it becoming an unnecessary interference with what he was in Beijing to achieve. He’d ask Jane Nicholson to shop for him: the sort of cheongsam she’d worn the first night at dinner. He wasn’t sure it was what Marcia would choose for herself, but it was something she could use to lounge around the flat. By now she would have given up her own apartment: knowing her he guessed she would already be making plans for the wedding. One of the first things he’d have to do when he got back was buy her an engagement ring. He wanted it to be something special: whatever she wanted, without giving a damn about the cost.

Samuels was in his office as promised when Gower got back to the embassy. The political officer went with him to the basement security vault, authorizing his access to the officer on duty there. Gower remained inside the vault to examine the package, wanting only to look at the photographs with which he had to force Snow’s departure. The alterations had been expertly done: to Gower’s untrained eye it was impossible to detect any tampering. He replaced them inside the envelope and resealed it, returning everything to the security official and rejoining Samuels in the tiny outer room.

As they walked back up the stairs together, Samuels said: ‘You’ve become a very popular person here. Everyone thinks you’re going to get a lot of improvements made around the place.’

‘I’m embarrassed about it,’ admitted Gower.

‘That’s the only embarrassment we want,’ said the diplomat.

Charlie finally got his confirmation of an affair between Peter Miller and Patricia Elder at precisely eight-thirty on a surprisingly sunny Wednesday morning in early March.

And in addition got far more than he expected.

He was perfectly hidden from the spectacular bordering mansions on the inside of the hedge that surrounds the park, and at that precise moment was finally deciding he’d wasted far too much effort over the past weeks chasing a personal impression that he should at last admit was wrong.

And then they emerged from the private exit of the penthouse.

They were not initially together. Miller came out first, alone, but hesitated after two or three paces, looking back into the still open door and eventually stopping, to wait. Patricia Elder followed. There was a brief conversation, with both consulting their watches, before they began walking together down the outer circle.

Charlie began to smile, knowing that familiar flush of satisfaction at a hunch turning out to be a hundred per cent right, which was always a feeling he savoured, wishing there’d been more of them in a troublesome life.

Almost at once the expression – and the satisfied feeling – faltered and died, never properly forming.

It was the movement of a camera that caught his eye, in an inconspicuous black Ford parked beyond his concealing hedge, less than five yards from where he stood: a camera aimed by one of the two men to take the last photograph of the disappearing Director-General of Britain’s external intelligence service and his deputy as they turned into Chester Gate, to reach Albany Street.

The Ford started up immediately, trying to move in the direction opposite to that taken by the oblivious couple: it had to pause, because of a passing van, conveniently enabling Charlie to take the number.

Charlie remained where he was for several moments before slowly moving off deeper into the park, towards the boating lake. An enquiry agent, hired by a suspicious Lady Ann? Or was it something professionally far more serious? A private detective agency could probably be easily confirmed from the registration number. It was just possible to check the other alternative, too, if a person remained an awkwardly suspicious and genuine bastard who didn’t believe in virgin births, that there was something good in everybody, or in New Realities for the future.

The taxi got Charlie to Notting Hill in fifteen minutes. He ambled into the tree-lined avenue linking the Bayswater Road with Kensington High Street and dominated on either side, with a few exceptions for millionaire residents, by the London embassies of foreign countries. He showed no reaction whatsoever at identifying from the registration he had so recently recorded the black Ford parked neatly among three other vehicles in the forecourt of what had become the Russian, not the Soviet, embassy.

Reaching Kensington, Charlie hesitated on the pavement, thoughts momentarily refusing even to present themselves for consideration. What the fuck was he going to do about that, he asked himself, wishing he knew.

His feet hurt, too, from walking the entire length of the embassy row.