Charlie’s Apprentice

Thirty-six

The gesture of pouring Charlie the Islay malt she was buying specifically for him now was practically automatic: that night Julia poured for herself, which was not: normally she didn’t drink whisky. Charlie accepted the glass but put it at once on the side-table before leaning forward from his facing chair to bring them very close. He reached out for her hands to direct her entire concentration upon him.

‘Every detail,’ he urged. ‘Everything you know.’

‘Very little,’ apologized the girl. ‘Nobody knows anything. He went out of the embassy in Beijing, telling people he would be back around midday. He never arrived.’

‘Beijing?’ queried Charlie.

‘That was the assignment. China, to bring out someone we think is under suspicion: liable to arrest.’

‘What about an announcement? An accusation?’

‘Nothing yet. We’re making official representations, enquiring about his whereabouts. As a missing diplomat, of course. That’s why I’m telling you now: you’d have learned anyway, in a few hours. The idea’s to create a fuss: the Director thinks it might make them cautious about the pressure they’ll put on him.’

‘Bollocks,’ said Charlie. ‘They’ll do what they like. It’s China, for Christ’s sake! They don’t care about Western opinion.’

‘I’m sorry, Charlie,’ said Julia, sadly. ‘Really very sorry.’

Charlie was grateful but indifferent to sympathy for himself. ‘Gower will be a bloody sight sorrier. Hardly anything of what we did … what he did before, at the proper training schools … prepared him. Why the fuck did it have to be China?’

‘There’s a hell of a flap at the Foreign Office. The DG – and Patricia – have made a lot in their memoranda about Gower’s resistance to interrogation.’

Charlie shook his head. ‘It’s not the same: never can be. You can go through all the motions … authentic physical stress … beating … drugs … sleep deprivation … all of that. But it’s not the same. You can always hold on to the fact that it’s a war game: that it’ll stop sometime. That insurance isn’t there, for the real thing. And the Chinese are good at it. They’ve been doing it longer and better than anybody else.’

‘You think he’ll break?’

‘I know he’ll break. Everyone does …’ Charlie was looking away from her now, deep in reflection. ‘It shouldn’t have been Beijing, not the first time. He wasn’t ready. That was wrong.’ His voice was distant: he wasn’t really addressing the girl whose hands he still held.

‘It was pretty shitty luck,’ agreed Julia.

‘Luck never enters into it.’ Charlie looked up, abruptly. ‘What about the person who’s exposed?’

Julia shook her head. ‘Not a lot. He’s a priest: told to get out but wouldn’t.’

Charlie frowned across at her, concentrating again. ‘Why send in? Why didn’t his Control in Beijing simply tell him to get out?’

‘The relationship collapsed. We brought the Control out a long time ago. A damage-limitation move, if the priest was arrested.’

‘What damage limitation, with Gower in the bag?’

She nodded in further agreement, at Charlie’s outrage. ‘No one anticipated this.’

Charlie stayed frowning. ‘Is that the way it’s being put forward?’

Julia nodded.

More damage limitation at Westminster Bridge Road than ten thousand miles away in China, thought Charlie, bitterly. ‘If the priest was arrested?’ he echoed.

‘There’s been nothing about that, either,’ conceded Julia. ‘But there is something.’

‘What?’

‘He had a dissident source, about a year ago. A man named Zhang Su Lin. He’s one of a number of dissidents who’ve been arrested in the past few weeks. There’s a purge going on.’

Charlie was silent for several moments. At last he took his drink, sipping it. Then he said, distantly again: ‘This could be a full-scale, eighteen carat, one hundred per cent disaster. With political and every other sort of fallout all over the place. And with Gower buried under it, right at the very bottom.’

‘I wish I could think of something practical to say.’

So did Charlie. But he didn’t know enough: supposed he’d never know enough. Only sufficient to make the judgement he’d just reached, which hardly required the political acument of the age. ‘The official reaction, if there is an accusation, will be absolute denial?’

‘It’s standard,’ reminded Julia. ‘I guess that’ll be it.’

Charlie wondered how a girl named Marcia whom he’d never met would feel seeing newspaper and television pictures of a cowed and brainwashed lover humbled in a court on the other side of the world. He smiled across at Julia. ‘Thanks, for bending the personal rules. Can you go on doing that? Just about Gower. I want to know much more than what’s going to be made officially public’

Julia didn’t reply at once. Then she said: ‘Just about Gower.’

‘Poor bastard,’ said Charlie, reflective again. ‘Poor, frightened bastard.’

‘I’m glad it’s not you,’ said Julia, unexpectedly. ‘That’s selfish, I know. Doesn’t help anyone. But I’m so glad it’s not you.’

Refusing to pick up on her remark, Charlie instead practically echoed the threat of John Gower’s interrogator. ‘All we can do now is wait.’

It wasn’t to be long, for any of them.

The British demands brought about the uproar.

The Chinese ambassador to London was summoned to the Foreign Office personally to receive the request for information about John Gower, described as an accredited diplomat on temporary secondment to Beijing. The interview was timed to the minute to coincide with the visit to the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Beijing of Sir Timothy Railton. The request the British ambassador formally deposited was worded identically to that collected by his Chinese counterpart, in London. The press release was confined, for reasons of practicality, to London. It began by expressing the concern of the British authorities in the Chinese capital and of the British government in London at the apparent disappearance of Gower. The British government were unable to offer any explanation for his not returning to the embassy and could only infer the man had become ill or been involved in an accident which had so far prevented his being properly identified.

The press statement was issued quickly after the simultaneously delivered information-seeking notes, so there was a gap of several hours before the Beijing answer. The delay was sufficient for media interest to begin, although initially with no suggestion of espionage overtones: the disappearance of a young and new diplomat in this still enclosed country, the one remaining communist superpower in the world, was enough to justify newspaper curiosity.

That curiosity erupted into near hysteria with the Beijing announcement that John Gower had been arrested as a spy engaged in counter-revolutionary activities against the State, activities which had already led to widespread arrests of dissidents throughout the country. Within twenty-four hours the newspapers discovered the existence of Marcia Leyton: the innocent vicar who had christened her confirmed the wedding preparations and the media cup was filled to overflowing, a spy sensation they never imagined possible after the end of their self-entitled Cold War, complete with a perfect human-interest angle.

All the pictures of Marcia were of a bewildered and confused girl. She broke down at the only press conference she attempted to give, so the denial that her fiance had any connection whatsoever with any intelligence service was issued by the family solicitor. Traced to Gloucestershire, Gower’s mother confronted the press on the lawn of the decaying mansion and insisted it was nonsense to describe her son as a spy. The Chinese had made a terrible mistake which they should rectify immediately.

It was on the day of the televised press conference during which Marcia broke down that Charlie was called to the ninth floor of Westminster Bridge Road.

There was another summons made that day, in Moscow. It demanded the appearance of Natalia Nikandrova Fedova before Vadim Lestov, the chairman of the Federal Agency for Internal Security. No reason was given.

Natalia finally made the telephone call she had delayed. It was the third day of the deadline she had imposed upon herself.