Charlie’s Apprentice

Thirty-eight

‘You’ve seen the newspapers? And television?’ greeted Patricia Elder. She was not sitting at her desk but standing before the window with its distant view of the Houses of Parliament. She was wearing the high-necked, dark green coat dress she had been wearing the morning Charlie had seen her leaving the Regent’s Park penthouse with Miller. It was difficult to imagine her without it, with her legs in the air. But perhaps they didn’t do it with her legs in the air. Miller looked a prosaic, missionary-position player.

‘Of course,’ said Charlie. A time to listen and a time to question, he thought. For the moment, it was the mouth shut, ears open routine, but the question was burning to be asked. What was he doing here on the ninth floor, practically as soon as a crisis had erupted on the other side of the world? Julia didn’t know either, not even when he’d arrived minutes earlier. To his enquiring look she’d simply shaken her head. She’d gestured towards the intercom, too, to warn him it was on.

‘It’s a disaster,’ declared Patricia.

How much of a disaster was it being for John Gower? ‘I only know what I have read in the newspapers,’ he prompted.

‘We don’t know much else. As far as we can gather he was picked up three days ago. The Chinese announcement gave no details apart from the accusation. We aren’t being allowed access.’

Was it reassurance she wanted? ‘His interrogation resistance was supposed to be good: we touched upon it but not in any situation of duress. Which is the only real test.’

‘How long?’ she demanded, brutally objective.

Charlie turned down the corners of his mouth. ‘Impossible to estimate, without knowing what they’re doing to him: without knowing how they caught him and if he was doing anything to make his guilt obvious and undermine any denial. The more innocent the circumstances of the seizure the easier, obviously, it’ll be for him to hold out.’

‘Maximum?’ she persisted.

‘It’s a pointless exercise,’ refused Charlie. ‘If he feels he can resist because they don’t have enough, maybe two weeks. Three at the very outside. If he was compromised at the moment of detention, far less: he might be breaking already …’ Charlie hesitated. ‘I still don’t know what he was doing there?’ It was a testing invitation, to tell him far more than the simple answer, which he already knew anyway.

Patricia moved away from the window, sitting at last at her desk and looking down at it for several moments, as if reaching a decision. And then she told him, disclosing Jeremy Snow as a priest and talking of the man’s refusal to accept he was compromised and of the incriminating photographs. She even identified Li, not simply by his family name but in full, as Li Dong Ming.

Charlie listened intently to every word, analysing every word, unasked queries flooding into his mind, but he was always ahead of what she was saying, the one query above all the others echoing in his head. Why? Why was she giving him details of an active operation he had no right to know about under the compartmenting system by which every intelligence agency operated? It wasn’t enough that the person swept up had been someone he’d supposedly trained: not enough by half. So why?

‘That’s the catastrophe,’ the deputy Director concluded.

‘Do we know enough to consider it that?’

She frowned at him. ‘In the last few months the Chinese have rounded up at least twenty dissidents: it’s probably more. One was once Snow’s source: perhaps the best one he ever had. How’s it going to look with an English Jesuit who’s acted for us as a freelance for three years and John Gower, someone officially attached to the British embassy, in the dock there with them?’

‘Are you sure it’s going to get as bad as that?’

‘It can’t,’ insisted Patricia, autocratically. ‘A way has got to be found.’

Now it was Charlie who frowned, wanting the remark straightened out. ‘A way has got to be found to do what?’

The deputy Director stood suddenly from her desk, resuming her position in front of the window. ‘Gower went to Beijing with instructions to make one last attempt to get the priest out. If Snow went on refusing, he was to be abandoned: he was freelance and deniable. Gower isn’t. Any more than William Foster was deniable, which was why we withdrew him, to break the link in the chain to the embassy.’

‘Which hasn’t, as far as we know, been established yet?’ anticipated Charlie. Surely not! he thought: surely he hadn’t answered the question about his own future! Hope surged through him.

‘Not as far as we know,’ she agreed. She looked directly at him.

Charlie looked directly back: this was very definitely not talk time.

She said: ‘We hoped for better, from Gower. Your apprentice.’

Bollocks, rejected Charlie: she wasn’t going to stick any of this on him. ‘You don’t know what happened to him yet. How it happened.’

‘He got arrested. After being trained by you, someone supposed to be so good. Someone who’d never been picked up.’

Bollocks again. ‘China is the most difficult country in the world to work in. Always was. Always has been. It shouldn’t have been a first assignment: certainly not an assignment where things could go so easily wrong.’

‘I’ve told you how he was specifically ordered to operate. No personal risk. At any time. He screwed up.’

‘Inquest thinking,’ rejected Charlie. ‘I thought the problem was the immediate future: like the next three weeks, if Gower holds out that long.’

‘It is,’ Patricia agreed. Her eyes hadn’t left him.

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Send you in, to prevent a disaster. You’re the Never-Been-Caught man whose very first pupil did just that: got caught. Whether he gets twenty years in a Chinese jail depends entirely on preventing any link being established, between Gower and Snow. We were prepared to abandon the damned priest. Now we can’t. Your job is to get him out, so the Chinese can’t establish any connection. What happens to Gower depends on you.’

He was back! Back and working properly! Reality dampened the euphoria. ‘None of this is my responsibility.’

‘It’s a mess, for you to clear up. Or to keep from becoming a bigger mess than it is.’

Get it official, Charlie told himself. ‘Does this mean I’m restored to the active roster?’

Patricia Elder hesitated. ‘For the moment.’

Charlie supposed she showed some integrity in being honest. ‘On trial?’

‘You’re being given the opportunity.’

Jesus, he wanted it! All Charlie’s regret and nostalgia of the past months concentrated into one consuming awareness that he wanted, under any circumstances or conditions, to become actively operational again. He’d accept the terms, whatever and however they were offered: anything to get back. ‘What have you done, already?’

The deputy Director shook her head. ‘You’re supposed to be the expert. Tell me what you’d do. Give me something to put to the embassy.’

Flattering, thought Charlie. ‘According to the embassy, Gower left everything in the security vault?’

‘It’s one of the straws we’re clutching, that there was nothing incriminating on him when he was picked up.’

‘Authorize my access to it: I’ll probably still need the photographs. Advise them of my arrival, with a request for every possible facility, as and when I call upon it.’

‘They won’t agree to that sort of carte blanche: not the embassy nor the Foreign Office here. They just won’t like it.’

‘They’ll like a bloody sight less a full-scale trial of Britons in the dock of a Chinese court: they haven’t got any choice but to help.’

‘I’ll try,’ promised the woman, doubtfully.

‘And announce through the Foreign Office the intention to send out an official, to enforce the protests of Gower’s innocence. There’ll have to be a visa application, too: to provide them with a name.’

‘What?’ From her window-ledge vantage point the deputy Director was looking at him in head-tilted surprise. ‘But that …’

‘… will give them someone to look out for,’ completed Charlie. ‘It won’t be me.’

The woman came back to her desk but did not immediately sit at it. Instead, shaking her head, she leaned across to face him. ‘I’m not sure I’m following you here.’

Charlie smiled. ‘I don’t want anybody to.’

‘I want more than that.’ Patricia sat, slowly.

‘If the Foreign Office will agree, make it one of their own men. A lawyer would be the obvious choice. Let him work with the legal representative in Beijing, then pull him out.’

The head-shaking refusal grew. ‘You must have embassy cover: diplomatic protection.’

‘Like Gower did!’

‘That’s a cheap shot, which doesn’t get us anywhere,’ rejected Patrica. ‘From what we’re getting from Beijing, there was nothing the embassy could have done. But at least, for Gower, we can mount every diplomatic protest because he was accredited. There’s no question of your going there as a loose cannon: it’s absolutely out of the question.’

‘The embassy is what they’ll be watching!’ argued Charlie. ‘If you link me to it in a visa application you’ll alert the Chinese I’m coming. And so soon after Gower’s seizure, the connection is inevitable.’

‘It’s a point,’ she conceded, with seeming reluctance.

‘Just allow me a few days, without provable links to the embassy: as a tourist. Tell the embassy I’ll present myself, when it’s necessary. But nothing radioed or wired. Everything by pouch.’

‘You think our cipher’s insecure!’

Charlie sighed. ‘Everyone’s cipher is insecure. Use the diplomatic bag. Please!’

‘There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be done that way,’ she agreed, in further concession.

‘I’ll want to look at the duplicate prints of all that Snow photographed, along with the rest of the file. And see Foster.’

‘What for?’

‘I don’t know, not until I’ve talked to him,’ said Charlie, matching her awkwardness. ‘There’s no reason why I shouldn’t see him, is there?’

‘If he’d done the job properly, we wouldn’t have this crisis,’ said Patricia, bitterly.

‘I don’t want to learn his mistakes,’ said Charlie. ‘I want to know how to avoid them.’

She hesitated, momentarily. ‘You should know that Foster’s finished, because of this. He’ll be retained but never given any responsibility again.’

‘Better not appoint him a special, end-of-course instructor of how to survive,’ said Charlie.

The cynicism went badly wrong. ‘We didn’t choose very well last time, did we?’ she said, sourly.

Charlie decided, impatiently, that this was childish, yah-boo stuff. He regretted starting it in the first place. ‘Gower had a fiancée. Marcia. I don’t have a surname. She’s been on television and in the papers.’

‘So?’ frowned the woman.

‘She’ll be as frightened as hell. Not know what’s going on.’

The frown remained. ‘You think she should be told?’

Now she was initiating the childlike remarks. ‘I think when she tries to find out she shouldn’t be fobbed off by some metal-voiced Foreign Office robot with the usual load of bollocks. But convinced as much as possible that everything is being done to help the man she thought she was going to marry!’ said Charlie, irritated.

The smile was brief but with neither humour nor sympathy. ‘Didn’t you tell me once that you’d never let any personal feelings intrude?’

Bugger her, thought Charlie. ‘Gower might appreciate it. He’s probably doing his best for you at the moment.’

‘Let’s hope it’s better than he’s done so far.’

‘How did it go?’ demanded Peter Miller.

‘He practically bit my hand off,’ said Patricia. She’d gone immediately next door after Charlie Muffin’s departure, nervously surprised there’d been nothing from Miller before the encounter. The previous night Ann had been due at the Regent’s Park penthouse, her first visit since they’d spent the week there together.

‘Nothing you didn’t expect?’ The voice, as usual, was blandly neutral.

Patricia didn’t respond at once, although the hesitation was not to consider the question. She shouldn’t show any expectation: certainly not apprehension. ‘Not really, although he wasn’t quite as overwhelmed as I thought he would have been. Very quickly began making demands.’

‘Difficult ones?’

She forced a smile. He should have said something by now! Miller didn’t smile back. ‘He wants to avoid the embassy at the beginning. And he asked for a decoy to be sent.’

‘What did you say?’

Maybe his wife hadn’t come after all. Or maybe – although hard to believe – the perfume hadn’t been discovered yet. Against which was the fact that he hadn’t made any move to kiss her, which he normally did, when they met for the first time in the day. She desperately wished now that she hadn’t left the bottle: taken the risk. ‘Agreed to his being solo, at first. Left the decoy idea for us to think about.’

‘It’s not a bad idea.’

When was he going to talk about something other than about this damned assignment interview, which he should know without asking would have gone quite satisfactorily? ‘He wants to talk to Foster.’

The Director-General came forward over his desk, hands steepled before him. ‘What did you say to that?’

‘Agreed. What else?’ Was she imagining the brittle-ness in his voice? Why had she done it?

Miller nodded. ‘No reason why he shouldn’t, I suppose.’

‘Every reason why he should: it’s an obvious thing to do.’

‘You tell him we’re sidelining Foster?’

The perfume couldn’t have been found yet: that was the only explanation. She nodded to the question. ‘There were some wisecracks: except they weren’t very wise. He made himself look stupid. And realized it, too.’

‘That’s a word that’s been in my mind overnight,’ said Miller.

Patricia looked at him, in apparent incomprehension. At last! ‘What word?’

‘Stupid.’

‘I don’t understand.’ She wished he hadn’t called it that, although she supposed that was how it would have seemed.

Without taking his eyes from her, Miller reached sideways into a drawer. He lifted out the half-used bottle of Chanel and placed it on the desk between them. ‘Yours.’ It was an announcement, not a question.

Patricia, who believed she’d prepared herself for whatever he might say but now wasn’t sure, about anything, half lifted and then dropped her hands, in a gesture of helplessness, and said: ‘Yes, but … I don’t … where …?’

‘On Ann’s dressing-table.’

‘That’s not possible! I tidied everywhere!’

‘Right in the very middle of Ann’s things. As if it had been placed there.’

‘That’s not right … I mean I’m not saying it wasn’t there … what I’m saying is I couldn’t have left it … I’m sure I couldn’t …’

‘Didn’t you miss it?’

Her hands rose and fell again. ‘No. It’s not the only bottle I have … another at Chiswick … it just never arose …’

Miller looked steadily, blankly, over the desk.

Say something! she thought. Say something, please, something I want so much to hear: shout even, if you’re angry, although you never shout, no matter how enraged you get, do you? When he still didn’t speak, she said: ‘Was it bad when she found it?’

‘She didn’t find it,’ announced the man, calmly. ‘I did.’

No! The failure wailed so despairingly through Patricia’s mind it was as if she could hear her own voice moaning it. The smile was practically impossible, like what she had to say. ‘Thank God!’

‘I always check, after we’ve been there. Before Ann comes.’

‘Always?’ It was right that she should show some affront.

‘Always,’ he echoed.

‘What does that mean?’ she demanded, disappointment fuelling the annoyance. ‘That you don’t trust me?’

‘It means I’m extremely careful. Fortunately.’

‘Would it have been so bad if Ann had found it?’ Wrong! The word, a warning this time, reverberated through her mind like the earlier despair. She knew it could harden any suspicion he might have, but at the same time she wasn’t sorry she’d said it, either.

‘Did you intentionally leave it, Patricia?’ There was no anger in his voice: no emotion in the way he was speaking at all, which she found more unsettling than if he’d raged at her.

‘NO!’ She knew she was reddening but that didn’t matter because it could have been in anger at the accusation. ‘How can you ask me a question like that?’

‘It seems perfectly valid, to me.’

‘I don’t think so! I thought there was trust between us. Love, too. Maybe I was wrong.’ Patricia realized she was coming dangerously close to the edge, confronting him more forcefully than ever before. And he’d avoided her question, as he always avoided her question.

‘This isn’t the way Ann is going to be told.’

‘How is it going to be?’ she demanded, not able to hold her anger. Why? Why did he have to be so bloody careful! Why couldn’t the precious, cosseted, protected Lady Ann have been the one to find it?

‘Properly. Calmly. With my telling her.’ The voice droned, the man utterly in control of himself and his feelings.

‘After the boys finish at university! Or has some other schedule arisen I don’t know about yet?’

‘You’re putting a strain on things, Patricia.’

‘Is that a threat?’ Of course it was! Back off: she had to back off! She couldn’t risk losing him!

He shook his head. ‘A statement of the obvious.’

Oh no! He wasn’t ending it: surely he wasn’t doing that! The fear surged through her, far worse than the despair and disappointment and anger, so that she felt physically sick. Don’t let him end it! She didn’t have anyone else: any chance or hope of anyone else. She’d trusted him, relied upon him: given up other friendships that might have led to something. What little she had of Peter Miller was all she had, of anyone. ‘It was a mistake, the perfume. I honestly didn’t realize I’d left it. I’m sorry. And glad it hasn’t caused the upset it could have done.’

Miller pushed the bottle further towards her, across the table. At last he smiled. ‘You’d better take it, hadn’t you?’

Patricia did so, slipping it into her pocket to conceal it as she went between their two offices. It bulged, too noticeably, so she took it out again, covering it in her hand.

‘Let’s do it my way,’ he said.

‘All right.’ Which was how they’d always done everything. His way. To his convenience. And always would, she supposed, miserably.