Charlie’s Apprentice

Fifty

Charlie cut the visit as short as he could, but it still took a supreme effort of will to sit by his mother’s bedside and maintain even a minimal conversation. It didn’t help that she was more alert than she had been for months, talking incessantly and clearly expecting him to stay much longer, as did the nursing home staff. He left promising to extend his next visit.

He stopped again at the Stockbridge hotel, the first available convenient place, still feeling shaky. He couldn’t believe how close he’d been to collapsing when he’d recognized Natalia’s writing! He was getting far too bloody old for shocks like that. Shock wasn’t the right word, although it described how it had affected him. He couldn’t think how he wanted to express it, but revelation was one word that occurred to him. Escape – inexplicably – was another. Then he asked himself why it was important to categorize it at all, so he stopped bothering, because there was so much else he had to think about. He bought another Islay malt, a large one, and settled in a corner far away from any possible interruption. He drank, settling himself further. He laid the package on the table in front of him, but did not immediately take out the contents – stupidly reluctant to touch it in case it wasn’t true, stupid because it was true-staring down at it instead like a fortune-teller consulting a crystal ball.

This had to tell him much more than a crystal ball had ever told any fortune-teller, he determined. And he had to read and understand every sign.

His first and most important realization wasn’t that he was the father of a child named Alexandra, wonderful and incredible though that was: so wonderfully incredible that he knew he would need much more time to fully comprehend it.

His initial and most important awareness was that Natalia had survived his abandonment in London, thus answering the persistent and recurring uncertainty that had nagged at him ever since he watched her keep the rendezvous from which he’d held back. Very quickly came the only possible progression. He hadn’t lost her! Natalia had traced him, so she didn’t hate him, as she had every right to hate him. As he’d expected her to.

What else? Read the signs, read the signs! Too much nostalgia risked obscuring the reasoning she expected him to follow. Which he had to follow, not to lose her again. Only consider the important facts that the nostalgia had provided, then. Two essential points: that she had survived and that she’d found him. More to learn from the second than the first. Not just found him. Found Miller and Patricia Elder and the significance of Regent’s Park. Careful here! Nothing to do with the sort of bluff, double-bluff, agent, double-agent bullshit he’d so recently been involved with in Beijing. What Natalia was offering was personal, not business. Her dilemma, when she’d agonized about staying in London with him, had always been about an absolute refusal to become an informing defector against her own country, and because he knew her so well Charlie was sure that loyalty hadn’t changed.

So why had she included the photograph that he’d actually – by astonishing coincidence – witnessed being taken? Not just taken, he qualified, moving towards a hopeful conclusion: officially taken. As part of an operation. Abruptly Charlie remembered the grey Ford in his rear-view mirror as he travelled back to London from the nursing home, briefly allowing himself the satisfaction of knowing that he had been right that day. The same operation?

It all had to be guesswork, the most obvious and logical surmises he could reach, but Charlie thought he saw it. Natalia was telling him she hadn’t just survived but was now powerful enough to use the resources of the Russian agency virtually how she liked. To do which she had to be very powerful indeed.

And the package at which he was still staring confirmed it! Powerful enough to travel to Koblenz, from where she’d posted it. But why to the nursing home? Because they’d talked about it! For all those months he’d been in Moscow he’d worried about not being able to make his usual visits and he’d talked about it to Natalia, although he couldn’t recall what he’d said that had remained with her after all this time to lead her to the location from which they followed him. But then lost him. Or rather he’d lost them! So the nursing home was all she had: the only way of reaching him again, if she chose to do so.

Charlie pulled the contents from their folder at last, smiling down at the Moscow photograph. It was a Moscow photograph and a place he recognized. Alexandra – Sasha as Natalia obviously preferred to call her – was in an adjustable buggy, tilted back, seeming to smile up at the camera although she was obviously too young, not yet a year old, to know how to smile for a camera. But it was the background in which Charlie was interested. There appeared to be a monument of some sort but it was incomplete, only half a sphere. He was sure he knew it but couldn’t bring it to mind, no matter how fixedly he stared at it.

Gradually, inevitably, his concentration slipped sideways to the second print, and then he fully appreciated what he was looking at – and how he could use it – and Charlie sniggered aloud, quickly stifling the reaction.

For the moment Natalia and a baby he had never seen and never expected to have would have to wait. There was his own survival to guarantee. Charlie considered just one more drink, believing he deserved a celebration, but didn’t have it, anxious to get back to London to complete everything.

The paper upon which the photograph was printed could be forensically proven to be Russian, and photographic paper anyway provides one of the best possible surfaces for fingerprints, so it had to be changed. Natalia’s fingerprints could be upon it and his own certainly were and Charlie wasn’t satisfied with just wiping either side with a cloth. He did that anyway, of course, as thoroughly as he could, before taking the print of Miller and Patricia Elder into a department store photocopying section. The assistant wore gloves, the way they all do. Charlie was extremely careful handling the copies that were returned to him, cupping his fingers only at the edges, where no print could register. When he got back to the Primrose Hill flat he actually used tweezers.

He cut newsprint letters from that night’s Evening Standard to address the first envelope to the security division at Westminster Bridge Road, enclosing one duplicate photograph of Peter Miller and Patricia Elder arm-in-arm on the ring road around Regent’s Park.

He addressed with the same cut-out letters the second duplicate print, again by itself without any attempted explanation, in a second envelope to Lady Ann Miller at the Berkshire stud listed in Who’s Who. Knowing that the franking was relevant, Charlie travelled back to Kensington to post them. He didn’t touch either envelope at any time with his bare hands.

He’d fucked them, Charlie decided: either way he’d fucked them, which they’d deserved for what they’d done to Jeremy Snow and John Gower and tried to do to him. They really should have read and understood how vindictive he could be.

He had, of course, got printouts of the transmissions that Hong Kong had intercepted, going to and from the Beijing embassy, and the whole point of telling Julia Robb was to panic them into trying to sanitise the records. But they would have still had enough power to overwhelm him if it had got to an official inquiry when they’d tried to dump him. Now he didn’t have to bother with any of it.

As she had predicted herself, Julia would probably go when Miller and Patricia Elder were discreetly retired and yet another Director-General and deputy were appointed. But then it was simple justice that she should.

In a way, she had been shittier than either of the other two. They at least hadn’t pretended the friendship, like she had, even hinting at the end it could go deeper than being platonic. Although he supposed it had been they who’d persuaded her to see him as often as she eventually had, to pass back whatever he’d said in off-guard moments of any suspicions he might have had before going to Beijing. She hadn’t been very good, Charlie reflected: she’d given away far more than she’d learned, particularly about the relationship between Miller and Patricia Elder.

He supposed protecting himself at all times, in whatever circumstances, came down to never trusting anyone, although he’d trusted Julia until the idea had occurred to him on the flight back from China. He was glad it had. It really hadn’t taken very long at the national registration unit at Southport to discover that Julia Robb had never been married but had always been a spinster. And that she didn’t have a sister, either, with whom the non-existent husband could have run away. Julia really shouldn’t have tried to make her sob-story so wet-eyed.

With the one photograph so protectively utilized, Charlie concentrated again when he got back to his flat upon the print of the daughter he had never seen and hadn’t ever believed he was going to have.

She was beautiful, he decided. Wonderfully, innocently, diminutively beautiful. He wanted to know what she felt like, smelled like, sounded like, was like. Just wanted. But how? How? How?

And then he recognized the background. It was half a sphere, a replica of the capsule in which Yuri Gagarin had been blasted up to become Russia’s – and the world’s – first man in space: the replica which rested at the foot of the ugly tower monument to the achievement in Moscow’s Leninskaya Prospekt. But what did it mean? Did it mean anything? It had to. Natalia wouldn’t have done all this, without everything having some significance. Charlie turned the photograph back and front, from Natalia’s inscription back to the print, and then revolved it again.

And then stopped. She hadn’t simply written Her name is Sasha. There was the date, obviously of Sasha’s birth. By which Natalia was telling him she had been pregnant when he’d abandoned her to go back alone to Russia. And that he was the father. An anniversary recurring in two months’ time.

He had a date, Charlie realized. And a place.