Comrade Charlie

Chapter 28

With his customary objectivity — which in matters of personal safety could be brutal — Charlie Muffin admitted to himself that he was taking the biggest risk of a risk-burdened life. Additionally, he accepted that what he was doing was reprehensibly unprofessional. That any unbiased observer would judge it to be bloody daft. And that he thought so too: worse than bloody daft, in fact. Insane was a far better word. He tried to balance the assessment by telling himself he was irrevocably committed, but refused that excuse at once, knowing it not to be the case: that he could still change his mind. And then, in complete honesty, confronted the fact that he didn’t want to operate any differently from the way he was doing right now, so he wouldn’t. Besides, to change his mind at this point would be to admit a mistake and Charlie had an inherent dislike of admitting mistakes and most certainly wouldn’t contemplate such an admission to Harkness. Which, he conceded, made him not just bloody daft but bloody minded, as well. And still left him facing the biggest risk he’d ever knowingly taken. Because if this went wrong by one tiny iota those who ruled his existence — not shithead Harkness but Intelligence Committees and permanent civil servants — might be sufficiently pissed off with him to think a hundred years in a ratinfested jail cell was too good and remove Charles Edward Muffin from circulation altogether. Charlie was convinced such an embarrassment-avoiding course had been taken before, with other insubordinate troublemakers: far less trouble, far less difficulty, all so much neater.

The problem, which always seemed to be the same problem, was watching his ass at the same time as looking straight in front to see all the approaching dangers. He’d taken all the precautions he could think of taking, which hardly rated as precautions at all, and he couldn’t think of anything else he could do. Which was unsettling because Charlie never liked to be absolutely devoid of ideas like he was this time.

He completely tidied his apartment and conceived fresh snares, and before he officially took his leave he treated William French to a pub lunch (pie, pickles and beer perfectly kept in wood barrels) to thank the man for what he had already done and to ask if he could keep in touch while he was away from the office.

‘I’m not going to regret this, am I, Charlie?’ probed the Technical Division scientist cautiously. ‘A favour’s a favour but this is coming close to needing some proper authority.’

‘It’ll be all right,’ assured Charlie. I hope, he thought: he was never comfortable endangering mates, no matter how justified the necessity might be.

‘I’ve kept my name off everything,’ warned French. ‘If there is any sort of fuck-up followed by an inquiry I won’t even know what they’re talking about or who Charlie Muffin is.’

‘That’s precisely what I’d expect you to do,’ said Charlie honestly. ‘You don’t think I’d point the finger, do you!’

‘No,’ agreed the man at once. ‘I don’t think you’d do that under any circumstances.’

Charlie didn’t imagine he would either: he just wasn’t sure. He said: ‘So I’ll keep in touch, OK?’

‘You know how I feel about open telephone lines,’ said the man whose expertise was telephones.

‘I’ll be circumspect.’

‘That’s not much of a safeguard.’

‘It is when we both know what we’re talking about.’

It was, of course, necessary for Charlie fully to reconnoitre the Soviet delegation hotel and he sketched the surveillance over two days. He explored all the roads immediately adjacent to the Blair hotel, like Gloucester Terrace and Bathrust Street and Westbourne Crescent, giving particular attention to any that had one-way traffic restrictions, and then spread the check as far north as the Paddington Basin and as far south as Hyde Park, although he did not go down as far as the restaurant in which Vitali Losev had made his first hostile meeting with Alexandr Petrin.

With just days to go before Natalia’s arrival, Charlie had his hair cut and bought two new shirts and a new tie and briefly considered — and rejected — new shoes, and alternated his two suits so that he could have both cleaned and pressed.

And then, finally, Charlie decided he was ready: there was nothing left to be done that he hadn’t already done. All he could do now was wait. He admitted to himself that he was nervous: more nervous than he could remember being on a lot of past assignments, which was virtually how he was regarding this, an assignment. He had some idea, from the photographs, but he still wondered if Natalia would be the same when he saw her again for the first time.

Throughout all the preparations, the Soviet observers maintained their twenty-four-hour watch.

At its most basic a number-for-letter code transliterates directly the letter of an alphabet for its corresponding number, in the case of English the letter A represented by the figure one and running consecutively through to Z, which is twenty-six. There are, however, mathematical variations which can be introduced to make unravelling the cipher difficult — and hopefully impossible — for the codebreakers. If the sender and recipient agree in advance to use a variable of two, for instance, then the transliteration can range over five choices of letter: the intended letter and two either side. It can be further complicated by changing the variable from day to day, from odd to even numbers. And compounded by mixing two languages, English with Russian for example: in Cyrillic Russian there is no easy equivalent for H or J but there are two possible inflections for the letter K.

Having purposely provided the British with what he wanted them to recognize as a number-for-letter code Berenkov had the KGB Technical Division introduce random variations established in advance by a translation key sent to the London embassy in the diplomatic bag.

The intention remained always for the interceptors eventually to be able to read the messages, whatever the variation, but for them to believe the more difficult changes indicated an increasing importance of the contents.

Which was precisely what happened.

The transmission from Moscow on the day Krogh arrived in London was a mixture of English and Russian and had a variable range rising from one to four. It was to take the codebreakers a week to comprehend it and when he received it Richard Harkness ranked it as the most important interception and translation so far made.

It said: REACTIVATE PAYMASTER BY ONE THOUSAND.

He hurried Hubert Witherspoon to the ninth floor.