The Run Around

Chapter Nine

Charlie Muffin was irritated, for more than one reason. The most obvious cause was the forthcoming encounter with Harkness but the greater feeling came from the frustration of not being able to do anything but sit and wait and rely on others. Charlie didn’t like sitting and waiting: most definitely not on an operation like this, one with a time limit. And he never liked relying on others because it was far too easy to slip on their dropped banana skins. Which was perhaps an unfair reflection on this particular job. He’d had re-run the one half-face picture of Primrose Hill through all the physiognomy checks possible, trying for comparisons with all known Eastern bloc agents going back for three years, using the computer system as well as human analysis. And come up with a blank, like the first time. So objectively it was unlikely that any immigration officer or Special Branch man, despite their training, was going to do any better. It was a bastard, a right bastard. Maybe, ultimately, they would have to pick up Harkness’s suggestion and sound a general alarm, impractical though it had seemed during the meeting with the Director. Which was further cause for irritation. Charlie didn’t like being unable to come up with a better idea than that prick of a deputy.

Sighing, he left his cubby-hole office in good time for the appointment, reluctant to provide the man with more grounds for complaint than he already had. Charlie was ten minutes early and was told by the stiffly coiffeured secretary that he had to wait. He did so patiently, refusing to be riled any more than he already was, knowing damned well there was no reason for Harkness to delay the interview and that the man was playing his usual silly buggers. Charlie bet that Harkness had been one of those snotty little kids who take their bats home if they weren’t allowed to have first crack at the ball.

Harkness’s office was lower than the Director’s and further to one side, so the vibration from the underground trains hummed up from the foundations. The man was waiting neatly behind his desk: the suit today was blue-striped, the colour-coded accessories pastel-blue. The office was antiseptically clean, as it always was.

‘Anything come in since yesterday?’ said Harkness.

‘Nothing,’ said Charlie. The man knew damned well that if there had been anything he would have been informed.

‘You drew a Mercedes from the pool,’ announced Harkness.

‘What?’ said Charlie. If Harkness could play silly buggers, then so could he. In fact Charlie reckoned he was better at it than the other man.

‘For the Novikov debriefing you drew a Mercedes from the pool,’ repeated Harkness, pedantically.

The deputy’s pink cheeks were pinker than usual and Charlie hoped it was anger. He said: ‘That was the debriefing you didn’t think was any good.’

‘It was returned damaged,’ said Harkness.

‘Was it?’ said Charlie, in blank-faced innocence.

‘The motif was torn away.’

‘Wonder how that happened,’ said Charlie.

‘You didn’t notice it?’

‘No.’ He wondered if the man ever farted: probably not.

‘It’s directly in front of you, when you drive, man!’

Temper, temper, thought Charlie. He said, ‘Never noticed it. Honest.’

‘There were smaller, less expensive vehicles you could have chosen.’

‘Probably,’ agreed Charlie.

‘So why didn’t you?’

‘I got the impression from the Director’s briefing that there was some urgency,’ said Charlie. Get out of that, he thought.

Harkness couldn’t. Definitely red-faced now he said: ‘You drew the car on the ninth?’

‘That sounds right,’ said Charlie, intentionally vague to irk a man to whom precise detail was everything.

‘It was not returned to the pool until the tenth.’ persisted Harkness.

‘I’m sure the pool records are accurate.’

‘So why did you keep it overnight?’ demanded Harkness. ‘You know that contravenes regulations.’

‘I wasn’t sure whether I would need it to return to Sussex the following day, to expand on anything Novikov might have told me,’ lured Charlie.

Harkness stepped into the very middle of the trap. ‘You’d been summoned for a meeting with the Director!’ pounced the deputy. ‘So you couldn’t have returned to Sussex the following day?’

‘But the summons was through …’ Charlie hesitated, appearing to seek a polite route ‘… through some misunderstanding about the worth of the debriefing, like I mentioned earlier,’ he said. ‘I thought it was a good interview: and it did turn out to be, didn’t it? If I’d had any afterthoughts I’d hoped the Director would have delayed our meeting. As it was, I didn’t have any afterthoughts so it wasn’t necessary. Bit of luck that, wasn’t it?’

Harkness’s mouth was in a tight line. He said: ‘There is a form to be filled in, for damaged vehicles.’

‘I’m sure there is,’ said Charlie. The prat had probably created it.

‘You’ll need to complete it.’

‘You want me to explain the misunderstanding about the debriefing?’ asked Charlie, the innocence as perfectly pitched as before.

Harkness’s face was blazing now. ‘Just the circumstances of the damage,’ he said, brittle-voiced.

‘Don’t know the circumstances of the damage,’ reminded Charlie. ‘Never realized it had happened.’

‘Complete the confounded form!’

Charlie bet for once the man regretted the determination against swearing: ‘fucking form’ would have relieved the pressure much better. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, obediently.

Harkness recognized the insolence at once: ‘sir’ was a word he knew did not exist in Charlie’s vocabulary, apart from occasionally when addressing the Director. He failed completely to comprehend Wilson’s admiration for the grubby little oik. Harkness said: ‘A letter has been channelled to me. From your bank.’

Here we go, thought Charlie: everyone on the roller-coaster and no one knowing where the ride would end. Cautiously he said: ‘Yes?’

‘Are you in financial difficulties?’

‘Isn’t everyone?’ smiled Charlie, hopefully. Harkness doing the unexpected would be the biggest joke of all time.

‘Do you realize this could put you in a review situation?’

‘Review situation?’

‘The Permanent Security Review Committee consider financial irregularity very important.’

‘What financial irregularity!’

‘You’ve sought an arrangement for £10,000?’

‘Yes.’

‘Meaning you can’t live within your means?’

Charlie had expected his past record – a record Harkness could never forget or overlook – to result in suspicion like this. But the headmaster-to-difficult-pupil number was still a pain in the arse. He said: ‘It is an application to an English bank, not an offer to go over to the Russians.’

‘Like you once did!’

Charlie bet he could move his lips in anticipation of the other man’s thoughts. He said: ‘I did not go across to the Russians: I taught a lesson to those who tried to make me sacrifice of the month.’

‘The directors of American and British intelligence!’

‘They were prepared for me to be seized: killed maybe. All I did was make them look stupid. Which wasn’t very difficult,’ said Charlie. ‘They were only in Soviet custody for twenty-four hours, anyway.’ Should have been longer, he thought. Arseholes, all of them.

‘Now you need money?’

‘And that makes me a security risk?’ said Charlie, answering question by question.

‘There’s precedent for it doing so.’

‘Not with me,’ insisted Charlie. ‘I could have stayed in Russia last time if I’d wanted to, remember?’ And still been with Natalia, he thought. He wished so much to know what had happened to her; to be sure that she was safe.

‘You’re under pressure to repay creditors?’

‘No,’ said Charlie. The bookmaker’s demand for £300 hardly ranked with the National Debt, after all.

‘So why do you need the money?’

‘Few improvements around the flat,’ ad-libbed Charlie, prepared from the encounter with the bank manager. ‘Thought I might get a little car for the week-ends.’

‘For which your salary is insufficient?’

‘I’ve been passed over by the last two promotional boards,’ reminded Charlie. And he’d bet a pound to a pinch of the smelly brown stuff that Harkness had been in there blocking his upgrading.

‘You realize that the security requirements – my having become involved because of this letter – are that I make a thorough investigation into your financial affairs, don’t you?’ said the Deputy Director.

Charlie wondered which would upset Harkness more, the membership fees to the three after-hours drinking clubs or the subscription to the Fantail Club, where there was a lot of fanny and tail and all of it uncovered for appreciative selection. Straight-faced, he said: ‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Well it does.’

‘I don’t suppose I have any say in it, your having become involved?’

‘None at all,’ said Harkness. ‘The procedure now is regulated.’

Like the right sort of bowel movement, thought Charlie: the bastard was enjoying himself. He said: ‘Regulations also say I must have complete access to your report, don’t they?’

Harkness blinked, appearing surprised at Charlie’s knowledge of always disdained rules, unaware that Charlie could quote every one that was likely personally to affect or benefit him. The deputy said: ‘Of course.’

‘I’m very happy for you to make whatever enquiries you consider necessary,’ said Charlie, because he had to. He accepted positive vetting as a necessity of the job but was uncomfortable at this prissy little sod opening cupboard doors looking for threadbare skeletons. Harkness was more likely to encounter threadbare suits, but that wasn’t the point.

‘I will also require a full account, in much more detail than you’ve so far provided, of why you require this overdraft facility,’ said Harkness.

‘For which there is a special form?’ anticipated Charlie.

‘It’s A/23/W98,’ confirmed Harkness.

‘Thanks,’ said Charlie.

‘And there’s still the expenses situation, with which this could be connected,’ said Harkness.

No stone left unturned, thought Charlie. He said: ‘I’ll try to complete the form this afternoon.’

‘I will need it for the Review Committee and –’ began Harkness when the red internal telephone rang, the man’s direct link to the Director.

‘Where the hell’s Muffin!’ demanded Wilson.

‘With me,’ said Harkness.

‘Something’s come up,’ announced Wilson. ‘Get him here.’

When Harkness relayed the order, Charlie said: ‘Do you want me to go right away or should I fill in the form first?’

‘Get out!’ yelled Harkness, finally losing control.

Not bad, decided Charlie, making his way to the upper floor.

*

Berenkov drafted a total of twelve Russians to form the protective screen around the Bern embassy. Six came in, all separately, by air and the rest entered Switzerland, again separately, by road and rail. Four were seconded within the legation itself but the remainder were split into two-man cells, each to monitor and watch independently.

None of the groups were told the reason for their surveillance, of course, and one ironically established itself only two streets away from the Wyttenbackstrasse, where Zenin had a room at the back, away from the street, in the Marthahaus.

It took him a day to locate and to rent in the name of Henry Smale a lock-up garage in which to hide the rented Peugeot. During that search – and afterwards—he went to great lengths to avoid the Soviet embassy, only wanting to be linked with it once and then briefly. With time to spare he explored the old part of town, Spitalgasse and Marktgasse and Kramgasse and Gerechtigkeitsgasse, actually considering – and then rejecting – the idea of an early trip to the Bernese Oberland. More important to make the reconnaissance back in Geneva, from which he was intentionally distancing himself. The Oberland could wait until later, when there was a real reason. He had wondered how he’d feel as it got closer, pleased at the moment there was no nervousness. If there were a sensation at all it was one of anticipation, eager anticipation.