The Run Around

Chapter Thirteen

By the end of the third day Charlie Muffin had unsuccessfully interviewed thirty-two members of the cabin staff of six different airlines, was well into the second bottle of room-service whisky, had discovered the Mercedes scratched in the hotel car park and was under increasing pressure from Sir Alistair Wilson to accept more people to conduct the hopeful photo-identification sessions, which was unnecessary because the delay in locating and bringing to England the stewards and stewardesses who had left London during those vital three hours meant there were long periods each day when there was no one even for Charlie to interrogate. And he thought the food at the airport was absolutely bloody awful: by the second day he’d had diarrhoea. That night, not bothering with dinner because of the stomach upset, which he was treating with the remains of the second bottle, Charlie accepted he’d soon have to submit to the Director’s insistence, pointless though it might be. He’d been in similar, cul-de-sac situations a dozen times before and the headquarters reaction was always the same, a determination to create movement in the belief that the direction would automatically be forward. He guessed it made them feel better. He wished he did.

The demands to the European embassies had fortunately not produced any further political events, which would have meant widening the search and made it more difficult than it already was and so far the Watchers had not come up with anything new. Charlie almost wished they would. He had been truthful putting this possibility no higher than fifty per cent during the meeting with the Director but was by now more conscious than he had been at the beginning of the upheaval his interview demands were causing. There would be no necessity for an explanation or apology to any of the airlines if the whole thing ended as unproductively as it had so far proved to be but Charlie knew that behind the undesignated doors of Whitehall and within the department his balls would be used for squash practice and not just for the game, either. Once – just once – it would have been nice to stand under a shower without knowing it was someone pulling the flush over his head.

And then the following morning the first person he interviewed was a senior Swissair stewardess named Eva Becker who studied the Primrose Hill photograph with Teutonic intentness, looked up at him serious faced and said: ‘Yes.’

‘Yes what?’ asked Charlie, cautiously.

‘I think I have seen this man.’

‘On the thirteenth?’

‘Yes,’ said the stewardess. ‘It was flight 837.’

He knew all the answers already but it was important that everything came from her, without any prompting or assumption from him. He said: ‘What time?’

‘Twenty hundred.’

One hour after the immigration episode: the timing could not be more precisely right. Charlie said: ‘Where does that flight go?’

‘Geneva,’ she said.

‘And then?’

‘No where,’ she said. ‘It terminates there.’

‘Why do you think it was him?’

‘I thought he was rude,’ said the woman.

‘Rude?’

‘He refused any drinks. Or the food snack,’ she said. ‘When I offered again – it’s customary to do so – he said he’d already told me he didn’t want anything and hadn’t I heard him. It was very impolite. Wilfred thought so too.’

‘Wilfred?’

The woman nodded behind her and through the glass of the fishbowl office Charlie saw a man in a Swissair uniform, waiting to follow her. She said: ‘We were flying together that evening. Like we are today.’

The steward’s full name was Wilfred Stemi. Charlie was careful to ensure there was no conversation whatsoever between them when they exchanged places, from which she might have alerted the man and Stemi identified the photograph as positively as she had done and for the same reasons. And with an acceptably minimal degree of difference from that assembled by the professional analysts he provided a satisfactory physical description of the man, just as she had done.

It had been a packed flight, without one vacant seat, and when Charlie retrieved the manifest from the Swissair passenger computer he counted sixty English-type names likely to be travelling on British passports. There were three Smiths.

Charlie decided it was a waste of time to drive all the way back into London for a secure conversation with the Director, only to have to drive back out again, so he used the open line once more, admiring the quickness with which Wilson acknowledged the guarded conversation. Charlie said he needed to go to Geneva at once and asked for a replacement to carry out the job interviews, determined the photograph should go on being checked by the other aircrews from the other airlines in case this sighting was a mistake, like that in Primrose Hill could still be a mistake. He would, he said, be leaving behind a list of people whose references he wanted officially checked and Wilson said he wasn’t quite sure what that meant and Charlie said he would be when he saw the list.

‘You want the Swiss firm advised of your arrival?’ asked the Director.

‘Definitely,’ said Charlie, at once. This wasn’t a one-man operation, although that was normally the way he liked to work. If Geneva were the right location it meant he had more time because neither the arms limitation session nor the Middle East conference was until the end of November but he still needed all the help he could get from as many branches of Swiss intelligence that there were: the haystack was still about as big as Mont Blanc.

‘Looking forward to a productive trip?’

‘Still not considering anything more than a fifty per cent return,’ warned Charlie, guardedly.

‘Anything else we can do from this end?’

‘There’s the hotel bill to settle.’

‘I’ll see it’s done.’

‘And a Mercedes to collect from the car park there.’

‘I’ll tell the Pool.’

Charlie wondered about mentioning the scratch and then decided it could be Harkness’s ulcer irritant for that day.

He reached Geneva’s Cointrin airport by mid-afternoon and made himself immediately known to the security colonel there. The man checked, as Charlie suggested, with the central intelligence unit in Bern, who confirmed his arrival had already been signalled from London and together they questioned the four immigration officers who had been on duty on the night of the 13th. One man said he thought the face in the photograph looked familiar but admitted when pressed that he could not swear to it. Charlie hopefully toured all the car rental desks at the airport but there was no recognition from any of them.

The colonel suggested the Beau-Rivage because it was the best hotel and Charlie, who hadn’t been to Geneva before, accepted the choice. The man insisted upon driving him into the city. As they drew up outside the hotel on the Quai de Mont Blanc the colonel, who had not been given a reason for the order to assist Charlie in everything, said: ‘This man likely to cause us a lot of trouble?’

‘If he’s who I think he is, more trouble than you’d believe,’ said Charlie.

Thirty minutes later Charlie stood at the window of his lake-fronting room, never to know that four days earlier Vasili Nikolaevich Zenin had enjoyed the same view from the hotel’s restaurant and later strolled into the town along the quai that Charlie could see below.

Charlie turned back into the room, gazing down at the picture which was becoming bent and cracked with use. ‘Got something else on you,’ he said. ‘You’re a rude bugger. Silly mistake to have made, sunshine, silly mistake to have made. But thank Christ you did.’

And then he remembered his own mistake and thought, Shit! He’d forgotten to ask those restaurants that knew him to agree those phoney receipts were theirs when Harkness’s men came around, as Charlie knew they would.

Roger Giles was grateful the marriage appeared to be ending amicably because he’d never been able to understand how people who had once loved could end up hating. And he and Barbara had loved each other once: gone as far as to talk about how sad it was that other people got divorced, never imagining it could happen to them. He still found it difficult to realize that it was happening. Or why.

It had been Barbara’s suggestion they stop sleeping together, although sex had not been the problem between them. Barbara stood in the doorway of his single bedroom at the Alexandria house, watching him pack.

‘Any idea when you’ll be back?’ Like the wives of all intelligence operatives, she never talked in specifics, like she never referred openly to his being a member of the CIA or blamed the Agency for what had collapsed between them, although she considered his commitment to the Agency the reason.

‘November 30,’ he said. ‘Definitely no later than 1 December.’

‘Unusual to be so definite.’

‘Positive dates this time.’

‘I can go ahead with lawyers’ appointments then?’

Giles hesitated and then said: ‘Sure.’

‘If I need to arrange anything on your behalf, can I do that too?’

‘Certainly,’ said Giles, quicker this time. ‘I’ve settled all the bills and there’s almost a thousand dollars in the checking account. Draw whatever you want.’

‘Thanks,’ said Barbara. They were each going to miss each other an awful lot, she knew. Somehow it all seemed so unnecessary, like the nonsense over the bedrooms. She could not think now why she had insisted upon it.