The Run Around

Chapter Twenty-three

Alexei Aleksandrovich Berenkov regarded Charlie Muffin as his equal, which was an accolade. The Russian had frequently concluded during those long, sleepless and gradually despairing nights in London’s Wormwood Scrubs that no one but Charlie Muffin would have persisted, sifting and checking and cross-checking and then pursuing with the relentlessness of a starving Siberian wolf the labyrinthine maze Berenkov had created for his own protection and which eventually ensnared him. Or behaved, either, as Charlie had after the arrest. Not treating him as a hydra-headed monster, to be looked at like some fairground curiosity through the prison-door peephole, but treated as an equal, professional to professional. It had been a challenge, being debriefed by Charlie. Berenkov still sometimes wondered what the score had finally been, before his release. He’d meant to ask, when they’d met later in Moscow, but the occasion had not presented itself. They’d been fools, the British, to imagine such a man as expendable. But to his benefit, Berenkov recognized. If the British had not decided to use Charlie Muffin as the disposable bait in the crossing of the Berlin Wall – and been caught out by the man doing so – Berenkov guessed he could still now be decaying in that damp-walled cell with the stinking pisspot in the nighttime corner and the eight boring hours in the prison library and the one boring hour in the exercise yard and the rest of the time alone with the smell of damp and piss. Charlie Muffin had hardly been his capturer then. Saviour in fact. No, that was not correct, either. There might have been professional admiration between them, but that was where the feeling ended: where it had to end, as professionals. His repatriation to the Soviet Union in exchange for the British and American intelligence directors whom Charlie lured into Soviet entrapment in Vienna had been convenient, that’s all. He’d been an advantage and Charlie had used him, like he used all advantages. Which was why the man was so dangerous. And why he had to be destroyed. Berenkov reached the conclusion quite dispassionately: again it was professional, not personal. He knew Charlie Muffin would understand that. Were the situation reversed, it was the sort of decision Charlie would have reached. It was regrettable but necessary: that was why he had not mentioned the man’s name to Valentina. She’d liked Charlie: perhaps rightfully considered him to be the man who had restored a husband to her, after so many – too many – years as an espionage agent in the West. Women thought like that; with their hearts rather than with their heads. Men had to think differently.

Berenkov arrived first at Dzerzhinsky Square, of course, but Valery Kalenin was close behind, with such a short distance to travel from Kutuzovsky Prospekt: Berenkov had considered their coming together in the same car but decided upon some time to himself, fully to consider the implications of the Swiss sighting.

‘A problem?’ demanded Kalenin at once.

Instead of replying, Berenkov handed the other man the set of photographs.

The KGB chief gazed down at them, slowly shaking his head. Then he looked up and said: ‘Charlie Muffin!’

‘They were taken today outside the embassy in Bern,’ announced Berenkov.

‘How many were there!’ demanded the KGB chief, at once.

‘That’s the confusing part,’ admitted Berenkov. ‘I checked, obviously. But it was not a concentrated sweep. Just Charlie Muffin. And he was too late. Zenin had already made the pick-up.’

‘I don’t understand a fishing expedition,’ complained Kalenin.

‘If the British knew more there would have been a build-up,’ insisted Berenkov. ‘The Swiss would be swamping the embassy. And they’re not.’

‘Still worth letting it run, then?’

‘We’ve still got the embassy covered,’ reminded Berenkov. ‘If there’s any sort of change in the surveillance we can still turn Zenin off at the apartment. I know it’s not in the planning and there’s a risk of panicking him but it’s always an option for us.’

‘Charlie Muffin, of all people!’ said Kalenin, reflectively. Kalenin had posed as the defector bait to lure the English and American directors to Vienna and there had necessarily been supposed planning meetings between himself and Charlie.

Berenkov knew the KGB chairman had about the man a professional regard similar to his own. He said: ‘I know Charlie Muffin. So do you. His being there worries me.’

‘But you said he was alone.’

‘How professional were the cells I ran in England and Europe regarded?’ asked Berenkov, confusingly.

Kalenin frowned across the Dzerzhinsky Square office at his friend, whom he regarded as one of the least conceited people he had ever known. He said: ‘Magnificent. You know that.’

‘Charlie Muffin worked virtually alone when he closed me down,’ said Berenkov. ‘And what about his coming here after the escape from a British jail?’

‘A plant: we know that.’

Berenkov shook his head. ‘The Englishman who was with him and whom we captured admitted everything,’ he said. ‘Everything except that. He always insisted Charlie Muffin knew nothing about it.’

‘But that’s how Natalia Fedova discovered there was an attempt of infiltration in the first place!’ refuted Kalenin, who had again personally interrogated the woman.

Berenkov, who knew of his friend’s involvement, said: ‘That’s what Comrade Fedova insists.’

‘Are you suggesting Charlie Muffin was working quite separately: on something we haven’t realized!’

‘I’m suggesting we re-open the file on the whole episode of his being here,’ said Berenkov.

‘It would mean Comrade Fedova was mistaken,’ said Kalenin, in further reflection.

‘Or something worse,’ said Berenkov.

‘Oh no!’ said Kalenin, understanding. ‘That can’t be. She was the one who alerted me!’

‘Isn’t the classic way to avoid suspicion to shift it entirely upon someone else: particularly if that someone else is guilty?’

Kalenin was silent for several moments, then he said: ‘I agree the file should be re-opened. But personally, by you. I don’t want any suggestion of a mistake having been made.’

Berenkov nodded, accepting the order and said: ‘I think we should go beyond a re-examination. I think Charlie Muffin is too dangerous. I think he should be taken out.’

Kalenin sat regarding the other man for several moments, considering the suggestion. He said: ‘You’re surely not suggesting he should be killed in Switzerland?’

‘Of course not,’ said Berenkov. ‘It would attract far too much attention: actually confirm everything. But I think an operation should be devised for something very quickly afterwards.’

Once more Kalenin did not respond immediately. Then he said: ‘I admired him. Liked him, too.’

‘So did I,’ said Berenkov. ‘I don’t think that should affect our getting rid of him.’

‘Not at all,’ nodded Kalenin, in agreement. ‘But I want to know what he was doing here first. Discover that if you can, before you order it.’

Sulafeh Nabulsi felt gripped by an inner warmth, an excitement that would not dissipate and that she did not want to go away: she was scarcely conscious of anything around her on the way back across the city to the Rue Barthelemy-Menn, switching between taxi and tram but not really trying to weave any sort of false trail.

So enclosed was she that she did not hear Mohammed Dajani when he first called out in the hotel foyer, and still frowned at him in apparent lack of recognition when he put himself in her path.

‘Where have you been?’ Dajani demanded.

‘Out,’ she said.

‘I’ve been waiting.’

‘What for?’

‘You. I thought we could explore the city, like we talked about.’

It took Sulafeh a great effort to concentrate. ‘I’m tired,’ she said. Even to have the man near her was repulsive, after the ecstatic experiences of the afternoon.

Dajani’s face tightened. ‘I thought we were going to be friends,’ he said.

‘Leave me alone!’ she said, stepping around him. ‘Just leave me alone!’

The arrogant, career-minded, over-sexed bitch needed to be taught a lesson, to learn to whom it was necessary to show the proper sort of deference, recognized Dajani. So she would be taught.