Here Comes Charlie M

‘Oh,’ said Charlie, uninterested.

‘Why did you do that?’ asked Willoughby. ‘If they’d found your passport, in a bag that shouldn’t have been aboard, then Ruttgers would have lived.’

‘No,’ said Charlie, definitely. ‘That’s why the passport and Edith’s bag were important.’

Willoughby sat, waiting. It would only increase the man’s disgust, realised Charlie. It didn’t seem to matter.

Sighing, he went on: ‘The bomb that destroyed the aircraft wasn’t in Edith’s bag. There were two other bombs, both in separate pieces of Ruttger’s own luggage. I wasn’t able to get near enough to the aircraft to see what sort of baggage checks were being conducted. So I had to create a dummy … something that could have been discarded, if there had been any sort of examination. In fact, there wasn’t.’

‘That’s horrifying,’ said Willoughby. He seemed to have difficulty in continuing, then said at last: ‘Did my father teach you to think like that, as well?’

‘Yes,’ confirmed Charlie simply.

‘And I thought I knew him,’ said Willoughby sadly.

‘I’m sorry that you became so deeply involved,’ Charlie apologised. ‘It was wrong of me to endanger you as much as I did.’

‘I would have refused, had I known it was going to turn out like this,’ said the underwriter.

‘Of course you would,’ said Charlie.

‘What are you going to do now?’

‘It’s over a month since the headstone went up on Edith’s grave,’ he said. ‘Those laburnum trees are very near and they stain …’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ corrected Willoughby.

‘I know,’ said Charlie. ‘But that’s as far ahead as I want to think, at the moment.’

He rose, moving towards the door.

‘I saw a man working on a grave when we met that day near your father’s tomb. He’d maintained it in a beautiful condition. I want to keep Edith’s just like that.’

‘Charlie,’ said Willoughby.

He turned.

‘Keep in touch?’ asked the underwriter.

‘Maybe.’

‘I was wrong to criticise,’ admitted Willoughby. ‘I know they weren’t your rules …’

Charlie ignored the attempted reconciliation. It might come later, he supposed.

‘They won, you know,’ he said. ‘Wilberforce and Ruttgers and God knows who else were involved. They really won.’

‘Yes, Charlie,’ said Willoughby. ‘I know they did.’

‘We were damned lucky, Willard.’

‘Yes, Mr President. Damned lucky.’

Henry Austin pushed the chair back and stretched his feet out on to the Oval Office desk.

‘Can you imagine what the Russians would have done if they’d found the stuff. that fell out of the plane?’

‘It’s too frightening to think about.’

‘Thank Christ the British were so helpful.’

‘I think they were as embarrassed as we were.’

The telephone of the appointments secretary lit up on the President’s console.

‘The new C.I.A. Director is here, Mr President,’ said the secretary.

‘Send him in,’ ordered Austin.

THIRTY-THREE

Although the last snows of winter had thawed and it was officially spring, few other people had opened their dachas yet, preferring still the central heating of Moscow. Berenkov had lit a fire and stood, with the warmth on his back, in his favourite position overlooking the capital.

He heard the sound of glasses and turned as Valentina came towards him.

‘It was kind of Comrade Kalenin to give you this French wine,’ said the woman.

‘He knows how much I like it,’ said Berenkov. He sipped, appreciatively.

‘Excellent,’ he judged.

His wife smiled at his enjoyment, joining him at the window.

‘So she died, as well?’ said Valentina, suddenly.

Berenkov nodded. The woman’s interest in the Charlie Muffin affair had equalled his, he realised.

‘We’ve positive confirmation that it was her,’ he said.

‘But not about him?’

‘Enough,’ said Berenkov. ‘There’s really little doubt’

Neither spoke for several moments and then Valentina said: ‘That’s good.’

‘Good?’

‘Now there won’t be the sort of suffering that you and I would understand,’ explained the woman.

‘No,’ agreed Berenkov. ‘There won’t be any suffering.’

One thousand five hundred miles away, in a cemetery on the outskirts of Guildford, Charlie Muffin scrubbed methodically back and forth, pausing occasionally to pick the red and yellow laburnum pods from among the green stone chips.

A Biography of Brian Freemantle

Brian Freemantle (b. 1936) is one of Britain’s most prolific and accomplished authors of spy fiction. His novels have sold more than ten million copies worldwide, and have been optioned for numerous film and television adaptations.

Born in Southampton, on the southern coast of England, Freemantle began his career as a journalist. In 1975, as the foreign editor at the Daily Mail, he made headlines during the American evacuation of Saigon: As the North Vietnamese closed in on the city, Freemantle became worried about the future of the city’s orphans. He lobbied his superiors at the paper to take action, and they agreed to fund an evacuation for the children. In three days, Freemantle organized a thirty-six-hour helicopter airlift for ninety-nine children, who were transported to Britain. In a flash of dramatic inspiration, he changed nearly one hundred lives—and sold a bundle of newspapers.

Although he began writing espionage fiction in the late 1960s, he first won fame in 1977, with Charlie M. That book introduced the world to Charlie Muffin—a disheveled spy with a skill set more bureaucratic than Bond-like. The novel, which drew favorable comparisons to the work of John Le Carre, was a hit, and Freemantle began writing sequels. The sixth in the series, The Blind Run, was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel. To date, Freemantle has penned fourteen titles in the Charlie Muffin series, the most recent of which is Red Star Rising (2010), which brought back the popular spy after a nine-year absence.

In addition to the stories of Charlie Muffin, Freemantle has written more than two dozen standalone novels, many of them under pseudonyms including Jonathan Evans and Andrea Hart. Freemantle’s other series include two books about Sebastian Holmes, an illegitimate son of Sherlock Holmes, and the four Cowley and Danilov books, which were written in the years after the end of the Cold War and follow an odd pair of detectives—an FBI operative and the head of Russia’s organized crime bureau.

Freemantle lives and works in London, England.