The Run Around

They walked fast but without any obvious attention-attracting haste back down the Rue de la Corraterie to the bridge and a public telephone kiosk Zenin had spotted when they crossed earlier. He said: ‘The secretariat Director, Zeidan? Is he staying at your hotel?’

‘Yes,’ she said, curiously.

Zenin nodded towards the telephone. ‘Call him,’ he ordered. ‘Say you had an appointment tonight with Dajani but he did not turn up: ask him if he knows where Dajani is.’

‘Why?’

‘To maintain your absolute, unknowing innocence,’ said Zenin. ‘This way you are a worried colleague who has been stood up. If you don’t bother to raise what is later going to become an alarm, there might be some suspicion.’

She smiled up at him. ‘You’re very clever, aren’t you?’

‘Careful,’ he qualified.

Sulafeh was very quick and when she came back to the Russian she said: ‘Zeidan thought there must have been some misunderstanding. He asked what I was going to do.’ She hesitated, pointedly. ‘I said I was going to eat by myself and then look around the city; that I might be late getting back. Which I want to be.’

Zenin did not bother to look at what he’d taken from Dajani’s pockets until he got back to the apartment and when he did he laughed.

‘Dajani’s a careful man, too,’ he said. ‘Look! Condoms!’

‘We’re not going to need those, are we?’ said Sulafeh.

Alexei Berenkov re-read completely the interrogation transcript and the trial record of Edwin Sampson after his return from Potma and created for himself more uncertainties than he discovered answers. It was Kalenin’s turn to eat with them, which gave Berenkov the opportunity to discuss it informally while Valentina was discreetly and customarily busying herself in the kitchen.

‘Sampson is adamant that Charlie Muffin had no part in his attempted infiltration,’ insisted Berenkov. ‘I threatened him with interrogation at the Serbsky again and to block any release approach, from the British. He still maintained his story.’

‘You believe him then?’

‘Yes,’ said Berenkov, simply.

‘So where does that leave us?’

‘With Natalia Nikandrova Fedova,’ said Berenkov, simply again.

‘She was adamant, too,’ remembered the KGB chairman. ‘At the trial she said she followed Charlie Muffin to the GUM department store and saw him meet Sampson there after they had been debriefed and separated from each other here. There was nothing she said that varied at all from what she told me the night Charlie Muffin escaped, the night she raised the alarm.’

‘I’ve read the transcript,’ said Berenkov. ‘She was hardly questioned, because of Sampson’s confession of guilt.’

‘There was no need.’

‘Maybe that was an oversight.’

‘Are you inferring some sort of collusion between the woman and Charlie Muffin!’ said Kalenin. ‘Suggesting in fact she’s a spy, in place?’

‘There was an affair, wasn’t there?’

‘Which she intentionally cultivated, according to her testimony: she was suspicious of him, despite his successfully passing the debrief. It enabled her to maintain a constant watch on the man.’

‘Very praiseworthy!’ said Berenkov.

Kalenin frowned at the obvious doubt. He said: ‘There has never been any reason to doubt that Natalia Nikandrova is not a loyal member of the debriefing section of the KGB.’

‘Until now,’ said Berenkov.

As he spoke, his wife came into the room, carrying the coffee and brandy. Valentina said: ‘You look as if you’re plotting!’

‘I think Alexei is,’ said Kalenin.

‘Maybe others have in the past,’ suggested Berenkov.

Chapter Thirty

Charlie reckoned he’d done bloody well, complying to the letter with the Director’s instructions. He’d gone near no one, upset no one and talked to no one, except to the room service supervisor for a meal and a bottle of wine when he got back from Bern. The only thing he had not done was to sit and do nothing because that was clearly daft. Instead he worked steadily and without interruption – apart from the brief meal and even then he read on – through the Israeli dossiers, determined to absorb as much as possible despite the size of the task. By nine he had gone through the Palestinian and Jordanian backgrounds and stopped because the words were blurring before his eyes, exhausted concentration aching through him. Deciding that it was a deserved reward for effort, Charlie went back to room service and ordered brandy, two large ones because it seemed a waste to bring the waiter all the way with just one.

The more detailed examination completely confirmed his initial impression, Charlie decided, feeling the brandy warm through him: the Israeli files could not be faulted. Every Arab investigation was painstakingly detailed, in the case of the Palestinian and Jordanian records with what Israel considered terrorist links individually itemized along with the incidents and events supporting those allegations, all of which were set out in a chronological arrangement. When such people were picked out there was a red marker on the cover of the folder and top-sheet assessment of that person: in every instance the judgement was that none of them any longer represented risk or danger.

Charlie found no difficulty accepting this view, despite the scepticism of a man who never completely admitted the vice-versa logic of night following day. After all, the majority of Commonwealth leaders jostling to get as close as possible to the Queen during those London conference photo-calls had Foreign Office records identifying them as independence-fighting villains who in their time had danced around demanding the demise of the British monarchy.

He was wasting his time, Charlie reluctantly decided, creating work to convince himself he was working. Whatever or wherever the lead, it was not going to come from this filing clerk’s nightmare. Of which, objectively, he’d already been aware, from the comparable pictures. Where then? He didn’t know. And he didn’t like not knowing and he didn’t like the impotent frustration he’d felt, ever since this sodding job began. In fact he liked bugger all about any of it. If he were honest – which he always was with himself if sometimes not with other people – Charlie accepted it was easy to understand the doubt everyone else was showing. Because he had nothing. His own doubt wormed its way into his mind, disconcertingly. Had he got it wrong: clutched too eagerly at a mistaken identification and really wasted his time, spending days running around like a blue-arsed fly in quite the wrong place? He liked the prospect of that least of all.

Although he would have been surprised if they had managed it so quickly, Charlie lifted the telephone when it rang expecting it to be Cummings with a come-and-get-your-wrist slapped order from London for conning them with the photographs. But it was the barrel-toned Levy, the man’s voice echoing into the room.

‘How’s it going?’ demanded the Israeli intelligence chief.

‘Slowly,’ conceded Charlie. He was not talking to anyone else, he thought, in self-defence: Levy was talking to him.

‘Thought I might have heard from you.’

‘Why?’ demanded Charlie, immediately hopeful there might have been a development of which the other man wrongly imagined him to be aware.

‘Believed we were going to keep in touch,’ said Levy.