Comrade Charlie

‘Paul?’

Laura made another impatient hand movement, this time towards a studied portrait photograph of a pleasant-faced, kindly looking man. ‘My husband. He’s in Venezuela…was in Venezuela. Shit!’

Charlie thought again of the T-shirt slogan and decided that sometimes, very rarely, life wasn’t a bitch after all. Pitching the false regret perfectly in his voice, he said: ‘I see. That’s… I’m sorry about that.’

Laura held out her hands to him and said: ‘Darling, I’m sorry. I really am sorry.’

‘So am I,’ said Charlie, soft-voiced now. Careful, smart-ass, he thought: you’re working towards an escape, not an Oscar nomination. ‘If he’s on his way in from the airport I’d better be going, hadn’t I?’

‘You’d better,’ she agreed.

Laura came close, expecting to be kissed: she smelled very nice, perfumed and clean. Charlie kissed her, lightly, feeling backwards with a painful foot for the beginning of the stairway down into the mews.

‘Charlie?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I didn’t get what I wanted,’ said the woman. ‘You got what you wanted, though, didn’t you?’

Charlie laughed, glad that Laura did too. He said: ‘You’ve made me feel a lot better.’

‘I’ve still got to wait for the same feeling,’ she said.

The mews was sealed off at one end but at the other still had the canopied brick entrance from when it had all been stables and artisans’ cottages, although the original huge gate had long since been removed. As Charlie emerged he saw someone paying off a taxi and hurried to get it before it drove off. When he reached it he recognized the passenger as the man in Laura’s photograph.

‘Night!’ said Charlie brightly.

The man was momentarily surprised at such friendliness from a stranger in the middle of London. ‘Goodnight,’ he said.

Charlie got to the Pheasant with twenty minutes to spare before closing time. He downed the first Islay malt in one because that wasn’t a drink at all: that was medicinal, to gaff the fish that still felt as if it were swimming upstream. He took most of the second the same way. He began to relax on the third, deciding that as evenings go the encounter with Laura had gone very successfully indeed. If she tittle-tattled back to Harkness the enigmatic remarks about the man looking in the wrong place for embarrassments it might be perfect. He might even be able to stuff the red tape right back down the man’s throat.

The barman approached, mopping the counter, looking inquiringly at Charlie’s glass. ‘It’s been the quietest night for a long time,’ he said. ‘Quiet all day.’

‘They’re the best sort though, sometimes,’ insisted Charlie. ‘Days when nothing at all happens.’

It was, however, far from being a day when nothing happened. It was the day when the US Defense Committee met at the Pentagon and approved the construction of the missile intended to form the nucleus of America’s Strategic Defense Initiative, more commonly known as its Star Wars programme.

The approval session – and the identity of those Defense-approved contractors to whom development of the prototype missile was to be awarded – carried the highest security classification. But Washington DC is a porous place where rumours, even over something so sensitive, are balanced for their political advantage. After so many concessions from a Moscow and a Soviet hierarchy different from any they had known or dealt with before, the State Department saw no harm in the smallest of leaks, hopefully to influence the continuing Conventional Arms Limitation discussions in Geneva.

That most influential of aeronautical magazines, Aviation Weekly, was the first to publish an indication of the Star Wars decision, quickly followed by other monitoring publications and other monitoring commentators.

It was also monitored in Moscow, which was the State Department intention, although not at all in the way that they had expected.

2

No established order of Soviet society has suffered a greater upheaval by the ascent to power of Mikhail Gorbachev than the KGB, which is the most established of all orders of Soviet society. From the moment of its inception, within a month of the 1917 revolution, the Russian intelligence apparatus, through all its name changes, developed into the essential core of government yet insularly aloof from it. An elaborate spider’s web of internal directorates and sections and departments, each enveloping strand interlocking with another enveloping strand to control the Soviet people, was spun to maintain the power of successive leaders and their Politburo. And those leaders were always made gratefully aware of the fact. In 1953 Nikita Krushchev – the man later responsible for its last name change to the KGB – successfully challenged the autonomy of the organization by defeating the bid of its then chairman, Lavrenti Beria, to succeed Stalin. Krushchev’s mistake was introducing at the same time the edict that the Politburo approve every major international espionage activity before its commencement.

The KGB has always been chameleon-like in its ability to adjust its appearance to merge into its current surroundings. For a while, even after Krushchev’s demise, the system of control appeared to operate, although those within the organization continued as they had since 1917, a people apart from other Russian people, with access to concessions and luxuries and privilege, untouched by the perpetual shortages and deprivations suffered by the rest. The adjustment to circumstances and surroundings took place at the very top: if the KGB had instinctively to know the attitudes of the Politburo, ran the persuasion, then its chairmen needed to be members of that ultimate controlling, policy-forming body. So the successive appointments were made, which put the KGB where it always sought to be, at the absolute heart and mind of things. Making the organization, in fact, stronger and more powerful than it had ever been before.

Then came Mikhail Gorbachev. And glasnost. And perestroika. And after freedom and openness came the most unimaginable change of all. The KGB was demoted, by every definition of the word. Chairman Viktor Chebrikov was transferred to another ministry and his successor, Colonel-General Vladimir Kryuchkev, was denied that all-important elevation to the ruling Politburo. The republics of Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania were allowed publicly to vote against Moscow’s central control and thousands paraded in the streets in support of autonomy. Yet bigger demonstrations were permitted – and even more incredibly, seen on Soviet television to be permitted! – between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

The chameleon changes colour when it’s frightened but this time the frightened KGB didn’t know which hue to adopt: internal and external directorates and divisions instead scuttled around in disarray, seeking concealment and disguise.

There were two KGB executives, intimate friends yet pragmatic even in friendship, for whom the American Star Wars revelations destroyed any chance of the hoped-for, regroup-and-think concealment. One was General Valeri Kalenin, a slightly built Georgian and First Deputy of a service to which he had devoted his life to the exclusion of all else, even marriage. The other was his immediate subordinate, Alexei Berenkov, also a general, and head of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, its overseas espionage arm.

It was a mark of their friendship that Kalenin had alerted Berenkov at the moment of the Kremlin summons, bringing the man from the First Chief Directorate on the Moscow ring road to the KGB headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square.

The chief executive offices of the KGB are on the seventh floor of the original pre-revolutionary building, quite separate from the wartime, prisonlaboured extension added by Stalin. Berenkov waited for Kalenin’s return at a window overlooking the square, with its beard-tufted statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the service’s founder, and at the lights pricking on against the evening’s dusk in the GUM department store beyond, wondering how many others had stood at windows in the building as he was now, mourning the passing of previous traditions. A lot, he guessed: