Comrade Charlie

housewives appeared to be. Using the authority of London headquarters he had Blackstone’s bank statements and financial affairs accessed just as efficiently and thoroughly as the Russians before him, and uncovered the man’s straitened circumstances. And was in a position to acknowledge – more quickly than the Russians at a comparable stage of their separate surveillance – that Blackstone’s shortage of money was caused by the drain of maintaining the two admitted households. But there were no indicative, tell-tale deposits in any financial account to show by as much as a penny the slightest additional, welcome income beyond that which the man received as a senior-grade tracer at an Isle of Wight aeronautics factory. Blackstone drank lager beer, on draught, not bottled. He preferred the colour blue, in the clothes he wore. He didn’t smoke. He had an account at a betting shop. He didn’t read a regular newspaper. He had no close male friends. He was, in fact, such a boring man that Charlie reckoned he had to have a prick like a baby’s arm with an apple in its hand to keep one wife happy, let alone two, no matter how mundanely content they were.

But the sensation of unease wouldn’t go. Rather, it increased and as the days passed Charlie encountered other feelings, like irritation and anger. Yet Blackstone did nothing nor behaved in the slightest way suspiciously, which worsened Charlie’s irritation and anger.

Charlie allowed a full week to elapse before contacting Westminster Bridge Road. It was an open and therefore insecure telephone link, because it couldn’t be anything else from where Charlie was operating and Charlie intended doing nothing beyond reporting an intention to return to the clerk whose sole function it was to receive inexplicable messages from people he could never ask to be more explicit. But there was a note against Charlie’s code designation which meant he had to be routed through to the acting Director General.

‘What in heaven’s name do you imagine you’ve been doing!’

Charlie wondered if the man ever regretted the self-imposed discipline of not allowing himself to swear. Conscious of the restrictions of their communication method, Charlie said: ‘Working. What else?’

‘That’s what I’d like to know. You’ve been gone a week.’

‘I’ve been routed through to you,’ reminded Charlie, not interested in Harkness’ empty posturing, which was all it could be when they were speaking like this.

‘Is there any cause for concern?’

Charlie hesitated, wondering how Harkness would react to a reply about uneasy, instinctive feelings. He said: ‘No.’

‘So your holiday is over!’ said Harkness. ‘Get back here!’

‘The weather’s been terrific,’ said Charlie, indulging himself and careless of upsetting the other man. ‘High seventies every day.’

‘I said get back!’

‘I’ve already logged the intention to do just that.’

Charlie managed the hydrofoil that left ahead of the evening rush hour, remembering as he sat down Blackstone’s remark about people finding the island claustrophobic and deciding it was true. Pleasant though the visit had been, Charlie was looking forward to getting back to the mainland. Maybe there he wouldn’t feel so hemmed in.

There were six seats available, after Charlie had taken his. Four were very quickly filled by part of the KGB squad that, upon Berenkov’s adamant instructions from Moscow, had maintained an unremitting surveillance upon Charlie Muffin from the moment of his being indentified as Henry Blackstone’s intelligence interrogator.

Like many men of supreme confidence Alexei Berenkov was also an emotional one, and briefly his eyes actually clouded at the cable from London announcing the detection of Charlie Muffin. It was all so perfect! So absolutely and completely perfect. It gave him Charlie Muffin, which was what he’d set out to accomplish. But of practically matching importance it had occurred in circumstances that provided the ideal opportunity at last to tell Kalenin. To stop deceiving the man. Not completely true, Berenkov qualified. There would still be minimal deception in the manner in which he presented the discovery, but very minimal. At least his friend would know. A further benefit from the circumstances was that Kalenin couldn’t abort the pursuit, either.

Berenkov sought and gained a meeting with Kalenin in central Moscow that same day, late in the afternoon. The bearded First Deputy sat solemnfaced and unspeaking while Berenkov recounted the identification and then said: ‘So we can’t risk immediately using – even trying to use – the man Blackstone. And without the British material, we’ve failed.’

‘I’ve already decided upon another way,’ promised Berenkov.

‘Charlie Muffin’s involvement worries me,’ said Kalenin, who knew the man from the Berenkov repatriation and from the later phoney defection to Russia. ‘It worries me a lot.’

‘I’ve decided how to resolve that, as well,’ said Berenkov.

‘Kill him, you mean?’ said Kalenin dispassionately.

‘Oh no,’ said Berenkov at once. ‘To kill him now would attract precisely the sort of attention we don’t want. I’ve got something planned for Charlie Muffin that will be far worse than death.’

‘This isn’t a personal vendetta, is it?’ queried Kalenin with sudden prescience.

‘Of course not!’ denied Berenkov.

21

Alexei Berenkov had no false illusions about what he was trying to do in moving against Charlie Muffin. Objectively he recognized that one miscalculation could bring about his own destruction rather than that of the man he sought to destroy. But with his typical self-assurance he was not frightened by that awareness. If there were a feeling it was one of anticipation at finally manoeuvring just such a situation. Berenkov wanted to confront Charlie Muffin, like combatants in some medieval contest, which was perhaps a rather grandiose imagery but nevertheless how Berenkov thought of it and had for so long planned it. Which, objective again, Berenkov acknowledged to be pride, although he would not have gone so far as to admit to conceit, as well. Just pride. Dangerous – even reckless – pride in the shifting uncertainty of Moscow. But still a contest he was determined to have. He’d knowingly misled Kalenin by denying any personal importance in removing Charlie Muffin. Everything about the operation was personal: a personal, private matter that had finally to be resolved between them. Charlie Muffin. Or himself. One to end the ultimate victor, the other the permanently vanquished. It was not, however, that the Russian hated or despised Charlie. Far from it. Berenkov admired the man: respected him as a superb espionage professional. It was precisely because of that admiration and respect that Berenkov had set out to manipulate the encounter-by-proxy, as he had.

There’d already been two contests between them.

The first had been Charlie’s pursuit in England and throughout Europe, doggedly unrelenting, stubbornly refusing the false trails and deceptions that Berenkov had laid and which succeeded in fooling everyone else. No doubt that time who had emerged the victor: the sentence at London’s Old Bailey for running the Soviet spy ring had been forty years. And Berenkov would still have had twenty-eight to go if he hadn’t been exchanged for the British and American intelligence directors whom Charlie led into Soviet captivity in retribution for their willingness to sacrifice him, despite all that he had done.

And then there was the Moscow episode during which Charlie had met Natalia Nikandrova Fedova. Not such a clear victory there but dangerously close. Certainly under intensive, necessarily brutal interrogation the Englishman Edwin Sampson, with whom Charlie had supposedly escaped from English imprisonment, after their staged treason conviction, had confessed that his function after Soviet acceptance had been to infiltrate the KGB. But despite the chemical and then bone-crushing questioning Sampson had maintained he didn’t know Charlie Muffin’s purpose in coming to Russia: that they had not been working together. The incident had come near to bringing him down, Berenkov remembered. He’d believed Charlie Muffin’s defection to be genuine and accepted the man into his home and sponsored his appointment as instructor at the Soviet spy school, and but for Kalenin’s defence and protection after the man had fled back to England would probably have been replaced as a security threat.