Comrade Charlie

circumstances should be considered for employment, nor allowed within the restricted area at any time or under any circumstances whatsoever. But never to let him know that he was under any ban: rather that he might be seconded in response to an application he’d made. I also had our Technical Division impose a trace upon the Isle of Wight public kiosk to isolate all London calls made from it…’ He looked across at Witherspoon: ‘If you searched my office you should have come across the report.’

Witherspoon shook his head but to Harkness, who was staring at him furiously. ‘There was just a number. It didn’t mean anything.’

‘Strange things,’ prompted the Director General. ‘You said there were other strange things happening.’

‘I found myself under surveillance,’ announced Charlie. ‘It was very expert – more expert than it had been before – and it was unquestionably professional observation…’ Charlie paused and said: ‘And here I made a serious mistake, the only one I consider a I have made. And from which I hope to recover…’ He looked, pointedly, from Harkness to Witherspoon and then to the Special Branch men. ‘I had been, as you have heard, under constant internal harassment from this department…harassment I had identified and which had been openly acknowledged – an acknowledgement which is on file – to me by the deputy Director General prior to anything he has said here today. I inferred, quite wrongly, that what I had detected was a continuation of that harassment. I decided to run hare to the hounds, to see what more stupidity there was going to be. It was some time before I discovered it wasn’t internal at all. That it was Soviet…’

‘… You didn’t report being targeted by a hostile foreign agency …!’ broke in Harkness.

Charlie virtually ignored the question again, continuing to talk directly to Wilson. ‘I didn’t make the discovery immediately. It was some days after I returned from the Isle of Wight inquiry. I am extremely careful how I leave my flat: setting things that will alert me to an entry. I knew there was an entry – again I thought it was part of the internal investigation – because my door has several locks, one a Yale. But I never set it, because the others compensate: it’s always latched. When I tried to enter my flat one evening the Yale lock had been dropped. There were other things – cabinet and room doors closed which I had left ajar or in positions from which I could recognize if they had been touched, the slight disarrangement of magazines that had been left in a particular order. But I couldn’t, at first, discover why. It was a Sunday when I made a determined search…’ Charlie paused, going to Witherspoon. ‘You might like to take a note of the date, although of course it will be recorded by the official stenographers here. It was August 6…’

Witherspoon hesitated, frowning, and briefly made a notation on a pad in front of him.

‘… I found the cipher pad first,’ resumed Charlie. ‘The door of the cupboard housing the electricity meter was one I had left slightly open and it had been closed when I first discovered the entry. It was much more difficult finding the money: I thought I’d covered the bedroom until I noticed the slight variation between the indentations in the carpet that the leg castors had made. The bed had been put back just a fraction out of alignment to where it had been before…’

Charlie paused, wishing he had water, like Harkness earlier. He said: ‘That’s when I realized who had really established the surveillance which had by now been in place for a considerable amount of time. And realized, too, that it was being directed very personally against me and was not some wider operation. So I decided to go on running hare …’

‘… that would have been entirely wrong: against every regulation,’ interjected the determined Harkness. ‘If it were true – and I do not believe this absurdly concocted story for a minute – it should have been immediately reported to me!’

He’d already concluded that if he handled this confrontation wrongly he was lost, Charlie remembered: that it was all or nothing. Staring straight at Harkness, Charlie said: ‘I did not have then – nor do I have now – any confidence whatsoever in this department properly to investigate what was or is happening. I was the obvious target: I decided to let it continue to run, to try to see at least if a direction or a purpose emerged, before reporting it officially.’

‘That action, like that remark, was quite wrong,’ said Wilson, and Harkness snatched a sideways look of gratitude to the Director General he had earlier criticized.

Shit, thought Charlie. And then another reflection: All or nothing. He said: ‘It would not have been one I would have taken had different circumstances prevailed in this department.’

‘The innuendo in that remark is even more improper,’ said Wilson angrily, turning perceptibly towards a blazing-faced Harkness. ‘I think it calls for an apology to certain people in this room.’

There were several moments of absolute silence, with everyone’s concentration entirely upon Charlie. He swallowed and shuffled slightly on aching feet. Then he said: ‘With respect to yourself, sir, I decline to make any apology to anyone in this room for anything I have so far said or implied.’ There! he thought. Not just irrevocably committed: he’d put the noose around his own neck and had the do-it-yourself trapdoor lever in his hand.

‘We have been very patient…’ began Wilson, but for the first time ever Charlie risked talking over the man: ‘Please!’ he said, knowing he had only the briefest chance to hold them. ‘Just another few minutes…!’ and when Wilson stopped talking, more in further anger than permission, Charlie hurried on: ‘That money over there, the thousand pounds by which such great store is being set as being a Soviet payment to me, is my money.’

‘What!’ demanded Wilson, no longer angry.

He’d saved himself but he was still hanging on by his fingertips, Charlie calculated. ‘There was a thousand pounds in that cavity, when I discovered it,’ explained Charlie. ‘A plant, like everything else has been planted. Not knowing – still not knowing even now – why it was being done, it was blatantly obvious I had to take what precautions I could to avoid any further mistakes. I made the discovery, as I have said, on August 6th, a Sunday. On the morning of Monday, August 7th, I took the thousand pounds and three of the top sheets off the cipher pad to my bank. It’s the Barclays branch just across Vauxhall Bridge, on Millbank. I deposited it with an assistant manager, named Frederick Snelgrove, with written authority that it should be released upon demand to Sir Alistair Wilson. I then withdrew, in consecutively numbered notes from the cashier Sally Dickenson, whose fingerprints are on those notes, one thousand pounds from my own account. I had those numbers recorded and that record is also part of the provably dated deposit.’

Charlie stopped, hopefully, Nobody spoke. He said: ‘No one seems to have realized the significance! All this was done on August 7th. The message – “Reactivate payment by one thousand” – was not sent from Moscow until August 26th, according to your evidence: nineteen days after, I had already found the thousand pounds, switched it and made arrangements that any investigation – any after, proper investigation – would lead to its being eventually released to the Director General of this department.’

The reactions were mixed, throughout the room. The two unidentified men – who looked like clones of all the Whitehall mandarins Charlie had ever encountered – were bent sideways towards each other in whispered conversation. Sir Alistair Wilson was staring at him with obvious curiosity but with no other indication of what he was thinking. Harkness had a finger sideways to his mouth, gnawing at it in concentration, trying to absorb what Charlie had said. Witherspoon was scurrying through his documentation, seeking something. It was time to finish, while he was marginally ahead, decided Charlie. He said: ‘There have been other things added to the bank deposit since that initial date. There is a long list of vehicle registration numbers, which I believe to have been used by various Soviet observation teams, particularly since I moved into the delegation hotel in Bayswater. I have not had the facility, away from this department, to check out the ownership for those registrations. I would suspect they are hired. Tracing the hiring back will, I hope, give us the names of some Soviet front companies which we might not at the moment be aware are being used by the KGB…’

He smiled back towards the rigid-faced Smedley. ‘… And there are also the numbers of our own people who have been in such painfully obvious position over the past three or four days. Three Fords, a Vauxhall and a Fiat…As I have already suggested, the investigation has been appallingly amateurish…’

‘Anything else?’ cut off Wilson. There was no longer any anger in the frail voice.

‘I hope there will be when I know what was in the King William Street drop,’ said Charlie. He turned to Harkness. ‘So what was it?’

Harkness’ hand came only partially away from his mouth. ‘There still needs to be further investigation to discover its whereabouts,’ the man conceded.

‘What!’ said Charlie. Confident now, he slightly overstressed the incredulity. ‘You mean you don’t even know where it is yet!’