Charlie’s Apprentice

you remember every word that’s said: not something like what’s said. Everything.’

‘I see,’ said Gower. He thought this was childlike: stupid and unnecessary. He didn’t think he liked this man who would not even introduce himself.

‘As someone who achieved his maximum in interrogation technique, tell me what your first mistake was.’

There was a silence. Then Gower admitted: ‘I don’t know.’

‘You offered your name,’ said Charlie, simply.

‘This is an officially arranged meeting, for God’s sake! We had an appointment! I assumed you’d know my name.’

‘All the more reason for not offering it. In an unknown situation, you take, never give.’

‘I was personally told to come here by the deputy Director!’ Gower fought back. ‘And this is the headquarters building! Surely it’s safe to think …’

‘… Nothing’s ever safe,’ interrupted Charlie, urgently. ‘You’ve got to behave instinctively: in a real life situation there isn’t time to work everything out Immediately putting advice into practice, he demanded: ‘Why do you imagine it was important for me to find out you were right-handed?’

Gower hunched his shoulders, head bowed to avoid the older man detecting from any facial reaction the continuing annoyance. ‘I don’t know.’

‘How did I find out?’

‘I don’t know that, either.’ Pompous bastard, Gower thought.

‘I put the chair so you’d have to move it. You did it with your right hand, the same hand with which you offered the appointment docket. Then I told you to look at a poster behind you: you turned over your right shoulder …’ Charlie hesitated. ‘Mean anything?’

‘Absolutely nothing.’

‘Then either you were badly taught, or you’ve forgotten evasion techniques, if you suspect yourself to be under surveillance that you have to lose. It’s automatic if you are a right-handed person to move to the right: take right turnings, check to your right more than to your left. Learn to check both ways. Never stick to any pattern.’

‘I was told about avoiding patterns.’

‘But not about right or left?’

Gower wanted very much to say he considered it a meaningless trick. He didn’t. ‘I’ll remember,’ he promised, emptily.

‘If I had you under surveillance out there somewhere on the streets, without any idea where you lived or what your name was, how long do you think it would take me to discover both? Just from how you appear today?’

Another trick, anticipated Gower. ‘I don’t know.’ He wished he didn’t have to keep admitting that.

‘Less than a day,’ insisted Charlie. ‘I knew you’d come up by car, remember? That was obvious from your suit jacket not being creased: even if you’d taken it off on a train, you would have kept it on in a taxi or a bus, showing some signs of recent wear. So you took it off for the drive back from the country. With your own car, there’s a more than fifty per cent chance you would have parked it on a two-hour meter to which you would have to return. When you did, I could have got the vehicle registration number. Your name and address is recorded by the registration authorities: they respond to apparent official enquiries about vehicles possibly involved in unreported accidents. Remember if you’re under official surveillance – anywhere – there are official facilities that can be utilized. The initials on the left cuff of your shirt would be an immediate confirmation, of course. Your ring has a halved shield, the left half blank, the opposing half crossed with swords or possibly lances. I could locate that crest at the Office of Heraldry. Having identified the family name, I could get your full family history from Who’s Who, Debrett and Burke’s. I would expect to find that your father is dead or that your parents are divorced: you qualified spending the weekend with your “mother”. And you weren’t alone. You said “we”. So it was either a girlfriend or wife. If it was a wife, there’d probably be an indication in the listing in the reference books I’ve mentioned. Then there’s the Eton tie. From Eton records I could trace the university you went to: Oxford or Cambridge would be the obvious first choices. The Old Boys’ clubs and societies of either would be another check, whether you were married or not.’

Gower still regarded it as a trick, but at the same time it was unsettling, like having someone spying on him through a hole in a lavatory wall. ‘What, exactly, am I supposed to be understanding from all this?’

Charlie paused, isolating a continuing fault that he wasn’t yet prepared to discuss. ‘The value of proper observation. And the disadvantage of being so noticeable. Your suit is too good: and therefore too distinctive. Your shoes, too. The shirt’s too obvious and shouldn’t be monogrammed. You shouldn’t wear your ring: you’d probably get away with it in France and in a few rarefied surroundings in Spain and Germany but there’s no guarantee you’ll ever work in rarefied surroundings and even less that you’d be doing so in France or Spain or Germany. So the ring would pick you out – to a properly trained observer – as a foreigner in a country in which you were trying to assimilate, particularly if that country was in any part of Eastern Europe or Asia. The tie is identifiable and wrong, as well, for the reasons I’ve already spelled out.’

Gower was hot with annoyance. ‘What the hell are you saying, then?’

‘I’ve given you the best piece of instruction you’ve had since you got accepted into the service,’ said Charlie, evenly.

Gower studied the other man from the chair that really did seem about to collapse, wishing he’d concentrated more – instead of making angry judgements – to have avoided the need for yet another question. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, with no alternative.

‘The definition of a perfect intelligence officer,’ said Charlie. ‘The perfect intelligence officer is the sort of man that crowds are made of. Which is what I want you to become.’

Gower wished he didn’t feel so inadequate in front of a man he wouldn’t have even noticed in the street: and then the full import of the thought, against the immediately preceding definition of the perfect intelligence officer, came to him. He only just avoided smiling, not so much in amusement as in acceptance of the lesson. ‘I haven’t done very well, have I?’

‘I didn’t set out for you to do well. Or badly. Just for you to realize, from the absolute basics, what your job involves.’ Was this how schoolmasters conducted lessons?

Which was what he’d wanted so much to discover, conceded Gower: he’d been stupid, allowing the resentment. ‘Anything else I did wrong?’

‘Your other instructors didn’t mind you knowing their names?’

‘They didn’t seem to.’

‘Then why should you bother to conceal their identities, in a hostile interrogation? Cause yourself unnecessary pressure?’

‘You mean name them!’ Gower was astonished.

‘Why not? They let their names be known: why should you try to hide them?’

‘But that’s …’

‘… treasonable? It would be an arguable point. But in the circumstances we’re discussing, you’d have to reduce as much as possible what was being done to you. Use the names, if it’s necessary.’

Gower was concentrating now, not absolutely convinced – but growing increasingly so – of what he had to do. ‘What about the identity of the deputy Director-General, in such circumstances?’

‘The same, once your interrogators prove they’ve definitely identified you,’ insisted Charlie. It was looking hopeful.

‘And the location of Westminster Bridge Road as the headquarters of our service?’

‘Do you really think there’s an intelligence organization anywhere in the world that doesn’t know where every other organization lives, in its own country? Paperback spy writers identify this place!’

There was silence between them for several moments. Gower said finally: ‘I think I’ve learned a lot.’

‘You haven’t,’ Charlie contradicted. ‘You’ve gone through a good three-quarters of this meeting at varying stages of anger. Which I set out to achieve. So that’s something else you either didn’t learn or don’t remember, from your interrogation resistance lectures. You’ve lost the moment you let your temper go. Dead: maybe even