Charlie’s Apprentice

Charlie had to put his shoes back on to go inside the pub for more drinks. When he returned to the table he didn’t immediately sit. Standing over Gower he said: ‘It isn’t a pretty picture. Ever. It’s not even exciting. Nine times out of ten it’s boring, dull routine: checking files or official registers, conning your way past officialdom, trying to make sense out of nonsense.’

‘You married?’ demanded Gower, suddenly. He held up both hands, in a shielding gesture. ‘All right! I know it’s a personal question, which isn’t allowed. But it’s important to me.’

Charlie hesitated, finally sitting down. ‘I was once.’

‘Divorced?’

Charlie shook his head. ‘She was killed.’

‘I didn’t mean to bring up unpleasant memories.’

‘It’s OK,’ said Charlie, which was a lie. It would never be OK: there would always be the guilt that Edith had intentionally put herself between him and the gun of the deranged CIA official whom he’d exposed in retribution for an earlier joint-service decision to sacrifice him. The long-ago time of the Cold War, recalled Charlie, without any nostaligia: it had been an actual crossing through the Berlin Wall, with final proof of a Russian espionage ring operating out of London. ‘Why’s it important for you to know?’

‘How can you live with someone – get married, have kids – without ever telling them what you really do?’ demanded Gower. ‘It’s got to be unnatural: impossible. People talk about their jobs. Go to the firm’s events, stuff like that. How can you go through life living a lie with someone whom you’re supposed to love? Cheating them all the time?’

Charlie sighed. ‘When I married my wife she was the personal assistant to the Director-General: she knew what I did. Her knowing made it more difficult. Whenever I was away on assignment, she went through hell.’

‘You saying it goes beyond security: that it’s better if a wife doesn’t know?’

‘Are you married?’

‘Not yet. There is a girl.’

‘I’m saying it’s something everyone has to work out for themselves.’ Charlie paused. ‘Any of your illustrious other instructors teach you properly how to lie?’

Gower gazed back at Charlie across the table. ‘No!’ he said, close to indignation.

Charlie sighed again. ‘Christ, I’ve got an awful lot to teach you, haven’t I?’

*

The transfer of much of the KGB to the Russian Federation after the Commonwealth of Independent States was formed from the old Soviet Union meant that as the head of the old First Chief Directorate Natalia Fedora inherited practically intact the entire overseas network of the renamed external security agency. And a lot more responsibility besides.

In addition to what she had controlled in the past it was now necessary to have intelligence facilities in the former satellite countries like Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia of whose intelligence services the KGB was no more the overall controller, but instead despised, no longer accepted interlopers. Added to which was the need to establish completely new networks in the republics of the new Commonwealth, now technically foreign sovereign states in which any legacy of the old KGB which once ruled them by terror was not merely despised but considered criminal intrusion.

The only practical way for Natalia to run such a sprawling empire was to delegate, which she did both to create the service she wanted and, equally important, in the hope of forestalling any danger from Fyodor Tudin, whom she objectively regarded as an enemy whose every move had to be anticipated and watched, at all times.

She had appointed the man head of the Commonwealth republics division. It was unarguably a prestige position of real and proper power, impossible for Tudin, one of the few old guard KGB survivors, to perceive as a demeaning secondary post. So demanding was the creation and supervision of such a division that Natalia intended the man to be occupied to the exclusion of everything else, certainly any conspiracy against her.

But Fyodor Tudin was a resourceful and energetic man, a very bad enemy to have.

Walter Foster was surprised the query had come by wire and not in the diplomatic bag, because there didn’t seem any reason for urgency. And airline-carried diplomatic mail only normally took two days between London and Beijing. The resident intelligence liaison officer shrugged, long ago having given up trying to make sense from a very great deal of what London asked.

It was a short reply, taking him only minutes to encode. Because the message had come by wire, it was regulations that he reply by the same route. That also took only minutes.

His message said: Hunter journey ends two weeks.

The following day the People’s Daily carried a leading article threatening the strongest measures against foreign interventionists fomenting counter-revolution within the country.

Ten

Li stayed closer to Jeremy Snow than a second skin. In every hotel the reservation was for a shared, two- occupancy room. Always Li chose as their restaurant setting small, two-place tables away from any chance encounter with other Chinese. The man invariably positioned himself on buses or trains to create a physical barrier between Snow and other passengers. The initial morning in Zhengzhou – and at every subsequent hotel -he accompanied the priest to the communal shower facilities, outside the washing cubicle when Snow entered, damply on duty when Snow emerged. No conversation between them was ever interrupted by Snow needing a lavatory: every time, Li seemed to feel the same need and occupied the adjoining space. He waited dutifully outside of lavatory cubicles. Each day he offered to dispatch any correspondence Snow wanted sent during their journey, while they travelled. Each day Snow said he did not intend to send any. Li kept asking.

It was Li who established the regime for their conversations: Mandarin when they were sufficiently away from the possibility of other Chinese joining in, English when they were among people, but loudly spoken and with many official references, proclaiming his escort function to create the block against the frequent Chinese eagerness to practise the language with a foreigner. At the beginning in Zhengzhou, Snow had feared the usual approach from money-changers, convinced from the outset that Li would have summoned a plainclothes policeman or detained the man himself, but so obvious was Li’s authority that they were never once solicited.

Li was also a diligent questioner, but too eager. The man started, with seeming innocence, by praising Snow’s command of Chinese but alerted Snow at once by asking why he had perfected the language and why he was in China. In Beijing, which had appointed Li his escort, all those details were listed on his Foreign Ministry accreditation, to which the Chinese would have had access.

Because they were known, Snow talked easily of being a priest – even of his particular Order – but quickly insisted on his contentment at currently teaching English.

‘How can you be content, having abandoned your calling?’

‘I believe the need for what I am doing now is as much a calling,’ said Snow, wishing he had a stronger answer.

Li missed the opportunity to press the point, instead trying to hurry a comparison between Western theology and Mao’s version of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. Snow agreed that religion was a philosophy sometimes obscured by complicated mysticism but asked in return if the two thousand years of Western religion and the even longer Confucian, Buddhist and Taoist philosophies in China hadn’t proved more durable than the communism now abandoned in the Soviet Union and its former satellites. From someone so clearly – so proudly – a Party zealot, Snow expected the recorded-message response of Mao’s interpretation being the pure creed to continue forever, not the corrupted doctrine of self-serving criminals in Moscow. Instead Li accepted that Christianity and Confucianism and Buddism and Taoism were formidable persuasions to be respected, pointing out that the three Asian philosophies were recognized in China, as was Catholicism. Snow considered making the point that Confucian and Buddhist and Taoist temples existed more as tourist attractions than as places of worship. He was glad of his restraint when Li asked, still in open-faced innocence, if Snow believed communism was a philosophy as doomed in China as everywhere else. Snow at once insisted he was apolitical. Li abandoned the conversation, as if it were of no importance, but tried to re-introduce it on four further occasions, each time phrasing differently the questions which, responded to wrongly, could have brought against Snow accusations of a counterrevolutionary attitude.