Charlie’s Apprentice

‘I want to meet him!’ declared the girl, at once. ‘Invite him for dinner. That would be all right, wouldn’t it? My meeting your instructor, I mean.’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Gower, doubtfully. He’d been reluctant to engage in the conversation with Marcia in the first place: now he regretted it even more.

‘Invite him!’ she insisted. ‘I must meet this mystery man!’

He was a mystery man, accepted Gower. There wasn’t even a name to introduce to Marcia, if the invitation were accepted.

Fyodor Tudin was a dedicated career officer, an asexual bachelor whose only indulgence was sometimes to drink himself into a stupor in the secure solitude of his Sytinskij Prospekt apartment. The drinking had become more frequent since the changes, which still frustrated and angered him. It was not enough to have survived the KGB restructuring. He should have got the chairmanship of the Directorate, not that icy bitch of a robot Natalia Nikandrova. He’d earned it, for all he’d done in the past: would get it, despite her trying to bury him under the organization of the republic networks.

He just had to find a way.

Discovering personal failings – or best of all, personal, discrediting secrets – was the way. Which was why, within a week of his humiliating appointment as her deputy, he had searched her personal file in the archives. He’d been disappointed by the sparseness of what was there, hinting at an existence here in Moscow as empty as his own. A baby had been an intriguing hope, but the record of a woman who lived alone showed the death of a naval officer husband eighteen months earlier, so there had been nothing useful there. He had been equally hopeful of an odd involvement with an Englishman, until he saw it had been considered an operational success, contributing to her promotion.

Determined to find something, Tudin had initiated a discreet monitor on everything Natalia did, and was therefore curious when he discovered her necessarily recorded official enquiry about the son, Eduard, linked to an apartment at Mytninskaya.

So curious, in fact, that he extended it with additional enquiries of his own. And kept hoping.

Thirteen

Having taught Gower as well as he believed he was able, Charlie set the graduation tests, never once giving the man the slightest warning, even ordering some checks when he was not personally present, the obvious times for Gower to expect something. Others he staged when Gower would have considered himself to be off duty.

Gower only failed to locate one displaced object in a room-entry check. He picked out every shadowing car, on motorways and minor roads. Without being told, he took to hiring cars on credit cards and driving licences held under false, department-supplied legend names, and by so doing destroyed any paper trail from which it would have been possible to discover his true identity. He extended the hire-car precaution, detecting surveillance during one of the planned observations and lulling the professional department Watchers by constantly using the vehicle to embed his connection with it in their minds before evading them completely by abandoning the car in the most prominent place for them to continue watching while he disappeared. His basic tradecraft proved to be impeccable. Three times he beat professional observers on a ground pursuit by dodging in and out of department stores with front, side and back entrances. On two subsequent occasions, he defeated the same increasingly angry department observers passing in a brush contact an unseen package to another person – a woman – going in the opposite direction on a crowded street. He emptied and filled dead-letter drops faultlessly. He carried out his own surveillance on trained men instructed to lose him, which they did only twice in six different situations, never once establishing identifying eye-contact which would in turn have marked him out to an intelligence professional. There were three separate efforts to photograph him, using a team to appear as holidaymakers posing for a vacation souvenir in such a way as to have put him in the background. These he avoided every time. Under simulated interrogation by department specialists, he obeyed Charlie’s constantly repeated instruction by lying as little as possible – and by always being able to remember the lies he’d told – and withstood four hours of questioning before being caught out, and then in such a minor mistake that he was able to recover in what Charlie considered a sufficiently convincing way.

And on every one of those concluding days Charlie stressed it was all building up to an ultimate approval which Gower had to discover and announce, before the end of the session.

The session that Charlie intended to be their last – although he didn’t declare it as such, still wanting to be satisfied – took place in Charlie’s cramped office where they’d first met. It seemed to Charlie to have been a long time ago. ‘Think you’re ready?’ he demanded.

‘Your decision, not mine,’ Gower retorted. He’d weeks before lost the best-boy-in-the-class need.

So what was his decision, Charlie asked himself. Gower was inestimably improved from the day he’d entered this same office and called him sir, which he didn’t do any longer. But sufficiently? Charlie didn’t know. He’d never had to make this decision about another officer: only about himself, of whom he was supremely confident. Honestly he admitted: ‘I can’t think of anything else to teach you.’

‘Now it comes down to my instinct?’

‘If it’s possible to instil instinct.’

‘Is that the ultimate approval?’

‘You have to tell me,’ reminded Charlie.

‘I don’t think that’s it.’

‘What then?’

‘What you were trying to make me?’ suggested Gower.

‘Go on,’ encouraged Charlie.

‘Aware, all the time. Of all and everything around me. That was it, wasn’t it?’

Charlie nodded hopefully. ‘So! Do you think you are ready?’

‘I hope so.’

‘There’s no such thing as hope in an operational situation,’ lectured Charlie. ‘Or luck. It’s just down to you: how good you are.’

‘Yes,’ said the corrected Gower. ‘I’ve learned. I’m ready.’

‘You sure?’ Charlie feared he was going to be disappointed.

‘Our flat was entered four nights ago, while Marcia and I were at the theatre,’ said Gower, evenly. ‘The cupboard beneath the sink in the kitchen was open when we got back. It hadn’t been, when we left. My clothes drawers had been gone through, papers in the bureau put back in a different order. The night before last there was another entry: there were even slight score marks where the lock had been picked. We’ve got a rack, for unanswered mail: it’s dreadful but Marcia keeps it because it was a present from her mother. The letters were replaced in the wrong sequence.’

‘I was worried,’ admitted Charlie, finally relieved.

‘I was waiting, in case you’d tried something else. I couldn’t think of anything, apart from that.’

‘The people who went in weren’t told to be obvious. It was supposed to be completely professional.’

‘Will you file a critical report?’

‘Yes,’ said Charlie. ‘And you were quite right, after our first meeting, to put in a memorandum criticizing as bad security my advice about naming instructors and the deputy Director-General.’

Gower shook his head, in mock weariness. ‘So that was another test!’

‘You can never relax,’ insisted Charlie.

‘Your name isn’t James Harrison, is it?’ challenged Gower, enjoying the chance to prove himself.

‘No,’ said Charlie. ‘I didn’t see you check the register of the safe house in Berkshire: that was good.’

‘You knew I’d try to read it?’

‘I would have been unhappy if you hadn’t.’ Charlie spread his hands before him, satisfied. ‘I think we’ve finished.’

‘How did I do?’

‘Well enough.’

‘But not one hundred per cent?’ Gower sounded hopeful.

‘No one ever gets one hundred per cent,’ said Charlie. ‘Two final pieces of advice, as important as always