Charlie’s Apprentice

international tax affairs, always on aeroplanes to Europe and America and those tiny islands with special arrangements for those who can afford them. Absolutely brilliant. Directorship promised before he’s forty, eventual chairmanship of the group a foregone conclusion. We had a hell of a life: the whole yuppie bit …’ She gulped at her wine, further steeling herself. Flat-voiced, Julia went on: ‘I thought everything was wonderful: I suppose it was. But do you know what? All the time it was wonderful for him with someone else, too.’ Julia stared directly at Charlie. ‘And can you guess who that was?’

She seemed to expect a reply, so Charlie said: ‘No, I can’t.’

‘My own sister!’ declared Julia. ‘How about that? My own sister! One night, eighteen months ago, he came home and we went to bed and made love and then he announced it was over. I actually laughed, thinking there was some joke …’

‘Are you sure …?’ started Charlie, but she interrupted him back. ‘Yes! Let me, please! I want to talk about it!’

‘OK,’ accepted Charlie, waiting.

‘He told me who it was, too. While we were lying there, side by side. Not just wrecking my marriage. Wrecking the family, too. I didn’t know what to do … still don’t, I suppose. That’s what I meant about using you. Wanted to see what it would be like, going out with someone again. I hadn’t, you see. Not for years. No one apart from Andrew. Didn’t know if I could still do it properly …’ She smiled, wanly. ‘Classic Agony Aunt stuff. Destroyed wife, destroyed confidence.’

‘I didn’t guess. It was a great performance,’ said Charlie.

‘I don’t want anything!’ she said, in another of her blurted announcements. ‘Not someone else … romance … sex. I really don’t. I’m not going to become a man-hater or anything ridiculous like that. I’m just more comfortable – happier – by myself. Trusting myself.’

It was a classic case history of a dumped wife, decided Charlie. ‘I can understand that.’ Particularly the bit about only trusting oneself. He remembered lecturing Gower about it.

She looked at him uncertainly. ‘Can you?’

‘It’s kind of a personal philosophy of mine.’

‘But I get so damned lonely,’ Julia admitted. ‘I go out and do things by myself and just sometimes – very occasionally – I forget where I am and what I am doing but mostly I am as lonely as hell.’

‘I can understand that, too,’ said Charlie. There’d been aching loneliness, after Edith had been killed. That brief, wonderful, impossible period in Moscow with Natalia had probably been the only time since that he hadn’t lived permanently with the feeling.

‘I mean what I said,’ insisted the girl. ‘I really don’t want sex. I don’t want a lover or any sort of complication that is going to end up hurting more: I’ve had enough of that. You know what I want?’

‘What?’

‘A friend. Someone I can trust: feel safe with.’

Charlie didn’t speak for several moments, like Julia drinking his wine to cover his hesitation. Finally he said: ‘Can I apply?’ What about trust, after the way he’d used her?

‘It wouldn’t be fair,’ she said, positively. ‘That’s why I’ve told you. Didn’t want you to think there was anything … you know.’

‘And now I do,’ said Charlie. ‘So why not?’

‘Platonic relationship?’Julia queried, doubtfully.

‘That’s what it’s called,’ agreed Charlie.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said, uncertainly.

‘We won’t be, until we give it a shot.’

‘You mean it?’

‘Sure.’ Did he? wondered Charlie.

Natalia discovered Fyodor Tudin was spying on her from routine bureaucracy.

It was an inviolable rule, dating from the KGB period, that archives were registered against the name of whoever requested them, with the file cover itself dated with all previous withdrawals. When she called for Charlie’s records for yet another search, in the hope she might have missed something the first time, she found a date immediately following her initial examination. A simple cross-reference to the main register revealed Tudin’s name, which was also recorded against her own personal records, which the man had consulted soon after their respective appointments.

What else had he already done, in the hope of undermining her? And how, she wondered, could she protect herself? She’d have to find a way. It wasn’t just danger to her: it was danger to Sasha.

Twenty

Walter Foster’s emergency cable was coded for the Director-General’s ‘Eyes Only’ attention. Miller handed it to Patricia Elder as she responded to his summons and said: ‘It’s a bastard.’

Patricia looked up from the message and said: ‘We didn’t anticipate this, did we?’

‘We couldn’t, not until it was too late: after the photographs had already been taken.’ Miller nodded to the cable slip on the desk between them. ‘There’s no reason to wait until Foster gets here personally with a fuller account.’

‘What about Snow’s suggestion?’ asked the woman, doubtfully.

Miller shook his head. ‘Claiming some got damaged during processing or didn’t come out is as phoney as hell.’

‘It wouldn’t provide evidence for an actual seizure, though, would it? Snow is not one of their own people, where proper evidence doesn’t really matter. And it would give us time: everything has got to be in sequence.’

Miller shook his head again. ‘A time-frame we’d have no way of controlling: maybe cause more moves we couldn’t anticipate. You forget another problem, maybe as big as any other – the obvious determination of this bloody man Li. He won’t be stalled for long, not from the way he’s behaved so far.’

‘There’d still be no positive evidence to justify an arrest,’ persisted the woman.

‘We can’t rely on delay that goes on too long.’

Patricia got up, moving aimlessly about the office. ‘We don’t know how sophisticated their photographic analysis is: what scientific techniques they have. The only thing we can be sure about is that there will be technical analysis.’

‘Talk it through with our own Analysis here,’ ordered Miller. ‘They will have examined every one by now. Some photographs will be easier to treat than others. Get a list, in order of priority. What has to be erased or covered. How easy and undetectable it will be. Explain the problem fully to Technical. Have them make prints first, so they can suggest to us what is feasible before they actually do anything to the negatives.’

‘It’s possible the Chinese examination will only be a physical one, by eye: obviously by Li himself,’ suggested Patricia. ‘Maybe they won’t go to any laboratory.’

‘We’ve got to work from the opposite assumption,’ refused Miller.

‘We’ve got something!’ declared the deputy Director suddenly, stopping her perambulation. ‘In his account of the journey Snow referred to Li taking his own photographs. What if what Li took were copy sheets of everything Snow photographed, for comparison? That could be why Li wants to see Snow’s pictures: because the Chinese know already from examining Li’s stuff that they show things in the background that shouldn’t be there.’

‘It’s a possibility,’ conceded Miller, reluctantly.

‘More than a possibility,’ argued Patricia, increasingly convinced she was right. ‘Certainly one we have to consider.’

‘Definitely a question to put to Snow, to see if he can remember.’

Patricia Elder sat down again. ‘An additional reason for the direct contact he’s demanding.’

‘If there are true copy prints – and we alter ours here so the two don’t compare – it will provide whatever espionage proof the Chinese need: unquestionably be sufficient for an arrest.’

‘It’s all unravelling too quickly,’ complained the woman.

‘So we have to adjust just as quickly!’ said Miller. ‘I’m not worried. Merely trying to recognize the pitfalls