Charlie’s Apprentice

before they open up ahead of us, as this has done.’

‘Shall I brief Gower?’

‘Both of us,’ determined the intelligence chief. For several moments he remained looking down at his desk, immersed in thought. ‘The speed of things is restricting our manoeuvrability.’

‘Which is being further restricted by his refusal to accept any authority other than that of his Order in Rome,’ added the woman.

‘It will still be all right,’ said Miller.

‘So what about the authority of the Order?’ demanded Patricia. ‘That could become a very real problem.’

‘Have you forgotten any Vatican exchange with their mission in Beijing comes through our embassy channels, Father Robertson and Father Snow being British nationals?’

The woman had briefly overlooked the ease of interception. She nodded, wishing she hadn’t. ‘Yes,’ she agreed, slowly. ‘We can monitor every exchange. That could be useful.’

‘So we can control him very effectively,’ said Miller, confidently.

‘Sure we don’t need to see Foster, before we go on?’ queried the deputy.

‘No,’ said the Director. ‘We’ve got to catch up.’

John Gower entered the Director-General’s office with polite deference, but no lack of confidence.

‘Your first assignment,’ announced Miller.

Gower smiled. ‘I was hoping it would be that.’

‘You’re going to Beijing,’ said Patricia Elder, taking up the briefing. ‘An emergency has arisen: something that has to be resolved from here.’

Gower felt the beginning of excitement: the likelihood of his going to China had never entered his mind, during any private speculation as to where in the world he might go. ‘What?’

‘We think an agent is about to be exposed,’ said Miller. ‘You’re to get him out. We can’t risk an arrest: any political or diplomatic embarrassment.’

Political embarrassments had been covered in his most recent, unusual instruction, Gower remembered. ‘When do I go?’

‘We’ll begin the travel and visa arrangements today,’ said Patricia.

‘Who is it I have to get out?’

There was no immediate reply. Then Miller said: ‘You’ll get that later.’

Now the silence was from Gower. Then he said: ‘Why don’t you simply order the man to leave?’

‘He doesn’t accept the situation is as serious as we believe it is,’ said the woman. ‘He’s freelance, not officially attached to the department.’

‘Could there be an official attempt to stop us getting out?’

‘Not if we move quickly enough.’

‘But it’s a possibility?’ pressed Gower. How was he expected to handle official obstruction in perhaps the most ordered and restricted country on earth?

‘A possibility,’ agreed the Director-General.

‘I’m to travel with him?’

‘Yes.’

‘How do I get him out?’

‘The quickest and most practical way: that’ll have to be your decision, according to the circumstances you find when you get there,’ said Miller.

‘He’s already been warned? There’s been an attempt to get him to leave?’

‘Yes.’

‘What if he refuses to come with me?’

‘There was a personality clash with our resident officer, who is being withdrawn,’ said the Director-General. ‘There mustn’t be, with you. You’ve got to get him out.’

‘I’m to work through the embassy?’ He was already wondering how to tell Marcia.

‘Officially you’ll be a representative from Foreign Office Personnel, making a ground tour of existing embassy facilities: that cover puts you in the embassy, but only as long as you need: we won’t have to claim you’re filling a diplomatic vacancy.’

‘Who in the embassy will know my real function?’

‘The ambassador, obviously,’ replied Miller. ‘Possibly his most senior attache. You’ll work quite alone.’

At that moment, at either extreme of the world, two things that were very much to affect John Gower occurred simultaneously.

At London’s Heathrow airport, Walter Foster disembarked from the Beijing flight. He paused just inside the terminal building, allowing himself the theatricality of breathing deeply, feeling free, which was a sensation he had not known for months.

And in the church complex in Beijing, Jeremy Snow looked up at Li’s unexpected appearance, again at the back of a class in progress.

‘I thought you might have received the photographs from England,’ said the Chinese,’ when the class had once more hurried away, frightened by another official intrusion.

‘Not yet,’ apologized Snow.

The London apartment address listed in Who’s Who for Lady Ann Miller – an entry which recorded in one line the occupation of her husband as a civil servant – formed part of one of the most spectacular Regency mansions built by Nash at the very edge of the park. It was a penthouse and therefore far too high for Charlie to gain an impression of its interior, but he was able to see into other lower flats on the nights when their occupants didn’t draw their curtains. This wasn’t simply wealth, Charlie decided: people who lived here wouldn’t know how much they were worth because money – the need for it and most certainly never the lack of it – would never have intruded into their lives.

He alternated between morning and night, an observation he accepted from the beginning was inadequate if attempted irregularly by only one man upon a house with possible exits not only on to the park but into Albany Street as well.

After several unproductive days and nights, Charlie began to wonder if his inference from Julia’s remark might not, after all, have been wrong. Or if this wasn’t the love-nest in any case.

Twenty-one

Father Robertson collapsed forty-eight hours after Li’s second visit. It was not until the middle of the morning, after the older priest had failed to appear for early prayers, that Snow went to Father Robertson’s personal quarters and found him. The man – and his bedding – was soaked in sweat, but at that stage he was still rational, talking with reasonable coherence although his teeth chattered from the helter-skelter fever.

Snow changed both the man and the bed, shocked when he blanket-bathed the old priest to see how emaciated he was. There were scars, too. A lot, on the back, were evenly spaced and in the same direction, as they would have been if Father Robertson’s skin had split under repeated beatings. Another, to the right of his chest, high on a bony, skin-stretched ribcage, was indented like a stab wound. It had healed in a large, uneven white circle, as if it had not been properly, medically, treated.

Within an hour of the first change and bath, Father Robertson and his bed were as soaked as before.

‘I have to get the embassy doctor.’

‘No!’ His irrational agitation had Father Robertson virtually on the point of tears. ‘It’s nothing. A small fever.’

On his way to the kitchen with the newly fouled bedclothes, Snow decided to ignore Father Robertson’s refusal, picking up the telephone to call the embassy. The line was not dead but inoperable, which it frequently was, emitting a familiar high-pitched whine through which it was impossible to dial.

There was a temporary calm – even an apparent respite in the fluctuating temperature – when the two men said the rosary together. Snow led the observance, anxious against tiring someone clearly on the edge of exhaustion. Before lapsing into a shuddering, tossing and turning sleep, Father Robertson several times