Charlie’s Apprentice

‘Do we know enough to consider it that?’

She frowned at him. ‘In the last few months the Chinese have rounded up at least twenty dissidents: it’s probably more. One was once Snow’s source: perhaps the best one he ever had. How’s it going to look with an English Jesuit who’s acted for us as a freelance for three years and John Gower, someone officially attached to the British embassy, in the dock there with them?’

‘Are you sure it’s going to get as bad as that?’

‘It can’t,’ insisted Patricia, autocratically. ‘A way has got to be found.’

Now it was Charlie who frowned, wanting the remark straightened out. ‘A way has got to be found to do what?’

The deputy Director stood suddenly from her desk, resuming her position in front of the window. ‘Gower went to Beijing with instructions to make one last attempt to get the priest out. If Snow went on refusing, he was to be abandoned: he was freelance and deniable. Gower isn’t. Any more than William Foster was deniable, which was why we withdrew him, to break the link in the chain to the embassy.’

‘Which hasn’t, as far as we know, been established yet?’ anticipated Charlie. Surely not! he thought: surely he hadn’t answered the question about his own future! Hope surged through him.

‘Not as far as we know,’ she agreed. She looked directly at him.

Charlie looked directly back: this was very definitely not talk time.

She said: ‘We hoped for better, from Gower. Your apprentice.’

Bollocks, rejected Charlie: she wasn’t going to stick any of this on him. ‘You don’t know what happened to him yet. How it happened.’

‘He got arrested. After being trained by you, someone supposed to be so good. Someone who’d never been picked up.’

Bollocks again. ‘China is the most difficult country in the world to work in. Always was. Always has been. It shouldn’t have been a first assignment: certainly not an assignment where things could go so easily wrong.’

‘I’ve told you how he was specifically ordered to operate. No personal risk. At any time. He screwed up.’

‘Inquest thinking,’ rejected Charlie. ‘I thought the problem was the immediate future: like the next three weeks, if Gower holds out that long.’

‘It is,’ Patricia agreed. Her eyes hadn’t left him.

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Send you in, to prevent a disaster. You’re the Never-Been-Caught man whose very first pupil did just that: got caught. Whether he gets twenty years in a Chinese jail depends entirely on preventing any link being established, between Gower and Snow. We were prepared to abandon the damned priest. Now we can’t. Your job is to get him out, so the Chinese can’t establish any connection. What happens to Gower depends on you.’

He was back! Back and working properly! Reality dampened the euphoria. ‘None of this is my responsibility.’

‘It’s a mess, for you to clear up. Or to keep from becoming a bigger mess than it is.’

Get it official, Charlie told himself. ‘Does this mean I’m restored to the active roster?’

Patricia Elder hesitated. ‘For the moment.’

Charlie supposed she showed some integrity in being honest. ‘On trial?’

‘You’re being given the opportunity.’

Jesus, he wanted it! All Charlie’s regret and nostalgia of the past months concentrated into one consuming awareness that he wanted, under any circumstances or conditions, to become actively operational again. He’d accept the terms, whatever and however they were offered: anything to get back. ‘What have you done, already?’

The deputy Director shook her head. ‘You’re supposed to be the expert. Tell me what you’d do. Give me something to put to the embassy.’

Flattering, thought Charlie. ‘According to the embassy, Gower left everything in the security vault?’

‘It’s one of the straws we’re clutching, that there was nothing incriminating on him when he was picked up.’

‘Authorize my access to it: I’ll probably still need the photographs. Advise them of my arrival, with a request for every possible facility, as and when I call upon it.’

‘They won’t agree to that sort of carte blanche: not the embassy nor the Foreign Office here. They just won’t like it.’

‘They’ll like a bloody sight less a full-scale trial of Britons in the dock of a Chinese court: they haven’t got any choice but to help.’

‘I’ll try,’ promised the woman, doubtfully.

‘And announce through the Foreign Office the intention to send out an official, to enforce the protests of Gower’s innocence. There’ll have to be a visa application, too: to provide them with a name.’

‘What?’ From her window-ledge vantage point the deputy Director was looking at him in head-tilted surprise. ‘But that …’

‘… will give them someone to look out for,’ completed Charlie. ‘It won’t be me.’

The woman came back to her desk but did not immediately sit at it. Instead, shaking her head, she leaned across to face him. ‘I’m not sure I’m following you here.’

Charlie smiled. ‘I don’t want anybody to.’

‘I want more than that.’ Patricia sat, slowly.

‘If the Foreign Office will agree, make it one of their own men. A lawyer would be the obvious choice. Let him work with the legal representative in Beijing, then pull him out.’

The head-shaking refusal grew. ‘You must have embassy cover: diplomatic protection.’

‘Like Gower did!’

‘That’s a cheap shot, which doesn’t get us anywhere,’ rejected Patrica. ‘From what we’re getting from Beijing, there was nothing the embassy could have done. But at least, for Gower, we can mount every diplomatic protest because he was accredited. There’s no question of your going there as a loose cannon: it’s absolutely out of the question.’

‘The embassy is what they’ll be watching!’ argued Charlie. ‘If you link me to it in a visa application you’ll alert the Chinese I’m coming. And so soon after Gower’s seizure, the connection is inevitable.’

‘It’s a point,’ she conceded, with seeming reluctance.

‘Just allow me a few days, without provable links to the embassy: as a tourist. Tell the embassy I’ll present myself, when it’s necessary. But nothing radioed or wired. Everything by pouch.’

‘You think our cipher’s insecure!’

Charlie sighed. ‘Everyone’s cipher is insecure. Use the diplomatic bag. Please!’

‘There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be done that way,’ she agreed, in further concession.

‘I’ll want to look at the duplicate prints of all that Snow photographed, along with the rest of the file. And see Foster.’

‘What for?’

‘I don’t know, not until I’ve talked to him,’ said Charlie, matching her awkwardness. ‘There’s no reason why I shouldn’t see him, is there?’

‘If he’d done the job properly, we wouldn’t have this crisis,’ said Patricia, bitterly.

‘I don’t want to learn his mistakes,’ said Charlie. ‘I want to know how to avoid them.’

She hesitated, momentarily. ‘You should know that Foster’s finished, because of this. He’ll be retained but never given any responsibility again.’

‘Better not appoint him a special, end-of-course instructor of how to survive,’ said Charlie.

The cynicism went badly wrong. ‘We didn’t choose very well last time, did we?’ she said, sourly.

Charlie decided, impatiently, that this was childish, yah-boo stuff. He regretted starting it in the first place. ‘Gower had a fiancee. Marcia. I don’t have a surname. She’s been on television and in the papers.’

‘So?’ frowned the woman.

‘She’ll be as frightened as hell. Not know what’s going on.’

The frown remained. ‘You think she should be told?’

Now she was initiating the childlike remarks. ‘I think when she tries to find out she shouldn’t be fobbed off by