Charlie’s Apprentice

‘You will inform the Curia of my permission to travel?’

‘Go!’ repeated Father Robertson, exasperated.

‘Li is demanding something: some photographs. I do not believe I will be allowed to leave until I pass them over.’

Father Robertson shook his head, a man pummelled with too much, too quickly. ‘Give them to him!’

‘I do not have them, not yet.’

The elderly man shook his head, wearily. ‘I do not understand. Do not want to understand. All I want is for you to go. Please go.’

‘As soon as I find a way,’ promised Snow. But who was there to show him?

‘So he is a spy?’ demanded Patrick Plowright.

‘He came to clear up some sort of mess, after that bloody man Foster. I’ve no idea what,’ confirmed Samuels. The feet of the diminutive embassy lawyer sitting opposite only touched the floor when the man stretched his toes, to make contact. Samuels tried to avoid obviously looking at them.

‘Still nothing on access?’

The political officer shook his head. ‘The ambassador has delivered three Notes, so far. The same number have been given to their ambassador in London.’

‘What’s the next step?’

Samuels looked uncomfortable. ‘Someone else is coming in.’

‘What!’

‘I know. It’s appalling, isn’t it?’

‘When’s he arrive?’

Samuels shrugged, realizing he was looking at the tiptoe difficulty of the other man and hurriedly averting his eyes. ‘He wasn’t on the plane we’d been told to expect. We’ve asked London what’s happened.’

‘Surely there’s something else we can do about Gower! Something practical?’

‘As a gesture of protest, Sir Timothy could be recalled to London. But that would blow up badly in our faces if the Chinese proved espionage.’

‘Which still has to be denied?’

‘Emphatically.’

‘It’s ridiculous!’

‘Of course it is. Sir Timothy is privately making the strongest protest imaginable to London.’

‘I thought all this spying nonsense was a thing of the past.’

‘I only wish it had been.’

‘What’s this new person going to do?’

‘God only knows.’

Charlie believed he’d moved around like a blue-assed fly, although making less noise. And achieved some early, possibly useful impressions.

He was pleased with the Hsin Chiao, a hotel reserved for Western tourists among whom he could merge and become lost. The reception desk wouldn’t let him have their only street map, so he had to memorize the position of the British embassy, which was marked, against the district containing the mission, which wasn’t. He studied a separate map, listing in English the numbers and routes of the buses, which looked comparatively convenient but which he guessed wouldn’t be. They weren’t. It meant a lot of walking.

Charlie went close enough to the embassy on Guang Hua Lu to fix it in his mind but not close enough for him to become identified with it. He didn’t try directly to approach the mission, either. Instead he circled where he knew it to be, always keeping a street distance away, until he found the logical main road leading away from it. There was a convenient park, where he remained for an hour, and a stall market in front of several shops, where he immersed himself for slightly longer. He identified two cars that made more than one journey up and down. One stopped within sight of Charlie, so he was able to see the two men who got out. And then he recognized Father Robertson from the photographs he’d studied in London. The priest strode from the direction of the mission remarkably quickly for a man of his age, and with purpose, as if he were keeping an appointment. Charlie was still in the final shop, supposedly looking at bolts of silk, when he saw Father Robertson returning. It was automatic for Charlie to check the timing: the mission chief had been away an hour. Seeing Father Robertson was a plus he hadn’t expected: it was too much to hope that Father Snow might use the approach road. Charlie still lingered, but the younger priest didn’t appear. Charlie wouldn’t have approached him, if he had.

Charlie had to walk much further than he anticipated, to get to the bus-stop. And then had to stand for almost forty-five minutes, because the first bus was filled. By the time he got back to the hotel his feet were on fire. It was just his shitty luck, he thought, to be in the land of The Long March.

Forty-three

With convoluted but personally adjusted logic, Charlie decided early the next day that what he had to do was comparatively simple because it was so difficult. Impossible, in fact, without unacceptable risks. And Charlie Muffin never took unacceptable risks.

Had Gower? There could be a logic to that, too: an over-ambitious officer on his first foreign assignment, taking too few precautions in an eagerness to prove himself. Charlie wouldn’t have thought Gower would do that. But the further, unarguable logic was that John Gower had done something wrong. And was now in jail because of it. Not just Gower’s failure, Charlie corrected. He himself surely had to share in whatever had happened? He’d been the graduation teacher, the supposed expert: Mr Never-Been-Caught, according to Patricia Elder’s well deserved sneer. So why had Gower – his apprentice, according to another sneer – been caught? Maybe easier here to come some way towards an understanding, by examining more inconsistencies. He’d certainly tried to teach Gower never to take unacceptable risks, and he’d preached about over-eagerness, but what else had there been that was applicable here? Bugger-all, decided Charlie, never to know how close his reflections were now to those of John Gower, so very recently. What benefit was learning about vehicle evasion in a city of bicycles? Bugger-all, he thought again. What could a Caucasian do to watch – or to avoid being watched – in a country of such different physiognomy? Once more, bugger-all.

Gower had come to him green and left him green, to come here. It didn’t make operational sense. What did then?

The impossibility of working safely outside the embassy, he recognized, reluctantly conceding that the iron- drawered deputy Director-General had been right. That morning he’d gone back to the main approach road, near the silk shop, and seen the rare and therefore recognizable cars repeat their up-and-down journeys of the previous day. Once more the second vehicle had discharged two men, and one had carried the same brown briefcase and the tightly furled umbrella of yesterday.

If he couldn’t approach Snow, then Snow had to approach him. But how? And where?

Charlie had the mission telephone number and could have dialled from an untraceable outside kiosk or stand, but the intercept would be on the mission line. And Snow anyway would have been followed to any outside rendezvous. So how … Charlie stopped, his mind snagging but unable to recognize upon what. Something else that didn’t make sense. Why? he demanded of himself. Why, trying to work out how to make contact with a sealed off priest in a much watched Jesuit mission, had his train of thought suddenly been derailed by something he couldn’t identify? He ran the reflection he had been having back and forth but still nothing came. It had to remain another question without a proper answer.

So how and where? The second query was easy. It had to be in the unapproachable security of the embassy. But how to get the priest there?

They wouldn’t like it, Charlie knew, when the idea came to him. The man would probably refuse and be quite entitled to do so, and if he did Charlie had no better suggestion at that time. But it was the best he could come up with at the moment and it was a relief to think of something that had a chance of working. It was his partially simple way out of the initially difficult situation. But still with a long way to go. Like how to get a followed and watched suspect priest out of a watched British embassy and on to a plane away from the country, without detection or interception.

One problem at a time, decided Charlie: until he won friends and influenced people he hadn’t solved the first