Charlie’s Apprentice

‘I’ve never seen either of them like it before,’ agreed the girl.

Charlie smiled, happily. ‘Miller said he was going to dump me. But that was before I told him about Robertson.’

‘It’s been a bloody awful business. All of it,’ she said.

‘You don’t know the half of it,’ said Charlie.

‘Enough.’

‘I don’t think so.’

Julia frowned up from her wineglass. ‘I’m personal assistant to both, remember.’

‘So who do you think Robertson’s working for?’

The frown remained. ‘Maybe I don’t know everything.’

‘It was a set-up,’ announced Charlie. ‘All of it. Right from the very beginning. From Snow getting permission to make the trip south with Li and me being put under the control of Patricia Elder and told I only had a menial future, to make me resentful and distracted, and then Gower, the man who could resist interrogation, being selected for me to train and afterwards sent to China, where he hadn’t been trained to operate.’

Julia shook her head. ‘Charlie, I’m not getting any of this!’

‘I didn’t, not for a very long time. It was sacrifice time: me, Snow, Gower. We should have all been in the dock together, all part of the dissident trials the Chinese are putting on. Would have been in court, if Snow hadn’t been killed. That really did break the chain. Ruined it all, for any public display at least. It was still good enough for Robertson: would have been, that is, if I hadn’t realized the mission surveillance was lifted and then seen him with Li …’

‘Please, Charlie!’ begged the girl.

‘Robertson isn’t supposed to be theirs!’ said Charlie. ‘He’s supposed to be our source, the man we thought we had deeply in place and would need even more when we lost all our facilities in Hong Kong after 1997: need him enough to sacrifice all of us.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘You tell me!’ Charlie came back. ‘You’re in a position to know. Isn’t Robertson supposed to be ours?’

‘There are things I’m not allowed to know,’ insisted Julia.

‘I’d hoped you would know: and that you’d tell me.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I would have been, if I had been swept up. Very sorry.’

‘I can’t believe it! Won’t believe it! You must be wrong!’

Charlie topped up their glasses. ‘I suppose they imagined a lot would be concealed in a Chinese prosecution that could be manipulated to cover anything, but they were still very clumsy. Samuels should be withdrawn. Pickering, too. They’re no bloody good, either of them. And according to what Snow told me, from their visit to the mission when Robertson was ill, they’re not getting on. Rowing all the time.’

Julia was looking at him unblinkingly, only her throat moving, wine forgotten in front of her.

‘And you don’t have to say anything,’ smiled Charlie. Like she hadn’t had to enunciate, confirming word for confirming word, the situation with Miller and his deputy.

‘I said from the beginning …’

‘… I know,’ said Charlie, indifferent to the protest. ‘I’m really not asking you to tell me anything …’ He seemed surprised to find the bottle empty, holding it aloft for the waitress to see and bring another. ‘I came out through Hong Kong. Did you hear about that?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘But you know about the Composite Signals Station at Chung Horn Kok, from which all the electronic traffic in Beijing is listened into?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was all picked up there, of course,’ said Charlie. ‘Not a risk, as far as Miller or the woman were concerned, because they were controlling it all and could dismiss it as unimportant. Its only significance was if someone else saw it. Someone like me, for instance.’

She had gone very white. ‘You’re not suggesting …!’

‘Not suggesting,’ agreed Charlie. ‘Definitely saying. Snow’s cable name was “Hunter”. He actually told me so. Chose it himself, from Genesis. Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the field. That’s what Jeremy Snow thought he was: cunning. Poor bugger. London cabled Foster while Snow was travelling, asking on an open wire when “Hunter” would be getting to Beijing. And Foster, who was a frightened idiot and chosen because of it, replied, again on an open link because it’s the system, providing the actual day. Which gave the Chinese, who maintain their own electronic surveillance on all the embassies, a date from which Snow could be positively identified, at any subsequent trial. There was another reference to “Hunter” in an emergency cable that Foster sent, after Li’s visit to the mission to ask for the photographs.’

‘This is all circumstantial,’ suggested Julia, uncertainly. ‘You’ve no proof the Chinese monitor.’

‘Every country monitors embassy traffic!’ insisted Charlie. ‘There was a lot for Beijing to listen to. The day before Gower went out, there was another cable from London, to the embassy. It said Second Hunter arriving. All Gower needed, from the moment of his arrival, was a sign around his neck.’ Charlie paused. Why, he wondered, hadn’t Gower done what he’d been told, always to travel under his own, personal arrangements? Too inexperienced, Charlie guessed. He smiled again, this time in his acceptance of the second bottle. Julia’s glass was still full, untouched, so he only bothered with his own. ‘It didn’t stop there. I made a specific request, to Patricia Elder, that everything about my going to Beijing should be by diplomatic pouch, so there couldn’t be any electronic interception. Yet the day before I got there, there was an open cable message about Hunter Three. It was lucky I wasn’t on the plane they expected me to be.’ Luck, reflected Charlie, had nothing at all to do with it.

Julia drank at last. Soft-voiced, she said: ‘I typed the cables … I didn’t realize … Christ, Charlie, I did it and I didn’t even realize what I was being told to do …!’

‘It’s not your fault: not important.’

‘Not important! Snow’s dead. We don’t know yet what Gower went through. You could have gone through the same. Worse even!’

Time to move on, Charlie decided. ‘I might not have thought about looking in Hong Kong if it hadn’t been for something Samuels said. Silly really. It’s just that I listen to everything. He talked about Snow being “swept up”. That’s a trade expression: departmental. Not the way a diplomatic officer talks. And then, later, he referred to the fact that Snow had used the confessional to tell Father Robertson what he had done, to get permission to run. Snow told me he’d done it. Only me. And I didn’t tell anybody. So the only other person from whom Samuels could have learned about it was Robertson himself. There were a lot of other things, as well. Like a political officer baby-sitting a sick missionary, which a person of his rank and pomposity would never have done, unless of course he was the man’s Control and worried that Robertson, sick with remorse at what he was doing, might have hallucinated and talked about it. No message ever got to or from Rome, about Robertson’s illness, incidentally. Or about the Chinese targeting Snow. I know because I stopped off in Rome on the way back: the Jesuit Curia didn’t know what I was talking about. That was the advantage of mailing through the British embassy: Samuels could filter everything. Run a very tight ship.’

Julia moved her head, aimlessly, stunned.

‘Samuels is the Resident, isn’t he?’

The head movement was more positive, a refusal to confirm the question.

‘Snow’s death told me,’ said Charlie. ‘English was OK to set up the airport decoy, making plane reservations I never intended to take up. But I needed Samuels’ ability to speak Mandarin to go through the train departures. That’s how the Chinese were able to have so many men in place, at the station: Samuels told Robertson how we were planning to get away. And Robertson alerted the people to whom he is really answering these days.’

‘No!’ disputed Julia, at once. ‘If they knew Snow was on the Nanchang train – moved against him when he left, to get to you – how come they didn’t get you, as well?’

‘They tried,’ said Charlie, smiling across at her. ‘The Shanghai express wasn’t the only train leaving at five that afternoon. There was one to Changsha, four tracks further along the concourse. That’s the train I told Samuels