‘Everything,’ said Silin. ‘I want to concentrate on the biggest single nuclear robbery there’s ever been.’ And by so doing, he thought, prove to everyone that things should stay just the way they were, apart from the changes he had in mind.
Fifteen hundred miles away, in London, the problem of things staying just the way they were was occupying the mind of Charlie Muffin. It had been, for weeks, but at that moment an internal messenger had just handed him the summons and said, ‘Tough shit, Charlie. Looks like you’re next.’
chapter 2
T he last time Charlie Muffin had felt like he did at that moment he’d been standing in front of a red-robed judge about to be sentenced. And had been, to the maximum of fourteen years, unaware what the buggers were really up to.
There wasn’t anything to work out today. The Cold War had melted into a puddle of different political bed partners and different priorities and the worst change of all affected poor bastards like him. So it was all over, lock, stock, barrel and boot. There’d already been the two seminars, addressed personally by the Director-General with all the deputies and division chiefs nodding in solemn-faced agreement to all the bullshit about fresh roles for a streamlined service. And immediately after the second conference there’d been the appointment of a relocation officer, with promises of alternative employment in other government ministries or advice on commuting pensions.
And finally this, the official memorandum that Charlie was fingering in his pocket on his way to the seventh floor. ‘The Director-General will see you at 14.00. Subject: Relocation.’ Ten words, if he included the numerals (and the worst of them all, ‘relocation’) ending the career of Charles Edward Muffin in the British intelligence community.
The only thing he couldn’t understand was being called before the Director-General himself. There were at least six deputies or division chiefs who could have performed the function, which in Charlie Muffin’s case roughly equated with shooting an old warhorse that had outlived its usefulness and needed putting out of its misery. Or someone in Personnel. It could even have been done by the newly appointed relocations officer, who might have been able to throw in the offer of a lavatory cleaner’s position or a school caretaker’s job.
Charlie’s feet began positively to ache the moment he emerged from the elevator on to the seventh floor of the new Thames-side building. Charlie Muffin’s feet invariably ached. Afflicted as they were by dropped arches and hammer toes, they were literally his Achilles heel, the weak point at which every bodily feeling or ill ultimately manifested itself. Sometimes they hurt because he walked too far or too long, a problem he’d largely overcome by rarely walking anywhere if there were alternative transport. Sometimes the discomfort came from his being generally tired. Sometimes, although again rarely, the problem was new shoes, a difficulty he handled by treating the comfortably beaten-into-submission Hush Puppies with the tweezer-tipped care Italian clerics show the Turin Shroud. And sometimes they twinged at moments of stress or tension or even suspected physical danger, the bodily focal point again for the inherent, self-defensive antenna which Charlie Muffin had tuned over the years to the sensitivity of a Star Wars early warning system. And of which Charlie always took careful heed.
Today’s discomfort was, momentarily, such that Charlie paused to flex his bunched-up toes to ease the cramp. He hadn’t expected it all to be as abrupt as this, as bad as this. But why not? Always before, when the shit’s-about-to-hit-the-fan pain had come like this, it had been in an operational situation and what he was about to face was going to be far more traumatic than anything he’d ever confronted in the field.
He was going to be dumped from the service – from which he’d briefly dumped himself when he’d run with the CIA’s half million and regretted every single waking and sleeping moment until they’d caught him, a regret quite separate from the scourging, always-present agony of losing Edith in the vengeance pursuit – and there was nothing he could do to prevent it.
Although there couldn’t be the slightest doubt about the forthcoming confrontation, a lot of Charlie’s uncertainty came from his not having been able to prepare himself. Charlie had never liked going into anything totally cold. Without any conceit – because the last thing from which Charlie Muffin suffered was conceit – he knew he was a cerebral Fred Astaire when it came to responding on his feet to unexpected situations, even though he couldn’t physically match that mental agility. Despite which he’d always tried to get as much advantage as he could, in advance. Maybe he should have gone first to see the relocations officer. Charlie had spent his life talking people into admissions and revelations they’d sworn on oath never to disclose. So extracting from a form-filling, form-regimented government bureaucrat every last little detail of what they intended doing to him would have been a walk in the park, unfitting though the analogy was for someone with Charlie’s feet. The belated awareness of an overlooked opportunity further disturbed Charlie. It had been a bad mistake not to have done it and he’d lived this long relatively unscathed by not making mistakes and most certainly not bad ones, as this was. Another indication, to add to the foot pangs, of how disorientated he’d been by the single line command from on high.
The Director-General’s suite, which Charlie had never entered, was a contrast to that of the service’s old headquarters in Westminster Bridge Road, to which he had quite regularly been admitted, usually at the very beginning or the very end of a disciplinary enquiry.
The outer custodian was male – another difference from the past – a sharp-featured, flop haired man who didn’t stop writing at Charlie’s arrival, to remain distanced from ordinary mortals. The determination didn’t quite work, because Charlie caught the quick eye-flicker of identification at his entry. Henry Bates, read the nameplate proudly displayed on the desk. Charlie stood, accustomed to waiting for acknowledgment: it often took supermarket check-out operators several minutes to realize he was standing in front of them. The attention, when it finally came, was expressionless. ‘They’re waiting.’
‘They.’ So he was meeting more than just the Director-General. And they, whoever ‘they’ were, had already assembled, even though he was still ten minutes early. Insufficient straw from which to make a single brick. But, adjusting the metaphor, enough for a drowning man to clutch, before going under for the last time.
There were five men in a half circle around the conference table, but apart from Rupert Dean, the Director-General whose identity had been publicly disclosed upon his appointment, Charlie could identify only one other by name.
Gerald Williams was the department’s chief accountant who had transferred from the old headquarters and in front of whom Charlie had appeared more times than he could remember to explain particularly high reimbursement claims. Which Charlie had incontestably defended on every single occasion until it had become a challenge between the two of them, in Williams’ case amounting to a personal vendetta.
Williams, who was a fat but extremely neat man, was at the far end of the half circle. His neighbour was as contrastingly thin as Williams was fat, a stick-figured man with a beak-nosed face chiselled like the prow of an Arctic ice-breaker, bisected by heavy-framed spectacles. At the opposite end, seemingly more interested in the river traffic than in Charlie’s tentative entry, lounged a bow-tied, alopeciadomed man who compensated for his baldness by cultivating a droop-ending bush of a moustache. The man next to him was utterly nondescript, dark-haired and dark-suited and with the white, civil service regulated shirt, except for blood-pressured apple-red cheeks so bright he could have been wearing clown’s make-up.