Charlie’s Apprentice
Brian Freemantle
For Mike and Helen Jackson,
with great affection.
Oh, laugh or mourn with me the rueful jest,
A cassock’d huntsman with a fiddling priest!
William Cowper,
‘The Progress of Error’
One
This title was more pompous than most – today’s Foreign Office offering was ‘The New Reality of the Future’ – but the contents were the same, just reconstituted and served up differently: mincemeat from previously left-over scraps.
Charlie Muffin preferred his own title. Bullshit. Which was how he’d judged every other analysis and thesis interpreting the dissolution of the Soviet Union into its uncertain Commonwealth of suspicious republics which was supposed to lead to a New World Order. All bullshit. He’d said it, too, although in language more acceptable to civil servants in the response arguments he’d had to make, to every woolly-minded exposition. He’d say it again, of course, about this effort. And be ignored, as he appeared permanently to be ignored these days.
Charlie sat in his favourite launch position, chair tilted back, legs splayed over withdrawn bottom drawers to support awkward feet, the waste basket propped in the far corner of his rabbit hutch office. He sighted, minutely adjusted the trajectory, and fired the dart carefully crafted from the last page of what he’d just read. Lift-off looked good, all systems go, but then abruptly the missile dipped, early impetus gone, to crash among the other failures already littering the heel-chipped floor largely uncovered by the minimal square of frayed, Ministry grade III carpet. It put the final score at three in, seven out. Bad. Or was it? On the recognized scale for intelligence operations three out of ten was a bloody good success rate: remarkable even, considering the cock-ups that inevitably occurred along the way and usually, and more importantly, to him. But then he wasn’t assessing an intelligence operation. Just the hit rate of a paper dart made from yet another document circulated throughout Britain’s clandestine agencies, setting out guidelines for intelligence gathering after the momentous political adjustments and realignments in Europe and what once had been, but was no longer, the Soviet Union.
Charlie sighed, lifting his feet to bring his chair more upright. Charlie realized that on a scale of ten he’d so far awarded zero to every assessment he’d been called upon to review. Which would upset people, particularly those whose assessments he’d dismissed as a load of crap. But then he often seemed to upset people, even when it wasn’t intentional. Which it wasn’t here: he was just being honest.
Charlie rose and scuffed around the desk, the spread-apart Hush Puppies even more spread apart by his having loosened the laces for additional comfort: launch directors don’t need tight shoes. Charlie carried the waste basket to the shredder first, before collecting the darts which had run out of impetus.
What about his own impetus? What was the New Reality for the Future for Charlie Muffin? He wished he knew: was almost desperate to know.
The personal upheavals and uncertainties exceeded all those international changes he’d been professionally commenting upon, for all these months. And been a bloody sight more difficult to assess. Impossible, in fact. Some still remained so: always would, he supposed. The familiar – almost daily – recriminations came and he accepted them, the remorse still sharp.
Where was she? Alive? Dead? Happy? Sad? Hating him? He stopped the run of questions at the one he thought he could answer, the one he always answered. Natalia had to hate him, if she’d survived. She had every reason. He’d been insane to let her go. However dangerous it had appeared – however dangerous it had undoubtedly been – he should have kept her with him. Found a way. Instead of like this, in a permanent vacuum.
He didn’t have any doubt – there couldn’t be any doubt – that she’d been allowed out of Moscow under those now long-ago emerging freedoms to be the bait, personally to trap him. But she hadn’t been part of it: not known the purpose or the direction of whatever had been set up against him. He was sure of that, after so much mental examination. More convinced than he’d ever been of anything he couldn’t positively prove in a professional life where so much had lacked proof. She couldn’t have been part because she wouldn’t have been part. Because she loved him. Or had done, then. What about pressure upon Eduard? The freedoms had only just begun and Eduard was in the Russian army, vulnerable to every threat and pressure. Charlie supposed she would have compromised to protect her son, even though during their brief reunion in London she’d despaired at how the army had coarsened and brutalized the boy, turning him into the mirror image of the womanizing, drunken husband who had abandoned her.
So OK, she might have been part. Just. And reluctantly, if she’d been forced to cooperate. But she would have warned him. There had been opportunities, difficult though it had all been, and she would have taken one of them to sound an alarm, if she had known what it had all been about.
What about himself? Charlie demanded. Simple. He’d failed her. He’d been unable to go the last mile – the last inch! – to ignore the instinctive self-preservation to keep the rendezvous: an escape rendezvous he’d seen her keep, but not left his concealment to complete.
Not just failed her. Lost her.
For what? The job? Charlie slumped back behind the desk, snorting the derision. What fucking job? Rejecting ill-considered, naïve assessments from analysts who’d got Double Firsts at Cambridge in International Political Science and never crossed the English Channel? Waiting for month after month for the summons and the briefing for a proper, active operation that never came? Folding paper darts instead and playing kids’ games, even awarding himself points!
What new reality was there going to be for his future? Hard reality, he guessed. Maybe a very uncertain future: perhaps no future at all. Sir Alistair Wilson’s retirement from the Director-Generalship, after the second heart attack, had been a foregone conclusion and with Sir Alistair had gone a special relationship, a very special understanding. Which hadn’t been favouritism or sycophancy or even friendship. It had been a complete professional recognition between two men born at either extreme of the English social divide, each respecting the other, each benefiting from the other, each never quite trusting the other.
In addition to all of which, Sir Alistair had served a magnificent Islay single malt whisky.
There hadn’t been even supermarket whisky with the new Director-General. Only two meetings since the appointment of Peter Miller: both very formal, both introductory, each man circling the other to mark and scent the other’s territory.
Miller was a professional appointee, transferred from internal counter-intelligence and showing it to someone able to recognize the signs, as Charlie could. The one characteristic so far picked up by Charlie was a taciturn, word-measuring suspicion about everything and everybody inherent in someone whose job until now had been to seek enemies within. Was Miller’s transfer to external operations another naïve assumption of new realities, a belief that they didn’t have to bother any more about hostile activity inside the country? Some of the opinions Charlie had read recently didn’t make that suggestion as absurd as it might otherwise have seemed.
Charlie was curious how this third meeting would unfold. More than curious. Hopeful, too, that it could finally be a briefing, on something positive for him to do. Christ, he hoped so! He’d had the memorandum fixing the appointment a week before, which wasn’t how he’d been briefed in the past, but he wasn’t attaching too much importance to that. Miller was new and new people arrived with new ways. Not all assignments were urgent: most weren’t, in fact. This could be one of those that needed time: careful consideration and proper planning. It could be … Charlie halted the speculation, recognizing another sort of kids’ game, thinking himself into an optimism for which there was no justification. He was having his third meeting with the Director, that was all. Foolish, unprofessional, to clutter his mind with a lot of groundless hopes. Not the way to operate; certainly not the way he operated. Ever.