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It had meant personal contact, between Charlie and the then head of the First Chief Directorate, General Valery Kalenin, someone else whom she had known but who had long since disappeared into oblivion through KGB changes. Natalia was caught by the assessments that Kalenin had recorded about Charlie. Absolute professional was a frequent phrase. Twice the exchange scheme was qualified as being in no way a defection by the Englishman. Kalenin had written: This is a man believing himself betrayed and vindictively intent upon creating the maximum embarrassment for men who planned to abandon him. I consider it extremely unlikely this man could ever be turned: throughout our meetings he has – although illogically – consistently presented himself as a loyal British intelligence officer. It is a morality difficult to understand but obviously a situation of which we have to take the utmost advantage.

There was another gap in the timetable, but here again Natalia was able to fill it in for herself, from what Charlie had told her. Of months stretching into more than a year of endless running, dragging the hapless Edith from country to country while he was hunted by the British and American agencies: of his wife’s death, intentionally putting herself in the path of a bullet meant for him: an even greater retribution, against her murderer: of eventual capture, treason trial and British imprisonment with a believed KGB agent, and the phoney jailbreak and defection, to Moscow.

The moment of their meeting, reflected Natalia, enveloped now in smothering recollection. She hardly needed any reminders from the file but she read on, actually studying after the gap of almost six years her own reports of debriefing Charlie Muffin. He’d deceived her, Natalia conceded: just as he’d deceived the repatriated Berenkov and even Valery Kalenin, the man who had earlier decided Charlie would never become a traitor. At once Natalia found the personal contradiction. He’d deceived her professionally, convincing her his defection was genuine, so that she never once suspected the entire exercise to be a discrediting operation against Berenkov. But he’d never deceived her personally. Theirs had been a genuine love – still was on her part – and when, finally, he’d triggered the trap for Berenkov he’d done it in a way that kept her beyond any danger from their intimate relationship.

Now, before her on the desk in black and white, she finally had the confirmation of how successfully he had shielded her. General Kalenin had conducted the inquiry, extending to the absolute limit the friendship that existed between the two men to minimize the harm to Berenkov’s career. And exonerating her completely.

Comrade Colonel Natalia Nikandrova Fedova at all times conducted herself in an exemplary manner, the General had recorded. It was she who finally alerted senior officers that the Englishman’s defection was, after all, a false one. The failure to affect an arrest was that of counter-intelligence not reacting quickly enough upon information supplied by Comrade Fedova.

Natalia stretched up from the dossier, needing a moment’s break from the jumble of words, passingly amused now at being referred to as ‘Comrade’, which seemed so archaic after all the changes. She remained scarcely conscious of her official surroundings, still wrapped in long-ago memories. She’d believed she would never see Charlie again, after his escape back to England. But the hurt had not been so bad that time. She’d been more easily able to accept the division between their personal, impossible dilemma and what he had to do operationally.

Natalia hunched over the file again, reaching the second inquiry upon Alexei Berenkov, the one from which the man had not escaped. Nor deserved to escape. It was not difficult, even in the stilted official language of what virtually amounted to a trial without judge or jury, to gauge Berenkov’s megalomania: the man’s unshakeable belief, even under interrogation, that he was justified to carry on a personal vendetta operation to discredit Charlie Muffin as Charlie Muffin had -minimally because of Kalenin’s intervention – discredited him. It was, she supposed, the dread of every organization such as theirs: that someone with enormous power would become mentally unstable and start abusing it to satisfy private ambitions.

Natalia closed the file, trying to form judgements on the necessarily separate levels, as always finding one overlapping on to the other.

By staying away from the final London rendezvous – the meeting she’d kept, finally deciding to abandon everything and everybody – Charlie had avoided being discredited as a Soviet sympathizer, to prove which Berenkov had created a miasma of additional disinformation material. So yet again – as always – Charlie had proved himself the ultimate survivor.

And by doing so destroyed whatever there could have been between them, personally.

Natalia believed she could have settled with Charlie, in England: certainly now, with the baby. It would have been difficult at first, of course: horrendously so, because she would never have been a defector, never prepared to disclose any secrets from her organization, any more than Charlie had ever been prepared – truthfully – to disclose anything from his side. So the official pressure upon her – upon both of them – would have been staggering. But with Charlie she could have endured it, eventually for them to have been together.

In the solitude of her Yasenevo office, Natalia shook her head, as if trying physically to throw off the reminiscence. What might have been could never be: so why had she bothered to go through the charade she had for so long denied herself?

Having at last posed herself the question, Natalia forced herself to answer it, properly for the first time. Because she hadn’t embarked upon it as a meaningless routine, unnecessarily stirring old memories better left undisturbed. She’d studied the dossier with a very determined objective, and the disappointment she felt now was not that of lost chances in the past but of not finding what she had been looking for, in the future.

She’d been seeking the slightest clue from which she might have been able once more to find Charlie. But hadn’t found it.

Within twenty-four hours, in another part of the same building, Fyodor Tudin wondered if he had found the indication he had been seeking, when he learned from her signature against the withdrawal authority that Natalia had studied the file on the Englishman with whom she was linked, in her own personal files.

Was there a weak spot there after all, he wondered.

They’d considered all of Jeremy Snow’s material, working on Miller’s side of the desk with their chairs familiarly together but without any physical contact or even conversation as they went through each report and each photograph. Finally the Director-General said: ‘He did welclass="underline" damn well.’

‘It’s unfortunate it has to turn out like this,’ agreed Patricia Elder.

‘Never forget the cardinal principle,’ reminded Miller. ‘The means always justifies the end.’

‘Let’s hope it does,’ said the woman.

Fifteen

‘Their separate accounts contradict each other, to a large degree, but it’s fairly obvious there is some suspicion.’ As he talked Peter Miller, who was concerned with neatness and order in all things, assembled in edge-to-edge stacks on his desk what had arrived overnight from Beijing. Snow’s information and opinion formed the larger pile, then the photographs, and finally Walter Foster’s account. The Director-General did so with his head habitually to the right, to benefit his better vision from that side.

Patricia Elder nodded, in agreement. ‘But just how much? We can’t get a single thing wrong, not now.’