As Natalia edged off the ring road at Yasenevo, into the skyscraper block of the original and still retained First Chief Directorate, she wondered if Charlie was as fortunate. She hope so.
Just over fifteen hundred miles away, Charlie Muffin stared down at the summons that had finally arrived from the deputy Director-General and hoped exactly the same thing.
Four
Patricia Elder’s suite came off the second arm of the new triangular ninth-floor layout at the centre of which reigned the starchily formal Julia Robb.
But the deputy Director’s room had none of the sterility of Miller’s. There were two flower arrangements, one on a small, elaborately carved cabinet of a sort that Charlie had never seen before in a government office. There was a display of art deco figures on the same cabinet and on a mantelpiece in the centre of which was a gold filigree and ormolu clock. There were screening curtains of festooned lace at the window, which had a partial view of the Big Ben clock and the crenellated roofing of the Parliament buildings. The deputy Director sat in front of the window, at a proper wooden and leather desk, not something fashioned from metal and plastic which looked as if it had popped out of a middle-price Christmas cracker. The only similarity Charlie could find with Miller’s quarters was the complete absence of any personal photographs. There would have hardly been room on the desk anyway: there were two red box containers and a string-secured manila folder Charlie recognized from the three – or was it four? – disciplinary hearings he’d endured over the years.
The woman’s suit was as formal as that of their initial meeting: today’s was grey, high-collared and as figure-concealing as before. Charlie automatically checked her left hand: there was still no wedding ring.
She studied him just as intently with her black-brown eyes, and at once Charlie felt like a schoolboy called to explain his hand up a knicker leg behind the bicycle sheds.
Patricia breathed heavily, before she spoke: the sigh, dismissive, remained in her voice. ‘So now we come to talk about Charles Edward Muffin …’
Charlie easily remembered the last two occasions he’d been addressed with such formality: both times at the Central Criminal Court at London’s Old Bailey. The first a set-up prosecution and an escape-intended imprisonment, all to create a phoney defection to the then Soviet Union: the unsuspected beginning of so many things. The initial encounter – his debriefing – with Natalia that had led to a love neither of them had foreseen and which he, ultimately, had ruined by not going to her in London. The operation – the purpose of which he’d never known until he’d innovated his own special self-protection – to discredit Alexei Berenkov. Which had nevertheless partially succeeded and led to Berenkov’s close-run retribution, involving a manipulated Natalia again. The second court appearance had been phoney too, like the announced ten year sentence, to convince the Russians his entrapment had succeeded in part. It should have protected Natalia, as well. There was no way of knowing if it had. Double disaster. Double abandonment. Belated double despair. So many things … Charlie stopped the nostalgia, forcing himself to concentrate, although the recollection of the trial stayed with him. ‘That sounds very officiaclass="underline" should I stand to receive my sentence?’
There was no facial relaxation. She patted the box files and said: ‘There’s enough to merit a sentence.’
‘A man is always presumed innocent until proven guilty by the weight of evidence. I was always innocent!’ said Charlie, brightly, trying to build bridges between himself and his new Controller.
‘There are parts that are impressive,’ she said. ‘But the bad outweighs the good: Charlie Muffin, forever making up his own rules but to whom no rules ever need apply.’ She paused. ‘Right?’
‘I’ve never failed, when it mattered,’ Charlie fought back. ‘When operations went wrong, it’s because they would have gone wrong anyway: they were impractical or incorrectly planned. Or I needed to innovate to survive, not having been properly briefed.’ What the fuck was this? It was like having to explain himself for being caught behind the bicycle sheds!
‘One of the central themes,’ isolated the deputy Director. ‘Your personal survival.’
A poor shot, seized Charlie. ‘I’ve always thought personal survival is a fairly basic principle; a blown intelligence officer is a failed operation and invariably an embarrassment, to be explained away. There aren’t any embarrassments in those files to be explained away.’
‘Not publicly.’
‘All that matters,’ insisted Charlie. ‘What the public don’t know doesn’t concern them. They can just go on sleeping safely in their beds while the shadowy people clean up the shit.’
She nodded, seemingly conceding the argument and giving no reaction to his swearing. ‘What comes first, for you? Personal survival? Or the operation?’
He didn’t have to be defensive about that. Charlie nodded to the files. ‘If you’ve read those thoroughly you don’t have to ask me that!’ The indignation was genuine.
‘You’re offended?’
‘With justification.’ Charlie still wished he didn’t feel as if he were explaining himself to a school principal.
‘Maybe it’s all semantics anyway,’ she said, dismissive again. ‘All in the past. The dinosaur age. Cold War, white hats, black hats.’
Quite a bran tub of mixed metaphors, thought Charlie: he didn’t believe dinosaurs existed in the Ice Age. Expectantly he said: ‘Now we’re looking into the new and different future I’ve been reading so much about in the last few months?’
‘Some of us are,’ she said, heavily. She extracted some obviously new and therefore recent sheets from the manila file. ‘You don’t seem to agree with a lot of what you’ve been asked to comment upon.’
Charlie regarded her cautiously. Again he’d tried to avoid anticipating this encounter, but he had not expected it to be like this, so openly and consistently hostile. ‘In a Europe more unstable than it has been for fifty years, I considered many of the opinions naïve.’
‘Explain naïve!’
‘There were suggestions, in at least three theses, that because of the end of the Cold War – whatever that was – intelligence services could be scaled down.’
‘“Whatever that was”,’ she quoted, questioningly.
Quick on her feet, judged Charlie. ‘Why don’t you define the Cold War for me?’
‘Why don’t you define it for me?’ she came back, easily.
Shit, thought Charlie. ‘Simplistic, because there was a Wall dividing Berlin and physical barriers between Eastern and Western Europe. Newspaper shorthand: spy-writers’ cliché.’
‘What did you think it was?’
Shouldn’t have let her be the first to speak. ‘I didn’t think it was anything,’ said Charlie, lobbing a difficult return.
She frowned and he was glad. ‘You’re not making sense.’
‘You know I am,’ insisted Charlie. He’d had her running about: not exactly broken her serve but getting some of the difficult returns back over the net.
‘The coming down of the barriers doesn’t matter, in reality?’ There was an uncertainty in her voice, beyond it being a question.
‘Not our reality.’
‘Tell me what our reality is,’ she demanded, gaining confidence.
‘What it has always been,’ said Charlie. ‘Finding out the intention of other governments and other world leaders, in advance of it becoming obvious, so that our leaders are not wrong-footed. Which means we now have to learn the intentions of more than a dozen separate governments of countries that used to be the Soviet Union but now consider themselves independent: the Russian Federation – which is also splitting up internally – most of all. And Czechoslovakia. And Poland. And Hungry. And Bulgaria. And how East is really going to integrate with West Germany. And whether communism is going to collapse in China, as it’s collapsed everywhere else. And what a close-to-bankruptcy America that thought it was the world’s policeman until Vietnam is going to do, now that it’s lost the black hat, white hat simplicity. And which bulging-eyed, Third World despot is going to channel the four or five million he hasn’t already put into his Swiss bank account into buying a nuclear device to threaten the next door neighbour Third World despot too busy at the time putting United Nations and pop concert famine aid money into another Swiss account. And then there’s the Middle East …’