With a stab of helplessness, Snow accepted that he didn’t know what to do.
And then, quickly enough for him to have considered it some kind of superior guidance, which he refused to countenance because it would have been an ultimate blasphemy, he did see a way. Partially, perhaps: but still a way. The final inevitable, irrevocable blurring of everything, he recognized at once. So he wouldn’t do it: couldn’t do it. Not inevitable and therefore not irrevocable. He couldn’t prostitute his faith and its tenets. Wouldn’t do it.
It would still be a way out, though, partial or not. Once he pacified – perhaps deflected was a better word – Li Dong Ming. He’d try to think of something else: anything else first. Didn’t want to sacrifice ail integrity.
Appropriately Snow’s prayer came from the Book of Lamentations. Oh Lord, he thought, thou hast seen my wrong: judge thou my cause. Blasphemy, he thought again: therefore utterly inappropriate.
Thirty-eight
‘You’ve seen the newspapers? And television?’ greeted Patricia Elder. She was not sitting at her desk but standing before the window with its distant view of the Houses of Parliament. She was wearing the high-necked, dark green coat dress she had been wearing the morning Charlie had seen her leaving the Regent’s Park penthouse with Miller. It was difficult to imagine her without it, with her legs in the air. But perhaps they didn’t do it with her legs in the air. Miller looked a prosaic, missionary-position player.
‘Of course,’ said Charlie. A time to listen and a time to question, he thought. For the moment, it was the mouth shut, ears open routine, but the question was burning to be asked. What was he doing here on the ninth floor, practically as soon as a crisis had erupted on the other side of the world? Julia didn’t know either, not even when he’d arrived minutes earlier. To his enquiring look she’d simply shaken her head. She’d gestured towards the intercom, too, to warn him it was on.
‘It’s a disaster,’ declared Patricia.
How much of a disaster was it being for John Gower? ‘I only know what I have read in the newspapers,’ he prompted.
‘We don’t know much else. As far as we can gather he was picked up three days ago. The Chinese announcement gave no details apart from the accusation. We aren’t being allowed access.’
Was it reassurance she wanted? ‘His interrogation resistance was supposed to be good: we touched upon it but not in any situation of duress. Which is the only real test.’
‘How long?’ she demanded, brutally objective.
Charlie turned down the corners of his mouth. ‘Impossible to estimate, without knowing what they’re doing to him: without knowing how they caught him and if he was doing anything to make his guilt obvious and undermine any denial. The more innocent the circumstances of the seizure the easier, obviously, it’ll be for him to hold out.’
‘Maximum?’ she persisted.
‘It’s a pointless exercise,’ refused Charlie. ‘If he feels he can resist because they don’t have enough, maybe two weeks. Three at the very outside. If he was compromised at the moment of detention, far less: he might be breaking already …’ Charlie hesitated. ‘I still don’t know what he was doing there?’ It was a testing invitation, to tell him far more than the simple answer, which he already knew anyway.
Patricia moved away from the window, sitting at last at her desk and looking down at it for several moments, as if reaching a decision. And then she told him, disclosing Jeremy Snow as a priest and talking of the man’s refusal to accept he was compromised and of the incriminating photographs. She even identified Li, not simply by his family name but in full, as Li Dong Ming.
Charlie listened intently to every word, analysing every word, unasked queries flooding into his mind, but he was always ahead of what she was saying, the one query above all the others echoing in his head. Why? Why was she giving him details of an active operation he had no right to know about under the compartmenting system by which every intelligence agency operated? It wasn’t enough that the person swept up had been someone he’d supposedly trained: not enough by half. So why?
‘That’s the catastrophe,’ the deputy Director concluded.
‘Do we know enough to consider it that?’
She frowned at him. ‘In the last few months the Chinese have rounded up at least twenty dissidents: it’s probably more. One was once Snow’s source: perhaps the best one he ever had. How’s it going to look with an English Jesuit who’s acted for us as a freelance for three years and John Gower, someone officially attached to the British embassy, in the dock there with them?’
‘Are you sure it’s going to get as bad as that?’
‘It can’t,’ insisted Patricia, autocratically. ‘A way has got to be found.’
Now it was Charlie who frowned, wanting the remark straightened out. ‘A way has got to be found to do what?’
The deputy Director stood suddenly from her desk, resuming her position in front of the window. ‘Gower went to Beijing with instructions to make one last attempt to get the priest out. If Snow went on refusing, he was to be abandoned: he was freelance and deniable. Gower isn’t. Any more than William Foster was deniable, which was why we withdrew him, to break the link in the chain to the embassy.’
‘Which hasn’t, as far as we know, been established yet?’ anticipated Charlie. Surely not! he thought: surely he hadn’t answered the question about his own future! Hope surged through him.
‘Not as far as we know,’ she agreed. She looked directly at him.
Charlie looked directly back: this was very definitely not talk time.
She said: ‘We hoped for better, from Gower. Your apprentice.’
Bollocks, rejected Charlie: she wasn’t going to stick any of this on him. ‘You don’t know what happened to him yet. How it happened.’
‘He got arrested. After being trained by you, someone supposed to be so good. Someone who’d never been picked up.’
Bollocks again. ‘China is the most difficult country in the world to work in. Always was. Always has been. It shouldn’t have been a first assignment: certainly not an assignment where things could go so easily wrong.’
‘I’ve told you how he was specifically ordered to operate. No personal risk. At any time. He screwed up.’
‘Inquest thinking,’ rejected Charlie. ‘I thought the problem was the immediate future: like the next three weeks, if Gower holds out that long.’
‘It is,’ Patricia agreed. Her eyes hadn’t left him.
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Send you in, to prevent a disaster. You’re the Never-Been-Caught man whose very first pupil did just that: got caught. Whether he gets twenty years in a Chinese jail depends entirely on preventing any link being established, between Gower and Snow. We were prepared to abandon the damned priest. Now we can’t. Your job is to get him out, so the Chinese can’t establish any connection. What happens to Gower depends on you.’
He was back! Back and working properly! Reality dampened the euphoria. ‘None of this is my responsibility.’
‘It’s a mess, for you to clear up. Or to keep from becoming a bigger mess than it is.’
Get it official, Charlie told himself. ‘Does this mean I’m restored to the active roster?’
Patricia Elder hesitated. ‘For the moment.’