‘I suppose you’re right,’ agreed Julia, sadly.
‘I’m screwed,’ said Charlie. ‘Not as badly or as much as they intended me to be. But I’m still screwed.’
‘I wish there was something – any thing – that I could do!’
Now Charlie straightened. ‘You’ve done a lot already.’
‘It just doesn’t seem fair!’
‘Life isn’t.’ Charlie looked enquiringly around the room, for their waitress. ‘We haven’t even ordered yet.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘I am!’ said Charlie, enthusiastically. ‘A lot of that Chinese food was shit!’ He ordered cajun blackened chicken. It was good.
It was an easier run down from London than he’d expected, so Charlie had time to stop at the Stockbridge hotel that allowed the exclusive fishing club their special privileges. They had Islay malt, which he recognized as his privilege. He savoured two whiskies, still trying to plan his moves to survive in the department, which he was determined to do. The snare he’d already laid seemed very inadequate: he still wasn’t sure whether – or how – to play his trump card.
Charlie was still at the nursing home when visiting began, hesitating at the matron’s office to apologize for his recent absence.
‘I’m glad you’re here at last,’ said the woman. ‘We’ve got something for you.’ Seeing Charlie’s reaction when he opened the package, she said worriedly: ‘Whatever is it? I thought for a moment you were going to faint.’
‘Nothing,’ said Charlie, thick-throated. He’d thought he was going to collapse, as well. And he’d never done that before, no matter how great the shock.
The package contained two photographs.
One was of the Director-General and Patricia Elder which he guessed he had actually seen being taken that morning outside the Regent’s Park penthouse.
The other was of a baby. Written on the back, in handwriting he recognized because they’d often left notes for each other in Moscow, was: ‘Her name is Sasha’ and a date.
Fifty
Charlie cut the visit as short as he could, but it still took a supreme effort of will to sit by his mother’s bedside and maintain even a minimal conversation. It didn’t help that she was more alert than she had been for months, talking incessantly and clearly expecting him to stay much longer, as did the nursing home staff. He left promising to extend his next visit.
He stopped again at the Stockbridge hotel, the first available convenient place, still feeling shaky. He couldn’t believe how close he’d been to collapsing when he’d recognized Natalia’s writing! He was getting far too bloody old for shocks like that. Shock wasn’t the right word, although it described how it had affected him. He couldn’t think how he wanted to express it, but revelation was one word that occurred to him. Escape – inexplicably – was another. Then he asked himself why it was important to categorize it at all, so he stopped bothering, because there was so much else he had to think about. He bought another Islay malt, a large one, and settled in a corner far away from any possible interruption. He drank, settling himself further. He laid the package on the table in front of him, but did not immediately take out the contents – stupidly reluctant to touch it in case it wasn’t true, stupid because it was true-staring down at it instead like a fortune-teller consulting a crystal ball.
This had to tell him much more than a crystal ball had ever told any fortune-teller, he determined. And he had to read and understand every sign.
His first and most important realization wasn’t that he was the father of a child named Alexandra, wonderful and incredible though that was: so wonderfully incredible that he knew he would need much more time to fully comprehend it.
His initial and most important awareness was that Natalia had survived his abandonment in London, thus answering the persistent and recurring uncertainty that had nagged at him ever since he watched her keep the rendezvous from which he’d held back. Very quickly came the only possible progression. He hadn’t lost her! Natalia had traced him, so she didn’t hate him, as she had every right to hate him. As he’d expected her to.
What else? Read the signs, read the signs! Too much nostalgia risked obscuring the reasoning she expected him to follow. Which he had to follow, not to lose her again. Only consider the important facts that the nostalgia had provided, then. Two essential points: that she had survived and that she’d found him. More to learn from the second than the first. Not just found him. Found Miller and Patricia Elder and the significance of Regent’s Park. Careful here! Nothing to do with the sort of bluff, double-bluff, agent, double-agent bullshit he’d so recently been involved with in Beijing. What Natalia was offering was personal, not business. Her dilemma, when she’d agonized about staying in London with him, had always been about an absolute refusal to become an informing defector against her own country, and because he knew her so well Charlie was sure that loyalty hadn’t changed.
So why had she included the photograph that he’d actually – by astonishing coincidence – witnessed being taken? Not just taken, he qualified, moving towards a hopeful conclusion: officially taken. As part of an operation. Abruptly Charlie remembered the grey Ford in his rear-view mirror as he travelled back to London from the nursing home, briefly allowing himself the satisfaction of knowing that he had been right that day. The same operation?
It all had to be guesswork, the most obvious and logical surmises he could reach, but Charlie thought he saw it. Natalia was telling him she hadn’t just survived but was now powerful enough to use the resources of the Russian agency virtually how she liked. To do which she had to be very powerful indeed.
And the package at which he was still staring confirmed it! Powerful enough to travel to Koblenz, from where she’d posted it. But why to the nursing home? Because they’d talked about it! For all those months he’d been in Moscow he’d worried about not being able to make his usual visits and he’d talked about it to Natalia, although he couldn’t recall what he’d said that had remained with her after all this time to lead her to the location from which they followed him. But then lost him. Or rather he’d lost them! So the nursing home was all she had: the only way of reaching him again, if she chose to do so.
Charlie pulled the contents from their folder at last, smiling down at the Moscow photograph. It was a Moscow photograph and a place he recognized. Alexandra – Sasha as Natalia obviously preferred to call her – was in an adjustable buggy, tilted back, seeming to smile up at the camera although she was obviously too young, not yet a year old, to know how to smile for a camera. But it was the background in which Charlie was interested. There appeared to be a monument of some sort but it was incomplete, only half a sphere. He was sure he knew it but couldn’t bring it to mind, no matter how fixedly he stared at it.
Gradually, inevitably, his concentration slipped sideways to the second print, and then he fully appreciated what he was looking at – and how he could use it – and Charlie sniggered aloud, quickly stifling the reaction.
For the moment Natalia and a baby he had never seen and never expected to have would have to wait. There was his own survival to guarantee. Charlie considered just one more drink, believing he deserved a celebration, but didn’t have it, anxious to get back to London to complete everything.