‘What!’ demanded Wilson, no longer angry.
He’d saved himself but he was still hanging on by his fingertips, Charlie calculated. ‘There was a thousand pounds in that cavity, when I discovered it,’ explained Charlie. ‘A plant, like everything else has been planted. Not knowing – still not knowing even now – why it was being done, it was blatantly obvious I had to take what precautions I could to avoid any further mistakes. I made the discovery, as I have said, on August 6th, a Sunday. On the morning of Monday, August 7th, I took the thousand pounds and three of the top sheets off the cipher pad to my bank. It’s the Barclays branch just across Vauxhall Bridge, on Millbank. I deposited it with an assistant manager, named Frederick Snelgrove, with written authority that it should be released upon demand to Sir Alistair Wilson. I then withdrew, in consecutively numbered notes from the cashier Sally Dickenson, whose fingerprints are on those notes, one thousand pounds from my own account. I had those numbers recorded and that record is also part of the provably dated deposit.’
Charlie stopped, hopefully, Nobody spoke. He said: ‘No one seems to have realized the significance! All this was done on August 7th. The message – “Reactivate payment by one thousand” – was not sent from Moscow until August 26th, according to your evidence: nineteen days after, I had already found the thousand pounds, switched it and made arrangements that any investigation – any after, proper investigation – would lead to its being eventually released to the Director General of this department.’
The reactions were mixed, throughout the room. The two unidentified men – who looked like clones of all the Whitehall mandarins Charlie had ever encountered – were bent sideways towards each other in whispered conversation. Sir Alistair Wilson was staring at him with obvious curiosity but with no other indication of what he was thinking. Harkness had a finger sideways to his mouth, gnawing at it in concentration, trying to absorb what Charlie had said. Witherspoon was scurrying through his documentation, seeking something. It was time to finish, while he was marginally ahead, decided Charlie. He said: ‘There have been other things added to the bank deposit since that initial date. There is a long list of vehicle registration numbers, which I believe to have been used by various Soviet observation teams, particularly since I moved into the delegation hotel in Bayswater. I have not had the facility, away from this department, to check out the ownership for those registrations. I would suspect they are hired. Tracing the hiring back will, I hope, give us the names of some Soviet front companies which we might not at the moment be aware are being used by the KGB…’
He smiled back towards the rigid-faced Smedley. ‘… And there are also the numbers of our own people who have been in such painfully obvious position over the past three or four days. Three Fords, a Vauxhall and a Fiat…As I have already suggested, the investigation has been appallingly amateurish…’
‘Anything else?’ cut off Wilson. There was no longer any anger in the frail voice.
‘I hope there will be when I know what was in the King William Street drop,’ said Charlie. He turned to Harkness. ‘So what was it?’
Harkness’ hand came only partially away from his mouth. ‘There still needs to be further investigation to discover its whereabouts,’ the man conceded.
‘What!’ said Charlie. Confident now, he slightly overstressed the incredulity. ‘You mean you don’t even know where it is yet!’
‘It will be found,’ insisted Harkness.
‘And I thought it was something else you’d just omitted to say,’ said Charlie in disbelief. He turned to Witherspoon but with a positive body movement to include Smedley and Abbott. ‘Who tossed my flat?’
There was no immediate response. Then Witherspoon breathed in heavily and squared his shoulders and said: ‘It was done under my supervision.’
Charlie gestured to the other two men. ‘By those two.’
Witherspoon nodded.
‘And what did you find?’
‘You have already heard what we found.’
‘Jesus!’ exclaimed Charlie. He hadn’t imagined it was going to be this easy to exact the retribution for the harm he believed Smedley and Abott had caused his mother. He said: ‘So you missed the micro-dot!’
There was a throat movement from Witherspoon, and Smedley’s colour heightened. There was what might have been a groan from Wilson, but the sound was hardly audible and Charlie might have been mistaken.
Charlie began to look back to the assembled inquiry team but then hesitated. He said: ‘No one has yet said here, in this room, what sort of code it is. it’s a variable number-for-letter system: that’s what the micro-dot says. That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ mumbled Witherspoon.
‘And that message, the one that identifies King William Street. Was that all it said?’
From the look that passed between Harkness and Witherspoon Charlie didn’t need the answer, but it came anyway. ‘No,’ said the man.
‘What’s missing?’
It was Harkness who spoke, once more trying to take the pressure off his protégé. ‘Some numbers which, at the moment, the cryptologists cannot decipher.’
‘They didn’t need to,’ sighed Charlie. He wouldn’t allow them any respite, any let-up on their exposure: they’d sought utterly to destroy him, were still intent upon destroying him. He said: ‘The key was already there if you’d correctly looked for it. Somewhere in the grouping the figures one and five and zero feature, don’t they?’
Witherspoon hurried back to his message folder. ‘At the end.’
‘Three digits, out of a grouping of nine?’ demanded Charlie. To Wilson he said: ‘The grouping of nine was on the micro-dot: it’s listed in the bank package for you. Could I ask you to cast your mind back to King William Street, sir?’
‘Good God!’ said Wilson, in recollection at last.
‘Yes,’ said Charlie. ‘Berenkov wanted me to know he’d planned whatever it is that’s going on. Which is arrogant, but then he always was an arrogant man. It was probably his only failing.’
‘I can’t follow this,’ protested one of the unidentified men. He had a pronounced Welsh accent.
‘A number of years ago,’ said Charlie. ‘I was responsible for the arrest and jailing of an extremely successful Soviet illegal, a trained KGB officer who was infiltrated into this country and who for several years ran a series of spy cells throughout Europe. At 150 King William Street, in the City of London, there is a privately owned safe-custody facility: clearing banks used to offer the service as a safe deposit box but very few do now. A number of private firms have filled the gap. Quite unknown by the company who own it, he used King William Street as a safe cut-out, a dead letter box to pass material between himself and KGB officers attached to the embassy here in London, without there ever being a requirement for them openly – or incriminatingly – to meet…’ He glanced at Witherspoon. ‘This investigation of me that you masterminded? Didn’t you check my operational file: everything I’d ever done?’
There was a despairing head movement of confirmation and Charlie felt not a jot of pity for the man. Charlie said: ‘It’s all there, in the Berenkov case file. And if you’d worked out that 150 King William Street was the address then I would have hoped that even you could have guessed at the other numbers not being part of the code at all. But the number of the facility itself.’
There was a new briskness to Wilson’s voice when he said: ‘It’s just past six o’clock: it’ll be closed.’
‘Which just might be to our benefit,’ suggested Charlie. ‘They’ll have monitored the drop, after filling it. Because they’ll want to know we’ve understood what they want us to. At the moment they’ll think we haven’t understood…’ Charlie allowed the glance towards Harkness. ‘Which until now we haven’t, have we?’