‘Your people at Langley are stupid.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Fredericks, sincerely. ‘They’re very stupid.’
The American felt strangely self-conscious, going out of the temple with the Russian watching him. The feeling was soon overtaken by another, better sensation. Kozlov thought he controlled everything and that they jumped when he said jump, but Jim Dale was back there, watching everything the guy did. Which made him the cleverer of the two, decided Fredericks, satisfied.
The arrangement had been that each of the people guarding him returned to the US embassy at Akasaka Toranomon directly after the failed meetings, to avoid any danger of identification from the possibly watching Kozlov, so Fish and Levine were back in Tokyo ahead of Fredericks. While they awaited the arrival of Dale — together with Winslow Elliott and Takeo Yamada, the two other CIA men whose wait at the other places set out but not used by the Russian had been pointless — Fredericks encoded Kozlov’s reaction and transmitted it to Washington. He took a lot of trouble, wanting, without making the criticism obvious, CIA headquarters fully to understand how near they had come to fouling up the whole thing by imagining remote control was possible. Fredericks waited in the code room for half an hour, for their response. When it finally came, it was limited to the briefly formal acknowledgement of receipt, and Fredericks knew he’d got the message home. Now they’d be scurrying around, each trying to dump on the other and avoid the responsibility for coming so close to disaster.
By the time he got back to the CIA section within the embassy, the other three men had returned and were waiting for him, and Fredericks made no attempt to sanitize the account, as he had to Langley.
‘Kozlov’s right,’ said Levine, when the CIA supervisor finished the explanation. ‘Langley are stupid. Kozlov might appear calm, to you. But inwardly he’ll be screwed up tighter than a spring; he can’t be any other way. It’ll only take the slightest thing to spook him.’
‘I’ve told them that,’ reminded Fredericks.
‘What did they say?’ asked Fish.
‘Nothing.’
They all knew, like Fredericks, what the silence meant, and there were various smiles around the room.
‘You know what I think,’ said Elliott, who was irritated at what he considered a wasted day. ‘I think we should snatch him. Arrange another meeting, like today, put extra men in everywhere and then jump him. Get some sort of knock-out stuff from Technical Division, sedate him until we get him on to a military plane and stop all this screwing about.’
‘What sort of dumb-assed idea is that!’ erupted Fredericks, genuinely irritated but also venting some of his earlier anger upon the man. ‘That’s kidnapping, for Christ’s sake! We’d have Moscow going ape, Japan screaming and Kozlov hostile without the wife he eventually wants with him. Why stop at Kozlov, if that’s the way we’re going to operate! Why not snatch Gorbachev and the entire fucking Politburo and run the Soviet Union from some cosy little safe house in Virginia!’
Elliott shifted under the ferocity of the attack, looking embarrassed. ‘It was an idea,’ he said, awkwardly.
‘Dumb-assed,’ repeated Fredericks, dismissively. ‘Let’s start behaving professionally.’ He looked to the men who had waited fruitlessly at the first two shrines. ‘Well?’
‘No one was monitoring you,’ said Fish. ‘I’m sure of it.’
‘You were clean at the Enno-Ji temple, too,’ said Levine.
‘Jim?’ asked Fredericks.
The CIA agent who had monitored the actual encounter was a sandy-haired man newly posted from Washington. He nervously took off his glasses and said: ‘Squeaky clean. There was only one other group of Caucasians around the buddha …’
‘American …?’ interrupted Fredericks.
Dale nodded: ‘Made a point of checking, after you left. A Lions club, from Milwaukee. Throughout the entire time you were with Kozlov, no one showed the slightest interest.’
Fredericks was silent for several moments, remembering his assessment in the buddha temple. ‘If he’s by himself, it indicates he’s genuine,’ he said, trying the opinion out on the others. ‘If it were some sort of trick, some entrapment embarrassment for instance, he’d be mob-handed: people identifying me, stuff like that.’
‘I’d say so,’ agreed Yamada, an American-born Japanese.
‘Me too,’ said Fish.
‘Still seems a lot of screwing around,’ said Elliott truculently.
Fredericks ignored the man, returning to Dale. ‘What happened after I left.’
‘He checked, for surveillance,’ said the American, wanting to boast his recognition and avoidance. ‘Went right by me into the souvenir shop: actually bought a key-ring. Then he went inside the buddha. It’s hollow, you know.’
‘Spare me the tourist crap,’ said Fredericks. ‘I heard it all from Kozlov when he was clearing his path. Sure he didn’t spot you?’
‘Positive,’ said Dale. ‘I told you, I checked the Milwaukee group. Got into the conversation with a couple of old guys and left the temple with them, like I was one of the party.’
‘Good deal,’ praised Fredericks.
‘So we’ve got to work with the British?’ said Yamada, introducing into the conversation what everyone had been avoiding.
‘We’ve still to get the word from Langley,’ said Fredericks, cautiously. ‘But that’s how it looks.’
‘But him!’ protested Elliott, gesturing to the file that had been air freighted overnight from Washington and lay on Fredericks’ desk, a picture of Charlie Muffin uppermost.
‘Him,’ confirmed Fredericks. ‘He’s the person London nominated.’
‘Do you know what the son of a bitch did!’ demanded Elliott.
‘I know the stories, like everyone else,’ said Fredericks.
‘He’s a fucking Commie traitor!’
‘There’s an argument against that, sufficient for the British.’
‘I don’t give a damn about what’s sufficient for the British,’ argued Elliott, feeling on safe ground now and trying to recover from the previous mistake. This thing is uncertain enough as it is, without his involvement.’
‘Could be useful, precisely because of that uncertainty,’ said Fredericks, evenly.
The tone of the supervisor’s voice halted Elliott’s outburst. He hesitated and then said, smiling: ‘We’re going to use him?’
‘We’re still feeling out in the dark about Kozlov,’ reminded Fredericks. ‘More things can still go wrong than we can even guess at. The participation of someone like Charlie Muffin — a man who provably screwed the British and American services and got both directors arrested by the Soviets in doing it — gives us a hell of an insurance policy, don’t you think?’
Smiles from the other men in the room matched that of Elliott, but it was the disgruntled man who spoke. ‘I like that,’ said Elliott. ‘I like that very much indeed.’
‘Only if something goes wrong with Kozlov?’ pressed Levine, who knew as well the American side of the history.
‘Let’s get Kozlov in the bag,’ said Fredericks. ‘Once we’ve achieved that and got the woman as well, we can think of settling things with Charlie Muffin.’
‘The British aren’t going to keep the woman? queried Dale, embarrassed the moment he spoke at showing his inexperience.
Elliott actually laughed, glad that finally the ridicule had shifted from him.
More kindly, Fredericks said: ‘Come on, Jim, what do you think! Do you really imagine we’re going to let the Limeys — and more particularly a Limey who made one of our directors prick of the month — get their hands in the cookie jar? Kozlov wants his particular cross-over deal, and after this morning he’ll get it. He’ll get the British baby-sitting his wife and he’ll get us, promising the keys to Fort Knox. And when we hit them the British — but more importantly Charlie Muffin — will think World War III has started in their own backyard.’
‘Which will serve the bastards right,’ said Yamada. ‘Can you believe the incredible arrogance, putting the man forward at all!’
‘We’d have screwed them whoever their man was,’ reminded Fredericks. ‘Charlie Muffin just makes it that much sweeter.’