Chapter Twelve
Not bad, judged Charlie, reviewing the debriefing. But not good, either. A stupid start, from which he’d had to make a hurried recovery and he would never know if that recovery was obvious. And she’d backed him into a corner at the end. But they were minimal uncertainties. The biggest – and one he’d failed to realise until now because everything had been so hurried – was the possibility that Sampson knew, from his then undiscovered position in London, how Wilson had used the Italian ambassador. Would there be any trace of his own involvement? The British Director had been personally involved, keeping it a top echelon matter, but Charlie supposed there would have had to be some headquarter discussion. And official paper work. Sampson had been number three on the Russian desk, he recalled. If there had been paper work, no matter how minimal, then at that clearance level Sampson would have read it. If he’d read it, then Sampson would have alerted Moscow, Charlie thought, carrying the internal discussion further. So why had she bothered to quiz him so closely? Maybe not the sort of test he’d imagined. Maybe he’d misinterpreted the whole damned thing and they’d just been checking to see whether he’d co-operate or lie. If that were the case then he’d emerged worse than he imagined. Worse but still recoverable. He’d said he wasn’t sure he’d co-operate and if he were later accused of lying about Italy he could convincingly argue that he wasn’t lying but uncertain at the time of his first debriefing about a full commitment. Could he argue it convincingly? He wouldn’t know until he tried. Back in the familiar labyrinth, he recognised. Difficult to imagine that just a month earlier – five weeks at the most – he was actually missing it.
As Charlie entered the shared apartment, to find the anxious Sampson waiting directly beyond the threshold, Charlie realised a way to retrace some of his steps if he had been trapped.
‘What happened?’ demanded Sampson at once.
‘A debriefing, that’s all,’ said Charlie, moving further into the main room.
‘What do you mean, that’s all! What happened? Was it a committee? Just one man? What do they want?’ He jerked his hand, irritably towards the telephone. ‘I’ve been sitting in this damned box all day and there’s been nothing, nothing at all.’
‘You keep telling me how important you are,’ said Charlie. ‘Perhaps they need time to prepare.’
‘Cut it out,’ insisted Sampson, voice quiet in his anger. ‘I want to know what it’s like.’
It had gone well, decided Charlie. ‘Just one person,’ he recounted. ‘A woman in my case. Natalia Fedova. Said she knew nothing about me, which had to be a lie. You know as well as I do the sort of records they keep. Went over everything, in a pretty general manner, from the time I exposed the Director. Finally asked me if I’d co-operate.’
‘You said yes, of course,’ anticipated the other man.
‘No,’ said Charlie.
‘No!’
‘Depends what they want me to do.’
‘No it doesn’t and you know it,’ said Sampson. ‘Christ, when are you going to learn?’
‘I won’t betray everything, not like you.’
‘You haven’t got any choice.’
Not the response he’d wanted, thought Charlie. ‘Maybe you haven’t,’ he said. ‘You’re committed.’
‘There was discussion about me!’
Better, thought Charlie. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘What? When?’
Perfect, decided Charlie, taking the second query. ‘Soon after I was questioned about my detection in Italy. You knew all about that, of course.’
‘About what?’ asked Sampson, impatient again.
‘My arrest in Italy. You were in London then?’
Sampson shook his head. ‘Beirut,’ he said. ‘I didn’t get back for several months after. The trial hadn’t happened, but you were back in the country.’
So the man wouldn’t have known! Safe, thought Charlie. It had been easier than he thought. Not wanting a later discernible pause he said, ‘They asked if I knew anything of you in the service. What sort of person you were. Whether I liked you even.’
‘What did you say?’
‘That I never encountered you when I was working in the department, that I thought you were a shit and that I didn’t like you.’
‘Bastard!’ exploded Sampson.
‘Do you think a reference from me is important?’
‘Because of me you’re not rotting in jail.’
‘Because of you a copper is dead and a prison officer is probably brain damaged.’
‘Aren’t you ever going to forget that?’
‘No,’ said Charlie simply.
‘You’re a cunt.’
‘One of us is.’ Had he covered everything he wanted to? wondered Charlie. It had to be now. He said. ‘You’ll cooperate, naturally? As soon as you’re asked?’
Sampson frowned, surprised at the question. ‘This is the moment I’ve been working towards – waiting for – for ten years. I just can’t understand why I’m being treated like this.’
‘It’s only the first day, for Christ’s sake,’ said Charlie. It seemed much longer.
‘I don’t deserve it,’ protested Sampson, petulantly. ‘After all I’ve done, the risks I’ve taken, I don’t deserve to be ignored, not even on the first day.’
‘Perhaps you’re not as important as you think you are then,’ jeered Charlie.
‘We’ll see,’ said Sampson. He laughed, viciously, and said, ‘And do you know what I’m going to do, when I get into some position of power?’
‘What?’ said Charlie.
‘I’m going to screw you,’ promised the other Englishman. ‘I’m going to make your existence here as miserable as I can so you’ll wish in the end that you’d stayed in jail.’
Can’t happen, asshole, thought Charlie. ‘Fuck you, too,’ he said.
Charlie made the search much later, when he was sure Sampson was asleep, using the pretext of getting water to drink from the kitchen. One listening device was concealed in the overhead light assembly in the main room, almost directly beneath which they’d argued earlier and another was in the doorhandle of the bathroom. There would be more, Charlie guessed. But the transcripts from these would support the woman’s examination. A field agent of his expertise would be expected to search and find them, he knew. But tonight might be a bit too obvious. Tomorrow would be soon enough. He’d spent two years in jail, after all; that would be explanation enough for not looking sooner. He’d got rusty.
Wilson stumped impatiently around the office, occasionally feeling down to his stiff leg. The pain was always worse when there was some professional pressure.
‘It’s the damned waiting,’ he said. ‘Waiting and with no way of knowing what’s happening.’
‘That’s the way it always had to be,’ reminded the more controlled Harkness. They’ll be waiting, too, don’t forget. And they’ll be more anxious than us.’
Wilson sat at last. ‘And it’ll be worth everything, if it all works,’ he rationalised. ‘Spectacular, in fact.’
‘Spectacular,’ agreed Harkness, who normally wasn’t given to hyperbole.
Chapter Thirteen
It was a standard interrogation method when two people are involved, choosing one, then the other, before the first is completed, calculated to off-balance. Sampson responded excitedly to the summons the following day, smallboy enthusiasm returning. He sat forward on the edge of the seat as the car went along the capital peripheral, gazing around at his first proper view of the Moscow suburbs, several times asking the driver about buildings or monuments they passed but getting no reply on any occasion. He sat respectfully on the seat that Natalia Fedova indicated, leaning forward from the edge for the questions, answering crisply and concisely, a hopeful applicant for a new job. He gave a full resume of his career within British intelligence, from the time of his university entrance, carefully listing the names of the operatives with whom he had come into working contact and actually spelling out their names when she paused, uncertainly. He gave a detailed background to all the information he provided, since his recruitment by Soviet intelligence, filling out the sparseness of his earlier, cryptic messages and reminding her that one of his last communications had been the warning of a possible spy in Moscow.