Brian Freemantle - Comrade Charlie

Harkness nodded, as if he were receiving confirmation of an already known fact. ‘Right,’ he said, softly and to himself. ‘I’ve always been right. Known I was right.’

‘What are we going to do?’ asked Witherspoon. This was too important for him to volunteer suggestions and ideas this early anyway.

‘Guard against the slightest error,’ warned Harkness cautiously. He sat back in his too-large chair, making a tower from his put-together fingertips. ‘Our earlier investigations — the investigations he thought he’d turned back upon us — will show we were quite correct to be suspicious. But he’s still a serving officer in this organization: some opprobrium is unavoidable.’

‘He was not your appointee,’ said Witherspoon sycophantically. ‘Neither was it your decision to re-admit him into the service, after his apparently proving his loyalty in Moscow.’

Harkness nodded gratefully, and smiled more fully, ‘All the more reason for taking care now, when we’ve got him in circumstances that are indefensible. He’s got a gutter cunning: let’s never forget that’.

‘But what is it?’ pressed Witherspoon. ‘Is our finding him like this an entire coincidence? Or is there a connection, a link, to the other business? Some of the intercepted messages could seem to fit.’

Harkness shook his head positively. ‘Too soon for any conjecture,’ he insisted. ‘At the moment we proceed in the belief that it is a coincidence, one quite apart from the other.’

‘A separate investigation then?’ accepted Witherspoon.

‘But which I want you to supervise,’ insisted the acting Director General. ‘You know all the facts, everything. It can only be you.’

‘I understand,’ said Witherspoon. There could be no explanation Charlie Muffin could make, so the outcome was inevitable. Just as, Witherspoon determined, his own gaining of further and increased credibility in Harkness’ opinion was inevitable.

‘It has to be as thorough as it’s possible to be: I’m not having the confounded man slip off the hook again. I want every case he’s ever been engaged upon examined…’ Harkness smiled in recollection. ‘Which will be easy because the arrogant swine gave me permission to access his personnel file at the assessment school. Tear his office apart. And the place where he lives. I want that stripped, taken apart by experts, by the best people we’ve got. And the maximum observation, of course. We’re to know what he’s doing, every minute of the day. And night.’

‘Why wait?’ demanded Witherspoon urgently. ‘Why not arrest him immediately? He’s a serving intelligence officer, like you said. In a hotel, without orders, containing a group of Russians! That’s enough, surely!’

‘No,’ refused Harkness. ‘It would be premature. I know it’s a risk, perhaps a terrible risk and that I’ve just warned against risks. But I’m not being inconsistent. We’ve got to take the chance because when we arrest Charlie Muffin I want every piece of evidence assembled and ready. I want everything so ready and prepared there won’t be an answer or an excuse he can even consider offering.’

‘All right,’ accepted Witherspoon doubtfully.

‘We’ve got him, Hubert! This time we’ve really got him!’

‘Yes,’ agreed Witherspoon. It was the first time the man had called him by his christian name.

‘And you’re the person who’s made it possible,’ said Harkness, in apparent recollection. ‘Well done! Very well done indeed.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Witherspoon.

‘I’ll see to it that credit is properly accorded.’

‘Thank you sir,’ said Witherspoon again.

Charlie made his now customary excursion from the hotel, reflecting how things and surroundings soon became predictable in people’s minds, and how dangerous it was. The telephone he’d used before was unoccupied and unvandalized. He dialled the direct number, as before, and recognized William French when the man replied.

‘Any luck?’ asked Charlie at once, guarded on the open line.

‘Luck doesn’t come into science and mathematics,’ rejected French.

‘It did with my mathematics,’ said Charlie. ‘I was bloody lucky if I got anything right at all.’

‘I’ve got it,’ announced the expert.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Charlie. ‘I’ve asked a lot from you.’

‘I’ve been thinking that for days!’

‘Why don’t you let me have an official account? But keep it vague: no memo to or memo from. Just the number.’

‘I thought this was un official.’

‘It’s always a problem, deciding the difference, isn’t it?’ said Charlie. ‘If you let me have a report then you’re covered against censure if anyone demands an explanation, aren’t you?’

‘Sometimes I can’t understand you at all,’ protested the man.

‘It’s a trick of the trade,’ said Charlie.

‘Enjoying the holiday?’

‘Could be better,’ said Charlie.

The Kensington house became a bearpit of snarling, teeth-bared Russians each biting and clawing at the other. Emil Krogh remained as aloof and separate from it as possible, although there was a satisfaction from their falling out despite his not being able to understand the arguments because when the bickering began they reverted to their own language. But mostly the American sealed himself off from his surroundings: like an exhausted and about-to-sink swimmer just able to make out dry land in the distance, Krogh fixed his mind solely upon the soon arriving day when the drawings would be finished. His only real contribution to the dissent — which he hope contributed to it — was to go on refusing to answer the daily repeated demand to know when that finishing day would be. Krogh thought it did contribute because rows frequently erupted between Petrin and Losev within minutes of the refusal conversation taking place. Like they invariably did later in the day, which became the set-aside time to stop drawing to go through the nitpicking queries assembled by the moustached space expert. Once more Krogh was not able to follow the constant disputes with the man but again he didn’t have to. It was clear that Petrin and Losev considered the line-by-line review to be a completely time-wasting obstruction and again Krogh attempted to worsen it, taking longer than was truly necessary to answer some points.

Despite the constant antagonism — an antagonism that developed into a contempt towards him from his countrymen — Yuri Guzins persisted with the nervous insistence, uncaring that the backlog was increasing, hoping that it was causing problems for the huge intelligence official who’d out-argued them at Baikonur. Guzins was sure it was that man who was responsible for his being in England. His release of drawings dwindled to one a day for inclusion in the diplomatic bag. And sometimes not even one.

These frictions were peripheral, however. The constant, unremitting fury was between Alexandr Petrin and Vitali Losev, the near hatred growing foolishly — and worse, ridiculously unprofessionally — to the extent that there no longer needed to be an identifiable reason for them to clash. Just to be together in a room was sufficient: thrust together they circled and goaded each other, literally like snarling bears in a pit.

It got so that Losev snatched illogically at small things in an effort to prove his superiority and when Berenkov’s easy resolution to the problem of Yuri Guzins’ delays arrived from Moscow the London station chief saw it as just such an opportunity. He went to Kensington ahead of the KGB technicians and announced the moment he entered the room: ‘Moscow’s patience has been exhausted waiting for what they’re supposed to be receiving from you. As from today I am going to get this operation working as it should do.’