Brian Freemantle - Comrade Charlie

‘So what are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about getting another job, of course.’

‘Where does of course come into it?’

‘Darling!’ said Charlie, pleading for her understanding. ‘You surely don’t imagine I can stay on in the service if you cross over and we stay together…get married! It would be absurd. I’ll have to resign.’

‘No!’ She had to convince him, Natalia thought desperately.

‘There’s no alternative.’

‘No, Charlie,’ she insisted. ‘You’ve got to find a way!’

‘There isn’t one!’ said Charlie, just as insistently.

‘Find one!’ she hissed, wanting to shout at him but unable to risk the noise in the sleeping hotel.

‘Why must I find a way, Natalia?’ asked Charlie solemnly.

‘Because if you don’t it will destroy us.’

‘That doesn’t make sense.’

‘It does to me. It makes very good sense. I might not have known much about Edith from our time in Moscow but I learned a lot of other things. Chief of which was what the service and the department mean to you. It’s ingrained into you, Charlie. You think it, live it, exist on it.’

‘It’s a job I’m good at,’ Charlie tried to qualify. ‘There’ll be others.’

Natalia shook her head in refusal. ‘It wouldn’t happen at once,’ she said. ‘Maybe not for quite a few months. But then you’d start to miss it and think about it more and more and it would grow up into a barrier between us. We’d start to fight, blame each other, and then it wouldn’t be perfect any more.’ She was right, Natalia knew: she was more convinced than she had been about anything in her life that she was right.

‘The department isn’t like it was, before I was in Moscow,’ said Charlie. ‘There have been changes. It isn’t that important to me.’

‘That’s not true. I don’t think you believe it even.’

Charlie remembered the long-ago determination to endure whatever shit Harkness dumped upon him and conceded that it wasn’t true, not completely. It was inevitable he would miss the department and there would always be regrets at not being part of it but Natalia was exaggerating to consider it becoming a problem between them. He said: ‘It’s what I have to do.’

There had to be a persuasion, a threat even! She thought of it and momentarily held back but then said: ‘I can’t be part of it.’

‘I want you to say that properly,’ said Charlie, more solemn that before.

‘I won’t cross to you,’ announced Natalia.

‘That’s nonsense.’

Dear God, let him believe the lie, thought Natalia. Because at that moment she knew it to be an empty threat, so much did she want him. Having started it she had to go on, to make it sound convincing. She said: ‘In Moscow you said you loved me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was it true?’

‘Of course it was true!’ said Charlie, unhappy at the impatience sounding in his voice.

‘Yet you came back: you wouldn’t cross to me.’

‘That’s not even logical,’ rejected Charlie. ‘Then I was on an assignment, although I didn’t know fully what it was. And I’ve told you how many times I wished I’d stayed.’

It had been a convoluted argument and Natalia was sorry now she’d tried to make the equation. She said: ‘I’m not trying to tell you I wouldn’t regret it. I’d regret it every day for the rest of my life. But not as much as I would everything collapsing between us if I stayed.’ She hoped that had sounded better, but she wasn’t sure it had.

Charlie was about to say that the decision wouldn’t be his to make anyway — that he’d be instantly dismissed if he didn’t resign first — but he stopped. This was a fatuous dispute and it was even more fatuous to protract. It was important, though, to end it so that Natalia didn’t do — or consider doing — anything he didn’t want her to. Charlie shrugged in apparent capitulation and said: ‘All right! I’ll find a way.’

Her face broke into an immediate smile. ‘You truly mean it!’

‘I truly mean it,’ lied Charlie. The moment she fled she was irrevocably committed: that was the time to discuss what little personal future he might have.

Natalia seized his face between both her hands to kiss him, pulling him close so their nakedness touched and said: ‘Oh my darling! I love you, love you, love you!’

‘No more talk of changing your mind?’

‘No more talk of changing my mind.’

Charlie lay sleepless for a long time after Natalia had slipped out to go back to her own room, hands cupped behind his head, not even bothering at first to extinguish the light she had insisted should be put on.

The following morning Charlie went for his usual promenade in the vicinity of the hotel but was back soon after the bar opened, where he hadn’t been for several days. The barman’s face opened at his entry and the man said: ‘Hello! Thought you’d changed your mind and booked out early.’

‘Been busy,’ said Charlie. ‘But I might have to leave sooner than I thought.’ He never had enjoyed playing the fool for too long. It made him feel uneasy, like so much else.

‘Unbelievable!’ exclaimed Harkness, jagged voiced in genuine shock. ‘Absolutely unbelievable.’

The product of Witherspoon’s organized search of Charlie’s office and Vauxhall flat, together with the swamping surveillance of the hotel, was set out on a narrow conference table that Harkness had had moved in specially to accommodate all the evidence. The dossier containing all the intercepted cable transmission was also there.

‘It is, isn’t it?’ agreed Witherspoon. ‘Absolutely unbelievable.’

‘Give me the sequence,’ demanded Harkness.

‘The dossier on the woman, Natalia Fedova, was among the material we seized in his desk…’

‘No official logging of it being created! No indication of who she is? Why she’s important.’

Witherspoon shook his head. ‘No. Nothing in Records, either.’

Harkness gestured towards a set of photographs of Natalia. ‘When were these taken?’

‘This morning,’ said Witherspoon. ‘We’re trailing her to Farnborough, of course.’

‘Go on!’ urged the acting Director General.

‘The rest of the stuff we located at his flat,’ said Witherspoon. ‘An indescribable mess, incidentally. It wasn’t easy to find. Some of the stuff was behind a skirting board in the bedroom. Some more in the casing of an electricity meter.’

Harkness started to reach towards what was on the table and then stopped. ‘Forensically examined yet?’

‘Not yet.’

Harkness withdrew his hand and said: ‘A thousand pounds exactly?’

‘To the penny,’ confirmed Witherspoon, guessing the point of the question.

‘Reactivate payment by one thousand,’ quoted Harkness.

Witherspoon smiled at guessing correctly. ‘Has past visitor met guest?’ he recited back ‘Charlie Muffin qualifies as a past visitor, from that episode in Moscow. And the woman is a guest.’

Harkness’ head moved up and down jerkily in his eagerness to agree. Excitedly he said: ‘It fits! It all damned well fits!’ and then looked up uncomfortably at the other man, having used the word damn. Quickly, with his accountant’s mind, he said: ‘We can step down all the other activities and surveillance. There’s nothing to be gained now by the unnecessary use of manpower. We’ve solved our mystery.’

‘I don’t think we should let him run much longer,’ warned Witherspoon.

‘Not yet,’ said Harkness. ‘Not just yet. I want to assemble the proper inquiry panel. I hope one particular man can be there. I want Sir Alistair Wilson there to learn how his preciously guarded operative has been a Soviet spy all along.’ And members of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Harkness thought: properly conducted, a preliminary inquiry to get rid of two men, not just one.