Brian Freemantle - Comrade Charlie

‘What!’ exclaimed Charlie, genuinely astonished. ‘The possibility of my discussing anything — incriminating or otherwise — with a mentally confused person is utterly in conceivable!’

‘I subsequently acknowledged that it was perhaps excessive,’ reminded Harkness. ‘Very little else has proved to be.’

Charlie was conscious of Wilson’s shift of impatience. Quickly he said to Witherspoon, ‘You have among those folders the results of my most recent assessment examinations?’

‘Yes.’

‘Pull out just one marking for me,’ asked Charlie. ‘What was the adjudication for surveillance and observation, both detected and performed?’

‘Really!’ Wilson protested.

‘In a very few moments I will be talking about a Soviet agent who does exist,’ stopped Charlie.

‘Reply to the question,’ the Director General ordered Witherspoon urgently.

‘Your rating for both is graded as excellent. Ninety-five per cent for detected surveillance, ninety-four for that which you conducted.’

Had he missed anything? wondered Charlie. He didn’t think so, not at this stage. There would always be time to pick up and elaborate later. He faced the committee and the frowning Director General and said: ‘When I finished the assessment course I was almost at once assigned to an inquiry upon the Isle of Wight, at a factory engaged on a joint development project with a Californian firm. The work is connected with the American Strategic Defence Initiative, Star Wars. A man named Blackstone, who is officially employed as a tracer although not on the secret project, had been found in suspicious circumstances. A company inquiry had already dismissed the matter as having no security risk. I was not satisfied, for reasons I shall make clear at the eventual prosecution…’

‘… Prosecution!’ broke in Harkness. ‘You told me — your report says — that the man was beyond suspicion.’

‘No I did not,’ corrected Charlie. ‘Read the file. I said that during the time I observed him he did not behave in a suspicious manner. There were things that made me curious, however. His attitude swung between extremes. He confessed to being a bigamist — which I admit did initially throw me in the wrong direction — but then, when I’d apparently accepted it as an explanation for his nervousness, never mentioned it again. He should have kept on about my reporting him to the police, for the crime. But he didn’t. I even protracted the interview on the last day, to give him the opportunity. He didn’t take it. And that second day he was much more confident. There were small discrepancies, too. He said he didn’t know the sort of work going on, for instance, when it had been generally reported…’ Charlie paused, smiling but in mockery towards Harkness. ‘That’s why I decided to stay on. I got to thinking: What is the most important thing a bigamist needs? And decided it was money. Which would make him an ideal target in a situation where there were secrets that the Russians might be interested in. So I watched. Like I said, there was nothing positively suspicious. But there was an episode with a telephone. It was a public kiosk, quite close to his home, yet he used it and not his own, so very close. I could not get near enough to identify the number he called but I could certainly see that he started from the bottom and the very top of the dial, so it had to be a London number prefixed by zero one. He followed by seven more digits, which further indicates it was a London connection…’

‘… There is no log, no file note of this whatsoever. That is directly contrary to procedure,’ cut in Harkness. ‘How much more self-admission are we going to need from this man!’

‘I agree with you,’ said Charlie, before Wilson could speak. ‘I contravened regulations, which I concede was wrong. But by this time other strange things were happening and I considered the course I took justified. As I said, Blackstone clearly called a London number. He spoke briefly, because I saw him. And then hung around the kiosk for about fifteen minutes — when his own house and his own telephone were less than five minutes away — to call again. That was all. I kept him under the closest surveillance for the remainder of a week and at no time did he do anything to arouse the slightest suspicion…’

It was Harkness who broke in again. Intent across the table, believing he was improving his accusations, the deputy Director said: ‘Are you telling us that you’ve let a man you believe to be an agent continue working at an installation where the highest classified work is being carried out? And done nothing about it!’

‘No,’ said Charlie. ‘I emphatically impressed upon the English project leader that Blackstone under no circumstances should be considered for employment, nor allowed within the restricted area at any time or under any circumstances whatsoever. But never to let him know that he was under any ban: rather that he might be seconded in response to an application he’d made. I also had our Technical Division impose a trace upon the Isle of Wight public kiosk to isolate all London calls made from it…’ He looked across at Witherspoon: ‘If you searched my office you should have come across the report.’

Witherspoon shook his head but to Harkness, who was staring at him furiously. ‘There was just a number. It didn’t mean anything.’

‘Strange things,’ prompted the Director General. ‘You said there were other strange things happening.’

‘I found myself under surveillance,’ announced Charlie. ‘It was very expert — more expert than it had been before — and it was unquestionably professional observation…’ Charlie paused and said: ‘And here I made a serious mistake, the only one I consider a I have made. And from which I hope to recover…’ He looked, pointedly, from Harkness to Witherspoon and then to the Special Branch men. ‘I had been, as you have heard, under constant internal harassment from this department…harassment I had identified and which had been openly acknowledged — an acknowledgement which is on file — to me by the deputy Director General prior to anything he has said here today. I inferred, quite wrongly, that what I had detected was a continuation of that harassment. I decided to run hare to the hounds, to see what more stupidity there was going to be. It was some time before I discovered it wasn’t internal at all. That it was Soviet…’

‘… You didn’t report being targeted by a hostile foreign agency …!’ broke in Harkness.

Charlie virtually ignored the question again, continuing to talk directly to Wilson. ‘I didn’t make the discovery immediately. It was some days after I returned from the Isle of Wight inquiry. I am extremely careful how I leave my flat: setting things that will alert me to an entry. I knew there was an entry — again I thought it was part of the internal investigation — because my door has several locks, one a Yale. But I never set it, because the others compensate: it’s always latched. When I tried to enter my flat one evening the Yale lock had been dropped. There were other things — cabinet and room doors closed which I had left ajar or in positions from which I could recognize if they had been touched, the slight disarrangement of magazines that had been left in a particular order. But I couldn’t, at first, discover why. It was a Sunday when I made a determined search…’ Charlie paused, going to Witherspoon. ‘You might like to take a note of the date, although of course it will be recorded by the official stenographers here. It was August 6…’

Witherspoon hesitated, frowning, and briefly made a notation on a pad in front of him.

‘… I found the cipher pad first,’ resumed Charlie. ‘The door of the cupboard housing the electricity meter was one I had left slightly open and it had been closed when I first discovered the entry. It was much more difficult finding the money: I thought I’d covered the bedroom until I noticed the slight variation between the indentations in the carpet that the leg castors had made. The bed had been put back just a fraction out of alignment to where it had been before…’