Brian Freemantle - Comrade Charlie

‘Tomorrow?’

‘We won’t be flying together, Emil,’ he refused. What about the future? An always leaking source, Petrin remembered. He said: ‘But we’ll keep in touch though, shall we?’

‘No!’ said Krogh weakly.

‘We’ll see,’ said the Russian, edging forward on his seat as the taxi slowed to stop at the junction of Rutland Gardens with the Knightsbridge Road: it had become the habit, developed from Petrin’s instinctive caution although with that caution dulled now from too much repetition, to walk the rest of the way, never positively identifying the house even to a casual cab driver.

The seizure went wrong because of a mistaken assumption, which was easy for the later inquiries to criticize and condemn but understandable in the heat and tension of the moment, because Washington’s reaction had been outright panic. There had been President-to-Prime Minister telephone calls and news of more CIA and FBI men arriving on a shared Agency plane and nerves were stretched cheese-wire tight. The belief of the stake-out squads, particularly among the London-based Americans, was that Krogh was already inside the house, living there, and that if he did not emerge after a certain time orders would be given to storm it. Not that he would approach it, virtually from their rear upon which no one was concentrating.

It was one of the embassy CIA men who first recognized Emil Krogh from the photographs that had been wired from Washington and a copy of which was now in every observing vehicle. The man snatched up the open channel radio in the parked Ford and yelled urgently: ‘Behind! Krogh’s coming from behind, from the main road! Grey suit, blue shirt. Fifty yards from the target house on foot with another male. Caucasian. Brown sport coat. Tan slacks…’

The mistakes began to compound themselves.

The observation teams should have allowed Krogh and Petrin to continue on into the house, where they would have been trapped. But two separate groups wrongly interpreted the warning to mean that Krogh was escaping from it, not going towards it. Men burst, far too obviously, from both vehicles.

Petrin realized what was happening seconds ahead of Krogh. He snatched out, halting the American, automatically beginning to turn before seeing that a third squad had left their vehicle and had closed off any escape back towards the main road. So he stopped, waiting.

A cry wailed out of Krogh, a whimpering, sobbing sound. And then he tried to run. There was nowhere he could have gone, because there were men blocking the road on either side of them, but he tried to flee anyway. The squads were concentrated upon the pavement, of course, so Krogh dashed blindly into the road from between two parked cars directly into the path of an oncoming Post Office delivery van. The American saw it and the van was not travelling fast and the driver had a few seconds to brake, so the impact was not a severe one: Krogh had his hands outstretched, in a warding-off gesture, and actually appeared to push himself away from the vehicle. There was, however, sufficient force to throw him over. He fell back towards the pavement but short of it and the front and the left side of his head struck precisely against the sharp kerb edge, instantly causing a depressed fracture from the temple practically to the rear of the skull. Apart from that, the American suffered only superficial bruising.

Other squads did storm the house then, emerging in minutes with the cringing, babbling Yuri Guzins and another Russian, tight-lipped and calm, like Petrin.

‘I am innocent! I haven’t done anything! please…!’ gabbled Guzins.

‘Shut up!’ barked Petrin, in matching Russian. ‘Say absolutely nothing. You can only suffer if you talk: if you tell them what’s happened.’

None of the British or American officers surrounding them understood the exchange, because not one of them spoke the language. It was a further error not to have foreseen the need, like not keeping the three Russians apart from each other.

Upstairs, in the room where Krogh had worked, the two intelligence supervisors surveyed the drawing equipment.

‘Holy shit!’ said Bowley.

Charlie finally slept: or rather collapsed through utter exhaustion. He did so at last in the duty officers’ dormitory and showered and shaved in the tiny adjoining bathroom when he got up in the afternoon, grateful afterwards that waiting for him were the fresh clothes that had been brought in, on Wilson’s orders, from the Vauxhall flat. Only when he was dressing did Charlie realize, surprised it had taken him so long, that he was effectively under house arrest. And then he modified the thought: the Russians would have seen the Special Branch seizure and expect him to be in custody. Which made it impossible for him to return to an apartment they might still be watching, as a precaution. It was in between accepted mealtimes in the basement cafeteria. Charlie asked for eggs on toast. The eggs tasted like a sample from a Brazilian rubber tree and the toast was as hard as the bark through which the rubber might have seeped.

Back in his office Charlie sat and couldn’t decide what to do; what he was expected to do. He wondered about Hubert Witherspoon, who was nowhere around. And then he wondered about Laura Nolan and whether she knew that he was back in the building. And then, avoiding it no longer, he wondered about Natalia and what she was doing and what she was thinking and — again — whether she had any part in the things that were happening all around him.

The summons from the Director General came in the half light of late afternoon and Charlie was glad because he was fed up wondering about things he couldn’t resolve. Charlie was curious about who else would be in the conference room, and even more curious when he entered and found there was no one apart from Wilson. The Director General was shaved and changed, which was an improvement upon that morning although the old man still looked ill. Charlie doubted Wilson would have returned all the way to his country home, in Hampshire, and then remembered there was a London pied-a-terre, somewhere in Mayfair. South Audley Street, he thought.

‘I think we’ve trawled everything in,’ announced Wilson. He was standing, just slightly propped against the table edge.

‘Sir?’ queried Charlie.

‘We’ve been to your bank. Everything was as you’d said it would be, properly authorized for my receipt. Even the fingerprints of the cashier Sally Dickenson matched those on the banknotes issued against your name. And we recovered the missed micro-dot from your flat, at the same time as collecting your clothes.’

‘How about the car numbers?’

‘Companies, like you guessed they would be. Two we certainly knew already to be used by the Soviet embassy. One’s new to us. Well done.’

‘And Blackstone?’

‘It’s coming, in bits and pieces. He identified Vitali Losev from one of the counter-intelligence snatch pictures. Said he knew him by the name Stranger: Mr Stranger. But that he was expecting to be taken over by someone else…’ Wilson smiled. ‘The recognition was to be Visitor. There was some money in the house when he was arrested. There’s some consecutive numbering with what was originally planted at your place.’

‘I thought he might take slightly longer to crack,’ reflected Charlie.

‘He was with wife number two, on the Isle of Wight, when we picked him up,’ reminded Wilson. ‘We brought in Ruth, his first choice, because wives have a right to know what’s happening to their husbands. There was a lot of crying: one big sad family. Or rather his families. He didn’t seem able to concentrate. ‘

Charlie smiled. ‘Stranger…Visitor…Guest,’ he mused. ‘Berenkov tried hard, didn’t he?’