Brian Freemantle: The Run Around

‘Well?’ said Charlie. It was nice to be admitted at last but he was unsure how genuine was their acceptance.

‘I think we closed a few doors that were too wide open,’ said Giles.

‘I don’t have any authority to interview Dajani,’ said Charlie. He looked at Levy. ‘And I guess it would be difficult for you, as well …’ He turned to Giles. ‘Don’t you think it might be an idea to investigate the attack yourselves?’

‘For what?’ said Levy. ‘According to Blom, the man didn’t see anything.’

‘According to Blom, there’s no danger!’ said Charlie, conscious as he spoke of the look which passed between the two other men. In full awareness, he said: ‘So you would have suggested all the tightening up today even if there hadn’t been any warning!’

‘That’s our job, Charlie,’ said the Israeli.

Being patronized was something that pissed Charlie off the most and he thought it was close to happening here. So much for acceptance. He said: ‘You don’t think it’s worth looking at independently: you’re the people talking about doors that have been left too wide open.’

‘I think it’s been checked out,’ said Levy.

‘I don’t believe it’s anything to get spooked about,’ agreed the American.

‘Believers in coincidence!’

‘Don’t make a monster out of every shadow, Charlie!’ pleaded Levy. ‘The poor bastard was mugged: the one thing that would have made it suspicious — the loss of any conference documents — didn’t happen!’

‘Like nothing else is going to happen,’ accused Charlie. Cunts, he thought. He was still thinking it three hours later when Alexander Cummings reached him at the Beau-Rivage from the Bern embassy.

‘You’re to come right away,’ ordered the British intelligence rezident . ‘London says it’s important.’

Back and forth like a fiddler’s elbow, thought Charlie.

Alexei Berenkov had studied all the interrogation transcripts and the records of the trial evidence and reviewed yet again his own interview with Edwin Sampson. And acknowledged that the only conclusion possible was that which Kalenin had reached, that Natalia Nikandrova Fedova was a loyal and dedicated KGB intelligence officer whose brilliant intervention had prevented Sampson infiltrating the Soviet service.

And he refused to accept it.

Berenkov had survived in the West for so long by refusing ever to believe the obvious — intrigued during the debriefing after his capture to realize it was also a precept of Charlie Muffin’s — even when it was supported by incontestable fact.

The need was to uncover something which did contest the facts. Because Natalia was attached to the First Chief Directorate and subject to his authority it was easy for Berenkov to know at all times where she was, enabling his squads to enter her apartment without any fear of discovery. The searchers went in first, under Berenkov’s strict instructions that nothing should be disturbed for her to realize her apartment had been burgled, and after them the technical experts went to work. There were two video cameras installed, both with fish-eye lenses capable of recording the activities throughout the entire room, one in the main bedroom and another in the living room. The encompassing lenses were the size of pinheads and fitted high in the ceiling cornice in both rooms. The audio equipment was not put actually into the telephone, where Natalia might have discovered it, but installed as an additional wire alongside the regular lead-in line. An extra microphone was fixed as a transistor to a small portable radio which usually appeared to be kept in the kitchen but which she sometimes carried from room to room, particularly to the bathroom in the mornings.

Berenkov hoped the break would not take long: Charlie Muffin was a problem that should be eradicated as quickly as possible.

‘It could be nothing,’ cautioned Sir Alistair Wilson, over the echoing, scrambled line, ‘but I think it’s sufficient for a warning.’

‘What?’ demanded Charlie.

‘The two men didn’t match,’ said the British Director. ‘But another picture did.’

‘With the man in Primrose Hill?’

‘No,’ declared the Director, ‘with a picture you sent of a woman described as Sulafeh Nabulsi.’

Charlie frowned in the secure communications room of the Bern embassy, striving for recall. ‘The translator,’ he said, remembering.

‘We didn’t have a name, until your picture. All there was on our terrorist files were two other photographs, both blurred and indistinct. With the assessment that she was a fanatic,’ said Wilson.

‘A positive match!’

‘The technical physiognomy comparison suggests it’s the same person and two of our expert visual examiners here agree.’

Charlie’s mind was far ahead of the conversation. Levy and Giles might believe in coincidence — his word, Charlie recalled — but he didn’t. So what connection was there between an apparent street attack on one translator with the Palestinian party and this sudden discrepancy with another? Charlie was sure the Israeli dossier upon the woman had not recorded any terrorist connections at all, like it had with some of the others. Aged thirty-four, he remembered further. Single and a language graduate from the University of Jerusalem. Her father had been listed as a doctor, practising in Ramallah, her mother dead. There had even been a number of teaching appointments he could not recall, apart from their having been in the Lebanon and Egypt. And from the University of Cairo there had been a further language degree. As the memories returned, Charlie had the most important recollection. The Israeli material had been indexed, with function descriptions of everyone. Now that Dajani had been incapacitated Sulafeh Nabulsi was not just another translator, she was the only translator. Charlie, a man of hunches, felt a familiar tingle: he had not known it for far too long. He said: ‘What have we got on her?’

‘Practically nothing, like I said,’ reminded Wilson. ‘The name even came from you. One of our photographs was supplied from Eygpt: she’s very much in the background of the Sadat attack. The other is from the Lebanon: it was taken at a mass funeral of guerillas who died in an Israeli air attack on Marjayoun, in the south.’

‘Why the insistence that she’s a fanatic?’

‘What information there is with both pictures describe her as belonging to the Fatah Revolutionary Command,’ said Wilson. ‘That’s the most extreme of the Palestinian factions. It’s led by Abu Nidal, who according to the Foreign Office has pledged his followers utterly against the accord being worked out in Geneva.’

‘None of this is in the Israeli dossier,’ disclosed Charlie.

‘I’m not prepared to be definite about it,’ said the Director, cautioning again. ‘I’m sending some stuff first thing tomorrow morning and I want you to warn Blom that it’s coming. Nothing has changed about our role. Which means your role. We’re advising. Nothing more.’

‘Of course.’

‘I mean it, Charlie.’

‘I understand,’ assured Charlie, easily. He’d gone through the routine of fuzzy pictures with Blom and been patronizingly tolerated by Giles and Levy, just in case he came up with something they’d missed — which they had with this — and now it was time to return to normal, Charlie Muffin’s normal. Working by himself.

‘Anything new from your end?’ enquired the Director.

The attack upon Dajani lifted the London information from the curious to the suspicious. Yet Sir Alistair himself acknowledged that the Nabulsi photographs could mean nothing. No purpose just yet then in crying wolf, Charlie thought, in self-justification. Easily again he said: ‘Not a thing.’