Brian Freemantle - Charlie M

Because your balls are on a hook, completed Charlie, mentally.

‘And some expenses …?’ coaxed Charlie.

Cuthbertson stared directly at him. He really hates my guts, thought Charlie.

‘Already reinstated,’ promised Cuthbertson.

Another query to put to Janet, thought Charlie. Wilberforce shifted. Was it embarrassment for his superior or irritation? wondered Charlie.

‘I will accept that although they initially did well, I sent inexperienced men into the field on this latest operation,’ confessed Cuthbertson. He snapped his mouth shut after the sentence, like a man realising he was dribbling.

Never before in his life, Charlie knew, would Cuthbertson have been forced to make so many admissions of error. He would not be a man to forget such humiliation. His head pulled up, so that he was looking directly across his desk.

‘So we need your help, Charles.’

‘Charlie,’ corrected the operative.

‘What?’

‘Charlie,’ he repeated, unrelentingly. ‘My friends call me Charlie’

Cuthbertson swallowed. The man would have enjoyed standing on one of those elevated platforms, watching over the Wall the body of the man he believed to be me burning beside the Volkswagen, Charlie decided. What, he wondered, had happened to the girl called Gretel?

‘We need your help, Charlie,’ recited Cuthbertson, the words strained.

Charlie looked at him, allowing the surprise to show.

‘How?’ he asked.

Cuthbertson covered the exasperation by concentrating on the blank blotter before him. After several moments, he looked up again, under control.

‘I want you to establish the link with Kalenin and bring him across,’ announced the Director.

It was a mocking laugh from Charlie, an amazed refusal to accept the words he was hearing.

‘There is nothing — nothing at all — that is funny about what I’ve said,’ insisted Cuthbertson, taut-lipped.

Impulsively, Charlie stood up, pacing around his chair.

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Nothing funny whatsoever …’

He stood behind the chair, hands resting on its high back, like a man at a lecture.

‘… It is just madness,’ completed Charlie. ‘Stark, raving madness …’

‘I don’t see …’ tried Wilberforce, but Charlie refused the interruption.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Please, just listen to me. A year ago we broke a European spy ring, headed in this country by Alexei Berenkov …’

‘For God’s sake, forget the bloody man Berenkov,’ erupted Cuthbertson, releasing his anger. ‘He’s got nothing to do with what we’re discussing …’

‘He’s got everything to do with it,’ rebuked Charlie, emphatically. ‘Can’t you see it, for Christ’s sake?’

Cuthbertson winced, but said nothing; a court martial offence, judged Charlie.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Wilberforce, trying to buffer the feeling between the two men.

Ignoring Edith’s warning of the previous night, Charlie burst on, ‘I’m astonished you can’t see what’s happening …’

The outburst had gained him the attention of both men, he saw. Cuthbertson would be worried he’d made the wrong assessment, like all the others.

‘We destroyed their system … a system that had cost them time and money and which we now know was enormously important to them,’ elaborated Charlie. ‘Suddenly, from the shadows, appears General Kalenin, the genius of the K.G.B., a man no one has seen for two decades, asserting he wants to defect. With the same remarkable timing, there are stories in all the major communist publications that he’s under pressure, giving the defection credence.’

He stopped, looking to both men. Neither spoke.

‘Like a rabbit coming out of a hat, he appears at Leipzig, exactly as he’s indicated to Colonel Wilcox …’

Cuthbertson was doodling flowers on to his blotter and Wilberforce had begun mining his pipe: as a child, the second-in-command would have had a comfort blanket, Charlie decided.

‘… and, like simple innocents, we grab at it,’ took up Charlie. ‘We expose an operative, get fed a load of defection bullshit and then our man, who has identified himself, gets shot. As if this weren’t warning enough, we go through the same procedure a month later in Russia and lose a second man.’

They weren’t accepting his arguments, Charlie realised.

‘It’s the oldest intelligence trick there is,’ Charlie insisted. ‘Make the bait big enough and so many fish will swarm you can catch them by hand.’

Cuthbertson shook his head. ‘I can’t agree … we’ve been unlucky, that’s all. Others agree with me.’

‘Others?’ jumped Charlie, immediately.

‘The analysis section, upon which you place such reliance,’ said Cuthbertson, quickly.

There was more, Charlie knew, remaining silent.

‘The initial approach was made at the American embassy,’ reminded Cuthbertson, reluctantly. ‘The C.I.A. assessed the media attacks on Kalenin and made the same decision as we did.’

Charlie threw back his head, theatrically, braying his laughter.

‘Oh Jesus!’ he said. ‘This is too much. Don’t tell me the Americans are riding shotgun on the whole operation.’

‘They’ve sought involvement,’ conceded the Director. ‘But I’m keeping the whole project British; they can have access to the debriefing in the course of time.’

Charlie made much of walking back around the chair and seating himself. Washington would be furious at being kept out, he knew.

‘I am aware,’ he began, speaking very quietly and with control, ‘that I am badly regarded in this department, a reminder of a British intelligence system that made some very bad mistakes … mistakes that meant changes were almost inevitable …’

He hesitated. They were back with him now, he saw.

‘But I have proved myself, if proof were needed, with the Berenkov debriefing,’ he continued. ‘I know espionage intimately … I’m an expert at it. You are a soldier, used to a different environment … a different set of rules …’

‘What is the point you are trying to make,’ broke in Cuthbertson, testily.

‘That we’re being set up,’ said Charlie, urgently. ‘A trap is being created and you are walking blindly into it …’

Again, Cuthbertson shook his head in refusal.

‘… Cut off now, before it’s too late,’ pleaded Charlie. ‘A committed man like Kalenin wouldn’t defect in a million years.’

‘You’re scared,’ accused the Director, suddenly.

‘You’re damned right I’m scared,’ agreed Charlie, open in his irritation. ‘Two agents plucked off within days of encountering Kalenin! We should all be terrified. If he has his way, he’ll wreck the whole bloody department.’

‘I want Kalenin,’ declared Cuthbertson, pedantically.

‘But he isn’t coming ,’ insisted Charlie.

‘He is,’ said the Director.

‘Then tell me why Harrison and Snare have been hit,’ demanded Charlie.

‘Because Kalenin is frightened.’

Charlie frowned, genuinely confused. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

Cuthbertson paused at the impertinence, then dismissed it.

‘On each occasion,’ enlarged the Director, ‘sufficient time elapsed for both men to dispatch full reports to London. Kalenin has allowed that, wanting the meetings to be relayed here. Both meetings were in public places … they would have been noted. And Kalenin would have known that. So he protected his back by going for them, once they’d served their purpose …’

He groped among the papers that leafed his desk.

‘… Snare refers several times to Kalenin’s ill-concealed fear …’

‘… bloody right,’ said Charlie. ‘And I might concede your point if Snare had been killed too. But he’s alive. By now, scientifically and without any pain, they will have taken apart the man’s mind, right back to the age of two. Kalenin wouldn’t have risked the inevitable exposure of his defection by letting Snare live, if the defection were genuine.’