Brian Freemantle - Red Star Burning

“There’s no way, no set of circumstances, in which Charlie Muffin could be suicidal,” persisted the Director-General.

“I’ve just spelt out the circumstances to you. And to him,” reminded Cowley. “He knows just how much of a target he is. And always will be. Just as he knows, simply to survive, what every day of every week of every month is going to be for that survival. I can’t imagine-no one can truthfully imagine-what the constant awareness of that is like. It’s worse than being imprisoned for life, in solitary confinement. In those circumstances a man quite quickly becomes dehumanized, robotlike, because there is no human contact apart from his guards, which isn’t enough. Charlie Muffin doesn’t have anyone with whom to adjust, to make a new life. But he’s not incarcerated. He can go out, to pubs and restaurants and cinemas and theaters, and see other people all around him. But never risk getting involved, never knowing whom he can trust. It’s permanent, unremitting torture.”

“Charlie Muffin’s always been a loner and never trusted anyone,” disputed Ambersom, gesturing to her own copy of Charlie’s personnel file. “What’s new now?”

“How he lived before was by his own choice,” the psychiatrist pointed out. “And before, he had the job. Which I acknowledge from everything I’ve read he did by his own rules and upset a lot of people in the process. But he was doing something: he had a reason to live. He doesn’t have that reason now: any reason whatsoever to go on living now.”

“What are you suggesting?” asked Smith, whose deceptive, quietly spoken demeanor hinted to his post-Oxford career as professor of Middle East studies, one of the core credos of which was that once-suffered harm had always to be avenged, a philosophy he’d quickly recognized in Charlie Muffin.

“I’m not employed here to suggest,” refused Cowley. “I’m here to assess his mental health and that’s what I’ve done.”

“Are you saying he’s mentally ill?” demanded the sharply suited, precisely spoken Ambersom, who’d bitterly opposed and still resented her manipulated transfer to MI5 from the external Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.

“Not yet,” qualified Cowley, forcefully. “I think in time, a comparatively short period of time, he could begin to develop a psychosis. I also think that he would be intelligent enough to realize himself what was happening to him and that with the emptiness of his existence, an emptiness that’s never going to be filled, he’d prefer to kill himself than gradually, knowingly, degenerate into mental decline.” The psychiatrist shifted his own copy of Charlie’s personnel file. “It might be difficult for most people to decipher from all that’s in here, but from what I’ve read and from the sessions I’ve had with him, I’ve got Charlie Muffin marked as an extremely proud, even arrogant man. He’d rather kill himself than end up mentally confused, wearing an incontinence pad.”

“Charlie Muffin has been an active intelligence officer for twenty years,” reminded Ambersom. “Quite irrespective of his most recent operation, we cannot risk the slightest mental uncertainty in someone who knows as much as he does about British intelligence activities over such a period. A lame workhorse that can no longer serve its purpose is put out of its misery, as an act of kindness.”

“I don’t want this conversation taken in that direction,” said Smith, who resented the woman’s appointment even more than she did, believing it the most positive indication that his attempted overthrow by Jeffrey Smale had only been postponed.

“If we accept the opinion of Dr. Cowley, which I certainly do, I don’t believe there is any alternative for us to consider,” argued the deputy director, eager to establish herself.

“There will be no discussion or consideration of physically disposing of anyone while I am Director-General,” declared Smith.

“The Americans have formally asked to debrief Charlie themselves,” disclosed Ambersom, one of whose new responsibilities was to liaise with U.S intelligence.

“Are you proposing they do your dirty work for us?” demanded Smith.

“I am bringing to your attention a formal request from Washington,” qualified Ambersom. “Their request comes with a number of questions not answered in our official debriefing of Charlie Muffin, an abbreviated version of which was made available to them.”

“Tell both the FBI and CIA to provide a full list of what more they want from the debriefing, with the understanding that we’ll answer what we can,” ordered Smith. “And in doing so remind them how many of their executive staff, including the CIA’s deputy director of operations, were present here in England, with every opportunity to debrief him, at the moment he exposed their naivete in believing that Stepan Lvov was their double-agent coup of the century when he was elected president of the Russian Federation.”

“The request was specifically for personal access to Charlie.”

“Which I’m not allowing.”

“They won’t consider that the sort of cooperation that’s supposed to exist between our services.”

“I don’t give a damn how they’ll consider it,” rejected the Director-General. “The last time Charlie Muffin was in a room with CIA and FBI people-which was the occasion he saved them all from making the biggest mistake in their combined histories-there was a U.S. plane at Northolt air base fueled and ready to take him God knows where on a rendition flight from which he would not have returned after whatever interrogation techniques they’d perfected at Guantanamo. You have any problem with CIA or FBI, pass it on to me to resolve.”

“Which leaves unanswered the question of what to do with a mentally declining Charlie Muffin,” Ambersom said, trying to fight back, flushed at the man’s rejection.

“Not quite. We’ve decided against letting him be put down like a workhorse for which there’s no further use, haven’t we?” said Aubrey Smith, very aware that there was no answering agreement from the woman.

“It could too easily be a trap, after the way we so recently humiliated them.” Gerald Monsford knew he’d come perilously close to being the highest-ranking victim of the Lvov debacle, surviving only by switching onto Jane Ambersom the responsibility for his own ill-timed and insufficiently considered attempts at self-promoting involvement, which he’d further concealed by decimating MI6’s Moscow embassy staffing. He was terrified now of another near disaster so soon afterward.

“Maxim Radtsic, whose identity has been confirmed by photographs in our own files, is the specifically designated executive deputy to the FSB,” replied Harry Jacobson, MI6’s newly replaced station chief. “He personally approached me at a diplomatic reception at the French embassy. Unless he was as desperate as he certainly appeared, he would not have identified his son as a potential kidnap victim by volunteering that Andrei was studying at the Sorbonne, would he?”

“You talked to Straughan about this?” Monsford protectively demanded. James Straughan was the service’s operational field director.

“It was Straughan who provided the photographic confirmation from the files, as well as establishing through our Paris rezidentura that Andrei definitely is a student at the Sorbonne.”

“Why didn’t Radtsic approach the French?”

Jacobson sighed in frustration at the Director’s unanswerable questions, despite the warning from Straughan before the Moscow call had been transferred that Monsford was a worryingly unpredictable, frequently erratic man. “I don’t know why he didn’t! It didn’t occur to me to ask. What occurred to me was that it was the opportunity of a lifetime.”