Brian Freemantle - The Blind Run

It took six weeks to move the library because Sampson evolved a way of even further delaying the work by insisting upon a complete re-indexing. But after six weeks even the most gullible of the prison officers were becoming impatient.

‘Heard where you’re going?’ Sampson asked. It was a Thursday and they knew that the following day was the very last that Charlie could expect to remain on library secondment.

Charlie shook his head. ‘Maybe administration.’ By lying about a non-existent pain in his broken arm and saying he still found difficulty in gripping with his hand, Charlie had managed to get a hospital report insisting he should be excused from any heavy work so he hoped to avoid the workshops, even though they would probably be safe now.

Sampson, who was lying on his bunk and looking up at the ceiling, said, ‘I tried to stop you coming back here, you know?’

Charlie frowned across the cell. ‘What?’

‘Tried to stop you coming back here,’ repeated Sampson. ‘After your release from the hospital.’

‘What the hell for?’ demanded Charlie. He felt a stomach-lurch of uncertainty, at the thought of the collapse of their fragile relationship and the physical reaction angered him because he recognised that despite all his efforts to remain aware of what was happening, he had come to rely upon it and didn’t want it to end and go back like it had been before.

Sampson did not immediately respond. Instead he swung up into a sitting position on his bunk, groped to the supports beneath where he hid the whisky and poured into both their mugs. Then he said, ‘Because of the risk.’

‘What risk?’

‘My risk,’ said Sampson.

‘You’re not making sense.’

‘You weren’t, before you went into hospital,’ said the other man. ‘Now you are.’

Charlie sipped the drink, looking warily over the mug at Sampson. ‘I still don’t understand.’

Sampson jerked his head towards the table and Charlie’s carefully annotated calendar. ‘Twelve years, three weeks and two days’ he said. ‘You think you can last another twelve years, three weeks and two days in here, Charlie?’

Charlie drank more deeply this time, not wanting to confront the question. Another indication of becoming institutionalised, he thought, ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘I do,’ said Sampson. ‘I think you’ll go mad. Or try to kill yourself, to get it all over.’

Charlie couldn’t imagine attempting suicide because nothing had ever got that bad. But he wasn’t sure. ‘There’s parole,’ he said.

Sampson made a dismissive gesture. ‘Not for people like us,’ he said. ‘Not for spies and child molesters.’

‘What’s the point you’re trying to make?’ said Charlie.

‘Do you want out?’ asked Sampson, simply. ‘Out with me?’

‘ Out!’

Sampson made another gesture towards the table, to the radio this time. ‘You didn’t think I got that to listen to the London Philharmonic and Letter from America, did you?’

Charlie stared at the radio, then back to Sampson.

‘It was always established this way, if I got caught,’ said Sampson. ‘I knew the radio to get and the long wave frequency to which to tune and how to recognise the messages, when they started to be transmitted. And they have started. Along with other things.’

Charlie felt a tingling numbness, the sort of sensation he’d sometimes known during a heavy boozing session outside, when he’d been celebrating or relaxing. But this wasn’t drunkenness. This was excitement, exhilarating excitement. Careful, important thing that had ever happened in his life so he couldn’t afford a single, minor, miniscule mistake.

‘That’s why I had to get into the library,’ continued Sampson. ‘I got that instruction even before the radio, from a small ad in the personal column of the Daily Telegraph. Every third Tuesday in the month is my contact day, the day I have to look to see if there’s a message for me. I didn’t know why the library was important, not at first, but I do now: that’s why everything has been moved.’

‘Why?’ said Charlie.

‘Outside construction,’ said Sampson. ‘Extension to the wing. Which means scaffolding and ladders and ropes.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Got that from the radio,’ said Sampson. ‘Amazing how easy it is to learn of the outside contracts given by the Public Works Department if you know the right way to go about it. And the Soviet embassy do. Work is going to start in a fortnight. And it will actually involve removing the bars from the windows…’ Sampson grinned, self-satisfied. ‘From the window of a room that I now know intimately, along a corridor where I’m an accepted figure, someone with every right to be there…’ He nodded towards the radio yet again. ‘I’ll be told when the bars are coming out: when to run. Everything will be ready, outside.’

‘That’s how George Blake got out,’ remembered Charlie, looking at the black set in the centre of the table.

‘Exactly!’ said Sampson, triumphantly. ‘Got away from a forty-two year sentence and is now in contented and happy retirement in Moscow. Can you imagine the embarrassment, when it happens again! It’ll make the British look so stupid that no other service in the world will think of telling them the time of day.’

Sampson was right, Charlie thought: the embarrassment would be incredible. The numbness came again, in anticipation this time.

‘Which is why I tried to keep you out of the cell,’ said Sampson. ‘You were a complication I didn’t want. But when I started making moves, through Hickley, I learned that to get you transferred I’d have to have someone else. And I wanted that even less…’ Sampson put his head to one side. ‘You realise what I’m saying, don’t you?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Charlie quietly. ‘I realise what you’re saying.’

‘I’ll take you with me,’ said Sampson. ‘I’ll get you out of this place and safely to Russia…’ He laughed suddenly, unable to contain his euphoria. ‘And we’ll live happily ever after.’

Out, thought Charlie. Dear God, the thought of being out.

Sampson came forward on his bunk, narrowing the distance between them. ‘But understand something,’ warned the man. ‘I’m taking you because I haven’t any choice. And I’m telling you about it because I haven’t got any choice about that, either. And because I know how you feel about being in here, because I’ve seen the way you go on with that calendar, every bloody day. But if you do anything to fuck it up, anything at all, then I’ll have you killed.’

Charlie just stared back at him.

‘I could do that, you know? Have you killed, I mean. It really wouldn’t be at all difficult, with the contacts I’ve got either inside or out. Nothing, nothing at all, is going to stop me getting out. You understand?’

‘Yes,’ said Charlie. ‘I understand.’

I’m getting out, thought Charlie. But not your way, bastard. You’re going to stay in jail forever.

The following day, Charlie was posted to the administration block, where the governor’s office was and where the clerical staff worked. The prison officer caught him trying to slip a paper knife into the waistband of his trousers on the Tuesday.

The rose in Sir Alistair Wilson’s buttonhole matched those in the vase on his desk, pervading the room with their perfume. The messages that had been transmitted from Moscow, from the very beginning, were attached to a master file, indexed in the order of their receipt. The British Director rippled his finger along the edge and said, ‘There’s a hell of a lot here.’

‘Let’s hope it isn’t too much,’ said the always cautious Harkness.

‘They haven’t changed the Baikonur code,’ said Wilson, referring to the uppermost message, the one that had come in overnight.