Brian Freemantle - The Blind Run

‘Please,’ she said, still smiling and holding her hand out in invitation towards the chair slightly to the side of her neat, orderly desk. As he sat, she said, ‘Welcome to Moscow.’

‘People keep saying things like that,’ said Charlie. There was hardly any accent in her voice, which was quite deep. He tried to make casual the look around the office, to locate the likely positioning of the cameras and recording devices. Some would unquestionably be in place and the seat to which he’d been directed was clearly positioned for a reason. There were too many possible positions and he decided the examination was pointless.

‘This is only a formality, you understand?’

Liar, thought Charlie. He said, ‘I understand.’

She took up a pen, looked down at an open folder and said, ‘I don’t know anything about you, other than your name.’

Liar again, thought Charlie. The KGB index was a legend, a computerised record far more detailed than any comparable system in any Western service. He’d have been on it for years and his file would have been heavily annotated after the affair with the English Director. It wouldn’t have been erased after his capture and imprisonment, either; nothing was ever removed from the Moscow index. She might be attractive but she wasn’t much good. She should have known he’d be aware of the Soviet system.

‘I don’t even know yours,’ he said. If they were debriefing him with someone as inexperienced as this he wasn’t regarded as anyone of importance. Which meant what he was supposed to do was going to be bloody difficult. Charlie didn’t like being regarded as someone past importance. Careful, he thought; he was beginning to think like Sampson.

The woman frowned momentarily at the clumsy flirtation, then smiled again. ‘Fedova,’ she said. ‘Natalia Nikandrova Fedova.’

‘Do I call you Comrade or Natalia?’

‘I don’t think you call me anything but rather remember this is an official meeting,’ she said.

Charlie thought she had to force the stiffness into her voice. He said, ‘But only a formality.’

‘I have a file to complete,’ she said, tapping the paper in front of her.

Like he’d already decided, a clerk, thought Charlie. He said, ‘Charles Edward Muffin – Charlie to friends. Born Elstree, England. Mother Joan, a cook. Father unknown. Entered British service from grammar school through immediate postwar exigency, when they were short and recruitment was easy. Active field agent until five years ago. Realised I was being set up by my own service as a decoy during an entrapment operation involving your own General Berenkov, who for many years ran an active cell in London and whose arrest I led. So I taught the bastards a lesson and made it possible for your people to seize the British Director – who should never have been Director anyway – and arrange an exchange for Berenkov…’ Charlie paused, aware of the carelessness of the recital. He said, ‘Most – if not all – of which should be in that folder in front of you because I know the sort of records you keep and I was, after all, personally involved with Berenkov and with your current chairman, General Kalenin…’

Natalia showed no reaction whatever to his impatience. She said, ‘What happened then?’

Then I had four miserable years on the run and never a day went by without my realising what a bloody fool I’d been, thought Charlie. He said, ‘At first I stayed in England, because I knew there would be a hunt and they wouldn’t have expected me to do that. Seaside towns, where there are always lots of visitors, so strangers aren’t unusual. Then Europe, holiday places again, never staying anywhere too long…’

‘What about your wife?’ demanded the woman.

It was several moments before Charlie replied, confronting the deepest and bitterest regret of all. Then he said, ‘I was almost caught, after the first year. A combined operation by my own service and the CIA, because I exposed their Director, too, and the Americans wanted me as well. I got away. She was killed.’ Dear Edith, he thought. Neglected and cheated on and forced by what he did into a life of a fugitive, which she’d hated. And never a moment of complaint or criticism. Why the hell had it taken her death to make him realise how much he’d loved her?

‘And then?’ persisted the woman, bent over the papers in front of her.

‘The British service was by tradition one of university graduates,’ remembered Charlie. ‘I never did fit. I was kept on by a marvellous man, one of the best Directors ever. He had a son, a Lloyds underwriter. He let me work for him – it had never been made public, what I did, because of the embarrassment it would have caused, so he didn’t know.’

‘You were working for him when you were caught?’

Charlie nodded, ‘In Italy,’ he started. The pause was momentary and he didn’t think she would have noticed it before he finished – differently from the way he intended – by saying ‘Two and a half years ago.’ Part of the original deal – the deal he believed Wilson had reneged on – had been to say nothing at the trial, even though it was held in camera, about the entrapment in Italy of the British ambassador as a Soviet spy because Wilson wanted to keep the conduits open to feed as much disinformation as he could to Moscow. Dismissive of this meaningless encounter with the woman Charlie realised he’d allowed himself to become careless, unthinking about the answers. Unthinking! The word stayed with him, an accusation. He was being unthinking. And stupid and arrogant and the worst – unprofessional – in imagining the meeting was meaningless. She’d made the mistake and he’d almost missed it. Natalia Nikandrova Fedova had said she knew nothing about him and then interposed the question about Edith: about whom she was supposed to have no knowledge. So the clerk-demeanour was a trick, a trick that had worked to achieve precisely the effect it had, lulling him into carelessness by the time they reached the point of the meeting, their need to know if the Italian ambassador had been uncovered. Charlie remembered the beaten prison officer and the murdered policeman and supposed Sampson would be absorbed into the Soviet service. Maybe it was a convoluted way of getting back at the man – misleading the KGB Sampson would undoubtedly join – but at the moment it was the only opportunity he had. He’d have to be careful to maintain his earlier attitude.

‘What were you doing for Willoughby’s son?’

Another mistake, isolated Charlie. He hadn’t named Willoughby as the Director for whom he’d worked all those years and ended practically idolising. Charlie said, ‘He was an underwriter, like I said. Sometimes some of the claims seemed suspicious. I’d investigate them.’

‘What was suspicious about Italy?’ pressed the woman.

‘It was a huge jewel robbery, involving the wife of the British ambassador,’ said Charlie, lounged in the chair physically to convey the uncaring attitude he wanted her to go on believing; the hidden cameras, too. ‘It coincided with the renewal at a vastly increased valuation of the policy and it looked a bit doubtful. People sometimes over-insure and then conveniently lose things if they’re short of money.’

She smiled disarmingly across the desk and said, ‘Even British ambassadors?’

‘Even British ambassadors,’ said Charlie, trying to recapture the earlier flirtation.

‘Was there?’

‘Was there what?’ said Charlie, knowing the question but maintaining the pretence.

‘Anything suspicious about the robbery?’

Charlie shrugged. ‘Never had time to find out. The station officer at the embassy for British intelligence was someone who had been in the department with me. He recognised me and sounded the alarm. And I got caught.’