Brian Freemantle: The Blind Run

The relevant times were logged and the evidence was in her favour and Kalenin decided the woman had made a desperate attempt to stop the escape. It had been his mistake wrongly to send the seizure squads to the spy school and to Charlie Muffin’s apartment. Only later – too late – did he identify from photographs the stranger whose abrupt entry into the British embassy was probably timed thirty minutes after Natalia Fedova’s attempted approach to him, an approach Kalenin now realised he should have responded to earlier. By the time the photograph had been identified as that of Charlie Muffin the damned man was already aboard the aircraft at Sheremetyevo. Kalenin had been halfway to the airport when the report came in on the car radio that the aircraft had taken off. They were fools, not to have stormed it; or to have shot the tyres out instead of standing helplessly around waiting for orders from higher authority. In his fury, Kalenin determined they would regret that indecision for the rest of their imprisoned days. The KGB chairman stopped the reflection, coming back to the woman sitting nervously in front of him.

‘Again,’ insisted Kalenin. ‘Tell me the salient points again.’

‘I encouraged the affair between us,’ repeated Natalia. ‘Without having any evidence I could bring before you or anyone else I was unhappy with the initial interviews and again with his performance at Balashikha.’ Natalia paused, unsure if she were fully expressing herself as she intended. ‘Never any evidence; no proof. Just a feeling. When we were together there was always an attitude, an uncertainty. Again, only a feeling. I started to follow him. Twice it was the same rendezvous, the GUM department store. It was obviously a point of contact. I followed him there again today, because I wanted positive proof that something was not as we suspected it. I knew he saw me. There was no obvious indication, but I knew I had been identified.’

‘So he fled,’ said Kalenin, reflectively. ‘He penetrated us, because of the stupidity of someone who should have known better. Damn Alexei Berenkov!’ He looked up at Natalia. ‘You’ve no doubt at all about the person you saw him meet on every occasion?’

‘None,’ said Natalia. ‘I knew, of course, why my debriefing was cut short. Knew what Edwin Sampson was being called upon to do. It was definitely Sampson, at every meeting. Despite all the indications to the contrary, that they disliked each other, they retained contact.’

‘Charlie Muffin is a survivor,’ mused Kalenin. ‘A professional survivor. Knowing you’d identified him, he’d have cut his losses and abandoned everything: better to save part of an operation than nothing at all.’

‘There’s still Sampson.’

‘Yes,’ said Kalenin, his fury returning. ‘There’s still Sampson and by the time his interrogation is over there is absolutely nothing that Sampson will not have told us.’