Brian Freemantle - The Blind Run

‘Cosy here,’ said Hickley.

‘Can I help you, Mr Hickley?’ said Charlie, cautiously. He’d done nothing so they couldn’t put him on restriction. Not unless it was a phoney charge.

‘I don’t think you can help me,’ said the prison officer. ‘I don’t think you can help anyone, Muffin. You can’t even help yourself.’

Charlie avoided looking directly at the man, careful of any accusation of unspoken insolence. There was nothing he could say to that, so not replying wouldn’t be insubordination.

‘Cosy,’ said Hickley again. ‘You like it here, Muffin?’

‘Yes, thank you, Mr Hickley,’ said Charlie. The enforced politeness was like a sour-tasting lump, in that part of his throat from which he couldn’t swallow to lose it.

‘Pity,’ said the officer, with lead-footed sarcasm. ‘Terrible pity.’

Nothing to say to that, either, Charlie realised. Just as he realised something else. Bastards, he thought: absolute bastards.

‘Time you were transferred,’ said Hickley. ‘Bad policy to keep someone in the same job for too long. Can even be dangerous. And you didn’t come here for a rest cure, after all, did you Muffin? You came here because you’re a shitty little spy who’s got to be punished. You know what we did to spies in the war, Muffin?’

‘Yes, Mr Hickley,’ said Charlie.

‘Tell me what we did to spies in the war.’

‘Shot them,’ said Charlie.

‘Shot them what?’ pounced the bully, at once.

‘Shot them, Mr Hickley,’ said Charlie.

‘Still should,’ said the man. ‘Don’t you think spies should still be shot, Muffin?’

Sampson included? wondered Charlie. He said, ‘Yes, Mr Hickley.’

‘Vacancy in the registration plant workshop just right for you,’ said Hickley. ‘You’re transferring tomorrow.’

The most dangerous place, thought Charlie: there was a small furnace and an indentation press and hammers and files and chisels and caustic solutions used in the spraying and the painting. A hundred different ways he could be attacked and hurt.

To the hovering Hargrave, Hickley said, for no other reason than to prolong his goading of Charlie, ‘Taking him away isn’t going to wreck the administration of the library, is it?’

‘No, Mr Hickley,’ said the prison librarian.

‘You’ll get on well with the new man,’ promised Hickley. He began talking directly to Hargrave but finished turning back to Charlie, to savour the moment fully. ‘Everyone does,’ he said ‘Sampson’s a good man. Knows the way things are supposed to work.’

‘Bastard!’ shouted Charlie, thirty minutes later, standing over Sampson in their shared cell.

The other man smiled up from his bedspace, appearing unconcerned at Charlie’s fury. ‘I didn’t fix it.’

‘Fucking liar!’

‘A state registered male nurse got sentenced for gross indecency: the hospital was the obvious place for him. So I had to be moved on.’

‘I could hurt you,’ said Charlie, striving for control. ‘I could knock shit out of you and put you in so much pain you’d wish you’d never been born.’

Sampson frowned up at Charlie’s bulged, sagging figure and then down at himself. Sampson never appeared to do any proper physical exercise but he was tautly thin, his body hard and muscle-ridged and Charlie wondered if it were a threat he could carry out.

‘Maybe you could and there again, maybe you couldn’t,’ said Sampson, stretching back challengingly to expose himself to any attack Charlie might make. ‘But I’ve made friends here. Friends who might decide that if I get hurt they have to try to even the score for me. You thought about that?’

Defeated, Charlie slumped back on to his own bunk. ‘Bastard,’ he said, emptily.

‘A lot of institutionalised prisoners do that,’ said Sampson. ‘Talk to themselves, I mean.’

General Valery Kalenin was a career intelligence officer, a man who entered the Soviet system – although fortunately from the safely protected distance in the early years from Georgia – when it was known as the NKVD and under the direction of Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, and risen to the rank of chairman of what is now known as the Komitet Gusudarstvennoy Bezo-pasnosti, the KGB, by the combination of outstanding ability and unfailing political awareness. Kalenin was a man who enjoyed his job and the power and privileges it gave him and more than any previous chairman personally involved himself in the workings and running of the agency’s myriad divisions. Kalenin, whose devotion to the service precluded marriage, even casual, passing affairs, all hobbies except the history of tank warfare and the enjoyment of a wide circle of friends, recognised that his refusal to delegate could be construed as a fault. But it was a fault he could not – despite some half-hearted efforts – correct. He was the controller and he needed completely to feel that he was in control.

Which was why the monitoring of the messages from the British embassy had come so early to his attention, rather than be filtered and relayed through a deputy, who might have waited for their cryptologists to break the code before bringing it forward. That might, Kalenin reflected, have been better anyway because at the moment all he had was an unintelligible jumble that he knew to be a coded message, was obviously therefore important but without the slightest indication of what it might be. Or what the dangers were that it might represent.

Kalenin stood at the window of his sparse office, gazing down upon the memorial to the network’s founder in Dzerzhinsky Square. First, months before, the warning that there was a spy within their service. Now this, a new code, so far defying all attempts at deciphering. Kalenin didn’t need it to be deciphered to know it was confirmation of the earlier intelligence.

He turned back to his desk and the telephone. The conversation with the code-breaking department was sharp and demanding, no instructions further than he’d already given, the call simply to let them know the transmissions had the personal attention of the chairman himself and were therefore important.

‘I don’t think that man’s human at all,’ protested the head of the analysts’ department, a mathematician named Malik. ‘I think he was made by a team of engineers and scientists in a damned laboratory somewhere.’

‘Then they made a mistake,’ said his assistant, not looking up from the message they were unsuccessfully trying to understand. They over-tuned his engine.’

They didn’t hurry. They didn’t have to. They knew and Charlie knew they could play with him as long as they liked, a communal cat with a captive mouse: a mouse, reflected Charlie bitterly, that didn’t have a hole to run to.

The workshop in which the registration plates were made was a hot, chemical-smelling, metal-clattering shell of a place, L-shaped with the furnace that caused the heat and made the metal malleable at one end, feeding out on to a conveyor belt lined either side by the indentation punches and continuing on to the bend in the L, where the spraying was done before the final sequence, the baking on of the paint in a small series of ovens almost as hot as the furnace at the other end. And every step of the process and cranny of the workshop a potential for attack, Charlie recognised, professionally. He drew on that professionalism, desperate to remember every trick and hint, trying to get a workspot on the outer section of the conveyor, where the wall was to his back and not in the middle corridor, the main walkway where people would always be behind him, straining to identify the main danger points in a roomful of danger. The furnace was the most obvious. It was gas-heated and the protection doors were always being opened and closed, for temperature checks, with frequent opportunities for him to be pushed forward, so the outstretched hand to save himself would go instead into the flames. And directly beyond, as well. The plates came out glowing, soft and ready for the numbered imprint, hot enough to take the skin off if they came into contact with an unprotected part of his body. The tidy-up section was the safest, Charlie decided: the plates were cool enough to handle here, beyond the impression stamp that could have crushed his hand from his arm if it were suddenly thrust into it. In the tidy-up section two banks of men, either side of the belt, honed off with rough chisels the unnecessary metal chips and edges from the stamping process and rejected any plate that had been badly printed, clipping it back into the return half of the belt for recycling. Charlie’s apprehension rose, further on. Here the plates were sprayed, under-coat first, then top-coat, men encased in protective clothing and helmeted and masked by filtering headgear, armed with spray guns that only needed the slightest redirection not to cover the intended plate but squirt instead a blinding stream into his eyes. And the apprehension remained at the drying ovens, where the danger of being thrust into the flames was even greater than at the furnace because they were open ended, the plates in continuous and slow moving procession through the banks of fire.