Brian Freemantle - Charlie Muffin U.S.A.

Kalenin reopened the file before him, seeking a date. He would have liked to have briefed the man personally, but with only twelve days remaining before the end of the exhibition in Florida he did not consider he had sufficient time to summon him to Moscow and then return him to America. It would have to be a briefing by remote control.

Kalenin depressed the button on his office intercom, gave his order and then sat with his eyes focussed above the door, counting on the second hand of the clock mounted there the time it took the secretary to reply. It was a man who entered, one minute and forty-five seconds later. Kalenin preferred male to female secretaries simply because over a long period he had found them more efficient. He nodded on this occasion, impressed with the speed of the response.

Kalenin accepted the second file, opened it and stared down at the photograph of an open-faced, smiling man, his hair cropped into a college crew cut. ‘Yale’ was inscribed across the front of his sweat-shirt.

The result of a one-night union beside a park bench, twenty-eight years earlier, between a falsely hopeful factory worker and a drunken seaman in the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda, Anatoli Nosenko had been plucked from the orphanage at the age of four and then taken first to a special house inland at Kaunas and then, after a medical examination had proved his fitness, and his Western rather than Slavic appearance had been judged acceptable, he was taken across country to the special school in the Moscow hills. At the age of five, when most Western children enter kindergarten to scrawl with crayons, shape Plasticine and grope with their letters, Anatoli commenced daily eight-hour training to enable him to become a deep penetration agent in the United States of America. Within a week of his arrival, he was ascribed the name John Williamson and never again referred to by his Russian identity. His instructors, who themselves had been specially schooled in language laboratories, spoke to him only in American-accented English, he listened to taped American radio programmes and watched videotaped recordings of American television. He was taught baseball and allowed to favour a particular team and follow their fortunes from the league tables during the season. He ate hamburgers and knew they came from McDonald’s, preferred his Kentucky fried chicken straight and not in barbecue batter and found peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches too sweet. He thought root beer tasted like medicine and always chose Coca Cola, usually the calorie-free variety. At the age of fifteen, coupled with his continued Americanisation and education, there began the additional instruction, in radio communication and Intelligence gathering. When he was seventeen, Williamson, whose educational qualifications were at least three years ahead of any comparable American teenager because of the unremitting, concentrated tuition, underwent six months of final preparation, during which his role was made clear to him. He was to be introduced into America and allowed to create a completely normal existence, giving no thought whatsoever to the Soviet Union until the time when he received the message activating him for the work for which he had been so exhaustively prepared. That message might arrive within a year, five years, ten years or maybe – although unlikely in view of the effort and expenditure employed on him – never.

It was because of that training and expenditure that Kalenin deeply debated the utilisation of such a man. It took him a further thirty minutes, once again weighing all the alternatives, before making the commitment. The preparation of the briefing, to be sent on the coded diplomatic wire to the Washington embassy and forward from there in such a way that the sender would have no idea of the recipient or purpose of the message, took Kalenin a further seven hours and it was almost midnight before he again looked up to that clock over the door.

He leaned back, stretching, decided that the El Alamein campaign which he had intended to re-create on the floor of his apartment that night would have to be postponed.

The initial message, merely alerting Williamson that he was being activated, arrived five hours later in the bachelor apartment overlooking the port where he worked as a freight clerk to a shipping firm. Obedient to his training, his first response was to initiate the cover story to protect himself against any curiosity for what, to those who knew him, would be regarded as unusual. In preparation for such an alert, Williamson had let it be known that he had family in the east, and now he obtained a week’s leave of absence in Washington on the grounds of his father’s impending death after a long and painful illness.

By ten o’clock in the morning he had packed, cancelled all deliveries and set out for the poste restante mail-box where he knew his instructions would be awaiting him.

It was exactly nine years, eight months and nine days from the Wednesday morning when he had arrived, on a students’ ticket on the Paris-Dallas flight and then boarded the Greyhound bus for San Diego. He was very excited. The package was waiting and he immediately put it unopened into an inner pocket of his jacket and walked until he found an unoccupied park bench before unsealing it. He sat for thirty minutes, committing his instructions to memory, then found a washroom in a nearby motel where he shredded the paper and flushed it, piece by piece, down a toilet. There were some other things in the package, which he put into his pocket.

By noon he was at the airport, with a ticket secured for the three o’clock flight to Miami. There had never been a day when a part of him had not remained tense, in readiness for this moment. Many times he had tried to conjecture the sort of mission for which he would be roused, but never imagined it would be anything like this. Knowing the importance of General Valery Kalenin in the Soviet Union, Williamson recognised the degree of confidence they were placing in him.

The type of mission had not been the only surprise. The conclusion of the briefing remained with him, more indelibly than the rest. He had been trained for such an eventuality and schooled to perform the function, but had always wondered how he would react if he were told to kill a man.

And that was what the message had insisted, most explicitly. He was to discover the person who knew the K.G.B. chief’s identity, learn how it had come about and then, to prevent any further dissemination, kill whoever had that knowledge.

The flight was on time and the plane half empty, so the seat next to Williamson was unoccupied, enabling him to put his bags there and have more foot room.

He sighed. It was good to be working properly after so long. He wondered if he would be able to get the job done and return to San Diego within the week. In only one thing had he veered from the intense training he had received in Moscow. He had never been able truly to appreciate either American baseball or football, so the advent in the United States of European soccer had delighted him. He rarely missed a match of the Los Angeles Rams, and their next game, somewhat ironically, was against the Miami Rowdies. He didn’t want to miss it.

Jack Pendlebury felt no hesitation in bringing one of his squads into Palm Beach. Since they were not to be employed in any way connected with the exhibition, he was confident that they would not be detected by any check Giuseppe Terrilli might make.

Within an hour of his poolside conversation with Clarissa Willoughby, the American had withdrawn Roger Gilbert from Lake Worth and appointed him controller of the surveillance operation on Charlie Muffin, with responsibility for thirty men. It took Gilbert a further two hours to get his people into position, identify their subject and establish a rota system under which each group operated every third day.