Comrade Charlie (2 page)

‘There are memos going back and forth about temporary authority and confirmed authority,' further disclosed the girl. ‘Nothing's been resolved yet.'

Charlie was resolving a number of things, though. The most important was that for the moment at least Sir Alistair Wilson was expected to return and not be forced into permanent retirement by the heart attack, otherwise the access restrictions would not still be in force. But just how long would the Joint Intelligence Committee and the Prime Minister wait? Equally clearly Harkness' role could not continue for any length of time on such a temporary basis. Why, with Charlie being relegated to duties a monkey could be trained to perform, had Harkness wanted his personnel history? Charlie had often wished he could get hold of it himself.
If
Harkness got access and
if
Charlie romanced Laura then perhaps he could persuade her to… No, stopped Charlie. Tempting though it was he wouldn't do that. Gossip was gossip, although still sufficient to get her dumped from the department. Photocopying personnel records, even for the man about whom they were compiled, was Official Secrets trials, the dock at the Old Bailey and ten years in those women's prisons where the girls got up to all sorts of hanky-panky. Bastard he might be but not that much of one, not yet: just close.

The waiter glided back and asked Laura: ‘How was the mousse?'

‘Wonderful,' she said.

‘Some coffee and brandy?' suggested Charlie.

‘I thought we might have that back at my place,' invited Laura.

Why hadn't he had offers like this from girls like this when he was eighteen and keen? Where would all those cinema usherettes and bus conductresses be now? ‘That would be nice,' Charlie accepted.

The bill clearly stated that a fifteen per cent service charge had been added but the waiter frowned at the exact money Charlie counted out.

‘Some people like to leave additional gratuities, you know!' the man sniffed.

‘Life's a bitch and then you're dead,' said Charlie. He'd seen it inscribed on a T-shirt and thought it was rather good: he'd been waiting for an opportunity to use it. Upon reflection he was not sure that this had been the occasion.

The bistro was sufficiently trendy for taxis to queue outside, so they didn't have to wait. Laura snuggled very close to him in the back and said: ‘That really was lovely.'

Charlie's stomach moved, as a reminder of what had been inflicted upon it, and his feet were aching but then they usually did this late at night, so he was used to that. He said: ‘A little overrated, I thought.'

‘Disappointing that there was no one famous there,' said Laura. ‘They all go there, you know? Famous people?'

‘I didn't know,' said Charlie. He really didn't want to go through the bed routine: that really would be tricking her. He said: ‘You could always lie to the girls tomorrow: make somebody up. They wouldn't know, would they?'

‘I don't suppose they would,' seized Laura eagerly.

She lived in the rich part of Chelsea, in a terraced house in a cobbled mews about which housing agents used words like exquisite and sought-after. She'd already gone ahead, leaving the door ajar, by the time Charlie turned around from paying the cab. Stairs inside led up to a first-floor, low-lighted drawing room. When he entered Laura was standing stonefaced but flushed by a telephone answering machine at the far side, beside the drinks tray.

‘I don't believe it!' she said. ‘I just don't bloody well believe it!'

‘Believe what?' asked Charlie, bewildered.

Laura gestured towards the machine which Charlie realized was on rewind, after relaying its messages. ‘Paul's on his way in from the airport. He wasn't due home for three or four days yet.'

‘Paul?'

Laura made another impatient hand movement, this time towards a studied portrait photograph of a pleasant-faced, kindly looking man. ‘My husband. He's in Venezuela…
was
in Venezuela.
Shit!
'

Charlie thought again of the T-shirt slogan and decided that sometimes, very rarely, life wasn't a bitch after all. Pitching the false regret perfectly in his voice, he said: ‘I see. That's… I'm sorry about that.'

Laura held out her hands to him and said: ‘Darling, I'm sorry. I really am
sorry
.'

‘So am I,' said Charlie, soft-voiced now. Careful, smart-ass, he thought: you're working towards an escape, not an Oscar nomination. ‘If he's on his way in from the airport I'd better be going, hadn't I?'

‘You'd better,' she agreed.

Laura came close, expecting to be kissed: she smelled very nice, perfumed and clean. Charlie kissed her, lightly, feeling backwards with a painful foot for the beginning of the stairway down into the mews.

‘Charlie?' she said.

‘What?'

‘I didn't get what I wanted,' said the woman. ‘You got what you wanted, though, didn't you?'

Charlie laughed, glad that Laura did too. He said: ‘You've made me feel a lot better.'

‘I've still got to wait for the same feeling,' she said.

The mews was sealed off at one end but at the other still had the canopied brick entrance from when it had all been stables and artisans' cottages, although the original huge gate had long since been removed. As Charlie emerged he saw someone paying off a taxi and hurried to get it before it drove off. When he reached it he recognized the passenger as the man in Laura's photograph.

‘Night!' said Charlie brightly.

The man was momentarily surprised at such friendliness from a stranger in the middle of London. ‘Goodnight,' he said.

Charlie got to the Pheasant with twenty minutes to spare before closing time. He downed the first Islay malt in one because that wasn't a drink at all: that was medicinal, to gaff the fish that still felt as if it were swimming upstream. He took most of the second the same way. He began to relax on the third, deciding that as evenings go the encounter with Laura had gone very successfully indeed. If she tittle-tattled back to Harkness the enigmatic remarks about the man looking in the wrong place for embarrassments it might be perfect. He might even be able to stuff the red tape right back down the man's throat.

The barman approached, mopping the counter, looking inquiringly at Charlie's glass. ‘It's been the quietest night for a long time,' he said. ‘Quiet all day.'

‘They're the best sort though, sometimes,' insisted Charlie. ‘Days when nothing at all happens.'

It was, however, far from being a day when nothing happened. It was the day when the US Defense Committee met at the Pentagon and approved the construction of the missile intended to form the nucleus of America's Strategic Defense Initiative, more commonly known as its Star Wars programme.

The approval session – and the identity of those Defense-approved contractors to whom development of the prototype missile was to be awarded – carried the highest security classification. But Washington DC is a porous place where rumours, even over something so sensitive, are balanced for their political advantage. After so many concessions from a Moscow and a Soviet hierarchy different from any they had known or dealt with before, the State Department saw no harm in the smallest of leaks, hopefully to influence the continuing Conventional Arms Limitation discussions in Geneva.

That most influential of aeronautical magazines,
Aviation Weekly
, was the first to publish an indication of the Star Wars decision, quickly followed by other monitoring publications and other monitoring commentators.

It was also monitored in Moscow, which was the State Department intention, although not at all in the way that they had expected.

2

No established order of Soviet society has suffered a greater upheaval by the ascent to power of Mikhail Gorbachev than the KGB, which is the most established of all orders of Soviet society. From the moment of its inception, within a month of the 1917 revolution, the Russian intelligence apparatus, through all its name changes, developed into
the
essential core of government yet insularly aloof from it. An elaborate spider's web of internal directorates and sections and departments, each enveloping strand interlocking with another enveloping strand to control the Soviet people, was spun to maintain the power of successive leaders and their Politburo. And those leaders were always made gratefully aware of the fact. In 1953 Nikita Krushchev – the man later responsible for its last name change to the KGB – successfully challenged the autonomy of the organization by defeating the bid of its then chairman, Lavrenti Beria, to succeed Stalin. Krushchev's mistake was introducing at the same time the edict that the Politburo approve every major international espionage activity before its commencement.

The KGB has always been chameleon-like in its ability to adjust its appearance to merge into its current surroundings. For a while, even after Krushchev's demise, the system of control appeared to operate, although those within the organization continued as they had since 1917, a people apart from other Russian people, with access to concessions and luxuries and privilege, untouched by the perpetual shortages and deprivations suffered by the rest. The adjustment to circumstances and surroundings took place at the very top: if the KGB had instinctively to know the attitudes of the Politburo, ran the persuasion, then its chairmen needed to be members of that ultimate controlling, policy-forming body. So the successive appointments were made, which put the KGB where it always sought to be, at the absolute heart and mind of things. Making the organization, in fact, stronger and more powerful than it had ever been before.

Then came Mikhail Gorbachev. And
glasnost
. And
perestroika
. And after freedom and openness came the most unimaginable change of all. The KGB was demoted, by every definition of the word. Chairman Viktor Chebrikov was transferred to another ministry and his successor, Colonel-General Vladimir Kryuchkev, was denied that all-important elevation to the ruling Politburo. The republics of Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania were allowed publicly to vote against Moscow's central control and thousands paraded in the streets in support of autonomy. Yet bigger demonstrations were permitted – and even more incredibly,
seen
on Soviet television to be permitted! – between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

The chameleon changes colour when it's frightened but this time the frightened KGB didn't know which hue to adopt: internal and external directorates and divisions instead scuttled around in disarray, seeking concealment and disguise.

There were two KGB executives, intimate friends yet pragmatic even in friendship, for whom the American Star Wars revelations destroyed any chance of the hoped-for, regroup-and-think concealment. One was General Valeri Kalenin, a slightly built Georgian and First Deputy of a service to which he had devoted his life to the exclusion of all else, even marriage. The other was his immediate subordinate, Alexei Berenkov, also a general, and head of the KGB's First Chief Directorate, its overseas espionage arm.

It was a mark of their friendship that Kalenin had alerted Berenkov at the moment of the Kremlin summons, bringing the man from the First Chief Directorate on the Moscow ring road to the KGB headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square.

The chief executive offices of the KGB are on the seventh floor of the original pre-revolutionary building, quite separate from the wartime, prisonlaboured extension added by Stalin. Berenkov waited for Kalenin's return at a window overlooking the square, with its beard-tufted statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the service's founder, and at the lights pricking on against the evening's dusk in the GUM department store beyond, wondering how many others had stood at windows in the building as he was now, mourning the passing of previous traditions. A lot, he guessed: just as a lot more would, in the future, whatever that future was for their organization.

Berenkov was a giant of a man, big in every way, booming-voiced and flamboyant-gestured. He was rarely affected by personal doubt, even during a period of imprisonment in Britain and thought that the current apprehension was unnecessary, supremely confident of his own ability to survive government policy changes. Which made Berenkov an unusual person. But then he was already unusual at his level within the KGB, someone with practical, gutchurning experience of what it was like to be an espionage officer in the field. From a London base he had operated clandestinely for more than ten years. Apart from rare snatched reunions under KGB guard in the hideaway places, he'd endured for all those years the separation from Valentina, the wife whom he adored. And still remained a getting-to-know stranger to Georgi, the son whose growing up from a child into a near-adult teenager he'd never known. Now Berenkov, a florid-faced man still heavy from the indulgence of being a Europe-wandering wine importer, which had been his London cover, enjoyed his equally indulgent and elitist existence in Moscow. He justifiably considered he had earned it all; the city centre apartment and the summer dacha in the Lenin Hills and the favoured Black Sea holidays and the Chaika limousine and the concessionary store facilities.

The door into Kalenin's office was electronically secured and Berenkov turned from the window at the faint sound of it being disengaged. Kalenin, a bearded man who did not often smile, appeared more serious than usual: he wore his full uniform, which indicated the formality of the encounter from which he had returned. He unbuttoned the tunic as he crossed the room, slumping into the high-backed chair.

‘Well,' he said, resigned. ‘We've been set our challenge by the new order!'

Berenkov walked closer, finding a chair of his own. ‘The Directorate? Or ourselves?'

‘It's one and the same, isn't it?' said Kalenin, whose primary function was chief tactician of the KGB's overseas activity.

‘So what is it?'

‘The Strategic Defense Initiative,' announced Kalenin, shortly. ‘We will not only match but beat the American development.'