Comrade Charlie (23 page)

‘August,' decided Aistov. He hesitated. Then he said: ‘The second Friday: it's my mother's birthday.'

This time Losev did the work. He carried everything in a box that fitted easily into his jacket pocket. He extracted it and settled at the kitchen table for the initial preparation. He took the dot from its protective plastic container with the special pointed-arm tweezers which he held in his left hand to apply the adhesive with the single-fibre brush in his right. When he nodded that he was ready Aistov took down the calendar and turned to the month of August. His hand trembling slightly from the concentrated strain, Losev lowered the dot to fit in the spot designated by his companion: it did so perfectly. Losev tamped it firmly into position and Aistov hung it back on the door. Losev stood back about two yards and said: ‘It's absolutely undetectable.'

The breasts of the August pin-up were less pendulous but her sex was quite visible. Aistov said: ‘I prefer this one.'

‘Could be mother and daughter,' said Losev. ‘Let's put it back like it was.'

Aistov returned the calendar to its original reading and followed the
rezident
back into the main room. The locksmith was at his post near the door and the other man was at the window, as they had left him. To the locksmith Losev said: ‘Free the door; it's time to go.'

They left as they'd arrived, one by one, Losev being the last to be sure everything was secured and left exactly as it has been when they entered.

The message and the time of the promised callback were waiting for Losev when he reached the embassy. He responded at once, forcing the unavoidable anger back as he drove through Kensington to the ‘safe' house and its telephone which Blackstone had as his contact point.

‘Did he give any indication of what he wanted?' Losev demanded at once from the duty telephone clerk.

The man shook his head. ‘Just that it had to be you. And that it was important.'

‘I'll believe it when I hear it,' said Losev.

Blackstone came on to the line precisely on time. He insisted he had been completely re-accepted as a loyal employee. When Losev pressed, the man said he hadn't heard but that he was still confident of being taken on to the secret project: if he didn't hear in a week he was going directly to ask for a reply.

‘So it's looking hopeful?' said Losev. The friendliness was difficult. There was nothing new or important in anything the man had said.

‘I think so. Certainly,' said the eager Blackstone.

‘I'm very pleased. So will other people be,' said Losev.

‘I was wondering…' started Blackstone and then stopped. He was doubling his horse-racing bets now and hadn't won for weeks.

‘Wondering what?'

‘This is just a setback, right? We're still going to go on together?'

‘Of course we are,' assured Losev. ‘I've got some news for you. There's consideration being given to some sort of basic retainer, on the weeks when there isn't anything positive.'

‘You really mean that!' snatched Blackstone.

‘I'm still awaiting the final approval.'

‘I'd be so grateful! You can't imagine how grateful!'

‘Just keep in touch,' ordered Losev, reciting the instructions he'd been ordered by Berenkov to relay. ‘At the moment nothing is guaranteed but it looks promising.'

‘I'll do my best for you,' said Blackstone anxiously. ‘I promise I will.'

Whether or not the British had broken the entrapping Soviet code had to be conveniently monitored and witnessed, so Berenkov set both up for London.

The first genuine Soviet espionage emplacement to be sacrificed was a dead-letter drop in the no longer used part of Highgate cemetery. It was a split-apart and sagging vault less than two hundred yards from Karl Marx's tomb. For a year it had been the undiscovered depository for minimally useful ship movement memoranda leaked by an Admiralty clerk, whom Berenkov also judged to be dispensable. Berenkov identified Highgate by acknowledging in code to the Russian embassy in London the importance of what they were receiving through it. Within twenty-four hours, fully observed by an undetected Soviet squad, the British set up their surveillance and twenty-four hours after that arrested the unwitting Admiralty clerk who was much later to be sentenced to eight years' imprisonment.

The second test involved a supposed Cuban businessman who was, in fact, a courier for the Dirección General de Inteligencia. Berenkov knew the man would be carrying a terrorist-customer list for Czech arms on a flight from London's Heathrow airport to Havana because Berenkov had ensured the delivery of the list, which was out of date anyway, to the Cuban embassy in London. On this occasion, in the same code, Berenkov cabled London on the value of the information being carried and supposedly ordered that any assistance sought should be given. Once more the airport seizure was witnessed by the watching Russians. The courier was not technically carrying anything illegal, for which he could have been arrested, but the terrorist list was seized on the grounds that it constituted information potentially useful to an enemy.

The code used by Berenkov for the two exchanges was the simple letter-transposed-for-figure cipher that the KGB's Technical Division had devised specifically for Berenkov. And which had been faithfully recorded on the micro-dot now attached to the girlie calendar in Charlie's apartment.

In Moscow Berenkov, satisfied that his code had been intercepted and broken, insisted on celebratory champagne and when Valentina asked what they were celebrating he said the very successful progress of an operation that was going to prove the advantage of sometimes acting audaciously.

In London Richard Harkness was equally ecstatic at their having penetrated a new Russian communication system although he didn't consider champagne because he never touched alcohol of any sort.

Both of what Harkness believed to, be intelligence successes had been commanded by Hubert Witherspoon. He didn't drink, either, so his celebration went unmarked as well.

24

William French, the electronics expert in the Technical Division, returned the favour sooner than Charlie had expected and Charlie knew he should have felt satisfied and vindicated but he didn't because things weren't sitting neatly in his mind, like he wanted them to sit. And there was a further uncomfortable dichotomy, an intrusion into his professional life by what he wanted privately to achieve by a reunion with Natalia. Which he quickly accepted was hardly a dichotomy at all because in these circumstances it was virtually impossible to differentiate between professional and private considerations.

He still tried.

Harkness was suddenly and unexpectedly leaving him alone, but realistically Charlie knew he couldn't rely on that continuing throughout the time Natalia was scheduled to be in London. And that he had therefore to remove absolutely the possibility of Harkness imposing another meaningless chore which risked keeping him apart from her.

The answer appeared easy and Charlie wished everything else was. From the information already released from Moscow he knew that Natalia was part of the delegation attending the Farnborough Air Show. And the Farnborough Air Show ran for a prescribed week in September. Still with three weeks' official leave due to him, Charlie filed the memorandum to Personnel and to Harkness requesting the entire period, to run before and after the show, to provide him with contingency time at either end and keep the period she would be in England sacrosanct from any interruption.

It was not difficult, either, to discover the hotel at which the Russian support staff were staying. A Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office had earlier in his career been a cultural attaché at the British embassy in Budapest, where Charlie had prevented the embarrassment of an injudicious involvement with an Hungarian secretary. The grateful diplomat returned Charlie's call within twenty-four hours and said why didn't he try the Blair, slightly off the Bays water Road. Just to be sure Charlie checked with an Inspector in the Special Branch Protection Unit, who confirmed the hotel while Charlie was still on the telephone.

Again Charlie allowed himself time at either end of the air-show week, reserving a day ahead and two days after the planned duration of the Russian visit. He followed up the telephone booking with a letter of confirmation and asked for confirmation in return, determined against anything going wrong.

And with conscious cynicism he continued to date Laura. He chose the weekend and rented a car and initially considered driving with her down to the Hampshire nursing home. But then changed his mind because when he telephoned ahead the matron said his mother hadn't come out of the relapse and wouldn't know he was there anyway. Instead they drove into Sussex and found a pub with oak beams and no slot machines or piped music in the bar.

On the way down Laura said Harkness appeared excited by the first major coup since his appointment as acting Director General but admitted she didn't know what it was because at the moment it was restricted to verbal reports to the Joint Intelligence Committee with the Cabinet Secretary taking the formal, four-copy-only notation.

‘It's got to be important then?' queried Charlie curiously.

‘Harkness seems to think so. Oh, I forgot! Witherspoon is involved somehow.'

Charlie waited until they got to the pub before trying to resolve an uncertainty that had grown worryingly in his mind since the investigation on the Isle of Wight, directly asking Laura if she thought Harkness was still targeting him.

Laura frowned and said: ‘Not at this actual moment: he's too caught up in this other thing, whatever it is. Why?'

‘I just wondered,' said Charlie uncomfortably. He didn't like making mistakes, ever.

‘Why so serious all of a sudden? You don't normally let it depress you.'

‘No reason,' lied Charlie. Shit, he thought: he wasn't getting the sort of feedback he wanted.

‘This is all pretty solemn for a dirty weekend in the country!' Laura complained brightly. ‘Can't we forget the department, just for a little while?'

Charlie made the effort, which wasn't easy, but Laura seemed content enough. They ate pheasant for dinner and drank their coffee in the chimney inglenook and the bed had an old-fashioned feather mattress into which they sank, like snow. There were fresh eggs for breakfast, which was a reminder of the Isle of Wight which Charlie didn't need.

Laura gave a mew of disappointment when Charlie suggested returning to London in the morning, so he compromised and stopped for lunch on the way. They still reached Chelsea by mid-afternoon and Laura said why didn't they lounge about for the rest of the day reading the Sunday papers and why didn't he stay the night. Charlie said that would have been fine but there were things he had to do, and they made arrangements to get together some time during the week.

Back at the Vauxhall flat Charlie sat thinking for a long time, until it became night and grew completely dark inside the living room. He finally put on the light and said to himself: ‘You're slipping, my son! And when you slip you end up flat on your ass.'

It was very late before Charlie went to bed because when he finished doing the things he had to do he spent a long time thinking again. In the morning he was late for work, because he stopped for an hour on the way, but Harkness wasn't looking for him so he was not called upon to explain.

The Soviet observation of Charlie was established as a twenty-four hour rotating duty, nominally under the supervision of a KGB officer named Viktor Nikov. The man was on duty that Sunday night outside Charlie's flat. He said to his companion: ‘Jobs like this really piss me off.' He suspected Losev had appointed him because of some personal animosity, although he couldn't decide the reason.

‘How much longer?' asked the other man.

‘I wish I knew,' said Nikov, with feeling.

Because the Blair was the designated hotel for the Russian party there was official justification for Losev's request to the management for a list of other registrations for the same period.

And Alexei Berenkov felt another flush of euphoria at the news of Charlie's reservation. Everything was unfolding as he intended it should: absolutely everything!

25

The physical reaction to what he was being forced to do began with Emil Krogh more than a week before his London flight. Some nights he did not sleep at all and on others he was always awake by three in the morning to lie, sweating with unformed fears, until it became light enough for him to get up. And then he was invariably sick, retching over the toilet pan until he couldn't be sick any more and then dry heaving until his eyes ran and his stomach and chest ached from the empty convulsions. He and Peggy slept in different beds and had their own separate bathrooms, but he still expected his wife to notice something, to make some remark, but she didn't. She had half suggested that she travel to England with him but he pointedly refused to pick up on the idea and she didn't press it, which was a small relief, but so small he instantly forgot it.

At Petrin's insistence they met for a final briefing session in the park again, although nearer the golf course this time. For once the Russian was prompt, arriving practically as soon as Krogh sat down.

‘You're not looking any better,' accused Petrin at once.

So today there wasn't going to be any legsspread relaxation and patronizing crap about the Californian weather. Krogh said: ‘I'm all right.' For weeks, long before the sleeplessness, he'd tried to imagine a way out, and the previous night, puddled in perspiration, he'd realized that suicide would be an escape: he'd had to get up earlier than usual to be sick.

‘You break down and everything goes,' warned Petrin.

‘I'm not going to break down. I said I'm OK.'

‘I'm going to London ahead of you,' announced Petrin. ‘Everything will be ready for you when you arrive.'