Only during the subsequent briefings from Johnson did Charlie try fully to dismiss Natalia from his mind. Otherwise, in those first few following days, his mind ran the entire gamut of his totally misconceived (on his part), totally mishandled (on his part) and totally misunderstood (on his part) relationship with Natalia Nikan-drova Fedova.
There was no guilt about deceiving her during their initial encounters. She’d been officially debriefing him after his supposed prison escape – defection for which he had been set up by that Old Bailey court sentence of fourteen years. His deceiving her then had been professional. She’d even accepted it – a professional herself – when the love affair had developed, after his Soviet acceptance. A further deception, Charlie acknowledged, forcing the honesty. Love hadn’t been part of the affair, in the beginning. He’d been lonely and thought there might be an advantage in sleeping with a KGB officer and the ‘sleeping with’ had been good and sometimes better than good. He hadn’t been able to concede love – definitely not allow it to overcome his professionalism – when he’d double-defected back to London. The job required he return and the job came first, before everything and everybody. Nor had he been able to recognize what had happened between them the first time she’d risked personal disaster accompanying an official Russian delegation to London to seek him out, not able to accept it wasn’t a retribution trap for the damage he’d caused his misled KGB champion by leaving Moscow. Her second contact attempt, when she’d traced him with the photograph of their London-conceived baby, had finally proved to him how wrong he’d been. He’d tried, too late and too ineffectually, finally to go to her by returning to Moscow after Gorbachev and then Yeltsin, to keep her suggested rendezvous: by every day and at every hour going to the spot he believed she had identified by the photograph, until he decided he’d misinterpreted that like he’d misinterpreted so much else and that the photograph was her sad and bitter attempt to show how absolutely he had betrayed and abandoned her.
She had every reason to be sad and bitter, to despise and hate him. Having thought so much and for so long about what a fool he’d been, Charlie found it very easy to understand what he regarded as ingrained professionalism would by Natalia be seen as disinterested cowardice.
As the preparation days passed, bringing Moscow nearer, Charlie’s initial euphoria gave way to realism and from realism to depression. Why should he have thought that Natalia would ever want to see him again? It was preposterous conceit to imagine that after five empty years and every rejection she’d even want him to be in the same city or the same country as her! Or to acknowledge or accept him as the father of the daughter he’d never seen and hadn’t known about until the photograph with the four word inscription: Her name is Sasha.
He’d failed Natalia like he’d failed Edith, although the circumstances were entirely different. When he’d fled Moscow he’d fixed for Natalia to be the one to expose his initial defection as the phoney KGB discrediting exercise it had always been. When he’d humiliated, by brief Russian detention, the British and American Directors willing literally to sacrifice him – and run with their $500,000 to add to their shame – he’d thought only of his own retribution, not theirs to follow. It had been Edith who took the assassination bullet intended for him.
In his self-admission of failing them, Charlie wasn’t thinking of physical neglect or abandonment. His failure, to both, was never being able properly to say ‘I love you.’ He’d uttered the words, of course, but automatically and emptily. He’d never told either of them spontaneously. His entire life had been spent living lies and telling lies and being someone he wasn’t until the truth was so rare he didn’t know how to express it or how to show it or, more often than not, even what it was.
He told lies even to himself, that ludicrous bloody defence – professionalism – always there to excuse or explain away what he didn’t truly want or like to admit. Which was cowardice. He might be – had been, he corrected – a truly professional intelligence officer. But as a man he’d been inadequate.
Charlie fully accepted the intended permanence of his new role when Johnson confirmed there was no reason for him any longer to maintain his London flat. Charlie had only ever used it as a place to sleep and keep the rain off, so apart from the several photographs of Edith and only the one of Natalia and of Sasha and some books, there were no memories or fondness for the place. In the end there were only three cardboard wine boxes to be shipped care of the Moscow embassy. To empty his apartment Charlie employed one of those firms that strip properties after their occupants die and the men plainly thought that was what had happened to a relative of Charlie’s. The foreman said most of the stuff was crap and it was surprising how some people lived, wasn’t it? Charlie agreed it was. The man hoped Charlie wasn’t expecting a lot for it and Charlie said he wasn’t and he didn’t get it. The furniture and contents of two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen went for?450; the inside of the washing machine fell out of its case and smashed as the men were getting it from the kitchen and the television was sold as scrap to a dealer in old sets to be cannibalized for its parts. As Charlie watched the van and most of his lifetime’s possessions disappear down the Vauxhall Bridge Road the warning echoed in his head that if he didn’t adjust and conform he’d be withdrawn from Moscow just long enough to be fired: if it happened he wouldn’t have anywhere or anything to come back to.
The disposal of the flat meant Charlie had briefly to move into an hotel, which he did ahead of consulting Gerald Williams, which when the bills came in formed the basis of the inevitable dispute over which the deputy Director had to arbitrate. That the decision was in Charlie’s favour worsened the already bad feeling between them. Charlie fought for, and got, the most expensive of the three apartments the Moscow embassy housing officer suggested, a sprawling conversion in a pre-revolutionary mansion on Lesnaya with bathrooms attached to both bedrooms and a dining room separate from the main living area. Charlie negotiated an extra?20 a day cost-of-living allowance, on top of the highest rate allocated in Washington and Tokyo, and had the longest and most heated argument of all to operate not on a system of fixed expenses but on fixed exchange rates. And to be allowed to submit claims for whatever he spent in the currency in which he spent it. As dollars were an even more common currency than roubles in Moscow it meant Charlie gained the Washington diplomatic dollars-to-sterling equal parity conversion to compensate for the official rate fluctuation. The ruling gave him as much as a fifty per cent profit on every dollar claimed.
Through the Washington embassy Charlie discovered the FBI agent specifically tasked with nuclear smuggling was James Kestler, although there was no file upon him. Neither was there any Records listing for the man in London archives, but a man named Barry Lyneham showed up as the Bureau’s station chief. Charlie also studied all the traffic between London and Moscow about his posting, eager for the one Russian name that would have meant something to him. Natalia did not appear anywhere. Neither was she listed among interior Ministry executives supplied by Moscow station. Maybe, Charlie thought, Natalia had left instead of being transferred. Or perhaps been moved to another ministry like so many former British intelligence officers had switched to other, peripherally connected departments.
From his Moscow enquiries Charlie learned the department’s existing intelligence chief was Thomas Bowyer, whom he had not previously known but who sent a personal welcome. The interchange provided Charlie with a further advantage, although at that stage he wasn’t sure how to utilize it: within an hour of the cable exchange between himself and Bowyer, Charlie was lectured by the deputy Director how Bowyer’s seniority had at all times to be respected, convincing Charlie of a back-channel link between London and Moscow upon which his performance and activities would be constantly monitored. Forewarned was forearmed, he reminded himself.
One of Charlie’s final acts, with the overseas disruption grant Gerald Williams predictably opposed but which Charlie quoted precedence to obtain, was to buy two new suits and a sports jacket and shirts and underwear, which was the largest expenditure on clothes he could ever remember making, another positive change in a changed life. The very last purchase was a new pair of Hush Puppies he had no intention of trying to wear in the immediate future but which he considered a worthwhile investment against the uncertainty of Russian footwear. At the same time he bought a set of shoe-trees two sizes larger upon which hopefully to stretch them until the tentative day he put them on.
Charlie never seriously considered a farewell party because he didn’t have enough acquaintances to invite so he gatecrashed someone else’s. Billy Baker had been chief of the Hong Kong station, which was being closed down entirely in advance of the colony’s 1997 return to China and Baker arrived back in London the week before Charlie’s departure with enough made-in-three-days,?20 Hong Kong suits to last a lifetime, a container load of Japanese electronic equipment, a Chinese mistress described as a housekeeper and a small, expenses-purchased William and Mary mansion in Devon from which, in his retirement, he intended to lord it over the manor like he’d lorded it over Hong Kong: a lot of the suits were tweed, for him to dress the part.
The whole affair was a parade – or maybe a parody – into the past. Baker staged it in the upstairs room of The Pheasant, the pub they’d all used when they were based at Westminster Bridge Road and when Charlie got there intentionally late, to cover his uninvited arrival, there were so many people he had difficulty getting into the room and even more difficulty getting a drink. The room was beginning to cloud with cigarette smoke and the ice had already run out. In the first five minutes, after which he gave up counting, Charlie identified twenty operational and London-based officers whom he had known and sometimes worked with, as well as a lot of Special Branch policemen who had been the legally arresting arm of the service. Everyone seemed to have a frenzied determination to follow the host’s example and get fall-down drunk as quickly as possible. Billy Baker held court at the bar, the Chinese girl, who had to be thirty years his junior, bewildered by his side but doubtlessly happy at the escape from Beijing rule. When he saw Charlie, Baker embraced him wetly, thanked him for coming, and said wasn’t it all a bloody mistake and a bloody disgrace. Charlie said yes, to both. It was the persistent, in fact the only, theme in every group he joined and just as quickly left, not having anything to contribute and not interested enough to invent a lie about what he was going to do in the future to make them all believe he’d been dumped, like they had. The constant movement took him frequently to the bar. He was there when the voice behind him said, ‘Pretty depressing, isn’t it?’
Charlie wished he could remember if her name was Juliet or June, which he should have been able to do because she was one of the Director-General’s secretaries whose bed he had almost, although not quite, shared pursuing his pillow talk self-preservation policy. ‘Very. Drink?’
‘Gin. Large.’
‘You OK?’
‘Saw it coming, so I moved over to the Department of Health a year ago, before it turned into a St Valentine’s Day massacre. Secretarial supervisor in the minister’s office. Boring as hell but it’s rent.’
She was still very attractive in a carefully preserved, carefully coiffeured sort of way, although the hair was beginning to stray in the heat and the crush. ‘Wise girl.’
‘Lucky,’ she said, looking around the room. ‘There’s got to be at least forty people here who’ve been told to go or moved elsewhere.’ She came back to Charlie. ‘How about you?’
‘Moving on,’ said Charlie, which wasn’t, after all, a lie.
‘Sorry, Charlie.’
Would he be? wondered Charlie. ‘It’ll work out.’
‘Charlie the Survivor,’ she declared, gin spoiling the coquettish smile. ‘That’s what they always said about you, Charlie. Even the Director-General.’
Now she decides to tell me! thought Charlie. How much more would he have learned if she had admitted him to her bed? Too late to be of any use now: the Director-General she was talking about had died at least six years ago. ‘Is that what they all said?’
She nodded. ‘That. And a lot more. How are things otherwise?‘
‘Otherwise?’ said Charlie, playing the game. It wasn’t much but it was better than sobbing into their drinks like everyone else.
‘You happy?’
‘Happy enough.’
‘With anyone?’
‘On and off.’
‘Nothing permanent then?’
‘Nothing permanent.’
‘Me neither.’
Why couldn’t it have been like this when he’d tried to know her better? ‘That won’t last, someone as pretty as you,’ he said, gallantly. She didn’t try to refasten the top button of her shirt that suddenly gave way under the strain.
‘Do you want to stay here much longer?’ she invited.
‘I wasn’t going to, anyway,’ said Charlie. ‘Got something fixed up.’ It had been a depressing mistake to come at all.
‘Oh,’ she said, crushed.
‘I’m sorry,’ apologized Charlie, still gallant. ‘I didn’t know you’d be here. Can’t cancel it now.’
‘Some other time maybe,’ she suggested, without offering a telephone number.
‘Sure,’ agreed Charlie, without asking for one.
There was another wet embrace and the insistence they keep in touch from Billy Baker and a shrill giggle from the Chinese girl and a lot of damp handshakes as he made his way out of the room and down the tilting stairs into Westminster Bridge Road. The death of the dinosaurs, he thought, breathing deeply in the darkness: or rather, their funeral. He looked sideways towards the old headquarters building, expecting it to be in darkness, but it wasn’t. It was bright with the permanent office lights of whatever ministerial department had taken it over. Gerald Williams would shit himself at the thought of the electricity bill, thought Charlie.
‘Seems you’ve covered all that’s necessary,’ encouraged the Director-General.
‘There’s a scientific and military mission in Moscow at the moment. I’ve asked them to give him the technical briefing before they leave.’
‘That’s a good idea.’
‘Williams is complaining we’ve made too many financial concessions.’
‘He’s memoed me direct, covering his back against any Treasury enquiry.’ Dean was unaccustomed to bureaucratic politics. He’d started out finding it amusing, but not any more. If half his students had behaved in the back-biting, self-serving way of virtually all the people he worked with now, he’d have suspended them from their courses until they grew up. He wished he felt more comfortable with Johnson.
The deputy Director smiled. ‘Muffin’s certainly pushed it to the very edge.’
Dean made a vague gesture over his desk, somewhere in the disorder of which Johnson presumed Charlie Muffin’s file was buried. ‘He’s always pushed everything to the edge.’
‘I can monitor that closely enough.’
‘It seems to have been difficult in the past.’
‘I wasn’t the person controlling him in the past.’
‘Are you now? I thought the committee had been established to do that?’ The other man’s arrogance was irritating.
Johnson bristled. ‘I meant on a day-to-day basis.’
‘There’s been a Director to Director note, from Fenby: he’s making a personal visit to London to meet me,’ disclosed Dean.
‘You’ll like him,’ predicted Johnson, who already knew of the visit but wanted to remind the other man of his longer experience of the department. ‘He sees the grand picture: the sort of man who knows that politics is the art of the possible.’
At the beginning of their relationship Dean had suspected Johnson’s frequent invocation of Bismarck aphorisms to be a mockery of his previous academic career but he’d learned since that the German genuinely was Johnson’s hero, which was perhaps understandable in view of Johnson’s Foreign Office association. Dean twirled his spectacles prayer-bead fashion and said, ‘I hope Muffin really understands just how much politics is involved.’
‘I can monitor that, too,’ insisted Johnson.
John Fenby thought being the Director of FBI was like being the maker of the best Swiss clock whose wheels and cogs meshed together without ever going wrong by a single second. It seemed to Fenby that virtually every FBI Director since Hoover quit or retired complaining at the impossibility of working with the President or the Congress or the Attorney General or of being the victim of staff incompetence, their only ambition from their moment of appointment to get away from Pennsylvania Avenue as fast as possible.
John Fenby didn’t want to get away from Pennsylvania Avenue. If he had his way – which he was determined always to do – Fenby was going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming from Hoover’s original seventh-floor suite from which, under two successive Presidents, he had moulded the Bureau into a personal fiefdom unmatched since the Bureau’s creator.
Fenby, who was a small, rotund man not unlike Hoover in both looks and stature, coveted the Director’s role for exactly the same reasons as its founder. He adored the Bureau jet. And the chauffeured stretch limousine. And being part of an inner circle at the White House and up on the Hill. And of personally controlling an empire of thousands spread around the globe, anxious to respond to every command he uttered. Had Fenby not been, primarily for public awareness rather than religious conviction, a twice-on-Sunday churchgoer he would have believed himself God. He contented himself with Boss, which was a Hoover word. It was, in fact, a secret regret that he couldn’t go out on arrests and be photographed with a Tommy Gun cradled in his arms, like Hoover had been. But that had been in another age. He couldn’t have everything. What he had was good enough. And what he had most of all was an awareness of how things operated in the capital of the world.
Like today.
The corner table at the Four Seasons was reserved permanently for him, whether he used it or not, the other tables moved out of hearing. Although he was the favour-purveyor, Fenby was also today’s host and therefore solicitously early, already seated when the Speaker arrived. Fenby enjoyed being included in the frisson of recognition that went through the restaurant as Milton Fitzjohn strode across the room, the political glad-hand outstretched. The required my-you’re-looking-fine-and-so-are-you recital concluded with Fitzjohn ordering bourbon. The abstemious Fenby, who never risked alcohol during working hours, already had his mineral water.
‘So how’s my boy doing, sir?’ Fitzjohn, whose iron-fist control and manipulation of Congress exceeded even that of Lyndon Johnson, occupied an original colonial mansion in South Carolina and assiduously cultivated a Southern gentleman mien to go with it. He didn’t consider anyone, certainly not any White House incumbent from whom he was only two heart beats away, his superior, but ‘sir’ was one of several insincere courtesies.
‘A rising star,’ assured the FBI Director. ‘Someone of whom you can be rightfully proud.’
‘I am, sir, I am. Mrs Fitzjohn will be particularly gratified to hear it.’ Referring to his wife in the third person and never in public by her christian name was another affectation. ‘Natural that she should be worried, though.’
‘Quite natural,’ agreed Fenby. He’d had reservations posting Kestler to somewhere like Moscow and certainly with the specific nuclear brief, but Fitzjohn had insisted his wife’s nephew get a high-profile assignment.
Fitzjohn demanded a T-bone bleeding from exposure. Fenby ordered his customary salad and a second bottle of water.
‘Mrs Fitzjohn is a little worried, I have to say, about some of the things she’s hearing about Moscow. Lot of crime there: people getting killed.’
Only someone with Fenby’s committed dedication to remaining in power could have greeted that statement with a straight face. ‘I think you can tell Mrs Fitzjohn that I am taking every precaution to ensure James’s safety. Not only that: to ensure his career in the Bureau, too.’ The British approach had been very fortuitous, although Fenby knew very few directors, perhaps only Hoover himself, would have realized every advantage as quickly as he had.
‘I’m extremely grateful to hear that, sir. Extremely grateful.’
Which is what Fenby wanted everyone in positions of power or influence in Washington to be, extremely grateful to him. Like the CIA would be grateful to him if he had to sacrifice the Englishman who had caused them so much embarrassment, all those years ago.
That afternoon he memoed the Bureau’s Scientific Division at Quantico to ensure they had a sufficiently qualified nuclear physicist, if the need for one arose. He didn’t expect there to be, but John Fenby left nothing to chance. Which was why he called Peter Johnson, in London, too.
‘How were lessons?’
‘All right.’
‘What did you learn?’
‘Numbers.’
‘How many?’
‘Can’t remember.’
‘You’re supposed to remember.’
‘Why?’
‘You go to school to make you clever.’
‘Are you clever?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Why not all the time?’
‘People make mistakes.’
‘Do you make mistakes?’
‘I try not to.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s important not to make mistakes.’
‘Do people get angry?’
‘If I make bad mistakes, yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it upsets them.’
‘Do you get angry if people make mistakes?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘I’ll try not to make mistakes.’
‘So will I,’ said Natalia, a promise to herself as much as to Sasha.