‘The definition of a perfect intelligence officer,’ said Charlie. ‘The perfect intelligence officer is the sort of man that crowds are made of. Which is what I want you to become.’
Gower wished he didn’t feel so inadequate in front of a man he wouldn’t have even noticed in the street: and then the full import of the thought, against the immediately preceding definition of the perfect intelligence officer, came to him. He only just avoided smiling, not so much in amusement as in acceptance of the lesson. ‘I haven’t done very well, have I?’
‘I didn’t set out for you to do well. Or badly. Just for you to realize, from the absolute basics, what your job involves.’ Was this how schoolmasters conducted lessons?
Which was what he’d wanted so much to discover, conceded Gower: he’d been stupid, allowing the resentment. ‘Anything else I did wrong?’
‘Your other instructors didn’t mind you knowing their names?’
‘They didn’t seem to.’
‘Then why should you bother to conceal their identities, in a hostile interrogation? Cause yourself unnecessary pressure?’
‘You mean name them!’ Gower was astonished.
‘Why not? They let their names be known: why should you try to hide them?’
‘But that’s…’
‘… treasonable? It would be an arguable point. But in the circumstances we’re discussing, you’d have to reduce as much as possible what was being done to you. Use the names, if it’s necessary.’
Gower was concentrating now, not absolutely convinced – but growing increasingly so – of what he had to do. ‘What about the identity of the deputy Director-General, in such circumstances?’
‘The same, once your interrogators prove they’ve definitely identified you,’ insisted Charlie. It was looking hopeful.
‘And the location of Westminster Bridge Road as the headquarters of our service?’
‘Do you really think there’s an intelligence organization anywhere in the world that doesn’t know where every other organization lives, in its own country? Paperback spy writers identify this place!’
There was silence between them for several moments. Gower said finally: ‘I think I’ve learned a lot.’
‘You haven’t,’ Charlie contradicted. ‘You’ve gone through a good three-quarters of this meeting at varying stages of anger. Which I set out to achieve. So that’s something else you either didn’t learn or don’t remember, from your interrogation resistance lectures. You’ve lost the moment you let your temper go. Dead: maybe even literally. Don’t you ever forget that. Don’t you ever forget anything I try to teach you, but don’t forget that most of all.’
‘Every other training session had a title,’ said Gower.
‘This has, too,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s called survival.’
Charlie wrote three memoranda.
The first pointed out the obvious dangers of instructional staff allowing their names to be easily known to trainee officers and the even greater danger of the identity of the deputy Director-General being disclosed by the Personnel department, in inter-office correspondence.
The second was a detailed account of his initial meeting with John Gower.
The third official letter to Patricia Elder asked to be informed of any communication John Gower sent to her. It was, Charlie insisted, a particularly important request.
The official communication completed, Charlie tilted himself back in his chair, reviewing the first day in a new job he disliked intensely. He’d shown off like a bastard, he decided. But then, legally he was a bastard. It reminded him he had to visit his mother very shortly.
Seven
Natalia Fedova lived in confused guilt about Eduard. Her son had grown up – until the age of nineteen at least, the last time she had endured his being with her – to be a replica of the father who had abandoned them both when Eduard was barely three years old.
All the bad memories – memories she’d erased from her mind – had been brought back by the official notification of her husband’s death, just over a year earlier. Memories of the drunkenness and the beatings and the whoring – he’d been in bed with a prostitute the night she’d actually given birth to Eduard, prematurely – had all flooded back.
But at least, in the first year, he had carried himself with some danger-hinting charm, helped by the dash of a naval officer’s uniform. Initial charm was the saving trait that Eduard had failed to inherit. It hadn’t been so obvious when he had been at university: none of it had been obvious then. It had all emerged, once he’d joined the officer cadet schooclass="underline" considered himself a man, able to do anything a real man could do. A large-for-his-size, perhaps overly confident teenager had left her. The person who returned from the academy had been an army-coarsened, foul-behaved, even fouler-smelling stranger interested only in the material benefits she could provide. Like the car and the apartment at Mytninskaya which he’d literally invaded with other army cadets as ugly and as frightening as himself and who he said were his friends she had to like. Later they had invaded with their whores when she was away, doing to her carefully maintained home whatever they liked, breaking and smashing and soiling. She shuddered at the last word, insufficient to describe the blood and stains and filth she’d found in her own bed, when she’d returned.
Despite which, despite everything, he was still her son, a son she felt – and could never stop feeling – she had abandoned.
She had tried so very hard over the months that now stretched into more than a year, to rationalize how she felt. But never fully succeeded. It was, maybe ridiculously, not enough for her to convince herself of the true situation. That it was Eduard who’d abandoned her: never ever making contact – never a letter, never a telephone call – until he was about to arrive in Moscow. When he needed the things – showing them off to the coterie of grabbing, snickering hangers-on – that her official position could provide. Even those sickening, impossible-to-avoid visits had ceased during her last year at Mytninskaya.
And now she was no longer at Mytninskaya. One of the benefits that went with her promotion – in a country and a city where there were no longer supposed to be elitist benefits but where there always would be – was a much more opulent, better-equipped and more comfortable apartment originally designated for members of the now discredited Communist Party, on Leninskaya Prospekt.
Without needing a reminder of the time, Natalia went to the chrome-glittered kitchen to begin preparing the baby’s bottle: from the window over the disposal-equipped sink she could see the monument to Russia’s first astronaut, seemingly so long ago, in terms of history little more than yesterday.
So much of her personal history seemed just like yesterday. And not just the Mytninskaya apartment, with its kitchen fittings so very inferior to this. An apartment she no longer occupied, she remembered, forcing herself to concentrate to get some cohesion into her mind. But the only address Eduard had: the only place he knew where to reach her. Yet it was still controlled by the Russian intelligence service. So this new address would not be divulged if Eduard tried to find her from the old apartment. Would he have tried since she’d left? Inevitably if he’d wanted something. Should she order that he was to be told where she was, if he enquired? Or try to locate him herself? With the power she now had – a degree of power which, after more than a year, she was still sometimes bemused to discover – she should be very quickly able to locate him and his unit or group or whatever it was called.
If he had a unit or a group. All the military had been withdrawn from the satellites and the no longer linked republics: the army was being decimated, destroyed more quickly and effectively than if there had ever been a war. Would Eduard still be in the army? He’d enlisted on a commission – not been a conscript – so there would have been some protection, but if the military reductions were anything like those already announced the cutbacks would have gone far beyond, biting deep into the structure of the regular army. Eduard would still be the most junior of officers, even if he had passed the promotion examinations. The most junior of officers would be the first to be dismissed under such reorganization.