‘I missed too much,’ insisted Gower.
‘In an operational situation you only have to realize one thing is out of place to know you’ve been turned over. You’re not expected to score a hundred per cent.’
Charlie took the duty officer’s recommendation of a pub with outside tables in an orchard with chickens running free, pecking at the fallen apples. Gower ordered beer, like Charlie, and drank with obvious enjoyment. Charlie eased his shoes off. Each was well into the first pint when Gower said suddenly: ‘I’m quite nervous, you know.’
Charlie frowned across the rough wood table. ‘About what?’
‘The job. What it will be like. Because that’s the trouble: there’s no way of knowing what it will be like, is there? Not really like. I wish I wasn’t. Nervous, I mean.’
‘I’m glad you are,’ said Charlie. ‘It gives you the right edge. I’ve never known an over-confident intelligence officer who was good at his job.’
‘You were operational?’
Charlie swallowed at the use of the past tense, nodding again.
‘Tell me what it’s like!’
At once aware of the man’s need, Charlie said: ‘There are some generalities. You’ll usually be working alone. So you’ll be lonely: miserable. It’s not uncommon, if you are sent in to a foreign capital, to be ordered to keep away from the embassy, to avoid it becoming compromised if anything goes wrong. If you are attached in any way to an overseas embassy, you’ll be unwelcome: diplomats are always frightened of people like us. You’ll make mistakes. A lot of the things you’ll be sent to do won’t work: most don’t, in fact. A success rate of twenty per cent is excellent.’
‘A failure rate that high isn’t going to look good on a personnel record.’
‘Hold it, now!’ cautioned Charlie, glad of the conversation. ‘We’re back to public school now, without the pretensions. Don’t ever look upon what you’re doing like it earns high or low marks to be totted up for a good end-of-term report.
‘Always remember an operation aborted or simply walked away from is better than a diplomatic incident that requires ministerial apologies to foreign governments and statements in the House of Commons. If anything goes wrong, you’ll be disowned: become a non-person.’
‘You’re not painting a very pretty picture,’ complained Gower.
Charlie had to put his shoes back on to go inside the pub for more drinks. When he returned to the table he didn’t immediately sit. Standing over Gower he said: ‘It isn’t a pretty picture. Ever. It’s not even exciting. Nine times out of ten it’s boring, dull routine: checking files or official registers, conning your way past officialdom, trying to make sense out of nonsense.’
‘You married?’ demanded Gower, suddenly. He held up both hands, in a shielding gesture. ‘All right! I know it’s a personal question, which isn’t allowed. But it’s important to me.’
Charlie hesitated, finally sitting down. ‘I was once.’
‘Divorced?’
Charlie shook his head. ‘She was killed.’
‘I didn’t mean to bring up unpleasant memories.’
‘It’s OK,’ said Charlie, which was a lie. It would never be OK: there would always be the guilt that Edith had intentionally put herself between him and the gun of the deranged CIA official whom he’d exposed in retribution for an earlier joint-service decision to sacrifice him. The long-ago time of the Cold War, recalled Charlie, without any nostaligia: it had been an actual crossing through the Berlin Wall, with final proof of a Russian espionage ring operating out of London. ‘Why’s it important for you to know?’
‘How can you live with someone – get married, have kids – without ever telling them what you really do?’ demanded Gower. ‘It’s got to be unnaturaclass="underline" impossible. People talk about their jobs. Go to the firm’s events, stuff like that. How can you go through life living a lie with someone whom you’re supposed to love? Cheating them all the time?’
Charlie sighed. ‘When I married my wife she was the personal assistant to the Director-Generaclass="underline" she knew what I did. Her knowing made it more difficult. Whenever I was away on assignment, she went through hell.’
‘You saying it goes beyond security: that it’s better if a wife doesn’t know?’
‘ Are you married?’
‘Not yet. There is a girl.’
‘I’m saying it’s something everyone has to work out for themselves.’ Charlie paused. ‘Any of your illustrious other instructors teach you properly how to lie?’
Gower gazed back at Charlie across the table. ‘No!’ he said, close to indignation.
Charlie sighed again. ‘Christ, I’ve got an awful lot to teach you, haven’t I?’
*
The transfer of much of the KGB to the Russian Federation after the Commonwealth of Independent States was formed from the old Soviet Union meant that as the head of the old First Chief Directorate Natalia Fedora inherited practically intact the entire overseas network of the renamed external security agency. And a lot more responsibility besides.
In addition to what she had controlled in the past it was now necessary to have intelligence facilities in the former satellite countries like Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia of whose intelligence services the KGB was no more the overall controller, but instead despised, no longer accepted interlopers. Added to which was the need to establish completely new networks in the republics of the new Commonwealth, now technically foreign sovereign states in which any legacy of the old KGB which once ruled them by terror was not merely despised but considered criminal intrusion.
The only practical way for Natalia to run such a sprawling empire was to delegate, which she did both to create the service she wanted and, equally important, in the hope of forestalling any danger from Fyodor Tudin, whom she objectively regarded as an enemy whose every move had to be anticipated and watched, at all times.
She had appointed the man head of the Commonwealth republics division. It was unarguably a prestige position of real and proper power, impossible for Tudin, one of the few old guard KGB survivors, to perceive as a demeaning secondary post. So demanding was the creation and supervision of such a division that Natalia intended the man to be occupied to the exclusion of everything else, certainly any conspiracy against her.
But Fyodor Tudin was a resourceful and energetic man, a very bad enemy to have.
Walter Foster was surprised the query had come by wire and not in the diplomatic bag, because there didn’t seem any reason for urgency. And airline-carried diplomatic mail only normally took two days between London and Beijing. The resident intelligence liaison officer shrugged, long ago having given up trying to make sense from a very great deal of what London asked.
It was a short reply, taking him only minutes to encode. Because the message had come by wire, it was regulations that he reply by the same route. That also took only minutes.
His message said: Hunter journey ends two weeks.
The following day the People’s Daily carried a leading article threatening the strongest measures against foreign interventionists fomenting counter-revolution within the country.
Ten
Li stayed closer to Jeremy Snow than a second skin. In every hotel the reservation was for a shared, two-occupancy room. Always Li chose as their restaurant setting small, two-place tables away from any chance encounter with other Chinese. The man invariably positioned himself on buses or trains to create a physical barrier between Snow and other passengers. The initial morning in Zhengzhou – and at every subsequent hotel -he accompanied the priest to the communal shower facilities, outside the washing cubicle when Snow entered, damply on duty when Snow emerged. No conversation between them was ever interrupted by Snow needing a lavatory: every time, Li seemed to feel the same need and occupied the adjoining space. He waited dutifully outside of lavatory cubicles. Each day he offered to dispatch any correspondence Snow wanted sent during their journey, while they travelled. Each day Snow said he did not intend to send any. Li kept asking.