Snow had become increasingly frustrated in the nine months he’d worked under Walter Foster. The red-haired, freckle-faced man looked and behaved like a timid clerk: even when there was virtually no risk at embassy gatherings of diplomats or Western enclave people, Foster was always twitching over his shoulder, inviting the attention they forever sought to avoid. So very different from the others. Bowley had always managed personal meetings in the early, first-arrival days. And George Street, too, using the flamboyant eccentricity of handlebar moustaches and floral waistcoats and an imported Rolls Royce to hide behind, deflecting any official interest by drawing it upon himself.
After three and a half years Snow didn’t have to be told to get everything, which was what Foster had said. He always got everything. Photographs, whenever possible. Any scrap of conversation, no matter how inconsequential. Twice he’d even supplied names of men at the time unrecognized at the middle level of the government both of whom subsequently achieved influential appointments, marking them as people to watch and monitor. And from Zhang Su Lin, when he’d had the man as an informant, he’d provided the virtual framework of the dissident movement that survived Tiananmen.
Fleetingly Snow regretted not being able to complain about Foster: get something done to improve the communication through the embassy. Was it so unchristian to think as he was thinking? Maybe, if any complaint affected the man’s career. But didn’t it go beyond Foster’s career, to his own personal safety? He was taking all the risks. Foster had the protection of diplomatic cover. Snow accepted he had nothing. Not true, Snow decided, in immediate contradiction. Didn’t he have the protection of God? Spiritual protection, unquestionably: just as his spiritual conviction was unquestionable. But this was temporal. Still not a difficulty. After three and a half years he was sure he had completely assimilated into a Chinese way of life, far more adjusted temporally than in any other way.
Snow planned his itinerary with infinite care. Every route he suggested took him into closed areas – because obviously these were the cities and places of interest – and he discerned from beginning negotiations at the Foreign Ministry that to press for the north might lead to a straightforward refusal. He instantly switched the persuasion to a southerly route.
It took a lot of discussion to finalize a route. It allowed him as far south as Chongqin, to return eastwards through Wuhan up to Shanghai before going more directly north, back to Beijing. It put him close to at least five restricted areas and maybe six closed cities. It would have been naive to hope to get into all, but if he penetrated just one or two the trip could be more than worthwhile. An additional benefit was that for the first few days he could travel alone without any official supervision.
It was not until Zhengzhou, on the sixth day, that he was scheduled to meet an escort to take him through the restricted areas. The guardian’s name was Li Dong Ming. His photograph showed a bland-faced, bespectacled man with rather large ears. Snow guessed him to be about thirty years old. If he was, they would be exactly the same age.
Natalia Nikandrova Fedova accepted that professionally she had been extremely fortunate.
She had been exonerated from any responsibility for the ultimately failed operation in England, which, incredibly, had turned out to be a personal affair for the ego-inflated satisfaction of the Directorate head, Alexei Berenkov. And then escaped completely the KGB reorganizational purges after the failed coup of 1991. Not just escaped: positively and materially benefited, when the KGB had been transferred to the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation, still headquartered in Moscow, but renamed as an internal security agency now. There had, of course, been the advantage in those early days of her being an officer in the external First Chief Directorate, not attached to any internal part of the oppressive apparatus which deservedly bore the brunt of the mass sackings, blood-lettings and even elimination of entire departments.
Natalia supposed there was a supreme irony that with her elevated rank of Major-General she now occupied the position once held – and finally abused – by Alexei Berenkov, who had been prepared to sacrifice her in his personal vendetta against Charlie Muffin, an adversary for whom one-time admiration became unreasoning competitiveness. Now Berenkov was disgraced, dismissed and stripped of all rank and privilege. And Charlie, who’d beaten Berenkov first with a phoney defection to Moscow and then again by refusing to fall into the London trap as a supposed Russian agent, was… was where? She wished, how very much she wished, that she knew. Whatever and wherever, he would still be in intelligence. He was too good to dump.
Natalia slowed the car at the traffic intersection at what she still thought of as Marx Prospekt, despite the Communist-cleansing name change which had altered the street maps of Moscow. She turned almost instinctively at the pause, looking into the rear of the car, annoyed with herself for forgetting to leave the bag with the clothes change and fresh nappies at the creche: she knew there would be spare things available at the nursery but she’d still telephone as soon as she got to the office.
Was it allowing too much self-pity for her to think she had been sacrificed, personally? Yes, she decided at once. Charlie had acted the only way possible – the only way he knew – as a professional intelligence officer. The setup was wrong and they’d both known it. She’d decided to take the chance. He hadn’t. And in the event she’d managed to rejoin the Soviet visiting group from which she had been prepared to defect without being missed, so there had been no inquiry or punishment.
The traffic began to move and Natalia looked away from the back of the car. Sasha couldn’t be considered a factor: neither had known then. Would it have made a difference, if Charlie had known? Perhaps. She liked to think it would. But she could never be sure. Determinedly Natalia rejected another reflection, this one probably more pointless than the rest. Whatever there might have been – could have been – for her and Charlie Muffin had ended: closed off forever, with no possibility of ever being opened or restored.
She had a baby whom she adored. A privileged life, despite the democratization which was supposed to have swept privilege away. And a high executive position, providing everything she could conceivably need, in addition to privilege. She was a lucky woman.
But not complacent. She could not afford to be, with Fyodor Tudin at her back. She’d made a mistake, agreeing to Tudin remaining as her immediate deputy. He was an old-timer, a relic of as far back as the Brezhnev era. Natalia knew she would always have to be wary of the depths of Tudin’s resentment of her being the Directorate chairman, rather than him.
As Natalia edged off the ring road at Yasenevo, into the skyscraper block of the original and still retained First Chief Directorate, she wondered if Charlie was as fortunate. She hope so.
Just over fifteen hundred miles away, Charlie Muffin stared down at the summons that had finally arrived from the deputy Director-General and hoped exactly the same thing.
Four
Patricia Elder’s suite came off the second arm of the new triangular ninth-floor layout at the centre of which reigned the starchily formal Julia Robb.
But the deputy Director’s room had none of the sterility of Miller’s. There were two flower arrangements, one on a small, elaborately carved cabinet of a sort that Charlie had never seen before in a government office. There was a display of art deco figures on the same cabinet and on a mantelpiece in the centre of which was a gold filigree and ormolu clock. There were screening curtains of festooned lace at the window, which had a partial view of the Big Ben clock and the crenellated roofing of the Parliament buildings. The deputy Director sat in front of the window, at a proper wooden and leather desk, not something fashioned from metal and plastic which looked as if it had popped out of a middle-price Christmas cracker. The only similarity Charlie could find with Miller’s quarters was the complete absence of any personal photographs. There would have hardly been room on the desk anyway: there were two red box containers and a string-secured manila folder Charlie recognized from the three – or was it four? – disciplinary hearings he’d endured over the years.