Know more, in fact. Not just that she herself had survived the London episode but that she had maintained a position – risen in rank, even – and that therefore Sasha would always be cared for and protected.
She didn’t want to write. Not more than she had already decided to do. Apart from the obvious danger, minimal though it might be after the destruction of Fyodor Tudin, for her to write might make it seem that she was asking for something, and she wasn’t. All she was doing was telling Charlie what he should know. Nothing else.
Gazing down at the London file she had ordered assembled, Natalia suddenly smiled when the way occurred to her, carefully extracting one photograph. She took another, from her handbag this time. It was on this one that she wrote, very briefly.
That night, packing in the bedroom of the Leninskaya apartment, the baby awake in the cot beside her, Natalia said: ‘We’re going on holiday, darling. Germany is a beautiful country.’
It was a further and obvious precaution for Natalia to go outside of Russia, which it was now very easy to do under the new freedoms. She supposed she could have even gone to England. She wouldn’t, though: determined as she was – having tried as hard as she had – she could only go so far. But no further. Not to England.
Forty-eight
Julia Robb pointed with an outstretched finger to the open intercom, shaking her head but mouthing the word ‘later’, and Charlie nodded his agreement. He started to move towards Patricia Elder’s room but Julia stopped him, gesturing towards the Director-General’s suite as she announced his arrival. Charlie winked at her as he changed direction. He thought she looked very pretty.
Peter Miller was rigidly upright at his desk. The woman was seated alongside it but with her chair turned outwards, also to confront him. There was no chair for Charlie. Bloody fools, he thought. The stupidity of having him before them like an errant schoolboy didn’t upset him. Schoolboy, schoolmaster, it was all the same. Bloody daft. Standing upset him, though. His feet were playing up: he guessed he must have travelled about fifteen thousand miles and at the moment it felt as if he’d walked every one of them.
‘I want an explanation! A proper one. And it had better be good,’ declared Miller. His usually bland voice was tight with anger.
It was unfortunate he couldn’t give it to them outright, reflected Charlie. ‘It all seems to have worked out pretty straightforwardly,’ he suggested. ‘Samuels told me before I left Beijing we were finally going to get Gower.’
‘He’s to be released, without charge,’ disclosed Patricia. She seemed to be having difficulty with the tone of her voice, too.
‘So there’s been no public embarrassment, apart from the initial business with Gower,’ assessed Charlie. ‘We can surely smother that with a public relations blitz, about false arrest and imprisonment? Everyone must be very happy.’
‘You were supposed to have left Beijing five days ago! On a flight the embassy booked for you. Where the hell have you been, for five days?’
They really weren’t very good, either of them, reflected Charlie: certainly Miller shouldn’t have been showing this degree of anger. ‘Being careful,’ said Charlie, easily. ‘Snow’s death was a tragedy. Didn’t want any more, did we?’
‘You’re arrogant!’ declared Miller. ‘Arrogant and supercilious! I told you I wanted an explanation!’
‘I don’t understand how I’ve upset you,’ said Charlie, open-faced.
‘You disappeared off the face of the earth!’ shouted Miller. ‘We thought the Chinese might have swept you up, like Gower. We were about to approach the Chinese authorities for information, as we did with him.’
‘We want to know!’ insisted the woman.
‘A lot’s happened that hasn’t made sense – still doesn’t make sense – so I avoided the obvious risks,’ smiled Charlie, hopefully.
‘Don’t patronize us!’ warned the Director-General.
‘I’m not!’ asserted Charlie. ‘But you’ve got to admit some odd things happened. Things that just didn’t add up.’
‘Like what?’ demanded Miller.
Charlie levered his shoulders up and down. His feet really did hurt like a bugger. ‘You’ll think I’m rude.’
‘We think that already,’ said the woman.
‘Gower, for instance,’ continued Charlie, unruffled. ‘This could have been one God-almighty problem, if Snow had been roped in with Zhang Su Lin and all the other political protesters. So it was vitally important to prevent. Too important, I would have thought, for a first-time operation for someone untried and untested, as Gower was. And not just untried and untested. Hardly prepared at all, for the special circumstances of working in China.’
There was a shift of discomfort, Miller looking briefly to the woman. ‘That was a mistake. I’ll concede that.’
‘Which might have been mitigated if you had properly fulfilled the job you were appointed to do,’ said the woman, defensively.
‘My fault?’ asked Charlie, ingenuously.
‘An admitted mistake not alleviated by any instruction or advice you gave,’ she said.
You won’t annoy me, my lovely, thought Charlie: I wonder how much I am going to disconcert you. ‘Then there’s that business of keeping Snow away from the embassy. Never quite understood the reason for that.’
‘Our operation decision: I think the reason was obvious.’
‘Then there was the quickness of things. And their sequence,’ continued Charlie. ‘If the Chinese were seeking to identify a cell, why did they jump Gower when they did? Why didn’t they let him set his signal and wait until Snow came to pick it up? That would have been the obvious thing to do.’
‘That was their mistake, moving too early,’ said Miller. ‘What other reason can there be?’
‘Don’t know. They were certainly quick at the railway terminus, when they did try to pick Snow up. That really puzzles me, how that happened.’
‘Why?’ asked Patricia.
‘How they knew he was there,’ said Charlie.
Miller sighed, impatiently. ‘For God’s sake man, that’s obvious, surely! They followed him!’
Charlie shook his head, doubtfully. ‘It wasn’t easy, evolving a way to get Snow out: nor accepting, as I had to accept, that there would be a watch for him at airports. That’s why I made the phoney plane booking out of Beijing. And rehearsed him through the visits to the Foreign Ministry and the Security Bureau…’
‘Which failed as badly as everything else you tried to teach him and Gower!’ sneered Miller.
‘But that’s the problem,’ persisted Charlie. ‘It was the best I could think of – the only thing I could think of -but I wasn’t happy Snow could carry it off. He hadn’t had any proper training, after all. So I didn’t trust him to do it by himself. I set the routing: knew where he was going and how he was going to try to do things. So I picked him up when he left the Bureau. Not that he could see me, of course. Stayed a long way off. To see if he was still followed. If he had been I was going to feign some encounter at the terminus: lost Westerner approaching another obvious Westerner for help, to abort the whole thing and try to think of something else. But he wasn’t followed. I was sure he wasn’t. He had confused them. I covered him all the way to the ticket queue. And became even surer there. That’s why I got on the Shanghai train, to wait for him…’
Miller sighed again. ‘This sounds to me like a weak defence to a miserable failure that’s going to mark the end of any future for you in this department.’
Charlie frowned at the threat, refusing to be stopped by it. ‘Think more about it!’ he urged. ‘There were at least twenty people there. Soldiers and civilians. And Li, in control of it all. To keep the hypothesis going, let’s concede that they did follow him, even though I know they didn’t. It would have been two or three men. Four at the most. From the time he arrived at the station and queued to buy his ticket to the time he disembarked from the Nanchang train to cross to where I was waiting was precisely seventeen minutes. I know. I counted every one of them.’