There’d already been two contests between them.
The first had been Charlie’s pursuit in England and throughout Europe, doggedly unrelenting, stubbornly refusing the false trails and deceptions that Berenkov had laid and which succeeded in fooling everyone else. No doubt that time who had emerged the victor: the sentence at London’s Old Bailey for running the Soviet spy ring had been forty years. And Berenkov would still have had twenty-eight to go if he hadn’t been exchanged for the British and American intelligence directors whom Charlie led into Soviet captivity in retribution for their willingness to sacrifice him, despite all that he had done.
And then there was the Moscow episode during which Charlie had met Natalia Nikandrova Fedova. Not such a clear victory there but dangerously close. Certainly under intensive, necessarily brutal interrogation the Englishman Edwin Sampson, with whom Charlie had supposedly escaped from English imprisonment, after their staged treason conviction, had confessed that his function after Soviet acceptance had been to infiltrate the KGB. But despite the chemical and then bone-crushing questioning Sampson had maintained he didn’t know Charlie Muffin’s purpose in coming to Russia: that they had not been working together. The incident had come near to bringing him down, Berenkov remembered. He’d believed Charlie Muffin’s defection to be genuine and accepted the man into his home and sponsored his appointment as instructor at the Soviet spy school, and but for Kalenin’s defence and protection after the man had fled back to England would probably have been replaced as a security threat.
So this, an ultimate confrontation, was justified. Justified personally and justified professionally. And it was the one that Berenkov was sure, without any eroding doubt, he was going to win.
Berenkov realized that the sequence with which he made his moves was of vital importance. And the most vitally important action of all remained obtaining the complete specifications for the American satellite. So at first, frustrating though it was to do so, he ignored England completely. Instead, using the secure diplomatic bag as his route for communication, Berenkov issued a series of instructions to Alexandr Petrin at the San Francisco consulate.
Only when he was completely satisfied that the American was to be activated in the way he wished did Berenkov revert to England. Here again he issued a series of acknowledge-as-comprehended orders, some of which were bewildering to the receiving Losev because following established intelligence procedure they were compartmented, without explanation of apparent relevance. There was no elaboration, for instance, for Blackstone having to be humoured with the promise of a retainer. Or, not in those first messages, how alternative arrangements were being made to obtain the English information.
The first practical step was to have the increasingly resentful Losev open a safe-custody facility, operated by a two-key, photographic recognition access, at a particular private bank in London’s King William Street. Berenkov was an expert in tradecraft material and their uses from his period as a European field supervisor. He travelled personally to the KGB’s Technical Directorate installation beyond the ring road, at Lyudertsy, to ensure he got exactly what he required, even though each of those requirements was a very normal tool of the espionage profession.
It was essential that Charlie ultimately realize there had been a confrontation between them and that he’d been utterly defeated. So Berenkov had the King William Street facility identified by name and access number in the micro-dot created for him by the Technical Directorate scientists as the site of the ‘dead letter’ drop, sure its significance would register with Charlie: it was the location and the method Berenkov himself had used all those years ago in London to exchange information with the Soviet embassy there. And which Charlie had been the officer to isolate and then to penetrate. In addition to the micro-dot Berenkov obtained a one-time-message cipher pad and had the experts further evolve for him a comparatively basic transposed letter-for-number communication code, which by being comparatively simple would make it matchingly easy for British cryptologists to break.
Berenkov shipped everything to London, again in the secure diplomatic bag. Once more there were detailed instructions to each of which the London station chief had to respond individually, guaranteeing complete understanding.
There were blueprints still outstanding from Emil Krogh’s factory in California, which meant a delay to everything being set into motion (but the hindrance had its benefits.) The order needed authority greater than his, which meant discussing the majority of the intended operation with Kalenin. Berenkov accepted when he did so the perceptible reservation of the other man, wondering if, when it became the spectacular coup he knew it was undoubtedly going to be, Kalenin would move to rebuild the bridges between them.
‘As a complete espionage proposal it’s very fragile, Alexei,’ cautioned Kalenin.
‘I’ve built in many safeguards,’ insisted Berenkov.
‘It’s what can’t be foreseen that concerns me,’ said Kalenin, unimpressed.
‘The two can be separated,’ argued Berenkov. ‘The entrapment of Charlie Muffin won’t conflict with our getting the space technology we want.’
‘I don’t see how we can ensure one doesn’t impinge upon the other,’ rebuked Kalenin. ‘At some stage they have to become inextricably linked, according to your proposals.’
‘Only when I know the space material is safe,’ insisted Berenkov with his customary enthusiasm.
‘When you were imprisoned in England I personally involved myself in the operation to get you freed,’ reminded Kalenin. ‘There was a faction within the government of the time that criticized your being arrested in the first place: described it as culpable carelessness. I defended you, against accusations like that. And became the bait to entice the British and American directors to Vienna where we seized them. Which, if it had gone wrong, could have exposed me to the same accusation.’
‘I know all this,’ said Berenkov, guessing the path the conversation was taking. He supposed it was inevitable, sooner or later.
‘I would not welcome being called upon again to defend you against culpable carelessness,’ announced Kalenin flatly. ‘We none of us can afford to become involved in debates where charges like that can be levelled.’
Berenkov sighed, saddened but not surprised. It was, he supposed, a mark of the friendship still between them that Kalenin was warning him in advance how he would react if mistakes were made. He said: ‘I would not like to put you into such a position.’
‘May your saint be at your shoulder, Alexei.’
Berenkov swallowed, at the traditional Georgian invocation for good luck. ‘I wish I knew how to reply,’ he apologized. ‘I don’t know your folklore sufficiently well.’