Charlie’s Apprentice Read Online Free PDF

What the fuck was this? It was like having to explain himself for being caught behind the bicycle sheds!
    ‘One of the central themes,’ isolated the deputy Director. ‘Your personal survival.’
    A poor shot, seized Charlie. ‘I’ve always thought personal survival is a fairly basic principle; a blown intelligence officer is a failed operation and invariably an embarrassment, to be explained away. There aren’t any embarrassments in those files to be explained away.’
    ‘Not publicly.’
    ‘All that matters,’ insisted Charlie. ‘What the public don’t know doesn’t concern them. They can just go on sleeping safely in their beds while the shadowy people clean up the shit.’
    She nodded, seemingly conceding the argument and giving no reaction to his swearing. ‘What comes first, for you? Personal survival? Or the operation?’
    He didn’t have to be defensive about that. Charlie nodded to the files. ‘If you’ve read those thoroughly you don’t have to ask me that!’ The indignation was genuine.
    ‘You’re offended?’
    ‘With justification.’ Charlie still wished he didn’t feel as if he were explaining himself to a school principal.
    ‘Maybe it’s all semantics anyway,’ she said, dismissive again. ‘All in the past. The dinosaur age. Cold War, white hats, black hats.’
    Quite a bran tub of mixed metaphors, thought Charlie: he didn’t believe dinosaurs existed in the Ice Age. Expectantly he said: ‘Now we’re looking into the new and different future I’ve been reading so much about in the last few months?’
    ‘Some of us are,’ she said, heavily. She extracted some obviously new and therefore recent sheets from the manila file. ‘You don’t seem to agree with a lot of what you’ve been asked to comment upon.’
    Charlie regarded her cautiously. Again he’d tried to avoid anticipating this encounter, but he had not expected it to be like this, so openly and consistently hostile. ‘In a Europe more unstable than it has been for fifty years, I considered many of the opinions naïve.’
    ‘Explain naïve!’
    ‘There were suggestions, in at least three theses, that because of the end of the Cold War – whatever that was – intelligence services could be scaled down.’
    ‘“Whatever that was”,’ she quoted, questioningly.
    Quick on her feet, judged Charlie. ‘Why don’t you define the Cold War for me?’
    ‘Why don’t you define it for me ?’ she came back, easily.
    Shit, thought Charlie. ‘Simplistic, because there was a Wall dividing Berlin and physical barriers between Eastern and Western Europe. Newspaper shorthand: spy-writers’ cliché.’
    ‘What did you think it was?’
    Shouldn’t have let her be the first to speak. ‘I didn’t think it was anything,’ said Charlie, lobbing a difficult return.
    She frowned and he was glad. ‘You’re not making sense.’
    ‘You know I am,’ insisted Charlie. He’d had her running about: not exactly broken her serve but getting some of the difficult returns back over the net.
    ‘The coming down of the barriers doesn’t matter, in reality?’ There was an uncertainty in her voice, beyond it being a question.
    ‘Not our reality.’
    ‘Tell me what our reality is,’ she demanded, gaining confidence.
    ‘What it has always been,’ said Charlie. ‘Finding out the intention of other governments and other world leaders, in advance of it becoming obvious, so that our leaders are not wrong-footed. Which means we now have to learn the intentions of more than a dozen separate governments of countries that used to be the Soviet Union but now consider themselves independent: the Russian Federation – which is also splitting up internally – most of all. And Czechoslovakia. And Poland. And Hungry. And Bulgaria. And how East is really going to integrate with West Germany. And whether communism is going to collapse in China, as it’s collapsed everywhere else. And what a close-to-bankruptcy America that thought it was the