Read Online Charlie’s Apprentice by Brian Freemantle - Free Book Online

stretched into more than a year, to rationalize how she felt. But never fully succeeded. It was, maybe ridiculously, not enough for her to convince herself of the true situation. That it was Eduard who’d abandoned her: never ever making contact – never a letter, never a telephone call – until he was about to arrive in Moscow. When he needed the things – showing them off to the coterie of grabbing, snickering hangers-on – that her official position could provide. Even those sickening, impossible-to-avoid visits had ceased during her last year at Mytninskaya.
    And now she was no longer at Mytninskaya. One of the benefits that went with her promotion – in a country and a city where there were no longer supposed to be elitist benefits but where there always would be – was a much more opulent, better-equipped and more comfortable apartment originally designated for members of the now discredited Communist Party, on Leninskaya Prospekt.
    Without needing a reminder of the time, Natalia went to the chrome-glittered kitchen to begin preparing the baby’s bottle: from the window over the disposal-equipped sink she could see the monument to Russia’s first astronaut, seemingly so long ago, in terms of history little more than yesterday.
    So much of her personal history seemed just like yesterday. And not just the Mytninskaya apartment, with its kitchen fittings so very inferior to this. An apartment she no longer occupied, she remembered, forcing herself to concentrate to get some cohesion into her mind. But the only address Eduard had: the only place he knew where to reach her. Yet it was still controlled by the Russian intelligence service. So this new address would not be divulged if Eduard tried to find her from the old apartment. Would he have tried since she’d left? Inevitably if he’d wanted something. Should she order that he was to be told where she was, if he enquired? Or try to locate him herself? With the power she now had – a degree of power which, after more than a year, she was still sometimes bemused to discover – she should be very quickly able to locate him and his unit or group or whatever it was called.
    If he had a unit or a group. All the military had been withdrawn from the satellites and the no longer linked republics: the army was being decimated, destroyed more quickly and effectively than if there had ever been a war. Would Eduard still be in the army? He’d enlisted on a commission – not been a conscript – so there would have been some protection, but if the military reductions were anything like those already announced the cutbacks would have gone far beyond, biting deep into the structure of the regular army. Eduard would still be the most junior of officers, even if he had passed the promotion examinations. The most junior of officers would be the first to be dismissed under such reorganization.
    Natalia completed the bottle preparation, leaving it to cool until Alexandra awoke. To what would Eduard be dismissed, she asked herself, brutally. Nothing, she knew. No home, no job, no monetary support. Nothing. So he could be one of the destitutes on the streets of Moscow, one of those shuffling, head-bent, sunken-cheeked men whom she drove by each day but never properly saw, or bothered to see, not thinking of them as individual people at all.
    Should she agonize about someone who had treated her as badly as Eduard had done: and who would doubtless treat her as badly in the future if they restored contact? It was difficult for her not to. But she didn’t want Eduard intruding into her life any more. Biologically he was her son, maybe. But nothing more. Therefore hardly enough. She had her own territory: her own peace. She was finally settled. She was in charge of an entire Directorate – perhaps the most important Directorate – of the reformed Russian security agency. Untouchable. Secure. There was a quick qualification: untouchable and secure providing she did not give Fyodor