Agent Running in the Field

by John le Carré

  ‘I shall look into it at once’ – and a note to himself in ballpoint to prove it.

  ‘He’s also a bit cut up that we couldn’t get his daughter into Oxbridge. He feels all it needed was a nudge from us and we didn’t provide it. Or you didn’t. Which is the way he sees it.’

  Dom doesn’t do guilt. He does injured or he does blank. He opts for injured.

  ‘It’s the colleges, Nat,’ he complains wearily. ‘Everyone thinks the old universities are an entity. This is wrong. You have to go from one college to the other, cap in hand. I shall chase it’ – another ballpoint note.

  Second on his list of topics is Delilah, a colourful seventy-something Hungarian woman member of parliament who took the Russian rouble then decided she preferred the British pound before it collapsed.

  ‘Delilah’s in great shape, Dom, thanks, just great. A bit fed up to discover my successor was a woman. She said that for as long as I was running her, she could dream that love was round the corner.’

  He has a grin and a shake of the shoulders about Delilah and her many lovers, but no laughter comes out. Sip of coffee. Return cup to saucer.

  ‘Nat’ – plaintively.

  ‘Dom.’

  ‘I’d really thought this was going to be a flashbulb moment for you.’

  ‘And why would that be, Dom?’

  ‘Well, for heaven’s sake! I’m offering you a golden opportunity to remodel, single-handed, a home-based Russian outstation that’s been in the shade too long. With your expertise you’ll put it right in – what? – six months max? It’s creative, it’s operational, it’s you. What more can you want at your time of life?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not with you, Dom.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘No. I’m not.’

  ‘You mean they didn’t tell you?’

  ‘They said talk to you. I’m talking to you. That’s as far as we’ve got.’

  ‘You walked in here blind? Jesus Christ. Sometimes I wonder what those fucking Human Resources people think they’re up to. Was it Moira you saw?’

  ‘Maybe she thought it was better coming from you, Dom, whatever it is. I think you said home-based Russian outstation that’s been in the shade too long. There’s only one I know of and it’s the Haven. It’s not an outstation, it’s a defunct substation under the aegis of London General and it’s a dumping ground for resettled defectors of nil value and fifth-rate informants on the skids. Last heard of, the Treasury were about to wind it up. They must have forgotten. Is that what you’re seriously offering me?’

  ‘The Haven is not a dumping ground, Nat – far, far from it. Not on my watch. It’s got a couple of officers who are long in the tooth, I grant you. And sources still waiting to realize their potential. But there’s first-rate material in there for the man or woman who knows where to look. And of course’ – as an afterthought – ‘it’s wide open to anyone who earns their spurs in the Haven to be considered for promotion to Russia department.’

  ‘So is that something you might be considering for yourself, by any chance, Dom?’ I enquire.

  ‘Is what, old boy?’

  ‘Making a career move to Russia department. On the back of the Haven.’

  He frowns and purses his lips in disapproval. Dom is nothing if not transparent. Russia department, preferably head of it, is his life’s dream. Not because he knows the terrain, has the experience or speaks Russian. He doesn’t do any of those things. He’s a late-entrant City boy, headhunted for reasons I suspect not even he can fathom, with no linguistic qualifications worth a damn.

  ‘Because if that’s what’s in your mind, Dom, I’d like to make the same journey with you, if that’s all right,’ I press on facetiously or playfully or angrily, I’m not sure which. ‘Or might you be planning to rip the labels off my reports and stick on your own, the way you did in Budapest? Just asking, Dom.’

  Dom thinks about this, which means he first looks at me over his wedding-arch fingers, then into the middle distance, then back at me again to make sure I’m still there.

  ‘Here’s my offer to you, Nat, take or leave. In my capacity as head of London General. I am formally offering you the opportunity to succeed Giles Wackford as head of substation Haven. For as long as I engage you on a temporary basis, you’re within my gift. You’ll be taking over Giles’s agents and his Station imprest forthwith. Also his entertainment allowance, what’s left of it. I’m suggesting you hit the ground running and pick up on the rest of your home leave at a later date. What’s your question?’

  ‘Doesn’t play for me, Dom.’

  ‘And why would that be, pray?’

  ‘I have to talk this whole thing through with Prue.’

  ‘And when you and Prue have so talked?’

  ‘Our daughter Stephanie is about to celebrate her nineteenth birthday. I’ve promised to take her and Prue for a week’s skiing before she goes back to Bristol.’

  He cranes forward, frowning theatrically at a wall calendar.

  ‘Starting when?’

  ‘She’s in her second semester.’

  ‘I am asking when you leave on your holiday.’

  ‘At five a.m. from Stansted on Saturday, if you’re thinking of joining us.’

  ‘Assuming you and Prue have talked things over by then and come to a satisfactory conclusion, I suppose I can have Giles hold the fort at the Haven till Monday week, if he hasn’t rolled off his perch by then. Would you be happy with that, or miserable?’

  Good question. Would I be happy? I’ll be in the Office, I’ll be working on the Russia target, even if I’m living off scraps from Dom’s table.

  But will Prue be happy?

  *

  The Prue of today is not the dedicated Office spouse of more than twenty years ago. As selfless, yes, and upright. And as much fun when she lets her hair down. And as determined as ever to be of service to the world at large, just never again in a secret capacity. The impressive junior lawyer who had taken courses in counter-surveillance, safety signals and the filling and clearing of dead letter boxes had indeed accompanied me to Moscow. For fourteen exacting months we had shared the perpetual stress of knowing that our most intimate exchanges were listened to, watched over and analysed for any hint of human weakness or lapse in security. Under the impressive guidance of our head of Station – the same Bryn Jordan who today was huddled in anxious conclave with our intelligence partners in Washington – she had played the starring role in husband-and-wife setpiece charades scripted to deceive the opposition’s eavesdroppers.

  But it was during our second back-to-back stint in Moscow that Prue discovered she was pregnant, and with pregnancy came an abrupt disenchantment with the Office and its works. A lifetime of deception no longer appealed to her, if it ever had. Neither did a foreign birthplace for our child. We returned to England. Perhaps when the baby is born, she’ll think differently, I told myself. But that was not to know Prue. On the day Stephanie was born, Prue’s father dropped dead of a heart attack. On the strength of his bequest, she paid cash down for a Victorian house in Battersea with a large garden and an apple tree. If she had stuck a flag in the ground and said ‘Here I stay’, she could not have made her intentions more clear. Our daughter Steff, as we were soon calling her, would never become the kind of diplomatic brat we had seen too many of, over-nannied and shuffled from country to country and school to school in the wake of their mothers and fathers. She would occupy her natural place in society, attend state schools, never private or boarding schools.

  And what would Prue herself do with the rest of her life? She would take it up where she had left it. She would become a human rights lawyer, a legal champion of the oppressed. But her decision implied no sudden separation. She understood my love of Queen, country and the Service. I understood her love of law and human justice. She had given the Service her all, she could give no more. From the earliest days of our marriage she had never been the sort of wife who can’t wait for the Chief’s Christmas party or the
funerals of revered members or At Homes for junior staff and their dependants. And I for my part had never been a natural for get-togethers with Prue’s radically minded legal colleagues.

  But neither of us could have foreseen that as post-Communist Russia, against all hope and expectation, emerged as a clear and present threat to liberal democracy across the globe, one foreign posting would follow on the heels of the last and I would become a de facto absentee husband and father.

  Well, now I was home from the sea, as Dom had kindly said. It hadn’t been easy for either of us, Prue particularly, and she had every reason to hope that I was back on dry land for good and looking for a new life in what she referred to, a little too often, as the real world. A former colleague of mine had opened up an outward-bound club for disadvantaged kids in Birmingham and swore he’d never been so happy in his life. Hadn’t I once talked of doing just that?

  4

  For the rest of the week leading up to our crack-of-dawn departure from Stansted I affected for reasons of family harmony to be mulling over whether to accept the pretty dreary job I had been offered by the Office, or make the clean break Prue had long advocated. She was content to wait. Steff professed herself unbothered either way. As far as she was concerned I was just a middle-order bureaucrat who was never going to make the grade whatever he did. She loved me, but from a height.

  ‘Let’s face it, sport, they’re not going to appoint us ambassador to Beijing or give us a knighthood, are they?’ she reminded me cheerfully when the question came up over dinner. As usual, I took it on the chin. For as long as I was a diplomat abroad, I at least had status. Back in the mother country, I was part of the grey mass.

  It was not till our second evening in the mountains, while Steff was out gallivanting with a bunch of Italian kids who were staying in our hotel, and Prue and I were enjoying a quiet cheese fondue and a couple of glasses of kirsch at Marcel’s, that I was seized with the urge to come clean to Prue about my job offer at the Office – really clean – not tiptoe around as I had been planning, not another cover story, but tell it to her from the heart, which was the least she deserved after all I’d put her through over the years. Her air of quiet resignation told me she had already sensed that I was a long way from opening that outward-bound club for disadvantaged kids.

  ‘It’s one of those run-down London substations that’s been resting on its laurels since the glory days of the Cold War and not producing anything worth a damn,’ I say grimly. ‘It’s a Mickey Mouse outfit, light miles from the mainstream, and my job will be either to get it on its feet or speed it on its way to the graveyard.’

  With Prue, on the rare occasions we get to talk in relaxed terms about the Office, I never know whether I’m swimming against the tide or with it, so I tend to do a bit of both.

  ‘I thought you always said you didn’t want a command post,’ she objects lightly. ‘You preferred to be second man, not bean-counting and bossing other people around.’

  ‘Well, this isn’t really a command post, Prue,’ I assure her warily. ‘I’ll still be second man.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?’ she says, brightening. ‘You’ll have Bryn to keep you on the rails. You always admired Bryn. We both did’ – gallantly setting aside her own scruples.

  We exchange nostalgic smiles as we recall our short-lived honeymoon as Moscow spies, with Station head Bryn our ever-watchful guide and mentor.

  ‘Well, I won’t be under Bryn directly, Prue. Bryn’s Czar of All the Russias these days. A sideshow like the Haven’s a bit below his pay grade.’

  ‘So who’s the lucky person who’s going to be in charge of you?’ she enquires.

  This is no longer the kind of full disclosure I had in mind. Dom is anathema to Prue. She met him when she came out to visit me in Budapest with Steff, took one look at Dom’s distraught wife and children and read the signs.

  ‘Well, officially I’ll be under what’s called London General,’ I explain. ‘But of course in reality, if it’s anything really major, it trickles up the pyramid to Bryn. It’s just for as long as they need me, Prue. Not a day longer,’ I add by way of consolation, though which of us I’m consoling is not clear to either of us.

  She takes a forkful of fondue, a sip of wine, a sip of kirsch and, thus fortified, reaches both her hands across the table and grasps mine. Does she guess Dom? Does she intuit him? Prue’s near-psychic insights can verge on the disturbing.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what, Nat,’ she says after due reflection. ‘I think it’s your good right to do exactly what you want to do, for as long as you want to do it, and bugger the rest. And I’ll do the same. And it’s my turn to pay the bill, so there. The whole of it this time. I owe it to my barefaced integrity,’ she adds, in a joke that never pales.

  And it was on this happy note, while we’re lying in bed and I’m thanking her for her generosity of spirit over the years and she is telling me sweet things about myself in return, and Steff is dancing the night away, or so we hope, that I come up with the notion that now is the ideal opportunity to make a clean breast to our daughter about the true nature of her father’s work, or as clean as Head Office allows. It was high time she knew, I reasoned, and far better she hear it from me than from anyone else. I might have added, but didn’t, that since my return to hearth and home I was becoming increasingly irked by her light-hearted disdain for me, and by her practice, left over from adolescence, of either tolerating me as a necessary domestic encumbrance or plonking herself on my lap as if I were some kind of fuddy-duddy in the evening of his life, usually for the benefit of her latest admirer. I was also irked, if I am being cruelly honest, by the way Prue’s much deserved eminence as a human rights lawyer encouraged Steff in her belief that I had been left standing.

  At first the lawyer-mother in Prue is wary. How much exactly did I propose to tell her? Presumably there were limits. What were they precisely? Who set them? The Office or me? And how did I intend to handle follow-up questions, should there be any, had I thought about that? And how could I be sure of not getting carried away? We both knew Steff’s reactions were never predictable, and Steff and I wound each other up too easily. We had form in this respect. And so on.

  And Prue’s warning words were, as ever, eminently sound and well founded. Steff’s early adolescence had been a bit of a living nightmare, as Prue didn’t need to remind me. Boys, drugs, screaming matches – all the usual modern-age problems, you might say, but Steff had turned them into an art form. While I was gravitating between overseas stations, Prue had spent every spare hour reasoning with head teachers and form teachers, attending parents’ evenings, ploughing through books and newspaper articles and trawling advisory services on the internet for guidance on how best to handle your hell-bent daughter, and blaming herself for all of it.

  And I for my part had done my humble best to share the load, flying home for weekends, sitting in conclave with psychiatrists and psychologists and every other kind of ist. The only thing they seemed to agree on was that Steff was hyper-intelligent – no great surprise to us – was bored stiff by her peer group, rejected discipline as an existential threat, found her teachers insufferably tedious, and what she really needed was a challenging intellectual environment that was up to her speed: a statement, as far as I was concerned, of the blindingly obvious, but not so to Prue, who has rather more faith than I have in expert opinion.

  Well, now Steff had her challenging intellectual environment. At Bristol University. Mathematics and Philosophy. And she was entering her second semester of it.

  So tell her.

  ‘You don’t think you’d make a better job of it, darling?’ I suggest to Prue, keeper of the family wisdom, in a weak moment.

  ‘No, darling. Since you’re determined to do it, it will be far better coming from you. Just remember you are quick-tempered, and don’t on any account do self-deprecation. Self-deprecation will drive her straight round the bend.’

  *

  Having run my
eye over possible locations, rather in the way I’d calculate a risky approach to a potential source, I concluded that the best setting and the most natural must surely be the little-used ski-lift for slalom practice running up the north slope of the Grand Terrain. It had a T-bar of the old type: you went up side by side, no need for eye contact, nobody within earshot, pine forest to the left, steep drop to the valley on the right. A short sharp descent to the bottom of the one and only lift, so no fear of losing touch, obligatory cut-off point at the top, any follow-up questions to be dealt with on the next ascent.

  It’s a sparkling winter’s morning, perfect snow. Prue has pleaded fictional tummy trouble and taken herself shopping. Steff had been out on the tiles with her young Italians till God knows what hour, but seemed none the worse for it, and pleased to be getting some alone-time with Dad. Obviously there was no way I could go into detail about my shady past beyond explaining that I’d never been a real diplomat, just a pretend one, which was the reason why I’d never landed a knighthood or an ambassadorship to Beijing, so maybe she could leave that one out now that I’d come home because it was seriously getting on my nerves.

  I’d like to have told her why I’d failed to phone her on her fourteenth birthday, because I knew it still rankled. I’d like to have explained that I had been sitting on the Estonian side of the Russian border in thick snow praying to God my agent would make it through the lines under a pile of sawn timber. I’d like to have given her some idea of how it had felt for her mother and me to live together under non-stop surveillance as members of the Office’s Station in Moscow where it could take ten days to clear or fill a dead letter box, knowing that, if you put a foot out of place, your agent is likely to die in hell. But Prue had insisted that our Moscow tour was the part of her life she did not want revisited, adding in her usual forthright way:

  ‘And I don’t think she needs to know we fucked for the Russian cameras either, darling’ – relishing our rediscovered sex life.