Agent Running in the Field

by John le Carré

  *

  Steff and I grab a T-bar and away we go. First time up, we chat about my homecoming and how little I know of the old country I’ve been serving half my life, so a lot to learn, Steff, a lot to get used to, as I’m sure you understand.

  ‘Like no more lovely tax-free booze when we come to visit you!’ she wails, and we share a hearty father–daughter laugh.

  Time to uncouple, and down the mountain we sail, Steff leading. So a really good soft opening to our tête-à-tête.

  ‘And there’s no disgrace to serving your country in any capacity, darling’ – Prue’s counsel ringing in my memory’s ear – ‘you and I may have differing views on patriotism, but Steff sees it as a curse on mankind, second only to religion. And keep the humour down. Humour at serious moments is simply an escape route as far as Steff’s concerned.’

  We hook up a second time and set off up the hill. Now. No jokes, no self-deprecation, no apology. And stick to the brief that Prue and I thrashed out together, no deviations. Staring hard ahead of me, I select a serious but not portentous tone.

  ‘Steff, there’s something about me that your mother and I feel it’s time you knew.’

  ‘I’m illegitimate,’ she says eagerly.

  ‘No, but I’m a spy.’

  She too is staring ahead of her. This wasn’t quite how I meant it to begin. Never mind. I say my piece as drafted, she listens. No eye contact so no stress. I keep it short and cool. So there you are, Steff, now you have it. I’ve been living a necessary lie, and that’s all I’m allowed to tell you. I may look like a failure, but I do have a certain status in my own Service. She doesn’t say anything. We reach the top, uncouple and set off down the hill, still nothing said. She’s faster than I am, or likes to think she is, so I let her have her head. We meet up again at the bottom of the lift.

  Standing in the queue we don’t speak to each other and she doesn’t look in my direction, but that doesn’t disconcert me. Steff lives in her world, well now she knows I live in mine too, and it’s not some knacker’s yard for Foreign Office low-flyers. She’s in front of me so she grabs the T-bar first. We have barely set off before she asks in a matter-of-fact voice whether I’ve ever killed anyone. I chuckle, say no, Steff, absolutely not, thank God, which is true. Others have, if only indirectly, but I haven’t. Not even arm’s length or third flag, not even as the Office calls it, deniable authorship.

  ‘Well if you haven’t killed anyone, what’s the next-worst thing you’ve done as a spy?’ – in the same casual tone.

  ‘Well, Steff, I suppose the next worst I’ve done is persuade chaps to do things they might not have done if I hadn’t talked them into it, so to speak.’

  ‘Bad things?’

  ‘Arguably. Depends which side of the fence you’re on.’

  ‘Such as what, for instance?’

  ‘Well, betray their country for starters.’

  ‘And you persuaded them to do that?’

  ‘If they hadn’t persuaded themselves already, yes.’

  ‘Just chaps, or did you persuade female chaps too?’ – which if you’d heard Steff on the subject of feminism is not as light-hearted as it might otherwise sound.

  ‘Largely male chaps, Steff. Yes, men, overwhelmingly men,’ I assure her.

  We have reached the top. We again uncouple and descend, Steff streaking ahead. Once more we meet at the bottom of the lift. No queue. Until now she has pushed her goggles up on to her forehead for the ride. This time she leaves them in place. They’re the mirrored kind that you can’t see into.

  ‘Persuade how exactly?’ she resumes as soon as we set off.

  ‘Well, we’re not talking thumbscrews, Steff,’ I reply, which is pilot error on my part: Humour at serious moments is simply an escape route as far as Steff’s concerned.

  ‘So how?’ she persists, gnawing at the subject of persuasion.

  ‘Well, Steff, a lot of people will do a lot of things for money and a lot of people will do things for spite or ego. There are also people who do things for an ideal, and wouldn’t take your money if you shoved it down their throats.’

  ‘And what ideal would that be exactly, Dad?’ – from behind the shiny goggles. It’s the first time for weeks that she’s called me Dad. Also I notice that she is not swearing, which with Steff can be a bit of a red warning light.

  ‘Well, let’s say, just for instance, somebody has an idealistic vision of England as the mother of all democracies. Or they love our dear Queen with an unexplained fervour. It may not be an England that exists for us any more, if it ever did, but they think it does, so go with it.’

  ‘Do you think it does?’

  ‘With reservations.’

  ‘Serious reservations?’

  ‘Well, who wouldn’t have, for Christ’s sake?’ I reply, stung by the suggestion that I’ve somehow failed to notice that the country’s in free fall. ‘A minority Tory cabinet of tenth-raters. A pig-ignorant foreign secretary who I’m supposed to be serving. Labour no better. The sheer bloody lunacy of Brexit’ – I break off. I have feelings too. Let my indignant silence say the rest.

  ‘Then you do have serious reservations?’ she insists in her purest tone. ‘Even very serious. Yes?’

  Too late I realize I have left myself wide open, but perhaps that was what I wanted to achieve all along: to give her the victory, acknowledge I’m not up to the standards of her brilliant professors, and then we can all go back to being who we were.

  ‘So if I’ve got this right,’ she resumes, as we embark on our next ascent, ‘for the sake of a country that you have serious reservations about, even very serious, you persuade other nationals to betray their own countries.’ And as an afterthought: ‘The reason being that they don’t share the same reservations that you have about your country, whereas they do have reservations about their own country. Yes?’

  At which I let out a merry exclamation that accepts honourable defeat while simultaneously asking for mitigation:

  ‘But they’re not innocent lambs, Steff! They volunteer. Or most of them do. And we look after them. We welfare them. If it’s money they’re after, we give them a pot of it. If they’re into God, we do God with them. It’s whatever works, Steff. We’re their friends. They trust us. We provide for their needs. They provide for ours. It’s the way of the world.’

  But she’s not interested in the way of the world. She’s interested in mine, as becomes apparent on the next ride up:

  ‘When you were telling other people who to be, did you ever consider who you were?’

  ‘I just knew I was on the right side, Steff,’ I reply, as my gall begins to rise despite Prue’s best injunctions.

  ‘And what side’s that?’

  ‘My Service. My country. And yours too, actually.’

  And on our absolutely last ride up, after I have composed myself:

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘Did you have affairs while you were abroad?’

  ‘Affairs?’

  ‘Love affairs.’

  ‘Did your mother say I did?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why the hell don’t you mind your own bloody business?’ I snap before I can stop myself.

  ‘Because I’m not my bloody mother,’ she yells back with equal force.

  On which unhappy note we uncouple for the last time and make our separate ways down to the village. Come evening, she declines all offers to blow the walls out with her Italian buddies, insisting that she needs to go to bed. Which she duly does, after drinking a bottle of red burgundy.

  And I, after a decent interval, relay our conversation in broad-brush to Prue, omitting for both our sakes Steff’s gratuitous parting question. I even try to convince us both that our little talk was mission accomplished, but Prue knows me too well. On the flight back to London next morning Steff seats herself on the other side of the aisle. Next day – the eve of her return to Bristol – she and Prue have the most godawful bust-up. Steff’s fury, it emerges
, is directed not at her father for being a spy, or even for persuading other chaps to be spies, male or female, but at her own long-suffering mother for keeping such a monumental secret from her own daughter, thereby violating the most sacred trust of womanhood.

  And when Prue gently points out that the secret was not hers to divulge but mine, and probably not mine either but the Office’s, Steff flounces out of the house, goes to ground at her boyfriend’s place and travels alone to Bristol, arriving two days late for the start of term after sending the boyfriend to collect her luggage.

  *

  Does Ed put in a guest appearance anywhere in this family soap opera? Of course he doesn’t. How could he? He never left the island. Yet there was a moment – a mistaken one, but memorable nonetheless – when a young fellow walked in on Prue and myself while we were enjoying a croûtes au fromage and carafe of white in the Trois Sommets ski hut that overlooks the whole terrain, and he could have been Ed’s double. In the flesh. Not an effigy, but himself.

  Steff was having a lie-in. Prue and I had skied early and were planning a gentle teeter down the hill and bed. And lo and behold in walked this Ed-like figure in a bobble hat – same height, same air of being alone, aggrieved and slightly lost – stubbornly stamping the snow off his boots in the doorway while he held everyone up, then yanking off his goggles and blinking round the room as if he’d mislaid his specs. I had even flung up my arm halfway in greeting before stopping myself.

  But Prue, quick as ever, intercepted the gesture. And, when for reasons that still elude me I demurred, she demanded a full and frank explanation. So I gave her a capsule version: there was this boy at the Athleticus who wouldn’t leave me alone till I’d agreed to give him a game. But Prue needed more. What had struck me so deeply about him on such brief acquaintance? Why had I reacted so spontaneously to his lookalike – not my style at all?

  To which it seems I reeled off a string of answers that, being Prue, she remembers better than I do: an oddball, I seem to have said, something courageous about him; and how, when a rowdy bunch at the bar had tried to take the mickey out of him, he’d gone on hammering away at me till he’d got what he wanted and, implicitly telling them to go screw themselves, pushed off.

  *

  If you love mountains as much as I do, coming down from them is always going to be depressing, but the sight of a run-down three-storey red-brick eyesore in a Camden back street at nine a.m. on a rain-drenched Monday when you haven’t got the least idea of what you’ll do with it when you get inside takes some beating.

  How any substation came to finish up in this neck of the woods was a mystery in itself. How it had acquired the ironic sobriquet of the Haven was another. There was a theory the place had been used as a safe house for captured German spies in the ’39–’45 war; another that a former Chief had kept his mistress here; and yet another that Head Office, in one of its endless policy lurches, had decreed that security was best served by scattering its substations across London, and the Haven by its sheer insignificance had got overlooked when the policy was scrapped.

  I mount the three cracked steps. The peeling front door opens before I have a chance to insert my aged Yale key. Directly in front of me stands the once redoubtable Giles Wackford, overweight and leaky-eyed, but in his day one of the smartest agent-runners in the Office stable, and just three years older than myself.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ he declares huskily through last night’s whisky fumes. ‘Punctilious to the minute as ever! My warmest salaams to you, sir. What an honour! Can’t think of a better chap to succeed me.’

  Then meet his team, which is dispersed in two-man outposts up and down a narrow wooden staircase:

  Igor, depressed sixty-five-year-old Lithuanian, one-time controller of the best Cold War Balkan network the Office ever ran, now reduced to handling a stable of tame office cleaners, doormen and typists employed by soft foreign embassies.

  Next, Marika, Igor’s reputed Estonian lover, widow of a retired Office agent who died in Petersburg when it was still Leningrad.

  Then Denise, a tubby, feisty, Russian-speaking Scottish daughter of part-Norwegian parents.

  And last little Ilya, a sharp-eyed Russian-speaking Anglo-Finnish boy I had recruited as a double agent in Helsinki five years ago. He had gone on to work for my successor on the promise of resettlement in the UK. At first Head Office wouldn’t go near him. It was only after my repeated representations to Bryn Jordan that they agreed to take him on as a member of the lowest form of secret life: junior clerical assistant cleared to Grade C. With cries of Finnish joy, he seizes me in a Russian-style embrace.

  And on a top floor condemned to eternal darkness, my ragtag support staff of clerical assistants with bicultural backgrounds and elementary operational training.

  Only after we have seemingly completed our grand tour and I am beginning to wonder whether my promised number two exists at all does Giles rap ceremoniously on a stippled-glass door that leads from his own musty office, and there in what I suspect was once a maid’s room I have my first sight of the youthful, bold-faced, stately figure of Florence, fluent Russian-speaker, second-year probationer, latest addition to substation Haven and, according to Dom, its white hope.

  ‘Then why hasn’t she gone straight to Russia department?’ I had asked him.

  ‘Because we deemed her a trifle callow, Nat,’ Dom had replied loftily in his borrowed speak, implying that he had been at the centre of the decision. ‘Talented yes, but we thought we should give her another year to settle.’

  Talented but needs to settle. I had asked Moira for a sight of her personal file. True to form, Dom had filched the best line.

  *

  Suddenly everything the Haven undertakes is Florence-driven. Or so it is in my memory. There may have been other deserving projects, but from the moment my eye lighted on draft Operation Rosebud it was the only show in our very small town, and Florence was its only star.

  On her own initiative she had recruited the disaffected mistress of a London-based Ukrainian oligarch codenamed Orson who had well-documented links to both Moscow Centre and pro-Putin elements in the Ukrainian Government.

  Her ambitious plan, luridly overstated, called for a Head Office stealth team to break into Orson’s £75 million Park Lane duplex, bug it to the rafters and make constructive adjustments to a bank of computers installed behind a steel door halfway up the marble staircase leading to the panoramic lounge.

  As currently presented, Rosebud’s chances of getting the green light from Operations Directorate were in my judgement zero. Illegal break-ins were a highly competitive field. Stealth teams were gold dust. Rosebud in its present state would be just one more unheard voice in a noisy marketplace. Yet the further I delved into Florence’s presentation, the more convinced I became that, with ruthless editing and smart timing, Rosebud could deliver actionable high-grade intelligence. And in Florence, as Giles was at pains to inform me over a nocturnal bottle of Talisker whisky in the back kitchen of the Haven, Rosebud had found an implacable if obsessive champion:

  ‘Girl’s done all her own shoe-leather work, all her own paperwork. From the day she dug Orson out of the files she’s been living and dreaming the bugger. I said to her: you got a vendetta against this fellow? Didn’t even laugh. Said he was a blight on humanity and needed flushing out.’

  Long pull of whisky.

  ‘Girl doesn’t just cosy up to Astra and make her a friend for life’ – Astra being the codename of Orson’s disenchanted mistress – ‘she stitches up the night porter of the target building into the bargain. Spins the fellow this yarn that she’s working undercover for the Daily Mail doing a feature on the lifestyle of London’s oligarchs. Night porter falls in love with her, believes every word she says. Any time she wants to take a look inside the lion’s cage, five thousand quid out of the Daily Mail’s reptile fund and it’s hers for the asking. Immature, my arse. Balls like an elephant’s.’

  *

  I organize a quiet lunch with
Percy Price, all-powerful head of Surveillance, an empire to itself. Protocol requires that I invite Dom along. It is quickly evident that Percy and Dom are not made for each other, but Percy and I go back a long way. He is a gaunt and taciturn ex-policeman in his fifties. Ten years ago, with the assistance of one of his stealth teams and an agent I was running, we stole a prototype missile from the Russian exhibition stand at an international arms fair.

  ‘My boys and girls keep bumping into this Orson fellow,’ he complains thoughtfully. ‘Every time we turn over a shifty billionaire with his finger in the Russian pie, Orson pops up. We’re not case officers, we’re watchers. We watch what we’re told to watch. But I’m very glad somebody’s decided to go after him at last, because him and his lot have been bothering me for a very long time.’

  Percy will see if he can give us a window. It will be touch-and-go, mind, Nat. If Ops Directorate decide at the eleventh hour that another bid is stronger, there’s nothing Percy or anyone else can do about it.

  ‘And of course everything goes through me, Percy,’ says Dom, and we both say, yes, Dom, of course.

  Three days later, Percy calls me on my Office mobile. Looks like there’s a bit of slack coming up, Nat. Could be worth a punt. Thanks, Percy, I say, I’ll pass the word on to Dom as appropriate, by which I mean as late as possible or not at all.

  Florence’s cubbyhole is one step from my office. From now on, I inform her, she will spend as much quality time as needed with Orson’s disenchanted mistress, codename Astra. She will take her for country drives, escort her on her shopping expeditions and have girly lunches with her at Fortnum’s, Astra’s favourite. She will also up her cultivation of the night porter at the target building. Disregarding Dom, I authorize a sweetener of five hundred pounds to that end. Under my guidance Florence will also draft a formal application for a first covert reconnaissance of the interior of Orson’s duplex to be conducted by a stealth team from Operations Directorate. By involving the Directorate at this early stage, we are signalling serious intent.