Agent Running in the Field

by John le Carré

  So it’s not until Peterborough that, sheltered by a giveaway copy of the Evening Standard, I touch in an endless string of digits and apply myself to agent Pitchfork’s unsatisfactory case history.

  *

  His name is Sergei Borisovich Kusnetsev, and henceforth against all known rules of my trade I will call him plain Sergei. He is the Petersburg-born son and grandson of Chekists, his grandfather an honoured general of the NKVD buried in the Kremlin walls, his father an ex-KGB colonel who died of multiple wounds sustained in Chechnya. So far so good. But whether Sergei is the true heir to this noble lineage remains uncertain.

  The known facts argue in his favour. But there are a lot of them, some would say too many. At sixteen he was sent to a special school near Perm, which in addition to physics taught ‘political strategy’, a euphemism for conspiracy and espionage.

  At nineteen he entered Moscow State University. On graduating magna cum laude in Physics and English he was selected for further training at a special school for sleeper agents. From the first day of his two-year course, according to his testimony, he determined to defect to whichever Western country he was assigned to, which explains why upon arrival at Edinburgh airport at ten at night he asked politely to speak to a ‘high officer of British Intelligence’.

  His ostensible reasons for doing this were unimpeachable. From an early age he claimed to have secretly worshipped at the feet of such luminaries of physics and humanism as Andrei Sakharov, Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman and our own Stephen Hawking. Always he had dreamed of liberty for all, science for all, humanism for all. How then could he not hate the barbarian autocrat Vladimir Putin and his wicked works?

  Sergei was also by his own admission homosexual. This fact of itself, had it become known to his fellow students or instructors, would have had him instantly chucked off the course. But according to Sergei this never happened. Somehow he preserved a heterosexual front, flirting with the girls on the course and even going to bed with a couple – according to himself, purely for cover purposes.

  And in substantiation of all the above, just look at the unexpected treasure chest sitting on the table in front of his bemused debriefers: two suitcases and one backpack containing between them an entire toolkit of the authentic spy: carbons for secret writing impregnated with the nearly latest compounds; a fictional girlfriend to write to in Denmark, the covert message to be written in invisible carbon between the lines; a subminiature camera built into a fob for a key ring; three thousand pounds of start-up money in tens and twenties hidden in the base of one suitcase; a wad of one-time pads and for a bonne bouche the phone number in Paris that may be called in emergency only.

  And everything tallied, right down to his pen portraits of his pseudonymous trainers and fellow trainees, the tricks of the trade he has been taught, the training gigs he has undertaken and his holy mission as a loyal Russian sleeper agent, which he reeled off like a mantra: study hard, earn the respect of your scientific colleagues, espouse their values and philosophy, write papers for their learned journals. In emergency, never under any pretext attempt to contact the depleted rezidentura at the Russian Embassy in London because nobody will have heard of you and anyway rezidenturas don’t service sleeper agents, who are an elite to themselves, hand-raised practically from birth and controlled by their own exclusive team at Moscow Centre. Rise with the tide, contact us every month and dream of Mother Russia every night.

  The only point of curiosity – and for his debriefers something more than curiosity – was that there was not one grain of new or marketable intelligence in any of it. Every nugget he revealed had been revealed by previous defectors: the personalities, the teaching methods, the tradecraft, even the spies’ toys, two of which were duplicated in the black museum in the distinguished visitors’ suite on the ground floor of Head Office.

  *

  The debriefers’ reservations notwithstanding, Russia department under the now absent Bryn Jordan awarded Pitchfork the full defectors’ welcome, taking him out to dinners and football matches, co-drafting his monthly reports to his fictional girlfriend in Denmark about the doings of his scientific colleagues, bugging his rooms, hacking his communications and intermittently placing him under covert surveillance. And waiting.

  But for what? For six, eight, twelve costly months came not one spark of life from his Moscow Centre handlers: not a letter with or without its secret under-text, not an email, phone call or magic phrase spoken on a predetermined commercial radio broadcast at a predetermined hour. Have they given him up? Have they rumbled him? Have they woken to his covert homosexuality and drawn their conclusions?

  As each barren month succeeded the last, Russia department’s patience evaporated until a day when Pitchfork was turned over to the Haven for ‘maintenance and non-active development’ – or, as Giles had it, ‘to be handled with a thick pair of rubber gloves and a very long pair of asbestos tongs, because if ever I smelt triple, this boy has all the markings and then some’.

  The markings maybe, but if so they were yesterday’s. Today, if experience told me anything, Sergei Borisovich was just one more poor player in the endless cycle of Russian double-double games who has had his hour and been tossed away. And now he has decided it’s time to press his help button.

  *

  The noisy kids have removed themselves to the buffet car. Alone in my corner seat I call Sergei on the mobile phone we gave him and get the same orderly, expressionless voice I remember from the handover ceremony with Giles back in February. I tell him I am responding to his call. He thanks me. I ask him how he is. He is well, Peter. I say I won’t be arriving in York before eleven-thirty and does he need a meeting tonight or can it wait till morning? He is tired, Peter, so maybe tomorrow will be better, thank you. So much for ‘top urgent’. I tell him we will be reverting to our ‘traditional arrangement’ and ask ‘Are you comfortable with that?’ because the agent in the field, however dubious, must always have the last word on matters of tradecraft. Thank you, Peter, he is comfortable with the traditional arrangement.

  From my ill-smelling hotel bedroom I again try Florence’s Office mobile phone. It is by now after midnight. More electronic howl. Having no other number for her, I call Ilya at the Haven. Has he received any late word on Rosebud?

  ‘Sorry, Nat, not a dicky bird.’

  ‘Well, you don’t need to be so bloody flippant about it,’ I snap at him and ring off in a huff.

  I might have asked him whether by any chance he has heard from Florence, or happens to know why her Office mobile is cut off, but Ilya is young and volatile and I don’t want the whole Haven family in a ferment. It is incumbent on all serving members to provide a landline number where they can be contacted out of hours in case no mobile phone signal is available. The last landline number Florence registered was in Hampstead, where I recall that she also likes to run. Nobody seems to have noticed that Hampstead didn’t exactly tally with her claim to live with her parents in Pimlico but then, as Florence assured me, there’s always the 24 bus.

  I dial the Hampstead number, get the machine and say I am Peter from Customer Security and we have reason to believe her account has been hacked, so for her own protection please to call this number soonest. I drink a lot of whisky and try to sleep.

  *

  The ‘traditional procedure’ I am enforcing on Sergei dated from the days when he was being treated as a live double agent with a serious prospect of development. The pick-up point was the forecourt to York city racecourse. He was to arrive by bus, armed with a copy of the previous day’s Yorkshire Post while his case officer waited in a lay-by in an Office car. Sergei would dawdle with the crowd long enough for Percy Price’s surveillance team to decide whether the encounter was being covered by the opposition, a possibility not as far-fetched as it may sound. Once the home team gave the all-clear Sergei would saunter to the bus stop and examine the timetable. Newspaper in his left hand meant abort. Newspaper in his right hand meant all systems go.

  Th
e procedure for our handover ceremony as masterminded by Giles had by contrast been rather less traditional. He had insisted it take place in Sergei’s own lodgings on the university campus, with smoked salmon sandwiches and a bottle of vodka to wash them down. Our wafer-thin cover if we should have to account for ourselves? Giles was a visiting professor from Oxford on a headhunting expedition and I was his Nubian slave.

  Well, now we are back to the traditional procedure, with no smoked salmon. I have hired a clapped-out Vauxhall, the best the rent-a-car company can offer me in the time. I drive with one eye for the mirror and no idea what I’m looking for, but looking all the same. The day is grey, fine rain is falling, more forecast. The road to the racecourse is straight and flat. Perhaps the Romans raced here too. White railings flicker past on my left side. A beflagged gateway appears before me. At pedestrian speed I nose my way through shoppers and wet day pleasure-seekers.

  And sure enough there at the bus stop stands Sergei amid a huddle of waiting passengers, examining a yellow timetable. He clutches a copy of the Yorkshire Post in his right hand and in his left a music case that isn’t in the script with a rolled umbrella threaded through the top. I pull up a few yards past the bus stop, lower the window and yell, ‘Hey, Jack! Remember me? Peter!’

  At first he pretends not to hear me. It’s copybook stuff and so it should be after two years of sleeper school. He turns his head in puzzlement, discovers me, does amazement and delight.

  ‘Peter! My friend! It is you. I truly don’t believe my eyes.’

  Okay, that’s enough, get in the car. He does. We exchange an air-hug for the spectators. He’s wearing a new Burberry raincoat, fawn. He takes it off, folds it and lays it reverently on the back seat but keeps the music case between his knees. As we drive away, a man at the bus stop makes a rude face to the woman standing next to him. See what I saw just then? Middle-aged poofter picks up pretty rent boy in broad daylight.

  I’m watching for anyone pulling out behind us, car, van or motorbike. Nothing catches the eye. Under the traditional procedure Sergei isn’t told in advance where he’s going to be taken, and he isn’t being told now. He’s skinnier and more haunted than I remember him from our handover. He has a tousled mop of black hair and doleful bedroom eyes. His spindly fingers are playing a tattoo on the dashboard. In his rooms in college they played the same tattoo on the wooden arm of his chair. His new Harris Tweed sports jacket is too big for his shoulders.

  ‘What’s in the music case?’ I demand.

  ‘It is paper, Peter. For you.’

  ‘Only paper?’

  ‘Please. It is very important paper.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  He is unmoved by my terseness. Perhaps he was expecting it. Perhaps he’s always expecting it. Perhaps he despises me, as I suspect he despised Giles.

  ‘Do you have anything on your body, in your clothes or anything else apart from the paper in the music case that I should know about? Nothing that films, records, does anything like that?’

  ‘Please, Peter, I do not. I have excellent news. You will be happy.’

  That’s enough business till we get there. With the din of the diesel engine and the rattly bodywork I’m scared he’s going to come out with stuff I can’t hear and my Office smartphone can’t record or transmit to the Haven. We’re speaking English and we’ll speak it until I decide otherwise. Giles had no Russian worth a damn. I see no value in letting Sergei know that I’m any different. I have chosen a hilltop twenty miles out of town allegedly with a fine view over the moors, but all we can see as I heave the Vauxhall to a halt and switch off the engine is grey cloud below us and driven rain whipping across the windscreen. By the laws of tradecraft we should by now have agreed who we are if we’re disturbed, when and where we’ll meet again, and does he have any pressing anxieties? But he’s put the music case flat on his lap and he’s already undoing the straps and pulling out a brown A4-size padded envelope, unsealed.

  ‘Moscow Centre has communicated with me at last, Peter. After one whole year,’ he declares with something between academic disdain and clotted excitement. ‘It is evidently momentous. My Anette in Copenhagen wrote me a beautiful and erotic letter in English and, underneath in our secret carbon, a letter from my Moscow Centre controller which I have translated into English for you’ – upon which he affects to make me a presentation of the envelope.

  ‘Hang on a minute, Sergei.’ I have taken possession of the padded envelope but haven’t looked inside. ‘Let me get this straight. You received a love letter from your lady friend in Denmark. You then applied the necessary compound, raised the secret under-text, decoded it and translated the contents into English for my benefit. All by yourself. Single-handed. That right?’

  ‘That is correct, Peter. Our combined patience is rewarded.’

  ‘So when did you receive this letter from Denmark exactly?’

  ‘On Friday. At midday. I could not believe my eyes.’

  ‘And today is Tuesday. You waited until yesterday afternoon to contact my office.’

  ‘All weekend while I worked I was thinking only of you. Night and day I was so pleased I was developing and translating all at once in my mind, wishing only that our good friend Norman was with us to enjoy our success.’

  Norman for Giles.

  ‘So the letter from your Moscow handlers has been in your possession since Friday. Have you shown it to anyone else in the meantime?’

  ‘No, Peter. I have not. Please look inside the envelope.’

  I ignore his request. Does nothing shock him any more? Does his academic standing place him above the ruck of common spies?

  ‘And while you were developing and decoding and translating, did it not occur to you that you are under standing orders to report any letter or other communication you receive from your Russian controllers instantly to your handling officer—?’

  ‘But of course. This is what I did exactly, as soon as I had decoded—’

  ‘—before any further action is taken by you, us or anyone else? Which is why your debriefers took the developing compound from you as soon as you arrived in Edinburgh a year ago? So that you couldn’t do your own developing?’

  And when I had waited long enough for my not entirely simulated anger to subside and still received no answer beyond a sigh of forbearance at my ingratitude:

  ‘What did you do for the compound? Pop into the nearest chemist’s shop and read out a list of the ingredients so that anyone listening would think, ah great, he’s got a secret letter to develop? Maybe there’s a chemist’s shop on the campus. Is there?’

  We sit side by side, listening to the rain.

  ‘Please, Peter. I am not stupid. I took a bus into town. I made purchases at many different chemists. I paid cash, I did not engage in conversations, I was discreet.’

  The same self-composure. The same innate superiority. And yes, this man could well be the son and grandson of distinguished Chekists.

  *

  Only now do I consent to look inside the envelope.

  First out, two long letters, the cover letter and the carbon under-text. He had copied or photographed every stage of development and the printouts were there for me to see, neatly ordered and numbered.

  Second out, the Danish-stamped envelope with his name and campus address in a girlish Continental hand on the front, and on the back the sender’s name and address: Anette Pedersen, who lives in Number Five on the ground floor of an apartment house in a suburb of Copenhagen.

  Third out, the surface text in English, running to six closely written sides in the same girlish hand as the envelope, lauding his sexual prowess in puerile terms and claiming that merely thinking about him was enough to give the writer an orgasm.

  Then the raised under-text with column after column of four-figure groups. Then the version in Russian, decoded from his one-time pad.

  And finally his own translation of the Russian en clair text into English for my personal benefit as a non-Russian-s
peaker. I frown at the Russian version, discard it with a gesture of incomprehension, take up his English translation and read it two or three times while Sergei affects contentment and flattens his hands on the dashboard to ease the tension.

  ‘Moscow say you are to take up residence in London as soon as the summer vacation begins,’ I remark casually. ‘Why do they want you to do that, do you think?’

  ‘She says,’ he corrects me in a husky voice.

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘Anette.’

  ‘So you’re saying Anette is a real woman. Not just some man in Centre signing himself as a woman?’

  ‘I know this woman.’

  ‘The actual woman? Anette. You know her, you’re saying?’

  ‘Correct, Peter. The same woman who is calling herself Anette for purposes of conspiracy.’

  ‘And how do you arrive at this extraordinary discovery, may I ask?’

  He suppresses a sigh to imply that he is about to enter territory where I am unequipped to follow him.

  ‘Each week for one hour this woman lectured us at sleeper school for the class of English only. She prepared us for conspiratorial activity in England. She related many interesting case histories to us and gave us much advice and courage for our secret work.’

  ‘And you’re telling me her name was Anette?’

  ‘Like all instructors and all students, she had only a work name.’

  ‘Which was what?’