Agent Running in the Field

by John le Carré

  ‘Russia rich,’ the driver pronounces in a hiss. ‘Czech people no rich. Yes!’ – and at the word yes, jams on the brakes and slews the car into what I take to be a lay-by until a crossfire of security lights freezes us in their beam.

  The driver lowers his window, shouts something. A blond boy of twenty-odd with a starfish scar on his cheek sticks his head through, peers at my travel bag with its British Airways label, then at me.

  ‘Your name, please, sir?’ he demands in English.

  ‘Halliday. Nick Halliday.’

  ‘Your firm, please?’

  ‘Halliday & Company.’

  ‘Why do you come to Karlovy Vary, please?’

  ‘To play badminton with a friend of mine.’

  He gives an order to the driver in Czech. We drive twenty yards, pass a very old woman in a headscarf pushing her wheeler. We draw up in front of a ranch-like building with a porch of Ionic marble columns, gold carpet and grab-ropes of crimson silk. Two men in suits stand on the bottom step. I pay off the driver, collect my bag from the rear seat and under the lifeless gaze of the two men ascend the royal gold stairway to the lobby and breathe in the aroma of human sweat, diesel oil, black tobacco and women’s scent that tells every Russian he is home.

  I stand under a chandelier while an expressionless girl in a black suit examines my passport below my line of sight. Through a glass partition, in a smoke-filled bar marked ‘Fully Booked’, an old man in a Kazakh hat is holding forth to an audience of awestruck oriental disciples, all men. The girl at the counter is looking over my shoulder. The blond boy with the scar stands behind me. He must have followed me up the gold carpet. She hands him my passport, he flips it open, compares the photograph with my face, says ‘Follow me, please, Mr Halliday’ and leads me into a sprawling office with a fresco of naked girls and French windows looking on to the lake. I count three empty chairs at three computers, two dressing mirrors, a stack of cardboard boxes bound in pink string and two fit young men in jeans, sneakers and gold neck chains.

  ‘It is a formality, Mr Halliday,’ the boy says as the men move in on me. ‘We have endured certain bad experiences. We are very sorry.’

  We Arkady? Or we the Azerbaijani Mafia who, according to a Head Office file I have consulted, built the place out of the profits of human trafficking? Thirty-odd years back, according to the same file, Russia’s Mafiosi agreed among themselves that Karlovy Vary was too nice a place to kill each other. Better to keep it a safe haven for our money, families and mistresses.

  The men want my travel bag. The first is holding out his hands for it, the second stands at the ready. Instinct tells me they are not Czech but Russian, probably ex-special forces. If they smile, look out. I hand over my bag. In the dressing mirror the scarred boy is younger than I thought and I guess he is only acting bold. But the two men who are examining my travel bag don’t need to act. They have felt the lining, popped open my electric toothbrush, sniffed my shirts, squeezed the soles of my trainers. They have picked at the handle of my badminton racquet, half unwound the cloth binding, tapped it, shaken it and made a couple of swings with it. Have they been briefed to do this, or is it instinct that tells them: if it’s anywhere, it’s here, whatever it is?

  Now they are cramming everything back into my travel bag and the scarred boy is giving them a hand, trying to make a tidier job of it. They want to pat me down. I lift my arms, not all the way, just a signal that I’m ready so come for me. Something about how I do this causes the first man to reconsider me, then step forward again more warily while his friend stands at the ready a step behind him. Arms, armpits, belt, chest area, turn me round, feel my back. Then down on his knees while he does my crotch and inside legs and talks to the boy in Russian, which as a simple British badminton player I affect not to understand. The boy with the starfish scar translates.

  ‘They wish you please to remove your shoes.’

  I unlace my shoes, hand them over. They take one each, bend them, feel them, hand them back. I lace them up again.

  ‘They ask please: why do you have no mobile phone?’

  ‘I left it at home.’

  ‘Why, please?’

  ‘I like to travel unaccompanied,’ I reply facetiously. The boy translates. Nobody smiles.

  ‘They ask also that I take your wristwatch and pen and wallet and return them to you when you depart,’ says the boy.

  I hand him my pen and wallet and unbuckle my wristwatch. The men sneer. It’s a Japanese cheapo, worth five pounds. The men look at me speculatively, as if they feel they haven’t done enough to me.

  The boy, with surprising authority, snaps at them in Russian:

  ‘Okay. Done. Finish.’

  They shrug, smirk doubt, and disappear through the French windows, leaving me alone with him.

  ‘You are to play badminton with my father, Mr Halliday?’ the boy asks.

  ‘Who’s your father?’

  ‘Arkady. I am Dimitri.’

  ‘Well, great to meet you, Dimitri.’

  We shake hands. Dimitri’s is damp and mine should be. I am talking to the living son of the same Arkady who on the very day that I formally recruited him swore blind to me that he’d never bring a child into this lousy rotten world. Is Dimitri adopted? Or did Arkady always have a son tucked away and was ashamed of putting the boy’s future life at risk by spying for us? At the counter the girl in the black suit offers me a room key with a brass rhinoceros attached to it but Dimitri tells her in ostentatious English, ‘My guest will return later,’ then leads me back down the golden carpet to a Mercedes four-track and invites me into the passenger seat.

  ‘My father asks that you will please be inconspicuous,’ he says.

  A second car is following us. I only ever saw its headlights. I promise to be inconspicuous.

  *

  We drove uphill for thirty-six minutes by the Mercedes four-track’s clock. The road was again steep and winding. It is a while before Dimitri starts quizzing me.

  ‘Sir, you have known my father many years.’

  ‘Quite a few, yes.’

  ‘Was he with the Organs at that time?’ – Russian Organy, secret services.

  I laugh. ‘All I ever knew, he was a diplomat who loved his game of badminton.’

  ‘And you? At that time?’

  ‘I was a diplomat too. On the commercial side.’

  ‘It was in Trieste?’

  ‘And other places. Wherever we could meet up and find a court.’

  ‘But for many years you do not play badminton with him?’

  ‘No. I don’t.’

  ‘And now you make business together. You are both businessmen.’

  ‘But that’s pretty confidential information, Dimitri,’ I warn him, as the shape of Arkady’s cover story to his son becomes clear to me. I ask him what he’s doing with his life.

  ‘Soon I will go to Stanford University in California.’

  ‘To study what?’

  ‘I shall be a marine biologist. I already studied this subject at Moscow State, also Besançon.’

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘My father wished me to go to Eton College but he was not satisfied with the security arrangements. Therefore I attended a gymnasium in Switzerland where security was more convenient. You are an unusual man, Mr Halliday.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘My father respects you very much. This is not normal. Also he says you speak perfect Russian but you do not reveal this to me.’

  ‘But that’s because you want to practise your English, Dimitri!’ I insist playfully, and have a vision of Steff in her goggles riding beside me on the ski-lift.

  *

  We have stopped at a checkpoint on the road. Two men wave us down, examine us, then nod us through. No guns visible. Karlovy Vary’s Russians are law-abiding citizens. Guns are kept out of sight. We drive as far as a pair of Jugendstil stone gateposts from Imperial Habsburg times. Intruder lights go on, cameras peer down at us as two other men appear fro
m a gatehouse, shine needless torches on us and again wave us through.

  ‘You’re well protected,’ I remark to Dimitri.

  ‘Unfortunately, this is also necessary,’ he replies. ‘My father loves peace, but such love is not always returned.’

  To left and right high wire fencing is threaded into the trees. A dazzled deer blocks our way. Dimitri hoots and it leaps into the darkness. Ahead of us looms a turreted villa, part hunting lodge, part Bavarian railway station. In its uncurtained ground-floor windows, stately people come and go. But Dimitri is not driving towards the villa. He has turned down a forest track. We pass labourers’ cottages and enter a cobbled farmyard with stables one side and a windowless barn of blackened weatherboard on the other. He pulls up, reaches across me and shoves open my door.

  ‘Enjoy your game, Mr Halliday.’

  He drives away. I stand alone in the centre of the farmyard. A half-moon appears above the treetops. By its shine I make out two men standing in front of the closed doorway to the barn. The door opens from inside. A powerful beam of torchlight leaves me momentarily sightless as the soft-spoken Russian voice with its Georgian intonation calls to me from the darkness:

  ‘Are you going to come in and play or do I have to beat the shit out of you out there?’

  I step forward. The two men smile courteously and part to let me through. The door closes behind me. I am alone in a white passageway. Ahead of me a second door, open, leads to an AstroTurfed badminton court. Facing me stands the dapper, compact figure of my sixty-year-old former agent Arkady, codename WOODPECKER, in a tracksuit. Small feet placed carefully apart, arms half raised for combat. The slight forward lean of the seaman or the fighter. Close-cropped grizzled hair, just less of it. The same unbelieving gaze and clamped jaw, the pain lines deeper. The same taut smile, no more readable than on the night years ago when I strolled up to him at a consular cocktail party in Trieste and challenged him to a game of badminton.

  He beckons to me with one jerk of his head then turns his back on me and sets off at a martial pace. I follow him across the court and up an open-tread wooden staircase leading to a viewers’ balcony. When we reach the balcony, he unlocks a door, beckons me through, relocks it. We climb a second wooden staircase to a long attic room at the end of which a glazed door is set into the gable. He unlocks it and we step on to a balcony overhung with vine. He relocks the door and speaks one Russian word curtly into a smartphone: ‘dismiss’.

  Two wooden chairs, a table, a bottle of vodka, glasses, a plate of black bread, a half-moon for light. The turreted villa rising above the trees. On its floodlit lawns, men in suits walk singly. Fountains play on a pond presided over by stone nymphs. In precise movements Arkady pours two shots of vodka, briskly hands me a glass, gestures to the bread. We sit.

  ‘Have you been sent by Interpol?’ he demands in his rapid Georgian Russian.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you come here to blackmail me? To tell me you will hand me over to Putin unless I resume collaboration with London?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? The situation is favourable to you. Half the people I employ report on me to Putin’s court.’

  ‘I’m afraid London wouldn’t trust your information any more.’

  Only then does he lift his glass to me in a silent toast. I do the same, reflecting that amid all our ups and downs I have never known him so angry.

  ‘So it’s not your beloved Russia after all,’ I suggest lightly. ‘I thought you always dreamed of that simple dacha among the Russian birch trees. Or going back to Georgia, why not? What went wrong?’

  ‘Nothing went wrong. I have houses in Petersburg and Tbilisi. However, as an internationalist I love best my Karlovy Vary. We have an Orthodox cathedral. Pious Russian crooks worship in it once a week. When I am dead I shall join them. I have a trophy wife, very young. All my friends want to fuck her. Mostly she doesn’t let them. What more should I want from life?’ he demands in low, swift tones.

  ‘How’s Ludmilla?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry. What did she die of?’

  ‘A military-grade nerve agent called cancer. Four years ago. For two years I mourn her. Then what’s the point?’

  None of us ever met Ludmilla. According to Arkady she was a lawyer like Prue, practising in Moscow.

  ‘And your young Dimitri – he’s Ludmilla’s son?’ I enquire.

  ‘You like him?’

  ‘He’s a fine boy. Seems to have a great future.’

  ‘Nobody has.’

  He punches a little fist swiftly across his lips in a gesture that has always signalled tension, then stares sharply over the trees at his villa and its floodlit lawns.

  ‘Does London know you’re here?’

  ‘I thought I’d tell London later. Speak to you first.’

  ‘Are you freelance?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A nationalist?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what are you?’

  ‘A patriot, I suppose.’

  ‘What of? Facebook? Dot-coms? Global warming? Corporations so big they can gobble up your broken little country in one bite? Who’s paying you?’

  ‘My Office. I hope. When I get back.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘A few answers. From old times. If I can get them out of you. Confirmation, if you’re willing.’

  ‘You never lied to me?’ – like an accusation.

  ‘Once or twice I did. When I had to.’

  ‘Are you lying now?’

  ‘No. And don’t you lie to me, Arkady. The last time you lied to me, you bloody nearly ended my beautiful career.’

  ‘Tough,’ he remarks, and we share the night view for a while.

  ‘So tell me this.’ He takes another pull of vodka. ‘What sort of bullshit are you Brits selling us traitors these days? Liberal democracy as the salvation of mankind? Why did I fall for that crap?’

  ‘Maybe you wanted to.’

  ‘You walk out of Europe with your British noses stuck in the air. “We’re special. We’re British. We don’t need Europe. We won all our wars alone. No Americans, no Russians, no anyone. We’re supermen.” The great freedom-loving President Donald Trump is going to save your economic arses, I hear. You know what Trump is?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He’s Putin’s shithouse cleaner. He does everything for little Vladi that little Vladi can’t do for himself: pisses on European unity, pisses on human rights, pisses on NATO. Assures us that Crimea and Ukraine belong to the Holy Russian Empire, the Middle East belongs to the Jews and the Saudis, and to hell with the world order. And you Brits, what do you do? You suck his dick and invite him to tea with your Queen. You take our black money and wash it for us. You welcome us if we’re big enough crooks. You sell us half London. You wring your hands when we poison our traitors and you say please, please, dear Russian friends, trade with us. Is this what I risked my life for? I don’t believe so. I believe you Brits sold me a cartload of hypocritical horseshit. So don’t tell me you’ve come here to remind me of my liberal conscience and my Christian values and my love of your great big British Empire. That would be an error. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Have you finished?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t think you were ever working for my country, Arkady. I think you were working for your own country and it didn’t deliver.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck what you think. I asked you what the fuck you want.’

  ‘What I’ve always wanted. Do you attend reunions of your old comrades? Get-togethers, medal ceremonies? Celebrations of old times? Funerals of the great and good? An honoured veteran like yourself, it’s practically mandatory.’

  ‘What if I do?’

  ‘Then I would congratulate you on living out your cover as a body-and-soul Chekist of the old school.’

  ‘I have no problem with cover. I am a fully established Russian hero. I have no insecurities.’

  ‘Which
is why you live in a Czech fortress and keep a stable of bodyguards.’

  ‘I have competitors. That is not insecurity. That is normal business practice.’

  ‘According to our records you attended four veterans’ reunions in the last eighteen months.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Do you ever discuss casework with your old colleagues? Even new cases, for that matter?’

  ‘If such topics arise, maybe I do. I never raise a topic, never provoke one, as you well know. But if you think you’re going to send me on a fishing expedition to Moscow, you’re out of your fucking mind. Get to the point, please.’

  ‘Willingly. I came to ask you whether you are still in touch with Valentina, pride of Moscow Centre.’

  He is gazing ahead of him, jaw struck imperiously forward. His back is soldier straight.

  ‘I never heard of this woman.’

  ‘Well, that’s a surprise to me, Arkady, because you once told me she was the only woman you ever loved.’

  Nothing has changed in his silhouetted features. Nothing ever did. Only the alertness of his body tells me he is hearing me.

  ‘You were going to divorce Ludmilla and sign up with Valentina. But from what you just told me, she’s not the woman you’re now married to. Valentina was only a few years younger than you. That doesn’t quite spell trophy wife to me.’

  Still nothing stirs.

  ‘We could have turned her, if you remember. We had the means. You yourself provided them. She had been sent to Trieste on an important mission for Centre. A senior Austrian diplomat wanted to sell his country’s secrets but refused to deal with any Russian official. Nobody from a consular or diplomatic community. Moscow sent you Valentina. Centre didn’t have many women officers in those days, but Valentina was exceptional: brilliant, beautiful and your life’s dream, you told me. As soon as she had got her man, the two of you conspired not to tell Centre for a week and treated yourselves to a romantic holiday on the Adriatic. I seem to remember we assisted you with finding suitably discreet accommodation. We could have blackmailed her but we didn’t see how we could do that without compromising you.’