Agent Running in the Field

by John le Carré

‘Want me to go on?’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘The Baroness Rachel and her brother exercise non-responsible, unaccountable oversight of four hundred and fifty-three unconnected, no-name, arm’s-length offshore companies registered principally in Nevis. You are listening, right? It’s just your face.’

  ‘I’ll try and adjust it.’

  ‘In addition to demanding absolute discretion, their clients demand high returns for their investment. Fifteen, twenty per cent, or what’s the point? The expertise of the Baroness and her brother is the sovereign state of Ukraine. Some of their biggest players are Ukrainian oligarchs. One hundred and seventy-six of the said no-name companies own prime properties in London, mostly in Knightsbridge and Kensington. However, one such prime property is a duplex in Park Lane owned by a company that is owned by a company that is owned by a trust fund that is owned by Orson. Facts. Non-contestable. Figures also available.’

  I don’t do dramatic response, and the Office doesn’t invite it. So no doubt I annoyed her when instead of emitting a cry of startled outrage I noted that our wine glasses needed filling and interrupted a long-running dispute between three waiters to make it happen.

  ‘You want the rest or not?’ she demands.

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘When Baroness Rachel is not tending her poor and needy oligarchs, she sits on a couple of Treasury sub-committees as a co-opted member of the Upper House. She was in the room when Rosebud came up. No minutes of the meeting survive.’

  Now it’s my turn to take a lengthy pull of wine.

  ‘Am I right in thinking that you have been pursuing these supposed connections for some while?’ I enquire.

  ‘You could be.’

  ‘Setting aside for the moment the question of how you think you know this and whether it’s true: how much of it did you tell Dom at your face-to-face meeting with him?’

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘What’s enough?’

  ‘The fact that his lovely lady wife manages Orson’s companies while pretending not to, just for starters.’

  ‘If she does.’

  ‘I’ve got friends who are into that stuff.’

  ‘So I’m beginning to gather. How long have you known these friends?’

  ‘What the fuck’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘What about Rachel’s membership of the Treasury sub-committee? Is that something you had from your friends?’

  ‘It could be.’

  ‘Is it also something you mentioned to Dom?’

  ‘Why should I? He knew.’

  ‘How d’you know he knew?’

  ‘They’re married for fuck’s sake!’

  Is this a jibe at me? Probably it is, even if the fantasy of our non-existent affair is more deeply rooted in her imagination than in mine.

  ‘Rachel’s a great lady,’ she goes on sarcastically. ‘The glossies adore her. She’s got medals for good works. Fundraising dinners at the Savoy. Slums it at Claridge’s. The lot.’

  ‘But the glossies don’t mention that she sits on top-secret Treasury sub-committees, presumably. Or perhaps the dark web does.’

  ‘How should I know?’ – too indignantly.

  ‘That’s what I’m asking you. How do you know?’

  ‘Don’t interrogate me, Nat. I’m not your property any more!’

  ‘I’m surprised you ever thought you were.’

  Our first lovers’ tiff and we never made love.

  ‘And how did Dom reply to whatever you said to him about his wife?’ I ask, after allowing a delay for passions to cool – notably hers, and for the first time I see her waver in her determination to treat me as enemy. She leans forward across the table and lowers her voice:

  ‘One. The highest authorities in the land are conversant with all such connections. They have examined and approved them.’

  ‘Did he say which highest authorities?’

  ‘Two. There is no clash of interests. Full and frank disclosure on all sides. Three, the decision not to proceed with Rosebud was taken in the national interest after due consideration of all aspects of the case. And four, it appears I’m in possession of classified information I’m not entitled to, so keep my fucking mouth shut. Which is what you’re about to tell me too.’

  She was right, if for different reasons.

  ‘So who else have you told? Apart from Dom and me?’ I ask.

  ‘Nobody. Why should I?’ – in a return to her earlier hostility.

  ‘Well, keep it that way. I don’t want to be vouching for your good character at the Old Bailey. Can I ask you again: how long have you been consorting with these friends of yours?’

  No answer.

  ‘Before you joined the Office?’

  ‘It might have been.’

  ‘Who’s Hampstead?’

  ‘A shit.’

  ‘What sort?’

  ‘A forty-year-old retired hedge fund manager.’

  ‘Married, I take it.’

  ‘Like you.’

  ‘Is he the same person who told you the Baroness looks after Orson’s offshore bank accounts?’

  ‘He said she was the City’s go-to investor for rich-shit Ukrainians. He said she could play the financial authorities like a harp. He said he’d used her himself on a couple of occasions and she’d delivered.’

  ‘Used her for what?’

  ‘To get things through. To circumvent regulations that don’t regulate. What do you think?’

  ‘And you passed these rumours – this hearsay – to your friends and they took it from there. Is that what you’re telling me?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do with the story you just gave me? Assuming it’s true?’

  ‘Fuck all. That’s what everyone does, isn’t it?’

  She is standing. I stand with her. A waiter brings the exorbitant bill. We all look on while I count twenty-pound notes on to the plate. She follows me into the street and grabs hold of me. We have the embrace we never had, but no kiss.

  ‘And just remember those draconian documents that Human Resources made you sign when you left,’ I warn her in parting. ‘I’m just sorry it ended badly.’

  ‘Well, maybe it didn’t end,’ she retorts. Then hastily corrects herself as if she has misspoken: ‘I just mean, I’ll never forget, that’s all. All you super people. My agents. The Haven. You were all great,’ she goes on too merrily.

  Stepping into the road, she waves down a passing cab and slams the door on herself before I can catch her destination.

  *

  I am alone on the baking-hot pavement. It’s ten at night but the day’s heat is coming up at my face. Our tryst has ended so swiftly that, what with the wine and the heat, I am tempted to wonder whether it happened at all. What’s my next move? Have it out with Dom? She did that already. Call out the Office’s praetorian guard and bring down the wrath of God on her friends, whom I picture to be a bunch of idealistic angry kids of Steff’s age who spend their every waking hour trying to shaft The System? Or take your time, walk home, sleep, see what you think in the morning? I’m about to do all of those things when my Office smartphone peeps an urgent incoming text. Stepping away from the lamplight I tap in the requisite digits.

  Source PITCHFORK has received decisive incoming. All Stardusters to assemble in my room 0700 tomorrow.

  Signed with the symbol of Guy Brammel, acting head Russia department.

  13

  Any attempt on my part to set out in neat order the operational, domestic and historic events that crowded the next eleven days is doomed to failure. Footling episodes intrude on others of vast significance. The streets of London may be languishing in the record heatwave, but they are swarming with angry marchers with banners, Prue and her left-leaning lawyer friends among them. Improvised bands pump out protests. Gas-filled effigies sway above the crowds. Police and ambulance sirens scream. The City of Westminster is unapproachable, Trafalgar Square uncrossable. And the reason for this mayhem? Britai
n is rolling out the red carpet to an American President who has come to sneer at our hard-won ties with Europe and humble the Prime Minister who invited him.

  *

  The 0700 meeting in Brammel’s office is the first in a non-stop string of Stardust war parties. It is attended by the all-important Percy Price, dean of surveillance, and by the elite of Russia department and Operations Directorate. But no Dom, and significantly nobody asks where he is, so I don’t. The redoubtable Marion from our sister Service is accompanied by two upstanding male lawyers in dark suits despite the sweltering heat. Brammel himself reads out Sergei’s latest instructions from Centre. They are to provide field support for a covert encounter between an important Moscow emissary, gender not provided, and a high-value British collaborator, no other details supplied. My own role in Stardust is formally agreed, and simultaneously restricted. Do I detect Bryn Jordan’s hand, or am I being more than usually paranoid? As head of substation Haven, I will be ‘responsible for the welfare and management of PITCHFORK and his handlers’; all covert communications to and from Moscow Centre will pass through me. But Guy Brammel, as acting head of Russia department, will sign off on all the Haven’s communications before they are given circulation.

  And there with a jolt my duties officially end: except that they don’t because that’s not who I am, as the distant Bryn should know better than anyone. Yes, I’ll be hunkered down for wearisome sessions with Sergei and his minder Denise in the Haven’s decrepit safe flat next door to Camden Town tube station. Yes, I shall be composing Sergei’s under-texts and playing chess with him late into the night while we wait for the next obscure East European commercial radio station to confirm by prearranged word-code that our latest love letter to Copenhagen is being processed.

  But I’m a field man, not a desk jockey, not a social carer. Haven outcast though I may be, but I am also the natural author of Operation Stardust. Who crucially debriefed Sergei, and scented blood? Who brought him down to London, made the forbidden pilgrimage to Arkady and thus delivered the conclusive evidence that this was not some run-of-the-mill game of Russian musical chairs but a high-end intelligence operation built around a potential or active British source of high value and run personally by Moscow Centre’s queen of illegals?

  In our time Percy Price and I have stolen a good few horses together, as the saying goes, and not just that prototype Russian ground-to-air missile in Poznań. So it should have come as no great surprise to anyone on the top floor that, within days of the first Stardust war party, Percy and I are crouching in the back of a laundry van fitted out with the latest wonders of modern surveillance, touring the first, then the second, and now the last of the three North London districts Sergei has been instructed to reconnoitre. Percy has christened it Ground Beta and I don’t question his choice.

  On our tours together, we reminisce about old cases we have shared, old agents, old colleagues, and talk like old men. Thanks to Percy I am also discreetly introduced to his Grande Armée of watchers, a privilege that Head Office emphatically does not encourage: after all, one day they may be watching you. The venue for this event is a red-brick desanctified tabernacle awaiting demolition on the outskirts of Ground Beta. Our cover is a memorial gathering of souls. Percy has rallied a cool hundred of them.

  ‘Any little boost you can give my boys and girls will be highly welcome and appreciated, Nat,’ he tells me in his homely cockney. ‘They are committed, but the work can be on the tedious side, especially with the heat we’ve got. You look a mite worried, if I may say so. Please remember that my boys and girls like a good face. Only they’re watchers, see, so it’s natural.’

  For love of Percy I press the flesh and pat shoulders, and when he invites me to address a few rallying words of encouragement to his faithful I do not disappoint.

  ‘So what we all hope to be watching this coming Friday evening’, as I hear my voice ring out pleasingly amid the pitch-pine rafters, ‘– this 20 July, to be precise – is a highly orchestrated covert encounter between two people who’ve never met each other. One, codename Gamma, will be a tried-and-tested operative with all the tricks of the trade up his or her sleeve. The other, codename Delta, will be a person of unknown age, profession and gender,’ I warn them, protective as ever of my source. ‘His or her motives are as much of a mystery to us as I’m sure they will be to you. But what I can tell you is this: if the stack of hard intelligence we are receiving even as I speak means anything at all, the great British public is about to owe you a very considerable debt of thanks, even if it will never know it.’

  The thunderous applause, wholly unexpected, touched me.

  *

  If Percy was uneasy about the effect of my facial expression on his flock, Prue has no such anxiety. We are eating early breakfast.

  ‘It’s just lovely to see you all eager for your day,’ she tells me, putting down her Guardian newspaper. ‘Whatever it is you’re up to. I’m so very pleased for you, after all the dire thoughts you had about coming home to England and what to do when you got here. I just hope it’s not too desperately illegal, whatever you’re doing. Is it?’

  The question, if I read it correctly, marks a substantial advance in our careful journey back to one another. Ever since our Moscow days it has been understood between us that even if I were to bend Office rules and tell her all, her principled objections to the Deep State would not allow her to enjoy my confidences. In return I had made something of a point – perhaps too much of one – of not encroaching on her legal secrets, even when it came to such titanic battles as the one her partnership is currently waging against Big Pharma.

  ‘Well, funnily enough, Prue, just for once, it isn’t awful at all,’ I reply. ‘In fact I think you might even approve. All the signs are that we’re on the verge of exposing a high-level Russian spy’ – which isn’t just bending Office rules, but trampling on them.

  ‘And you’ll bring him or her to court when you’ve exposed them, whoever they are. Of course you will. Open court, I trust.’

  ‘That’ll be up to the powers-that-be,’ I reply cautiously, since about the last thing the Office would want to do when it has rumbled an enemy agent is turn him over to the forces of justice.

  ‘And have you played an absolutely key role in smoking him or her out?’

  ‘Since you ask, Prue, to be truthful, yes,’ I concede.

  ‘Like going to Prague and discussing it all with Czech liaison?’

  ‘There is a Czech element. Let me put it that way.’

  ‘Well, I think that’s just perfectly brilliant of you, Nat, and I’m very proud of you,’ she says, brushing aside years of pained forbearance.

  Oh, and her partnership reckons they’ve got Big Pharma over a barrel. And Steff was very sweet on the phone last night.

  *

  So it’s a bright sunny morning with everything coming together in ways I hadn’t dared hope, and Operation Stardust is gathering unstoppable momentum. Sergei’s latest instructions from Moscow Centre require him to present himself at a brasserie off Leicester Square at eleven in the morning. He will select a seat in ‘the north-west area’ and order himself a chocolate latte, a hamburger and a side dish of tomato salad. Between eleven-fifteen and eleven-thirty, with these recognition signals set out before him, he will be approached by a person who will claim to be an old acquaintance, embrace him and depart saying he is late for an appointment. In the course of this embrace Sergei will become the richer by one ‘uncontaminated’ mobile phone – Moscow’s description – containing, in addition to a new SIM card, a slip of microfilm with further instructions.

  Braving the same seething crowds and heat that are bedevilling Percy Price’s coverage of the encounter, Sergei positions himself in the brasserie as instructed, orders his meal and is delighted to see approaching him with outstretched arms none other than the ebullient and ever-youthful Felix Ivanov – or so his cover name at sleeper school – a fellow student in his same intake and same class.

  The
covert handover of the mobile phone passes off faultlessly, but acquires unexpected social dimensions. Ivanov is equally surprised and delighted to see his old friend Sergei in such good fettle. Far from pleading an urgent appointment, he sits down beside him and the two sleeper agents enjoy a head-to-head that would have been the despair of their trainers. Despite the clamour, Percy’s team has no difficulty hearing them, or for that matter capturing the encounter on camera. As soon as Ivanov – in the meantime randomly christened Tadzio by Russia department’s computer – takes his leave, Percy dispatches a team to house him, in Tadzio’s case to a students’ hostel in Golders Green. Unlike his literary namesake, Tadzio is heavily built, husky and cheerful, a little Russian bear much loved by his fellow students, notably the female element.

  It also transpires, as Head Office’s checkers process the flood of incoming data, that Ivanov is not Ivanov any more, neither is he Russian. On graduating from sleeper school he has been reinvented as a Pole named Strelsky, a technology graduate at the London School of Economics admitted on a student visa. According to his application he speaks Russian, English and perfect German, having studied at the universities of Bonn and Zurich, and his first name is not Felix but Mikhail, defender of mankind. To Russia department he is therefore a creature of great interest, since he belongs to a new wave of spies who, far removed from the clunking methods of the old KGB, speak our Western languages to mother-tongue standards and parrot to perfection our little ways.

  In the Haven’s decrepit safe house in Camden Town, Sergei and Denise squat side by side on a lumpy sofa. Seated in the one armchair, I open up Tadzio’s mobile phone, which technical department has in the meantime made temporarily inactive, fish out the strip of microfilm and lay it under the enlarger. With Sergei’s one-time pad to guide us, we decode Moscow’s latest instructions. They are in Russian. As usual I prevail on Sergei to translate them into English for me. At this late hour I can’t risk letting him discover that I have been deceiving him from the day we met.

  As usual the instructions are flawless or, as Arkady would have it, too perfect. Sergei will affix a ‘No Nukes’ flyer in the top-left corner of the sash window in his basement apartment. He will confirm by return that it is visible to passers-by in both directions, and from what distance. Since no such flyer is available from known protest outlets, the preference these days being for ‘No Fracking’, Forgery department runs one up for us. Sergei will also purchase an ornamental Victorian pottery Staffordshire dog of between twelve and eighteen inches in height. eBay is awash with them.