Agent Running in the Field

by John le Carré

  *

  And didn’t Prue and I nip over to Panama a couple of times during these happy, hectic, sun-washed days? Of course we did, in a succession of hilarious nocturnal Skypes, now with Steff alone while Juno is out on bat safari, now with the two of them together, because even when you are surrounded by Stardust, the real world, as Prue insists on calling it, has to go on.

  The howling monkeys start beating their breasts at two in the morning and wake the entire camp, Steff tells us. And giant bats switch off their radar when they know their flight paths, which is why it’s a doddle to catch them in nets stretched between palm trees. But when you disentangle and tag them, you’ve really, really got to look out, Mum, because they bite and they’ve got rabies and you have to wear fucking great thick gloves like the sewage man, and their babies are just as bad. Steff’s a child again, we tell each other gratefully. And Juno, as far as we dare believe, is a decent, sincere young man who makes a good show of loving our daughter, so world hold still.

  But nothing in life is without its consequences. An evening comes – it is now by my shaky reckoning Stardust-night minus eight – when the house phone rings. Prue takes the call. Juno’s mother and father have flown to London on a whim. They’re staying at an hotel in Bloomsbury owned by a friend of Juno’s mother and they’ve got tickets for Wimbledon and tickets for the one-day England–India cricket international at Lord’s. And they would be greatly honoured to meet the parents of their future daughter-in-law ‘at any time convenient to the Commercial Counsellor and your good self’. Prue collapses in mirth as she struggles to impart this news to me. And well she might since I’m sitting in the back of Percy Price’s surveillance van at Ground Beta and Percy is explaining to me where he proposes to position his static posts.

  Nevertheless, two days later – S-night minus six – I miraculously contrive to present myself in a smart suit in front of the gas fireplace in our drawing room with Prue at my side, and in my persona of British Commercial Counsellor discuss with our daughter’s future parents-in-law such issues as Britain’s post-Brexit trade relations with the sub-continent and the tortuous bowling action of India’s spin bowler Kuldeep Yadav, while Prue, who has as good a poker face as any lawyer when she needs it, comes as close as she ever did to exploding into giggles behind her hand.

  *

  As to my essential evening badminton sessions with Ed over these stressful days, I can only say they had never been more essential, or the two of us in better form. For the last three sessions I had been raising my exercise level in the gym and in the park in a desperate effort to contain Ed’s newfound mastery of the court, until a day comes when the struggle, for the first time ever, is of no account.

  The date, never to be forgotten by either of us, is 16 July. We have played our usual strenuous match. I have lost again, but never mind, get used to it. Casually, towels round our necks, we head for our Stammtisch anticipating the usual sporadic Monday-evening clatter of voices and glasses in a largely empty room. Instead we are met by an unnatural, fidgety silence. At the bar, a half-dozen of our Chinese members are staring at a television screen that is routinely given over to sport of any kind from anywhere. But this evening we are not for once watching American football or Icelandic ice hockey but Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

  The two leaders are in Helsinki giving a joint press conference. They are standing shoulder to shoulder before the flags of both their nations. Trump, speaking as if to order, is disowning the findings of his own intelligence services, which have come up with the inconvenient truth that Russia interfered in the 2016 American presidential election. Putin smiles his proud jailer’s smile.

  Somehow Ed and I grope our way to our Stammtisch and sit. A commentator reminds us, lest we have forgotten, that only yesterday Trump declared Europe to be his enemy and for good measure trashed NATO.

  Where am I in my mind, as Prue would say? Part of me is with my former agent Arkady. I am replaying his description of Trump as Putin’s shithouse cleaner. I am remembering that Trump ‘does everything for little Vladi that little Vladi can’t do for himself’. Another part of me is with Bryn Jordan in Washington, cloistered with our American colleagues as they stare incredulously at the same act of presidential treachery.

  So where is Ed in his mind? He is bone still. He has retreated into himself: just deeper and further than I have seen him go. At first his mouth remains open in disbelief. His lips slowly come together and he licks them, then absentmindedly wipes them with the back of his hand. But even when old Fred the barman, who has his own sense of proprieties, switches us over to a cluster of frenzied women cyclists racing round a bowl, Ed’s eyes don’t leave the screen.

  ‘It’s a replay,’ he pronounces at last in a voice throbbing with discovery. ‘It’s 1939 all over again. Molotov and Ribbentrop, carving up the world.’

  This was too rich for my blood and I told him so. Trump might be the worst President America has ever had, I said, but he was no Hitler, much as he might wish to be, and there were plenty of good Americans who weren’t going to take this lying down.

  At first he didn’t seem to hear me.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ he agreed in the faraway voice of a man coming round from an anaesthetic. ‘There were plenty of good Germans too. And a fat lot of bloody good they did.’

  14

  S-night is upon us. In the Operations room on the top floor of Head Office, all is calm. The time is 1920 hours by the LED clock above the fake-oak double doors. If you’re Stardust-cleared, the show will start in fifty-five minutes. If you’re not, there are a couple of eagle-eyed janitors at the door who will be pleased to advise you of your mistake.

  The mood is leisured and, as the deadline approaches, becoming more so. Already nobody is panicking, everybody has time for everything. Assistants drift in and out bearing open laptops, Thermos flasks, bottled water and sandwiches for the buffet table. A wit asks if there’s popcorn. A plump man with a fluorescent lanyard fiddles with two flat screens on the wall. Both show the same lush image of Lake Windermere in autumn. The chatter we are hearing over our earphones belongs to Percy Price’s surveillance team. By now his hundred souls will be dispersed as shoppers come home from work, stall-holders, waitresses, cyclists, Uber drivers and innocent bystanders who have nothing better to do than ogle passing girls and murmur into mobile phones. They alone know that the mobile phones they are murmuring into are encrypted; that they are talking, not to their friends, families, lovers and pushers, but to Percy Price’s control centre, which this evening is a double-glazed eyrie perched halfway up the wall on my left side. And there sits Percy now, in signature white cricket shirt with sleeves rolled up and earphones on as he silently mouths commands to his scattered crew.

  We are sixteen strong and rising. We are the same impressive team that assembled to hear Florence’s failed oratorio for Operation Rosebud, with welcome additions. Marion from our sister Service is again attended by her two dark-suited spear carriers, also known as lawyers. Marion means business, we are told. She is smarting from the top floor’s refusal to hand her Service Operation Stardust on a platter, arguing that the putative presence of a highly placed traitor in the Whitehall village puts the case squarely in its court. Not so, Marion, say our top-floor mandarins. The sources are ours, ergo the intelligence is ours, ergo the case is ours and goodnight. In Moscow, in the bowels of Lubyanka, formerly Dzerzhinsky, Square, I imagine similar nervous spats breaking out as the denizens of Northern department’s illegals section dig themselves in for the same long night.

  I have been promoted. In place of Florence at the suitors’ end of the table, I have Dom Trench sitting opposite me at the centre of it. We have had no renewal of our discussion about Rosebud. I am therefore puzzled when he leans across the table and says in a low voice:

  ‘I trust we are not at odds regarding your chauffeured trip to Northwood some while back, Nat?’

  ‘Why should we be?’

  ‘I expect you to speak for me if cal
led upon.’

  ‘About what? Don’t tell me the car pool is kicking up?’

  ‘Regarding certain associated matters,’ he replies darkly, and withdraws into his shell. Is it really only ten minutes ago that I asked him in the most casual of ways what informal offices of state his baroness wife currently adorns?

  ‘She flits, Nat,’ he had replied, and braced himself as if in the presence of royalty. ‘My darling Rachel is an inveterate flitter. If it’s not some Westminster quango that you and I have never even heard of, she’s off to Cambridge to argue with the great and good about how to rescue the Health Service. Your Prue is no different, I’m sure.’

  Well, Dom, Prue thank God is different, which is why we’ve got a bloody great placard in the hall with the unoriginal logo ‘TRUMP LIAR’ that I trip over every time I walk into the house.

  Lake Windermere fades to white, stutters and returns. The lights in the Operations room are going down. Shadowy late arrivals scurry in and take their places at the long table. Lake Windermere bids a lingering farewell. In its place Percy Price’s cameras are giving us tracking shots of contented citizens enjoying the sunshine in a North London public park at half past seven on a sweltering summer’s evening.

  You do not expect, minutes before the consummation of a nail-biting intelligence operation, to be seized by a surge of admiration for your fellow countrymen. But on our screens is London as we love it to be: multi-ethnic kids playing improvised netball, girls in summer dresses basking in rays of the endless sun, old folk sauntering arm in arm, mothers pushing prams, picnickers under spreading trees, outdoor chess, boules. A friendly bobby strolls comfortably among them. How long since we saw a bobby all alone? Somebody is playing a guitar. It takes me a moment to remind myself that many of this happy throng were only thirty-six hours ago members of my congregation in the same desanctified tabernacle whose cumbersome spire this minute dominates the skyline.

  The Stardust team has learned Ground Beta by heart and thanks to Percy so have I. The public park boasts six crumbling tarmacadam tennis courts with no nets, a children’s playground with a climbing frame, seesaws and a tunnel. There is an ill-smelling boating pond. A bus route, a bicycle route and a busy thoroughfare with no parking form the western border; its eastern side is dominated by a high-rise council estate, its northern by a terrace of gentrified Georgian houses. In one of these, in a semi-basement, Sergei has his Moscow-approved apartment. It has two bedrooms. In one of them, Denise sleeps with her door locked. In the other, Sergei. An iron staircase leads down to it. From the upper half of its sash window you can see into the playground and follow a narrow concrete footpath with six fixed benches placed twenty feet apart, three a side. Each bench is twelve feet long. Sergei has sent photographs of them to Moscow, numbered one to six.

  The park also boasts a well-liked self-service café which can be approached either by way of an iron man-gate from the street side or from the park itself. Today the café is under temporary new management, the regular staff having received a full day’s pay in lieu, which as Percy says ruefully is where your costs come in. There are sixteen indoor tables and twenty-four outdoor. Outdoor tables have permanent umbrellas against rain or sun. For food and drink there is the indoor self-service counter. On hot days an outdoor ice-cream bar is marked by the sign of a happy cow licking at a double vanilla cone. Attached to the rear premises are public toilets with facilities for baby changing and the disabled. Plastic bags and green waste bins are provided for dog walkers. All this Sergei has dutifully reported in lavish under-texts to his insatiable Danish heart-throb, the perfectionist Anette.

  At Moscow’s behest we have also supplied photographs of the café, inside and out, and of the approaches to it. Having twice eaten there at his controller’s bidding, once inside, once outside, on both occasions between seven and eight p.m., and reported to Moscow on the density of diners, Sergei is under orders not to show his face there until further notice. He will remain in his semi-basement and wait on an event yet to be advised.

  ‘I will be all things, Peter. I will be one-half safe house keeper and one-half counter-surveillance.’

  He says half because it transpires that he and his old school friend Tadzio will be sharing operational duties. Should they bump into one another by accident they will ignore each other.

  I am scanning the crowd on the off-chance of a familiar face. During her sojourn in Trieste and again on the Adriatic coast, Arkady’s Valentina had been comprehensively filmed and photographed as a Moscow Centre emissary and potential double agent. But a woman of regular features can do pretty well anything she wishes with her looks over twenty years. The imagery section has produced a range of possible likenesses. Any one of them could be the new Valentina alias Anette alias you name it. I keep an open mind as a handful of women of mixed age alight at the bus stop, but not one of them advances on the man-gate leading to the café and the open spaces of the park. Percy’s cameras settle on an elderly bearded priest with a mauve surplice and dog collar.

  ‘Anyone to do with you at all, Nat?’ he calls over my earpiece.

  ‘No, Percy, nothing to do with me, thank you.’

  Ripples of laughter. We settle again. A different, shaky camera pans along the benches beside the tarmacadam path. I guess it is attached to our friendly bobby as he acknowledges the smiles of members of the public either side of him. We linger on a middle-aged woman in a tweed skirt and sensible brown brogue shoes reading her free copy of the Evening Standard. She wears a wide straw hat and has a shopping bag beside her on the bench. Perhaps she is a member of a ladies’ bowling club. Perhaps she is Valentina waiting to be recognized. Perhaps she is just another mature English spinster who doesn’t mind the heat.

  ‘Could be, Nat?’ Percy enquires.

  ‘Could be, Percy.’

  We are in the open-air section of the café. The camera looks down on two ample bosoms and a swaying tea tray. On the tea tray, one teapot small, one cup and saucer, one plastic teaspoon, one sachet of milk. And a cellophane-wrapped slice of Genoa fruitcake on a paper plate. Legs, feet, umbrellas, hands and pieces of face jostle as we pass by with our burden. We pull up. A woman’s voice, homely, friendly, Percy-trained, blurts into a neck microphone:

  ‘Excuse me, dear. Is anybody sitting in that chair?’

  The freckled, cheeky face of Tadzio is looking up at us. He speaks straight into camera. His perfect English is exactly that. If there is a cadence to it, it is German, or – with Zurich University in mind – Swiss:

  ‘This one’s taken, I’m afraid. Lady just went to get herself a cup of tea. I promised to keep it for her.’

  The camera shifts to the empty seat next to him. It has a denim jacket slung over it, the same jacket Tadzio wore for his encounter with Sergei in the Leicester Square brasserie.

  A more sophisticated camera takes over: a sniper-type camera levelled, I suspect, from the upper window of a broken-down double-decker bus with warning triangles that Percy installed this very morning as one of his static posts. No camera shake. We zoom in. Hold Tadzio alone at his table sucking Coca-Cola through a straw while he scrolls his smartphone.

  A woman’s back enters the frame. It is not a tweedy back. It is not an ample back. It is an elegant female back and tapers at the waist. It has a hint of the gym about it. It wears a long-sleeved white blouse and a lightweight Bavarian-style waistcoat. A slender neck is topped by a man’s straw trilby. Its voice – which comes to us from two unsynchronized sources, the one I suspect being the cruet set sitting on the table, the other further away and directional – is forceful, foreign and amusing:

  ‘Excuse me, kind sir. Is this chair actually occupied, or is it for your jacket only?’

  To which Tadzio, as if on command, springs to his feet and exclaims cheerfully, ‘All yours, lady, absolutely free!’

  Whisking his denim jacket off the chair with showy gallantry, Tadzio drapes it over the back of his own chair and sits down again.

  A different angle,
a different camera. With a deafening chime the tapered back sets down its tray, transfers a paper mug, tea or coffee presumed, two packets of sugar, a plastic fork and a slice of sponge cake to the table, and deposits the tray on an adjacent trolley before sitting herself beside Tadzio without turning to camera. With no further word passing between them, she picks up the fork, cuts into her sponge cake and takes a sip of tea. The brim of the straw trilby casts a black shadow over her face, which is turned downward. Her head lifts in response to an enquiry we have yet to hear. In the same moment, Tadzio glances at his wristwatch, mutters an inaudible exclamation, leaps to his feet, grabs his denim jacket and, as if remembering an urgent appointment, makes a hasty departure. As he does so, we are treated to a full shot of the woman he has abandoned. She is trim, handsome, dark haired, strong featured and, in her mid to late fifties, well preserved. She wears a long, dark-green cotton skirt. She has more presence than is comfortable in an itinerant female intelligence agent operating under natural cover. She always did have: why else would Arkady have fallen for her? She was his Valentina then, she is our Valentina now. Somewhere in the outer reaches of the building we are sitting in, the face-recognition team must have come to the same conclusion because the pre-awarded codename Gamma is winking at us in red phosphorescent print from our twin screens.

  ‘You wish, sir?’ she enquires into camera with heavy playfulness.

  ‘Yeah, well. I wondered whether it was all right to sit here,’ Ed explains, plonking his tray on the table with a monumental crash, and sits himself in what, seconds earlier, was Tadzio’s chair.