Agent Running in the Field

by John le Carré

  ‘And still is,’ I reply loyally, although this is news to me.

  We stand facing each other on the doorstep. Perhaps we share a premonition that we shan’t see each other again. I ransack my mind for an extraneous topic. Bryn as usual is ahead of me:

  ‘And don’t you worry your head about Dom,’ he urges me with a chuckle. ‘The man’s fucked up everything he’s touched in life, so he’ll be in great demand. Probably got a safe parliamentary seat waiting for him right now.’

  We laugh wisely at the world’s wicked ways. As we shake hands, he pats me on the shoulder American-style, and follows me the statutory halfway down the steps. The Mondeo pulls up in front of me. Arthur drives me home.

  *

  Prue is sitting at her laptop. One glance at my face, she rises and without a word unlocks the conservatory door to the garden.

  ‘Bryn wants me to recruit Ed,’ I tell her under the apple tree. ‘The boy I told you about. My regular badminton date. The big talker.’

  ‘Recruit him for what on earth?’

  ‘As a double agent.’

  ‘Directed against whom or what?’

  ‘The Russia target.’

  ‘Well, doesn’t he have to be a single agent first?’

  ‘Technically, that’s what he already is. He’s an upscale clerical assistant in our sister Service. He’s been caught red-handed passing secrets to the Russians, but he doesn’t know yet.’

  A long silence before she takes refuge in her professionalism: ‘In that case the Office must collect all the evidence, for and against, hand it over to the Crown Prosecution Service and see him fairly tried by his peers in open court. And not go preying on his friends to bully and blackmail him. You told Bryn no, I trust.’

  ‘I told him I’d do it.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘I think Ed pressed the wrong bell.’

  18

  Renate was always an early riser.

  It’s seven on a Sunday morning, the sun is up and the heatwave shows no sign of relenting as I stride northward over the burned tundra of Regent’s Park to Primrose village. According to my researches – conducted on Prue’s laptop not my own, with Prue looking on in a state of half-enlightenment, since a residual loyalty to my Service coupled with a pardonable reticence about my past transgressions forbids me to indoctrinate her fully – I am looking for a block of superbly restored Victorian mansion apartments with resident porterage, which ought to have surprised me because diplomatic staff like to cluster round their mother ship, which in Renate’s case would have meant the German Embassy in Belgrave Square. But even in Helsinki, where she had been the number two in their Station to my number two in ours, she had insisted on living as far – and she would say as free – from the diplomatic ratpack – Diplomatengesindel – as she could decently get.

  I enter Primrose village. A holy stillness reigns over the pastel-painted Edwardian villas. Somewhere a church bell tolls, but only timidly. A brave Italian coffee-bar owner is cranking down his striped awning and its groans rhyme with the echo of my footsteps. I turn right, then left. Belisha Court is a grey-brick pile on six floors and occupies the dark side of a cul-de-sac. Stone steps lead to an arched Wagnerian portico. Its black double doors are closed against all comers. The superbly restored apartments have numbers but no names. The only bell-button is marked ‘Porter’ but a saucy handwritten note wedged behind it reads ‘Never on Sundays’. Entry is by keyholders only and the lock, surprisingly, is of the pipe-stem variety. Any Office burglar would have it open in seconds. I would take a little longer but I have no pick. Its fascia is scratched from constant use.

  I cross to the sunny side of the cul-de-sac and pretend an interest in a display of children’s clothes while I watch the reflection of the double doors. Even in Belisha Court some tenant must need an early-morning jog. Half the double door opens. Not for a jogger but for an elderly couple in black. I surmise they are on their way to church. I let out a cry of relief and hasten across the road to them: my saviours. Like an utter fool I have left my keys upstairs, I explain. They laugh. Well now, they did it to themselves only – when was it, darling? By the time we part they are hurrying down the steps still chuckling to each other and I am heading along a windowless passage to the last door on the left before you get to the garden door because, as in Helsinki so in London, Renate likes a large ground-floor apartment with a good back exit.

  The door of number eight has a polished brass flap for letters. The envelope in my hand is addressed For Reni only and marked private. She knows my handwriting. Reni was what she liked me to call her. I slip the envelope through the flap, crash the flap open and shut a couple of times, press the buzzer and hurry back along the corridor into the cul-de-sac, left and right into the High Street, pass the coffee shop with a wave and a ‘hi’ for its Italian owner, across the street, through an iron gateway and up on to Primrose Hill, which rises before me like a parched, tobacco-coloured dome. At the top of it an Indian family in bright colours is trying to fly a four-sided giant kite but there’s hardly wind enough to stir the arid leaves that lie around the solitary bench I select.

  *

  For fully fifteen minutes I wait, and by the sixteenth I have all but given up. She’s not there. She’s out running, she’s with an agent, a lover, she’s off on one of her cultural jaunts to Edinburgh or Glyndebourne or wherever her cover requires her to show her face and press the flesh. She’s frolicking on one of her beloved beaches on Sylt. Then a second wave of possibility, potentially a lot more embarrassing: she has her husband or a lover in residence, he snatched my letter from her hand and he’s coming up the hill to get me: except at this point it isn’t the vengeful husband and lover, it’s Renate herself marching up the hill, fists punching across her stocky little body, short blonde hair bouncing to her stride, blue eyes blazing, a miniature Valkyrie come to tell me I’m about to die in battle.

  She sees me, switches course, kicking up puffs of dust in her wake. As she approaches, I stand up out of courtesy but she sweeps past me, plonks herself on the bench and waits, glowering, for me to sit beside her. In Helsinki she had spoken reasonable English and better Russian, but when passion seized her she would throw both aside and claim the comfort of her own north German. From her opening salvo it is apparent that her English has greatly improved since I last heard it during our stolen weekends eight years ago in a rattly cottage on the Baltic seashore with a double bed and a wood stove.

  ‘Are you absolutely out of your tiny mind, Nat?’ she demands idiomatically, glaring up at me. ‘What the hell d’you mean: private – ears-only – off-the-record conversation? Are you trying to recruit me or fuck me? Since I am not interested in either proposal, you can tell that to whoever sent you, because you are totally out of court and off the wall and embarrassing in all respects. Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ I agree, and wait for her to settle because the woman in Renate was always more impulsive than the spy.

  ‘Stephanie is okay?’ she enquires, momentarily appeased.

  ‘More than okay, thanks. Landed on her feet at last, engaged to be married, if you can believe it. Paul?’

  Paul is not her son. Renate to her sadness has no children. Paul is her husband, or was; part mid-life playboy, part Berlin publisher.

  ‘Thank you, Paul is also excellent. His women get younger and more stupid and the books on his list get lousier. So life is normal. Have you had other little loves since me?’

  ‘I’m fine. I’ve calmed down.’

  ‘And you are still with Prue, I hope?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘So. Are you going to tell me why you have summoned me here, or do I have to call my Ambassador and tell him our British friends are making inappropriate proposals to his head of Station in a London park?’

  ‘Maybe you should tell him I’ve been slung out of my Service and I’m on a rescue mission,’ I suggest, and wait while she gathers in her body: elbows and knees tightly together, hands linked on her lap.
r />   ‘Is that true? They fired you?’ she demands. ‘This is not some stupid ploy? When?’

  ‘Yesterday, as far as I remember.’

  ‘Because of some imprudent amour?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And whom have you come to rescue, may I ask?’

  ‘You. Not just you singular. You plural. You, your staff, your Station, your Ambassador and a bunch of people in Berlin.’

  When Renate listens with her large blue eyes, you would never imagine they could blink.

  ‘You are serious, Nat?’

  ‘As never before.’

  She reflects on this.

  ‘And you are recording our conversation for posterity, no doubt?’

  ‘Actually not. How about you?’

  ‘Also actually not,’ she replies. ‘Now please rescue us quickly, if that is what you have come to do.’

  ‘If I told you that my ex-Service had information that a member of the British intelligence community here in London has been offering you information concerning a top-secret dialogue we are having with our American partners, how would you reply to that?’

  Her answer comes even faster than I’d expected. Was she preparing it as she came up the hill? Or had she taken advice from above by the time she left her flat?

  ‘I would reply that maybe you British are on a ridiculous fishing expedition.’

  ‘Of what sort?’

  ‘Maybe you are attempting a crude test of our professional loyalty in the light of impending Brexit. Nothing is beyond your so-called government in the present absurd crisis.’

  ‘But you’re not saying that such an offer wasn’t made to you?’

  ‘You asked me a hypothetical question. I have given you a hypothetical answer.’

  At which her mouth snaps shut to indicate that the meeting is over; except that, far from stomping off, she is sitting dead still, waiting for more without wishing to show it. The Indian family, tired of trying to fly the kite, descends the hill. At its foot, platoons of joggers run left to right.

  ‘Let’s imagine his name is Edward Shannon,’ I suggest.

  Dismissive shrug.

  ‘And, still hypothetically, that Shannon is a former member of our inter-service liaison team based in Berlin. Also that he is enraptured by Germany and has the German bug. His motivation is complex and for our mutual purposes irrelevant. But it is not malign. It is actually well intentioned.’

  ‘Naturally, I never heard of this man.’

  ‘Naturally you haven’t. Nevertheless, he made a number of visits to your Embassy over the last few months.’ I spell out the dates for her, courtesy of Bryn. ‘Since his work in London didn’t provide him with a link to your Station here, he didn’t know who to turn to with his offer of secrets. So he buttonholed anyone in your Embassy he could find until he got handed over to a member of your Station. Shannon is an intelligent man but in terms of conspiracy he is what you would call a Vollidiot. Is that a plausible scenario – hypothetically?’

  ‘Of course it is plausible. As a fairy tale, everything is plausible.’

  ‘Maybe it would help if I mentioned that Shannon was received by a member of your staff named Maria Brandt.’

  ‘We have no Maria Brandt.’

  ‘I’m sure you haven’t. But it took your Station ten days to decide you hadn’t. Ten days of frantic deliberation before you told him you had no interest in his offer.’

  ‘If we told him that we had no interest – which obviously I deny – why are we sitting here? You know his name. You know he is trying to sell secrets. You know he is a Vollidiot. You have only to produce a fake buyer and arrest him. In such a hypothetical eventuality, my Embassy behaved correctly in all respects.’

  ‘Fake buyer, Reni?’ I exclaim in disbelief. ‘Are you telling me that Ed named his price? I find that hard to believe.’

  The stare again, but softer, closer.

  ‘Ed?’ she repeats. ‘Is this what you call him? Your hypothetical traitor? Ed?’

  ‘It’s what other people call him.’

  ‘But you too?’

  ‘It’s catching. It means nothing,’ I retort, momentarily on the defensive. ‘You said just now that Shannon was trying to sell his secrets.’

  Now it is her turn to retreat:

  ‘I said no such thing. We were discussing your absurd hypothesis. Intelligence peddlers do not automatically name their price. First they demonstrate their wares in order to obtain the confidence of the purchaser. Only afterwards are terms discussed. As you and I know very well, do we not?’

  We do indeed know. It was a German-born intelligence peddler in Helsinki who brought us together. Bryn Jordan smelt a rat and instructed me to crosscheck with our German friends. They gave me Reni.

  ‘So, ten long days and nights before Berlin finally ordered you to turn him off,’ I muse.

  ‘You are talking total nonsense.’

  ‘No, Reni. I’m trying to share your pain. Ten days, ten nights of waiting for Berlin to lay its egg. There you are, head of your London Station, a glittering prize within your grasp. Shannon is offering you raw intelligence to dream of. But, oh shit, what happens if he’s blown? Think of the diplomatic fallout, our dear British press: a five-star German spy-scare slap in the middle of Brexit!’

  She starts to protest but I allow her no respite, since I am allowing myself none.

  ‘Did you sleep? Not you. Did your Station sleep? Did your Ambassador? Did Berlin? Ten days and nights before they inform you that Shannon must be told that his offer is unacceptable. If he approaches you again, you will report him to the appropriate British authorities. And that’s what Maria tells him before she disappears herself in a cloud of green smoke.’

  ‘There are no such ten days,’ she retorts. ‘You are fantasizing as usual. If such an offer was made to us, which it was not, then it was rejected immediately and irrevocably and out of hand by my Embassy. If your Service or former Service thinks otherwise, it is deluded. Am I a liar suddenly?’

  ‘No, Reni. You’re doing your job.’

  She is angry. With me and with herself.

  ‘Are you trying to charm me into submission again?’

  ‘Is that what I did in Helsinki?’

  ‘Of course you did. You charm everyone. You are known for it. That is what they hired you for. As a Romeo. For your universal homoerotic charm. You were insistent, I was young. Voilà.’

  ‘We were both young. And we were both insistent, if you remember.’

  ‘I remember no such thing. We have totally different recollections of the same unfortunate event. Let us agree that for once and for always.’

  She is a woman. I am being overbearing and I am imposing on her. She is a professional intelligence officer in high standing. She’s cornered and doesn’t like it. I am a former lover and I belong on the cutting-room floor with the rest of us. I am a small but precious part of her life and she will never let me go.

  ‘All I’m trying to do, Reni,’ I insist, not bothering any longer to quell the urgency that has entered my voice, ‘is work out as objectively as I know the procedure, inside your Service and outside it, over a period of ten days and nights, for handling Edward Shannon’s unsolicited offer of prime-quality intelligence on the British target. How many hastily convened meetings? How many people handled the papers, telephoned each other, emailed each other, signalled each other, maybe not always on the most secure lines? How many whispered conversations in corridors between panicked politicians and civil servants desperate to cover their backsides? I mean Jesus, Reni!’ I break out. ‘A young man who has lived and worked among you in Berlin, loves your language and your people and considers he has a German heart. Not some lowlife mercenary, but a real thinking man with a crazy mission to save Europe singlehanded. Didn’t you sense that about him when you played Maria Brandt for him?’

  ‘I played Maria Brandt suddenly? What on earth gave you that stupid impression?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you handed him to your number two. Not yo
u, Reni. A walk-in from British intelligence with a shopping list of top secrets?’

  I am expecting her to protest again, to deny, deny, as we have both been taught to do. Instead of which, some kind of softening or resignation overcomes her and she turns away from me and consults the morning sky.

  ‘Is this why they fired you, Nat?’ she asks. ‘For the boy?’

  ‘In part.’

  ‘And now you have come to rescue us from him.’

  ‘Not from Ed. From yourselves. What I’m trying to tell you is that somewhere along the line between London, Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt and wherever else your masters confer, Shannon’s offer to you wasn’t just blown. It was intercepted and taken up by a rival firm.’

  A flock of gulls has settled beneath us in a single swoop.

  ‘An American firm?’

  ‘Russian,’ I say, and wait while she continues with great intensity to observe the gulls.

  ‘Posing as our Service? Under our false flag? Moscow has recruited Shannon?’ she demands for verification.

  Only her small fists, clenched on her knees for combat, betray her outrage.

  ‘They told him that Maria’s refusal to accept his offer was a delaying tactic while they got their act together.’

  ‘And he believed that shit? Dear God.’

  Again we sit in silence. But the protective hostility in her has drained away. Just as in Helsinki, we are comrades in a cause, even if we don’t admit it.

  ‘What’s Jericho?’ I ask. ‘The mega-secret codeword material that made him flip. Shannon only read a small part of it but that seems to have been enough for him to come running to you.’

  Her eyes are wide on mine all the time, as they were when we made love. Her voice has lost its official edge.

  ‘You don’t know Jericho?’

  ‘Not cleared for it. Never was, and by the look of it, never will be.’