Agent Running in the Field

by John le Carré

  Curtain up. We’re on. Shades of Prue and myself faking it for the microphones in Moscow.

  *

  They had told me at the Haven that Florence had a temper on her but until now I’d only seen it in action on the badminton court. Ask me whether it was real or simulated, I can only reply that she was a natural. This was improvisation on the grand scale: ad lib as art, inspired, spontaneous, merciless.

  First she hears me out in deathly stillness, face rigid. I tell her we have unchallengeable visual and aural evidence of Ed’s betrayal. I tell her she’s welcome to a private view of the footage, a straight lie. I say we have every good reason to believe that by the time she crashed out of the Office she was consumed with hatred for Britain’s political elite and it therefore comes as no surprise to me to learn that she has bonded with an embittered loner on a vengeance jag who is offering our hottest secrets to the Russians. I tell her that despite this act of supreme folly or worse I am authorized to offer her a lifeline:

  ‘You first explain to Ed in simple English that he’s blown skyhigh. You tell him we have cast-iron proof, cooked all ways. You inform him that his own Service is thirsting for his blood, but there’s a path to salvation open to him if he agrees to collaborate unreservedly. And in case he doubts it, the alternative to collaboration is prison for a very long time.’

  All this quietly spoken, you understand, no dramatics, interrupted once only by the arrival of the smoked salmon. I can tell by her continuing stillness that she is working herself into a froth of righteous anger, but nothing I have seen or heard of her till now prepares me for the scale of the detonation. Ignoring entirely the unequivocal message I have just delivered, she launches a full-frontal assault on its messenger: me.

  I think that just because I’m a spy I’m one of God’s anointed, the navel of the fucking universe, whereas all I am is another over-controlled public-school wanker. I am a badminton trawler. Badminton is how I pull pretty boys. I got the hots for Ed and now I’ve set him up as a Russian spy because he refused my advances.

  Tearing blindly into me like this, she is a wounded animal, a feral protector of her man and her unborn child. If she had spent the whole night dredging up every dark thought she ever had about me, she couldn’t have done a better job.

  After a needless intervention by the maître d’ who insists on knowing that everything is satisfactory, she returns to the charge. Taking a lead straight out of the trainers’ manual, she gives me her first tactical fallback:

  All right, let’s just suppose – for argument’s sake – that Ed has got his loyalties in a twist. Let’s suppose he went binge drinking one night and the Russians did a kompromat job on him. And that Ed went along with it, which he never would in a thousand years, but let’s suppose all the same. Do I then really imagine that on no terms at all he’s going to sign up as a fucking double agent in the full knowledge that he will be dropped down a hole any time we feel like it? So in a nutshell, kindly tell her, if I can, what sort of guarantees is my Office going to offer a double agent without a prayer to his name who’s about to put his head in the fucking lion’s mouth?

  And when I reply that Ed is in no sort of position to bargain and he must either take us on trust or accept the consequences, I am only spared another onslaught by the arrival of the turbot, which she attacks in short, indignant stabs while calculating her second tactical fallback:

  ‘Suppose he does work for you,’ she concedes in an only slightly more emollient tone. ‘Just suppose. Say I talk him into it, which I’d have to. And he screws up, or the Russians rumble him, whichever comes first. Then what? He’s blown, he’s used goods, fuck him, he’s on the rubbish heap. Why should he go through all that shit? Why bother? Why not tell you all to take a running jump and just go to jail? Which is worse, finally? Being played by both sides like a fucking marionette and ending up dead in a back street, or paying his debt to society and coming out in one piece?’

  Which I take as my cue to bring matters to a head:

  ‘You’re deliberately ignoring the scale of his crime and the mountain of hard evidence stacked against him,’ I say in my most persuasive and finite tone. ‘The rest is sheer speculation. Your husband-to-be is up to his neck in trouble, and we’re offering you a chance to dig him out. It’s a take-it-or-leave-it, I’m afraid.’

  But this only sparks yet another scathing response:

  ‘So you’re judge and jury now, are you? Fuck the law courts! Fuck fair trials! Fuck human rights and whatever your civil society wife thinks she stands for!’

  Only after prolonged thinking time on her part do I secure the grudging breakthrough that she’s made me work so hard for. Yet even now she manages to preserve a semblance of dignity:

  ‘I’m not conceding anything, right? Not a bloody thing.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘If, and only if, Ed says: all right, I got it wrong, I love my country, I’ll collaborate, I’ll be a double, I’ll take the risk. I said if. Does he get his amnesty or not?’

  I play it long. Promise nothing you can’t take back. A Bryn aphorism.

  ‘If he’s earned it, and we decide he’s earned it, and if the Home Secretary signs off on it: yes, in all probability he gets his amnesty.’

  ‘Then what? Does he risk his neck for free? Do I? How about a bit of risk money?’

  We’ve done enough. She’s spent, I’m spent. Time to call down the curtain.

  ‘Florence, we’ve come a long way to meet you. We want unconditional compliance. Yours and Ed’s. In return we offer expert handling and full support. Bryn needs a clear answer. Now. Not tomorrow. It’s either a yes, Bryn, I will. Or it’s no, Bryn, and accept the consequences. Which is it to be?’

  ‘I need to marry Ed first,’ she says, without lifting her head. ‘Nothing before.’

  ‘Before you tell him what we’ve just agreed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When will you tell him?’

  ‘After Torquay.’

  ‘Torquay?’

  ‘Where we’re going for our forty-eight-hour fucking honeymoon,’ she snaps in an inspired resurgence of anger.

  A shared silence, mutually orchestrated.

  ‘Are we friends, Florence?’ I ask. ‘I think we are.’

  I am holding out my hand to her. Still without raising her head she takes it, first hesitantly then clutches it for real as I secretly congratulate her on the performance of a lifetime.

  21

  The two and a half days of waiting might as well be a hundred and I remember every hour of them. Florence’s taunts, however wide of the mark, had been drawn from life, and on the rare occasions when I ceased pondering the operational contingencies that lay ahead of us, her searing performance came back to accuse me of sins I hadn’t committed, and quite a few that I had.

  Not once since her declaration of solidarity had Prue given the smallest hint of relenting on her commitment. She expressed no pain about my tryst with Reni. She had long ago consigned matters of that sort to the unrecoverable past. When I ventured to remind her of the perils to her legal career she replied a little tartly she was well aware of them, thank you. When I asked her whether a British judge would draw any distinction between passing secrets to the Germans as opposed to the Russians she replied with a grim laugh that in the eyes of many of our dear judges the Germans were worse. And all the while the trained Office spouse in her that she continued to deny went about her covert duties with an efficiency I tactfully took for granted.

  For her professional life she had retained her maiden name of Stoneway, and it was in this name that she instructed her assistant to book her a hire car. If the company required licence details, she would supply them when she collected the car.

  At my request she twice called Florence, the first time to ask in womanly confidence which hotel the honeymoon couple would be staying at in Torquay because she was dying to send flowers and Nat was equally determined to send Ed a bottle of champagne. Florence said the Imperial as Mr and Mr
s Shannon and Prue reported that she sounded focused, and was putting on a good turn as nervous bride-to-be for the benefit of Percy’s listeners. Prue sent her flowers. I sent my bottle, each of us ordering online, trusting to the vigilance of Percy’s team.

  The second time Prue called Florence was to ask whether she could be of any help with organizing the knees-up at the pub after the wedding as her partnership’s chambers were just down the road. Florence said she’d booked a big private room, it was okay but smelt of piss. Prue promised to take a look at it, although they agreed it was too late to change. Percy, are you listening there below?

  Using Prue’s laptop and credit card in preference to my own, we examined flights to various European destinations and noted that in the high holiday season Club Class on regular airlines was still largely available. Shaded by the apple tree, we ran through every last detail of our operational plan one more time. Had I neglected some vital move? Was it conceivable that after a lifetime devoted to stealth I was about to fall at the last fence? Prue said not. She had reviewed our dispositions and found no fault with them. So why don’t I, instead of fretting uselessly, give Ed a ring and see if he has time for lunch? And with no further encouragement needed, that is what I do in my role of best man, just twenty-four hours before Ed is due to exchange vows with Florence.

  I call Ed.

  He is thrilled. What a great idea, Nat! Brilliant! He only gets an hour, but maybe he can stretch it. How about the Dog & Goat saloon bar, be there sharp at one?

  The Dog & Goat it is, I say. See you there. Thirteen hundred hours sharp.

  *

  A dense cluster of civil service suits is packed into the saloon bar of the Dog & Goat that day, not surprisingly since it lies five hundred imperial yards from Downing Street, the Foreign Office and the Treasury. And a good few of the suits are around Ed’s age, so it somehow doesn’t seem right to me, as he wades towards me through the scrum on the eve of his wedding day, that hardly a head turns to acknowledge him.

  There is no Stammtisch available, but Ed uses his height and elbows to good effect and soon liberates a couple of bar stools from the mêlée. And somehow I fight my way to the front line and buy us a couple of pints of draught lager, not frosted but near enough, and a couple of ploughman’s lunches with Cheddar and pickled onions and crisp bread, handed along the bar in a fireman’s chain.

  With these essentials we succeed in improvising a watcher’s corner of sorts for ourselves, and bellow at each other above the din. I only hope that Percy’s people are managing to get an ear in, because everything Ed says is balm to my frayed nerves:

  ‘She’s gone completely and totally off the wall, Nat! Flo has! Invited all her posh mates to the pub afterwards! Kids and all! And booked us a bloody great hotel in Torquay with a swimming pool and massage parlour! Know what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’re skint, Nat! Clean broke! It’s all gone on builders! Yeah! We’ll have to do the washing-up on the morning after our wedding night!’

  Suddenly it’s time for him to go back to whatever dark Whitehall hole they’ve put him in. The bar empties as if on command and we’re standing in the relative quiet of the pavement with only Whitehall traffic thundering by.

  ‘I was going to have a bachelor night,’ Ed says awkwardly. ‘You and me kind of thing. Flo put the kibosh on it, says it’s all male bullshit.’

  ‘Florence is right.’

  ‘I took the ring off her,’ he says. ‘Told her I’d give it her back when she’s my wife.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘I’m keeping it on me so I don’t forget.’

  ‘You don’t want me to look after it till tomorrow?’

  ‘Not really. Great badminton, Nat. Best ever.’

  ‘And a whole lot more when you come back from Torquay.’

  ‘Be great. Yeah. See you tomorrow then.’

  On Whitehall’s pavements you don’t embrace, though I suspect it’s in his mind. Instead he makes do with a double handshake, grabbing my right hand in both of his and pumping it up and down.

  *

  Somehow the hours have slipped by. It’s early evening. Prue and I are back under the apple tree, she at her iPad, I with an ecological book Steff wants me to read about the forthcoming apocalypse. I have draped my jacket over the back of my chair and I must have entered some kind of reverie because it takes me a moment to realize that the squawk I’m hearing is coming from Bryn Jordan’s doctored smartphone. But for once I’m too slow. Prue has fished it out of my jacket and put it to her ear:

  ‘No, Bryn. His wife,’ she says briskly. ‘A voice from the past. How are you? Good. And the family? Good. He’s in bed, I’m afraid, not feeling his brightest. The whole of Battersea is going down with it in droves. Can I help? Well, that will make him feel much better, I’m sure. I’ll tell him the moment he wakes up. And to you, Bryn. No, not yet but the post here is haywire. I’m sure we shall come if we possibly can. How very clever of her. I tried oils once but they weren’t a success. And goodnight to you, Bryn, wherever you are.’

  She rings off.

  ‘He sends his congratulations,’ she says. ‘And an invitation to Ah Chan’s art exhibition in Cork Street. I somehow think we shan’t make it.’

  *

  It’s morning. It has been morning for a long time: morning in the hill forests of Karlovy Vary, morning on a rain-drenched Yorkshire hilltop, on Ground Beta and the twin screens in the Operations room; morning on Primrose Hill, in the Haven, on court number one at the Athleticus. I have made the tea and squeezed the orange juice and come back to bed: our best time for taking the decisions we couldn’t take yesterday, or discovering what we’ll do at the weekend or where we’ll go on holiday.

  But today we’re talking solely about what we’ll be wearing for the great event, and what fun it will be, and what a stroke of genius on my part to suggest Torquay because the children seem quite incapable of taking any practical decisions of their own – children being our new shorthand for Ed and Florence, and our conversation being a precautionary return to our Moscow days, because the one thing you know about Percy Price is, friendship comes second when there’s a telephone extension right beside your bed.

  Until yesterday afternoon I had assumed that all weddings took place at ground level, but I was abruptly corrected on the point when, on my way back from the Dog & Goat, I undertook a discreet photographic reconnaissance of our target area and confirmed that the Register Office of Ed’s and Florence’s choice was on the fifth floor, and the only reason it had a slot at such short notice was that it boasted eight arduous flights of cold stone staircase before you reached the reception desk, and another half-flight before you entered a cavernous arched waiting room got up like a theatre with no stage, with soft music playing and plush seats and a sea of uneasy people in groups, and a shiny black-lacquered door at the far end marked ‘Weddings Only’. There was one minuscule lift, with priority given to the disabled.

  I also established in the course of the same reconnaissance that the third floor, which was leased in its entirety to a firm of chartered accountants, gave on to an overhead Venice-style footbridge leading to a similar building across the street; and better still, to a lighthouse-style stairwell that descended all the way to an underground car park. From the insanitary depths of the car park, the staircase was accessible to anyone fool enough to want to climb up it. But to those wishing to descend it by way of the footbridge on the third floor, access was denied to all but certified residents of the block, see the lurid ‘NO ENTRY TO PUBLIC’ sign plastered across a pair of solid, electronically controlled doors. The chartered accountant’s brass plate named six partners. The one at the top was a Mr M. Bailey.

  The next morning, in near silence, Prue and I dressed.

  *

  I will report the events as I would any special operation. We arrive by design early, at 11.15 a.m. On our way up the stone staircase we pause at the third floor, while Prue stands smiling in her flowered hat
and I engage the woman receptionist of the firm of chartered accountants in casual conversation. No, she says in answer to my question, her employers do not close their doors early on a Friday. I inform her that I am an old client of Mr Bailey. She says robotically that he is in meetings all morning. I say we are old school friends, but not to disturb him, and I will make a formal appointment for next week some time. I hand her a printed name card left over from my last posting: Commercial Counsellor, H.M. Embassy, Tallinn, and wait till she consents to read it.

  ‘Where’s Tallinn?’ she asks pertly.

  ‘Estonia.’

  ‘Where’s Estonia?’ – giggle.

  ‘The Baltic,’ I tell her. ‘North of Latvia.’

  She doesn’t ask me where the Baltic is, but the giggle tells me I have made my mark. I have also blown my cover, but who’s counting? We ascend two more floors to the cavernous waiting room and take up a position close to the entrance. A large woman in a green uniform with a major general’s epaulettes is sorting wedding groups in line ahead. Jingle bells play over loudspeakers each time a wedding ends, upon which the group nearest the shiny black door is ushered in. The door closes and the jingle bells resume fifteen minutes later.

  At 11.51 Florence and Ed emerge arm in arm from the stairwell, looking like an advertisement for a building society: Ed in a new grey suit that fits him as poorly as his old one, and Florence in the same trouser suit that she had sported one sunny spring day a thousand years ago when, as a promising young intelligence officer, she presented Rosebud to the wise elders of Operations Directorate. She is clutching a bunch of red roses. Ed must have bought them for her.

  We kiss each other: Prue to Florence, Prue to Ed; after which, as best man, I plant my own kiss on Florence’s cheek, our first.

  ‘No pulling back now,’ I whisper loudly into her ear in my most jocular tone.

  We have barely disentangled ourselves before Ed’s long arms enfold me in a botched manly embrace – I doubt he’s ever tried it before – and the next thing I know he has lifted me to his own height and is holding me chest to chest, half suffocating me in the process.