The Spy Who Came in from the Cold s-3

by John le Carré

  Peters interrupted. "Just a minute," he said. "Do you mean to say all this intelligence came from Riemeck?"

  "Why not? You know how much he saw."

  "It's scarcely possible," Peters observed, almost to himself. "He must have had help."

  "He did have later on; I'm coming to that."

  "I know what you are going to tell me. But did you never have the feeling he got assistance from above as well as from the agents he afterwards acquired?"

  "No. No, I never did. It never occurred to me."

  "Looking back on it now, does it seem likely?"

  "Not particularly."

  "When you sent all this material back to the Circus, they never suggested that even for a man in Riemeck's position the intelligence was phenomenally comprehensive?"

  "No."

  "Did they ever ask where Riemeck got his camera from, who instructed him in document photography?"

  Leamas hesitated.

  "No...I'm sure they never asked."

  "Remarkable," Peters observed drily. "I'm sorry— do go on. I did not mean to anticipate you."

  Exactly a week later, Leamas continued, he drove to the canal and this time he felt nervous. As he turned into the gravel road he saw three bicycles lying in the grass and two hundred yards down the canal, three men fishing. He got out of the car as usual and began walking toward the line of trees on the other side of the field. He had gone about twenty yards when he heard a shout. He looked around and caught sight of one of the men beckoning to him. The other two had turned and were looking at him too. Leamas was wearing an old mackintosh; he had his hands in the pockets, and it was too late to take them out. He knew that the men on either side were covering the man in the middle and that if he took his hands out of his pockets they would probably shoot him; they would think he was holding a revolver in his pocket. Leamas stopped ten yards from the center man.

  "You want something?" Leamas asked.

  "Are you Leamas?" He was a small, plump man, very steady. He spoke English.

  "Yes."

  "What is your British national identity number?"

  "PRT stroke L 58003 stroke one."

  "Where did you spend VJ night?"

  "At Leiden in Holland in my father's workshop, with some Dutch friends."

  "Let's go for a walk, Mr. Leamas. You won't need your mackintosh. Take it off and leave it on the ground where you are standing. My friends will look after it." Leamas hesitated, shrugged and took off his mackintosh. Then they walked together briskly toward the wood.

  * * *

  "You know as well as I do who he was," said Leamas wearily, "third man in the Ministry of the Interior, Secretary to the S.E.D. Präsidium, head of the Coordinating Committee for the Protection of the People. I suppose that was how he knew about de Jong and me: he'd seen our counterintelligence files in the Abteilung. He had three strings to his bow: the Präsidium, straightforward internal political and economic reporting, and access to the files of the East German Security Service."

  "But only limited access. They'd never give an outsider the run of all their files," Peters insisted.

  Leamas shrugged.

  "They did," he said.

  "What did he do with his money?"

  "After that afternoon I didn't give him any. The Circus took that over straightaway. It was paid into a West German bank. He even gave me back what I'd given him. London banked it for him."

  "How much did you tell London?"

  "Everything after that. I had to; then the Circus told the Departments. After that," Leamas added venomously, "it was only a matter of time before it packed up. With the Departments at their backs, London got greedy. They began pressing us for more, wanted to give him more money. Finally we had to suggest to Karl that he recruit other sources, and we took them on to form a network. It was bloody stupid, it put a strain on Karl, endangered him, undermined his confidence in us. It was the beginning of the end."

  "How much did you get out of him?"

  Leamas hesitated. "How much? Christ, I don't know. It lasted an unnaturally long time. I think he was blown long before he was caught. The standard dropped in the last few months; think they'd begun to suspect him by then and kept him away from the good stuff."

  "Altogether, what did he give you?" Peters persisted.

  Piece by piece, Leamas recounted the full extent of all Karl Riemeck's work. His memory was, Peters noted approvingly, remarkably precise considering the amount he drank. He could give dates and names, he could remember the reaction from London, the nature of corroboration where it existed. He could remember sums of money demanded and paid, the dates of the conscription of other agents into the network.

  "I'm sorry," said Peters at last, "but I do not believe that one man, however well placed, however careful, however industrious, could have acquired such a range of detailed knowledge. For that matter, even if he had he would never have been able to photograph it."

  "He was able," Leamas persisted, suddenly angry. "He bloody well did and that's all there is to it."

  "And the Circus never told you to go into it with him, exactly how and when he saw all this stuff?"

  "No," snapped Leamas. "Riemeck was touchy about that, and London was content to let it go."

  "Well, well," Peters mused.

  After a moment Peters said, "You heard about that woman, incidentally?"

  "What woman?" Leamas asked sharply.

  "Karl Riemeck's mistress, the one who came over to West Berlin the night Riemeck was shot."

  "Well?"

  "She was found dead a week ago. Murdered. She was shot from a car as she left her flat."

  "It used to be my flat," said Leamas mechanically.

  "Perhaps," Peters suggested, "she knew more about Riemeck's network than you did."

  "What the hell do you mean?" Leamas demanded.

  Peters shrugged. "It's all very strange," he observed. "I wonder who killed her."

  When they had exhausted the case of Karl Riemeck, Leamas went on to talk of other less spectacular agents, then of the procedure of his Berlin office, its communications, its staff, its secret ramifications— flats, transport, recording and photographic equipment. They talked long into the night and throughout the next day, and when at last Leamas stumbled into bed the following night he knew he had betrayed all that he knew of Allied Intelligence in Berlin and had drunk two bottles of whisky in two days.

  One thing puzzled him: Peters' insistence that Karl Riemeck must have had help—must have had a high level collaborator. Control had asked him the same question—he remembered now—Control had asked about Riemeck's access. How could they both be so sure Karl hadn't managed alone? He'd had helpers, of course; like the guards by the canal the day Leamas met him. But they were small beer—Karl had told him about them. But Peters—and Peters, after all, would know precisely how much Karl had been able to get his hands on—Peters had refused to believe Karl had managed alone. On this point, Peters and Control were evidently agreed.

  Perhaps it was true. Perhaps there was somebody else. Perhaps this was the special interest whom Control was so anxious to protect from Mundt. That would mean that Karl Riemeck had collaborated with this special interest and provided what both of them had together obtained. Perhaps that was what Control had spoken to Karl about, alone, that evening in Leamas' flat in Berlin.

  Anyway, tomorrow would tell. Tomorrow he would play his hand.

  He wondered who had killed Elvira. And he wondered why they had killed her. Of course—here was a point, here was a possible explanation—Elvira, knowing the identity of Riemeck's special collaborator, had been murdered by that collaborator...No, that was too farfetched. It overlooked the difficulty of crossing from East to West: Elvira had after all been murdered in West Berlin.

  He wondered why Control had never told him Elvira had been murdered. So that he would react suitably when Peters told him? It was useless speculating. Control had his reasons; they were usually so bloody tortuous it took you a week to
work them out.

  As he fell asleep he muttered, "Karl was a damn fool. That woman did for him, I'm sure she did." Elvira was dead now, and serve her right. He remembered Liz.

  9

  The Second Day

  Peters arrived at eight o'clock the next morning, and without ceremony they sat down at the table and began.

  "So you came back to London. What did you do there?"

  "They put me on the shelf. I knew I was finished when that ass in Personnel met me at the airport. I had to go straight to Control and report about Karl. He was dead—what else was there to say?"

  "What did they do with you?"

  "They said at first I could hang around in London and wait till I was qualified for a proper pension. They were so bloody decent about it I got angry—I told them that if they were so keen to chuck money at me why didn't they do the obvious thing and count in all my time instead of bleating about broken service? Then they got cross when I told them that. They put me in Banking with a lot of women. I can't remember much about that part—I began hitting the bottle a bit. Went through a bad phase."

  He lit a cigarette. Peters nodded.

  "That was why they gave me the push, really. They didn't like me drinking."

  "Tell me what you do remember about Banking Section," Peters suggested.

  "It was a dreary setup. I never was cut out for desk work, I knew that. That's why I hung on in Berlin. I knew when they recalled me I'd be put on the shelf, but Christ!"

  "What did you do?"

  Leamas shrugged.

  "Sat on my behind in the same room as a couple of women. Thursby and Larrett. I called them Thursday and Friday." He grinned rather stupidly. Peters looked uncomprehending.

  "We just pushed paper. A letter came down from Finance: 'The payment of seven hundred dollars to so and so is authorized with effect from so and so. Kindly get on with it'—that was the gist of it. Thursday and Friday would kick it about a bit, file it, stamp it, and I'd sign a check or get the bank to make a transfer."

  "What bank?"

  "Blatt and Rodney, a chichi little bank in the City. There's a sort of theory in the Circus that Etonians are discreet."

  "In fact, then, you knew the names of agents all over the world?"

  "Not necessarily. That was the cunning thing. I'd sign the check, you see, or the order to the bank, but we'd leave a space for the name of the payee. The covering letter or what have you was all signed and then the file would go back to Special Dispatch."

  "Who are they?"

  "They're the general holders of agents' particulars. They put in the names and posted the order. Bloody clever, I must say."

  Peters looked disappointed.

  "You mean you had no way of knowing the names of the payees?"

  "Not usually, no."

  "But occasionally?"

  "We got pretty near the knuckle now and again. All the fiddling about between Banking, Finance and Special Dispatch led to cockups, of course. Too elaborate. Then occasionally we came in on special stuff which brightened one's life a bit."

  Leamas got up. "I've made a list," he said, "of all the payments I can remember. It's in my room. I'll get it."

  He walked out of the room, the rather shuffling walk he had affected since arriving in Holland. When he returned he held in his hand a couple of sheets of lined paper torn from a cheap notebook.

  "I wrote these down last night," he said. "I thought it would save time."

  Peters took the notes and read them slowly and carefully. He seemed impressed.

  "Good," he said, "very good."

  "Then I remember best a thing called Rolling Stone. I got a couple of trips out of it. One to Copenhagen and one to Helsinki. Just dumping money at banks."

  "How much?"

  "Ten thousand dollars in Copenhagen, forty thousand D-Marks in Helsinki" Peters put down his pencil.

  "Who for?" he asked.

  "God knows. We work Rolling Stone on a system of deposit accounts. The Service gave me a phony British passport; I went to the Royal Scandinavian Bank in Copenhagen and the National Bank of Finland in Helsinki, deposited the money and drew a passbook on a joint account—for me in my alias and for someone else—the agent I suppose in his alias. I gave the banks a sample of the co-holder's signature, I'd got that from Head Office. Later, the agent was given the passbook and a false passport which he showed at the bank when he drew the money. All I knew was the alias." He heard himself talking and it all sounded so ludicrously improbable.

  "Was this procedure common?"

  "No. It was a special payment. It had a subscription list."

  "What's that?"

  "It had a code name known to very few people."

  "What was the code name?"

  "I told you—Rolling Stone. The operation covered irregular payments often thousand dollars in different currencies and in different capitals."

  "Always in capital towns?"

  "Far as I know. I remember reading in the file that there had been other Rolling Stone payments before I came to the Section, but in those cases Banking Section got the local Resident to do it."

  "These other payments that took place before you came: where were they made?"

  "One in Oslo. I can't remember where the other was."

  "Was the alias of the agent always the same?"

  "No. That was an added security precaution. I heard later we pinched the whole technique from the Russians. It was the most elaborate payment scheme I'd met. In the same way I used a different alias and of course a different passport for each trip." That would please him, help him to fill in the gaps.

  "These faked passports the agent was given so that he could draw the money: did you know anything about them—how they were made out and dispatched?"

  "No. Oh, except that they had to have visas in them for the country where the money was deposited. And entry stamps."

  "Entry stamps?"

  "Yes. I assumed the passports were never used at the border—only presented at the bank for identification purposes. The agent must have traveled on his own passport, quite legally entered the country where the bank was situated, then used the faked passport at the bank. That was my guess."

  "Do you know of a reason why earlier payments were made by the Residents, and later payments by someone traveling out from London?"

  "I know the reason., I asked the women in Banking Section, Thursday and Friday. Control was anxious that—"

  "Control? Do you mean to say Control himself was running the case?"

  "Yes, he was running it. He was afraid the Resident might be recognized at the bank. So he used a postman: me."

  "When did you make your journeys?"

  "Copenhagen on the fifteenth of June. I flew back the same night. Helsinki at the end of September. I stayed two nights there, flew back around the twenty-eighth. I had a bit of fun in Helsinki." He grinned but Peters took no notice.

  "And the other payments—when were they made?"

  "I can't remember. Sorry."

  "But one was definitely in Oslo?"

  "Yes, in Oslo."

  "How much time separated the first two payments, the payments made by the Residents?"

  "I don't know. Not long, I think. Maybe a month. A bit more perhaps."

  "Was it your impression that the agent had been operating for some time before the first payment was made? Did the file show that?"

  "No idea. The file simply covered actual payments. First payment early fifty-nine. There was no other date on it. That is the principle that operates where you have a limited subscription. Different files handle different bits of a single case. Only someone with the master file would be able to put it all together."

  Peters was writing all the time now. Leamas assumed there was a tape recorder hidden somewhere in the room but the subsequent transcription would take time. What Peters wrote down now would provide the background for this evening's telegram to Moscow, while at the Soviet Embassy in The Hague the girls would sit up all nigh
t telegraphing the verbatim transcript on hourly schedules.

  "Tell me," said Peters; "these are large sums of money. The arrangements for paying them were elaborate and very expensive. What did you make of it yourself?"

  Leamas shrugged. "What could I make of it? I thought Control must have a bloody good source, but I never saw the material so I don't know. I didn’t like the way it was done—it was too high-powered, too complicated, too clever. Why couldn't they just meet him and give him the money in cash? Did they really let him cross borders on his own passport with a forged one in his pocket? I doubt it," said Leamas. It was time he clouded the issue, let him chase a hare.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, that for all I know the money was never drawn from the bank. Supposing he was a highly placed agent behind the Curtain—the money would be on deposit for him when he could get at it. That was what I reckoned anyway. I didn't think about it all that much. Why should I? It's part of our work only to know pieces of the whole setup. You know that. If you're curious, God help you."

  "If the money wasn't collected, as you suggest, why all the trouble with passports?"

  "When I was in Berlin we made an arrangement for Karl Riemeck in case he ever needed to run and couldn't get hold of us. We kept a bogus West German passport for him at an address in Düsseldorf. He could collect it any time by following a prearranged procedure. It never expired—Special Travel renewed the passport and the visas as they expired. Control might have followed the same technique with this man. I don't know—it's only a guess."

  "How do you know for certain that passports were issued?"

  "There were minutes on the file between Banking Section and Special Travel. Special Travel is the section which arranges false identity papers and visas."

  "I see." Peters thought for a moment and then he asked: "What names did you use in Copenhagen and Helsinki?"

  "Robert Lang, electrical engineer from Derby. That was in Copenhagen."

  "When exactly were you in Copenhagen?" Peters asked.

  "I told you, June the fifteenth. I got there in the morning at about eleven-thirty."

  "Which bank did you use?"