A Most Wanted Man

by John le Carré

  Either way, she decided it was time to be severe. At Erna’s suggestion she had brought a copy of the printout that she had shown to Issa, plus a second printout of Dr. Abdullah’s phone number, home address and e-mail, also freely available on the Internet. Remembering it all in a rush, she whipped the pages out of her rucksack and handed them to him while she watched herself in the mirror.

  “So that’s your man, anyway,” she said in her severest voice. “And he’s all about Muslim giving.” And while he looked at the pages in some puzzlement—since she had still to explain their purpose to him, she hadn’t quite got around to it but she would—she dived gaily for her rucksack again and this time came up with his uncashed check for fifty thousand euros, for which she felt obliged to thank him yet again, so profusely that she completely put him off reading about Dr. Abdullah, which made them both laugh, straight into each other’s eyes, which she wouldn’t normally have allowed to happen, but it was all right with Brue because she trusted him, and anyway she was laughing louder than he was, until she got hold of herself and checked herself in the mirror for decorum.

  “So there are complications, right?” she said, still straight into his face, and she was sad to see some worry lines starting to appear in it, because until now it had been so lit up with this bit of rather good family news he’d had, but there you go.

  The complication was, she explained, that basically her client would like to give away everything to good Muslim causes and to this end proposed to solicit instruction from the great and good Dr. Abdullah about the right way to do this, except that owing to our client’s extremely delicate status—which we both know about, so I won’t enlarge on it any further for obvious reasons—he wasn’t in a position to make the approach directly and therefore, once he had successfully established his claim to his father’s money—which you imply won’t be a problem—he would be looking to Mr. Tommy, as he calls you affectionately, to make it for him.

  “If that’s an acceptable way to go as far as Brue Frères is concerned?” she ended, still into his eyes, and giving him her most luminous smile, which, sadly again for her, he seemed unable to reciprocate with any conviction.

  “And our client is—all right?” he inquired doubtfully, his eyebrows nearly going through his head in his concern.

  “In the circumstances, he is well, thank you, Mr. Brue. Very well. Things could be far, far worse, I’ll put it that way.”

  “And he’s still—he hasn’t been—?”

  “No”—cutting him short—“no, Mr. Brue, he has not. Our client is exactly as you saw him, thank you.”

  “And in safe hands?”

  “As safe as they can be in the circumstances, yes. A lot of hands actually.”

  “And what about you, Annabel?” he asked, with a dire change of voice, and leaning urgently across the table grasped her forearm and held it while he stared at her with such a loving tenderness in his eyes that her first instinct was to share his concern and burst into floods of tears, and her second to recoil sharply, and seek the shelter of her professional status. By now she had also registered, with disapproval, that he had permitted himself the liberty of her Christian name, and more shamelessly still the intimate du form, both without her consent. And for this there was really no excuse whatever. She had gone rigid, she discovered, and she blamed him for that too. Also for the fact that she was speaking from between her teeth. Her chest was hurting, but who gave a shit what hurt her and what didn’t? Certainly not some middle-aged banker who had presumed to paw her forearm.

  “I don’t break down,” she announced. “Got it?”

  He got it. He was already pulling back, looking ashamed of himself, but somehow he was still holding her wrist.

  “I never break down. I’m a lawyer.”

  “And a very good one,” he was agreeing, with his absurd alacrity.

  “My father’s a lawyer. My mother’s a lawyer. My brother-in-law’s a lawyer. My boyfriend was a lawyer. Karsten. I threw him out because he was working for an insurance company, delaying asbestos claims so that the plaintiffs would die off. We are not allowed, in my family, as a profession, to be emotionally led. Or swear. I swore at you once. I regret it. I apologize. I referred to your fucking bank. It’s not a fucking bank. It’s just a bank. A perfectly decent, honorable bank, insofar that is possible for a bank to be.”

  Not content with clinging onto her wrist, he was trying to get an arm across her back. She shook him off. She could stand on her own feet, and did so.

  “I’m a lawyer without a negotiating position, Mr. Brue, which is about the most stupid, useless thing in the universe. Just don’t tell me anything soothing. I am not available for ingenious schemes. We go through with this, or Issa’s dead meat. This is the Save Issa Society. This is do the only possible, rational thing, for Issa’s sake. Am I making myself totally clear?”

  But before Brue could produce an appropriately appeasing answer, she had sat down with a bump on the chair behind her, and the two women on the far side of the room were scurrying towards her. One was putting her arm where Brue had tried to put his, and the other was flapping her fat hand at a Volvo estate car illegally parked at the curb.

  12

  Günther Bachmann was preparing to set out his stall. Since nine this morning, the big buyers from Berlin had been trooping into Arni Mohr’s anteroom in their twos and threes, sampling his coffee, snapping orders to their underlings, barking into cell phones and scowling at their laptops. In the car park stood two official helicopters. Common motorists must make do with the stables area. Bodyguards in bad gray suits prowled the courtyard like lost cats.

  And Bachmann, the cause of it all, the man who had made the weather, the case-hardened fieldman in his only respectable suit, was working the room, now earnestly conferring in undertones with a bureaucratic baron, now shoulder-slapping an old buddy from way back. Ask Bachmann how long his product had been in the making, and if he knew you well enough, he’d pull his clown’s smile and murmur twenty-five fucking years, which was how long, one way or another, he’d been laboring in the secret vineyard.

  Erna Frey had deserted him. She must be close to that poor child, as she now called Annabel. If she needed a second excuse, which she didn’t, she would cross the earth rather than breathe the same air as Dr. Keller of Cologne. Deprived of her steadying influence, Bachmann moved faster and spoke more brightly—but perhaps too brightly, like an engine with a missing cog.

  Which of these men and women with their affable smiles and sideways glances was his friend for the day, and which his enemy? Which dark committee, ministry, religious persuasion or political party owned their allegiance? Only a tiny handful, to his knowledge, had ever heard a bomb explode in anger, but in the long, silent war for the leadership of their Service, they were case-hardened veterans.

  And that was another lecture Bachmann would have dearly loved to give to these swiftly risen managers of the post-9/11 boom market in intelligence and allied trades—another Bachmann Cantata that he kept up his sleeve for the day when he was invited back to Berlin. It warned them that however many of the latest spies’ wonder toys they had in their cupboards, however many magic codes they broke and hot-signals chatter they listened to, and brilliant deductions they pulled out of the ether regarding the enemy’s organizational structures, or lack of them, and internecine fights they had, and however many tame journalists were vying to trade their questionable gems of knowledge for slanted tip-offs and something for the back pocket, in the end it was the spurned imam, the love-crossed secret courier, the venal Pakistani defense scientist, the middle-ranking Iranian military officer who’s been passed over for promotion, the lonely sleeper who can sleep alone no longer, who among them provide the hard base of knowledge without which all the rest is fodder for the truth benders, ideologues and politopaths who ruin the earth.

  But who was there to hear him? Bachmann, as he was the first to know, was a prophet banished to the wilderness. Of the entire Berlin espiocrac
y assembled here today, only the tall, languid, clever, slightly aging Michael Axelrod, who was at this moment stooping to address him, could be described as an ally.

  “All well, so far, Günther?” he inquired, with his habitual half-smile.

  The question was not without its purpose. Ian Lantern had just strolled in. Last night, at a shotgun wedding hosted by Axelrod himself, the three of them had had a really friendly drink together, in the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel. Little Lantern had been so English and embarrassed about fishing in Günther’s waters, and so frank and open about what London had been planning to do with Issa if they ever hooked him—“and quite honestly, Günther, he was such a tiny twinkle in our eye, I’m absolutely convinced that in the end we’d have come to you guys and said, ‘Look, let’s get together on this one and do whatever you’re doing’”—that Bachmann knew he had distrusted Lantern all his life.

  But what he hadn’t bargained for was Martha, who sailed into Arni Mohr’s anteroom on Lantern’s heels almost as if he were her appointed herald, which perhaps he was: majestic Martha, the Agency’s formidable number two in Berlin—two out of God only knew how many—dressed like the Angel of Death herself in a crimson satin kaftan covered in black sequins. And sidling after Martha, and so close on her heels that he could have been using her bulk for cover, none other than six-foot-something Newton, alias Newt, onetime deputy chief of operations at the U.S. embassy in Beirut and Bachmann’s opposite number there, who at the sight of his old comrade broke ranks and loped over to him, and embraced him while he yelled, “Holy shit, Günther, I last saw you stretched out in the bar of the Commodore! What the fuck are you doing in Hamburg, man!”

  And Bachmann, while he joshed and laughed and generally acted like a good fellow in return, silently asked Newton the same question: What in heaven’s name is the Berlin station of the Central Intelligence Agency doing in Hamburg, horning in on my patch? Who invited them and why? And as soon as Martha and Newton had gone off in search of other prey, he asked it again of Axelrod, heatedly and urgently.

  “They’re harmless observers. Calm down. We haven’t even begun yet.”

  “Observing what? Newt doesn’t observe. He slits throats.”

  “They feel they have a stake in Abdullah. They believe he cofinanced an attack on one of their housing compounds in Saudi Arabia, plus another that misfired against a U.S. listening base in Kuwait.”

  “So what? For all we know, he cofinanced the Twin Towers. We’re trying to recruit him, not judge him. How did they get here? Who copied them in?”

  “Joint. Who d’you think?”

  “Who at Joint? Which part of Joint? Which of half-a-dozen parts of Joint? Are you saying Burgdorf copied them in? Burgdorf fed my operation to the Americans?”

  “Consensus,” Axelrod snapped, which was precisely the moment that Martha chose to cast herself off from Arni Mohr and like a great liner set course for him, towing Ian Lantern in her wake.

  “Why, Günther Bachmann as I live and breathe!” she bellowed, in her ship-to-ship voice, as if she had only now caught sight of him on the horizon. “Why the hell are you still doing jail time in this neck of the woods?”—gripping his hand and drawing him into her ample body as if she needed him all to herself. “You met my little Ian already? Of course you did. Ian’s my British poodle. I walk him in Charlottenburg every morning, don’t I, Ian?”

  “Religiously,” said Lantern, drawing up gratefully beside her. “And she cleans up after me too,” he added with a wink for his new friend Günther.

  Axelrod had removed himself. Across the room, Burgdorf was murmuring to his satrap Dr. Otto Keller but eyeing Bachmann, so perhaps it was Bachmann they were discussing. Men of the unbending right should look the part, but Burgdorf at sixty resembled to Bachmann a disgruntled child, sulking because his siblings got more mother love than he did. The double doors had opened. Chest out, arms respectfully to his sides, Arni Mohr the impresario was bidding his guests to the feast.

  Perturbed by the American presence, as well as mystified by it, Bachmann took up his preappointed seat at the end of the long conference table. Mohr had awarded him pride of place—or was it the dunce’s chair? True, Bachmann was the originator of the operation and its petitioner; but also, if things went wrong, the culprit. The Joint Committee’s decisions despite the infighting that preceded them were, as Axelrod had just reminded him, by iron policy collective. Freelance suitors such as Bachmann were therefore objects of common risk, as well as profit, to be accepted or rejected by consensus. It was in this awareness, perhaps, that the rival camps of Burgdorf and Axelrod appeared to have closed ranks in mutual defense at the farther end of the table, leaving their bureaucratic dependents to take up the space between themselves and the aggressor.

  To emphasize their observers’ role, Mohr had supplied Martha and Newton with a separate table all their own—but, compounding Bachmann’s consternation, the two had unaccountably become three, thanks to the addition of a square-shouldered woman in her forties with perfect teeth and long, ash-blonde hair. And if that were not enough, in the short space of time since the six-foot-something Newton had embraced Bachmann, he had grown a beard, or perhaps Bachmann had failed to spot it in the clinch: a perfectly trimmed spade-shaped dab of black, perched on the point of his chin, just where you would aim to land your punch, except that Newton would by then have knocked you cold.

  The sweetly courteous Ian Lantern, though a foreigner, was a co-opted player. He had been placed at the main table, but at a point near enough to the observers’ table to whisper in Martha’s ear. At Lantern’s left sat Burgdorf, but well apart from him, for Burgdorf, so dapper, fresh and personable, did not relish physical proximity. Two down from Burgdorf sat a couple of female obsessives from Berlin’s money-laundering team. Their vocation was to drive themselves into premature old age resolving such riddles as how a ten-thousand-dollar bank transfer raised in good faith by a Muslim charity in Nuremberg could turn itself into five hundred liters of hair dye in a back garage in Barcelona.

  The rest of the faces arranged before Bachmann were ministerial or worse: top men from Treasury; a funereal woman from the chancellor’s office; an absurdly young departmental chief from the Federal Police service and the former foreign editor of a Berlin newspaper whose expertise was killing press stories.

  Should Bachmann begin? Mohr had closed the door and locked it. Dr. Keller scowled at his cell phone and shoved it in his pocket. Lantern tipped Bachmann his gritty smile that said, Go for it, Günther. Bachmann went for it.

  “Operation Felix,” he announced. “May I take it that everyone here has seen the material? Nobody short-changed?”

  Nobody short-changed. Every face turned to him.

  “Then Professor Aziz will please provide us with a profile of our target.”

  Hit them with Aziz first, and leave the hard part till the end, Axelrod had advised.

  For twenty years, Bachmann had loved Aziz: when Aziz was his head agent in Amman; when Aziz was rotting in a Tunisian prison with his network hanged and his family in hiding; and on the day Aziz hobbled out of the prison gates on his thrashed bare feet into the German embassy car waiting to take him to the airport and resettlement in Bavaria.

  And he loved Aziz now, as a side door opened and Maximilian by arrangement briefly showed himself, and the diminutive, soldierly, dark-haired, dark-suited, mustachioed figure marched softly into the room and took his place on a raised dais at the far end of the table: Aziz the resettled spy, Joint’s leading expert on the byways of jihadism—and on the acts and meditations of his former fellow student from Cairo days, Dr. Abdullah.

  Except that Aziz doesn’t call him Abdullah. He calls him Signpost, this being the whimsical codename selected by Axelrod in veiled reference to the spiritual handbook of all Islamic militants, called Signposts Along the Way and written by their mentor Sayyed Qutub while sitting out his sentence in an Egyptian prison. The voice of Aziz is grave, and underscored with pain.

&n
bsp; “Signpost is in all ways but one a man of God,” he begins, assuming the role of counsel for the defense. “He is an entirely genuine, erudite scholar. He is unquestionably devout. He preaches the peaceful path. He sincerely believes that the use of violence in overthrowing corrupt Islamic governments is contrary to religious law. He recently published a new translation into German of the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed. It’s a pretty excellent translation. I don’t know a better one. He lives simply and eats honey.” No one laughs. “He is a passionate honey eater. Among Muslims, he is known for this passion for honey. Muslims like to typecast people. He is a man of God, of the Book and of honey. But unfortunately it is our perception that he is also a man of the bomb. The case is not proven. But the evidence is persuasive.”

  Bachmann steals a quick look round the table. Honey, God and bombs. Every eye on the soldierly little professor, former friend of the honey-eating bomber.

  “Until five years ago he wore tailored suits. He was a dandy. But once he started to appear on German television and take part in public debates, he adopted a more humble attire. He wished to become conspicuous for his humility. For his abstemious lifestyle. It is a fact. I don’t quite know why he did this.”

  Neither does his audience.

  “All his life, Signpost has sincerely struggled to override sectarian distinctions within the Umma. For this I suggest he is to be admired.”

  He hesitates. Most of those present, but not quite all, know that by Umma, he is referring to the community of all Muslims worldwide.

  “In his fund-raising activities, Signpost has sat on the board of charities of many persuasions, some bitterly opposed to one another, for the purpose of promoting and distributing zakat,” Aziz continues, and takes another quick read of his audience.