A Most Wanted Man

by John le Carré

  “Does your client speak Arabic?”

  “Forgive me.”

  “German? French? English? If he is Chechen, he must speak Russian. Or maybe only Chechen?”

  “Whatever language he speaks, I assure you that an appropriate interpreter will be provided.”

  Dr. Abdullah wistfully fingered the paper before him and, fixing his gaze on Brue once more, relapsed into his thoughts.

  “You are jocular,” he complained at last. “You are like a man freed. Why? Your bank is saying good-bye to a fortune and you smile, which makes you paradoxical. Is it your perfidious English smile?”

  “Perhaps my English smile has a reason.”

  “Then perhaps it is the reason that troubles me.”

  “My client is not the only one who finds the origin of these monies distasteful.”

  “But money has no smell, they say. Not to a banker, surely?”

  “All the same, I think I may say that my bank is breathing a small sigh of relief.”

  “Your bank’s morality is to be admired then. Tell me something else, please.”

  “If I can.”

  The single bead of sweat had returned, this time on the other side of Brue’s ribs.

  “There is an urgency about all this. What is this urgency? What strange engine is driving us, exactly? Come, sir. We are two honest men. We are alone.”

  “My client is living on borrowed time. At any minute, he may cease to be in a position to authorize these donations. What I need as soon as possible from you is a list of your recommended charities and a description of the causes they serve. I’ll then pass this to his lawyer, who will submit it to our client for his approval, and we can conclude our business.”

  As Brue rose to leave, Dr. Abdullah was once more his energetic, impish self.

  “So I have no time and no alternative,” he complained accusingly, shaking Brue’s hand with both of his, and smiling up at him with his twinkly eyes.

  “And neither have I,” Brue agreed with equal good humor and in the same tone of complaint. “Until very soon, I hope.”

  “Then I wish you a most safe journey home, sir, to the bosom of your family, as we say. Allah be with you.”

  “And you look after yourself, too,” said Brue with equal warmth as they awkwardly shook hands.

  Returning to his car, Brue discovered that the sweat had drenched his shirt and made a wet band of the collar of his jacket. As he reached the autobahn, his two minders fell in behind him, grinning like idiots. Brue didn’t know what he had done to amuse them. Or when he had hated himself more.

  Ever since Brue’s departure from Abdullah’s house eight hours ago, Erna Frey and Günther Bachmann have barely exchanged a word, although they are sitting only inches apart behind Maximilian’s bank of screens. One screen is linked to the signals intelligence center in Berlin, another to satellite surveillance, a third to a motorized five-man team of Arni Mohr’s watchers.

  At 15:48 hours, in dead silence, they had listened with half-closed eyes to the Brue-Abdullah exchange as relayed by Brue’s listening fountain pen to Lantern’s watchers in the garage across the road, and passed through to the stables after encryption. Bachmann’s one response was a soundless clapping of his hands. Erna Frey made no response at all.

  At 17:10 hours came the first of a string of intercepted phone calls from Abdullah’s house. A simultaneous translation from Arabic into German scrolled down the signals intelligence screen. For Bachmann, the Arabic speaker, the translation was redundant. For Erna Frey and most of Bachmann’s team, it was not.

  With each call, the name of the person contacted appeared at the bottom of the screen. A parallel screen provided personal particulars and trace details. The calls, six in all, were exclusively to respectable Muslim fund-raisers and charity officials. None of the personalities contacted, according to side comments offered by the researchers, was under current investigation.

  The message to each person called was identical: We are in funds, my brothers, merciful Allah in His infinite bounty has deemed us worthy of a great, an historic gift. A quirk common to each conversation was that Dr. Abdullah pretended—not very convincingly—to be talking about a gift of American rice rather than U.S. dollars. By this simplistic code, millions then became tons.

  His reason for dissembling, according to the side comment, was precautionary: he wished not to arouse by accident the appetite of any local employee who chanced to be listening in. There was little variation between the conversations. A single transcript could have done for all six.

  “Twelve and a half tons best quality, my dear friend—American tons—have you got that?—yes, indeed, tons. Every grain of it to be distributed among the faithful. Yes, you old moron! Tons. Has God clapped His merciful hands over your stupid ears? There are conditions, you understand. Not many, but conditions all the same. Are you still listening? Our oppressed brethren in Chechnya receive the first consignment. Their hungry will be the first to be fed. And we shall train more doctors, Inshallah. Is that not wonderful? In Europe also. We have one candidate already!”

  This particular call was made to one Shaykh Rashid Hassan, a longtime friend and former fellow student of Abdullah in Cairo, now residing in the English town of Weybridge in Surrey. Perhaps for the same reason it was the longest and most intimate. However it ended cryptically, a fact noted by the researchers.

  Our good friend will no doubt call you later to discuss whatever is to be discussed, Abdullah promises. The reply is a noncommittal grunt.

  At 19:42 hours, the first live images appear:

  Footage of Signpost emerging from his porch looking very European in a pale Burberry raincoat and English-style country cap. He is alone. A black Volvo saloon waits at his front gate, its rear door open to receive him.

  Researchers’ side note: The Volvo is registered to a Turkish-owned car rental company in Flensburg, a full hundred and fifty kilometers north of Hamburg. Nothing is recorded against the company or its owners.

  Signpost enters the back of the Volvo, assisted by the elder of his two bodyguards, who sits himself beside the driver. The surveillance camera changes point of view, falls in behind the Volvo and follows it. Pious men drive themselves unwillingly, Bachmann reflects. He is watching the bodyguard in the front seat, who is watching the rear and side mirrors.

  The Volvo reaches the autobahn, continues northeast for twenty, forty, fifty-seven kilometers. Dusk is falling. The camera assumes the furry green of a night-vision lens. For all this distance, the silhouette of the bodyguard’s head has continued to rotate between the car’s mirrors. As the Volvo pulls into a rest area, his vigilance increases.

  Bodyguard exits front of car and takes a pee while he appears to check the rest area for any unwelcome presence. He stares at camera, presumably checking Mohr’s surveillance vehicle parked about fifty meters behind him.

  Returning to the Volvo, the bodyguard opens the rear door, speaks into the car. Signpost emerges and, clutching his cap against the wind, advances on a glass phone booth at the eastern end of the rest area. He enters the booth and immediately inserts a check card that he has ready in his hand. Idiot, thinks Bachmann. But perhaps the card, like the Volvo, is not Signpost’s own.

  As Signpost dials, a name appears at the foot of one of Maximilian’s screens. It is the same Shaykh Rashid Hassan of Weybridge whom Signpost has called from his house earlier this evening. But something odd has happened to Signpost’s voice in the meantime as, belatedly, and a little out of sync, Berlin signals center picks it up.

  At first, even Bachmann can barely disentangle what he is hearing. He has to turn to the simultaneous translation on the next-door screen for help. Signpost is talking Arabic all right, but in a heavy colloquial Egyptian dialect that he presumably believes will defeat the ear of any chance eavesdropper.

  If so, he is mistaken. The simultaneous translator, whoever he is, must be a genius. He doesn’t falter:

  SIGNPOST: Is this Shaykh Rashid?

&nb
sp; RASHID: I am Rashid.

  SIGNPOST: I am Faisal, the cousin of your distinguished father-in-law.

  RASHID: So?

  SIGNPOST: I have a message for him. Can you convey it to him?

  RASHID: (delayed reply) I can. Inshallah.

  SIGNPOST: There has been a delay regarding delivery of artificial limbs and wheelchairs to his brother’s hospital in Mogadishu.

  RASHID: What of it?

  SIGNPOST: The delay will be rectified immediately. Then he will be free to take his holiday in Cyprus. Can you give him that message? He will be happy.

  RASHID: My father-in-law will be told. Inshallah.

  Shaykh Rashid rings off.

  14

  “Frau Elli,” Brue began, signaling the familiar routine.

  “Mr. Tommy,” Frau Ellenberger replied, preparing herself for another of their ritual exchanges. She was mistaken. This time, Brue was in executive mode.

  “I’m pleased to say that as of this evening we shall be closing down the last of the Lipizzaner accounts, Frau Elli.”

  “I am relieved, Mr. Tommy. It is high time.”

  “I shall be receiving the claimant this evening after banking hours. That is his express wish.”

  “I have no engagements this evening. I shall be happy to remain behind,” Frau Elli replied, with mysterious avidity.

  Was she pressing to see the back of the Lipizzaners—or to meet the bastard son of Colonel Grigori Borisovich Karpov?

  “Thank you, that won’t be necessary, Frau Elli. The client insists on total privacy. However, I would be grateful if you would exhume the appropriate papers and place them on my desk.”

  “I take it the claimant has a key, Mr. Tommy?”

  “According to his lawyer, he has a very appropriate key. And we have our key. Where?”

  “In the oubliette, Mr. Tommy. In the wall safe. Under double combination.”

  “Beside the safe boxes?”

  “Beside the safe boxes.”

  “I always thought it was our policy to keep the safe-box keys as far away from the safe boxes as possible.”

  “That was in Mr. Edward’s time. In Hamburg you adopted a more relaxed policy.”

  “Well, perhaps you’d be good enough to release the key for me.”

  “I shall have to ask the chief cashier for her assistance.”

  “Why?”

  “She is the keeper of the other combination, Mr. Tommy.”

  “Of course. Do you have to tell her what it’s about?”

  “No, Mr. Tommy.”

  “Then kindly don’t. And we’re closing early today. I would like the bank cleared of everybody by three o’clock this afternoon latest.”

  “Everybody?”

  “Everybody but me, if you don’t mind.”

  “Very well, Mr. Tommy,” she said.

  But the anger in her face unsettled him, the more so since he couldn’t understand it. By three in the afternoon the bank had been cleared, as instructed, and Brue telephoned Lantern to confirm. Within minutes came a ring at the door. Alone in the building, Brue trod cautiously downstairs to find four men in blue overalls standing on the doorstep, and parked behind them in the bank’s forecourt a white van purporting to belong to the Three Oceans Electrical Company of Lübeck. In the trade, unsurprisingly, we call them buggers, Lantern had confided, preparing him for their invasion.

  The eldest of the four had two piratical gold teeth.

  “Mr. Brue?” he inquired, teeth flashing.

  “What do you want?”

  “We have an appointment to check your system, sir,” he said in laborious English.

  “Well, come on in,” Brue replied grumpily in German. “Do whatever you have to do. Just don’t muck up the plasterwork, if you don’t mind.”

  He had told Lantern till he was blue in the face that Frères was stiff with video cameras inside and out. If Lantern’s buggers really needed to put in more of the same, why didn’t they simply adapt the existing wiring? But this wasn’t good enough for the people Lantern now referred to as “our German friends.” For the next hour, Brue prowled his office impotently while the men went about their work: hall, reception area, staircase, the computer room where the cashiers sat, the secretaries’ room, the lavatories, the oubliette, which he had to unlock for them with his personal set of keys.

  “And now, please, your own room, Mr. Brue, sir. If you permit,” said the man with the gold-toothed smile.

  Brue hung about downstairs while they defiled his office. Yet, search for damage as he might, nowhere did he find a trace of their handiwork. And when he repossessed his own quarters, they too appeared untouched.

  With meaningless expressions of respect, the men departed and Brue, alone again and suddenly feeling it, slumped in a heap at his desk, unwilling even to stretch out his hand towards the stack of aging Lipizzaner papers that Frau Ellenberger had left there for his attention.

  But soon a different Brue asserted himself, whether the old one or a new version was irrelevant. He was Brue redux. Striding across the room, hands thrust into his pockets, he peered intently at the original, hand-painted Brue family tree that for thirty-five years had been the daily reminder of his inadequacy. Have our German friends stuck one of their bugs behind it? Is the great founder himself spying on my every move?

  Well, let him. In a few weeks from now he’ll be spying from a green wheelie bin.

  Swinging on his heel he glared back into the room: my room, my partners’ desk, my wooden bloody clotheshorse by Randall’s of Glasgow, my bookcase: not my father’s, not his father’s and not his father’s. And the books in it, even if I’ve never opened them: mine too. And it is time they knew that; time I knew it myself. Mine to do what I like with. To burn, or sell or donate to the wretched of the earth.

  So bugger them. As I have just been buggered, ha-ha.

  And having thought this little obscenity—and mulled it over, and savored it—he repeated it aloud, courteously and in good English, first for Lantern’s sake, then for Lantern’s German friends, and finally for all his listeners everywhere. Were they switched on yet? Bugger that too.

  Then with great deliberation he went about setting the scene: Issa sits here, Abdullah there and I’ll be sticking here behind my desk.

  And Annabel?

  Annabel does not get relegated to the back of the class, thank you. Not in my house. She’s here as my guest and she’ll bloody well get the treatment I say she deserves.

  And so thinking, he spotted his grandfather’s chair lurking in the darkest corner to which he had consigned it, the hideous, overcarved chair with the Brue crest on its top, and the Brue tartan embroidered on its faded upholstery. Dragging it out of retirement, he tossed a couple of cushions into it and stood back to admire his handiwork: that’s how she likes to sit, bolt upright, disturb me at your peril.

  As a last touch, he marched to his fridge in the alcove, fetched a couple of bottles of still mineral water and set them on the coffee table so that they would be at room temperature by the time she arrived. He thought of pouring himself a scotch while he was about it, but resisted. There was one last vital piece of business to transact before the evening’s conference began, and he was really looking forward to it.

  Brue had insisted on the Atlantic without supplying any reason. Lantern, having made a reconnaissance, had meekly approved his choice. The time was seven o’clock, the same hour exactly at which he and Annabel had first met. The same scents pervaded the lobby. The same Herr Schwarz was on duty. The same babel issued from the bar. The same unappreciated pianist was playing tunes of love as Brue took up his same position beneath the same mercantile paintings, and kept his eyes trained on the same swing doors. Only the weather was different. A low spring sun was beating down the street, freeing the passersby and making them taller. Or so it seemed to Brue, perhaps because he felt freer and taller himself.

  He had arrived early, but Lantern and his two boys had arrived earlier and were seated like three m
iddle executives between Brue’s corner and the swing doors, presumably to head him off in case he made a dash for it with Issa’s passport. Across the aisle and short of the entrance to the grill room sat the two women who had hurried to Annabel’s aid at Louise’s restaurant. They looked ready to do it again: unsmiling and methodical as they engaged in unconvincing dialogue over a city map.

  She had shed her rucksack.

  It was the first thing Brue noticed about her as she navigated the swing doors. No rucksack, a slower tread, no bicycle. A sand-colored Volvo had delivered her to the door and it wasn’t a taxi, so it must have been her minders’ car that had delivered her.

  She was wearing the same scarf round her neck that she had worn as a hijab at Leyla’s house. The stern legal-black skirt and long-sleeved blouse and jacket at first came as a mild surprise to him. They suggested a lawyer who was about to make a court appearance, or had just made one, until he remembered that he too had selected his darkest suit for tonight’s appointment with Dr. Abdullah.

  “Water?” he suggested carefully. “No lemon? Room temperature? The mixture as before?”

  She said, “Yes, please,” but didn’t smile.

  He ordered two waters, one for himself. Shaking hands with her, he allowed himself only a sideways glance at her face for fear of what he might see. She looked drawn and sleepless. Her lips were pressed together in self-control.

  “And I think you have your escorts here, do you not?” he said, deliberately jovial. “We could send them over a drink, if you like. Bottle of champagne.”

  A Georgie-like shrug.

  He was camping for her deliberately. He was playing the English bloody fool. He was using comedy in a way it had no business to be used, but it was the only way he knew. He was an old ham actor, preparing her for her big scene, and wanting to show her that he loved her.

  “I reckon you’re a bit underprotected, actually, Annabel. Given what we seem to be worth to our handlers. You’ve only got two of the beasts, whereas I’ve got three. Mine are over there, if you’d care to take a look.” He gestured pointedly in their direction. “The undersized young fellow in the suit is their leading intellect. Lantern, his name is. Ian Lantern of the British embassy in Berlin, you can check him out with the ambassador any time. The other two are—well, a bit sub, frankly. Not a lot between the ears. I assume you also are wearing a listening device?”