A Most Wanted Man

by John le Carré

  “Richter?” Issa repeated, as if he had never heard the name.

  “Annabel. Frau Richter. Your lawyer. The lady to whom you owe your presence here tonight, and a great deal else, if I may say so.”

  Returning from wherever he had gone, Issa passed the document to Annabel, then the envelope.

  “This is money, Annabel?”

  “It will be,” she said.

  Upstairs once more, Brue went out of his way to appear perfunctory, fearing that Issa, confronted with the physical reality of his father’s monstrosity, might recant. Annabel, perhaps sharing his anxiety, was quick to take her cue from him. She briskly marched her client through the terms and conditions of his bearer bond, and asked him whether he had any questions, to all of which Issa shrugged in vague acquiescence. He had no questions. There was a receipt for him to sign, and Brue handed it to Annabel, inviting her to explain its purpose to her client. Quietly and patiently, she told Issa what receipt meant.

  It meant that, until he gave the money away again, it was his. If on signing the receipt he wished to change his mind and keep the money, or look for some other use for it, he was free to do so. And it occurred to Brue that, in saying this to Issa, Annabel was placing loyalty to her client above loyalty to her handlers and manipulators; and that this was a matter of principle to her as well as a considerable act of courage, risking everything she had been brought here to do.

  But Issa had no intention of changing his mind. With the pen waving in his right hand, and the bunched fingers of his left hand pressed to his brow, and the gold chain peeking from them, Issa signed the receipt in a series of angry slashes. Momentarily careless of her Muslim manners, Annabel reached out to take the pen from him, inadvertently brushing her hand against his. He recoiled, but she took it all the same.

  A financial statement had been prepared by the manager of the Liechtenstein foundation. By virtue of the bearer bond and now the signed receipt, Issa was the foundation’s sole owner. The sum total of all his assets, as relayed by Brue to Dr. Abdullah, was twelve and a half million American dollars; or as Dr. Abdullah had preferred to describe it to his friend in Weybridge, Surrey, twelve and a half tons of American rice.

  “Issa,” said Annabel, in an effort to wake him from his trance.

  Staring at the bearer bond, Issa passed his palms over his hollowed cheeks, as his lips moved silently in prayer. And Brue, who knew of old all the little signs of sudden acquisition—the suppressed light of greed, of triumph, of relief—looked in vain for them in Issa, just as he had looked in vain for them in Abdullah; or if he saw them at all, saw them first transmit themselves to Annabel, then vanish as soon as they appeared.

  “So then,” he said brightly, “on the assumption that we have no further matters to discuss, what I have suggested to Frau Richter that we do—and indeed what we have provisionally done subject to your approval, Issa—is place this entire sum temporarily on account with our own bank, in such a way that it can be instantly transferred, by wire, to the beneficiaries that you and Dr. Abdullah, in the light of your ethical and religious concerns, decide upon”—he shot out an arm and glanced at his costly watch—“in, well, seven minutes from now, say. Less, if I’m not mistaken.”

  He was not. A car was pulling up in the forecourt. A muted exchange of Arab voices followed. The driver and his passenger were saying good-bye to each other. Brue caught an Inshallah and recognized Dr. Abdullah’s voice. He caught a salaam in farewell. The car drove away and a single pair of footsteps approached the front porch.

  “Forgive me one moment, please, Frau Richter,” he said officiously and bustled downstairs for the next act.

  Arni Mohr was proud of his new surveillance van, and had parted with it only on condition that it be deployed outside the exclusion zone that he and the police had drawn around Brue’s bank. Inside the zone: Arni’s street watchers and police shooters; outside the zone, the van, Bachmann, his team of two, and one empty cream-colored taxi, plastered with advertisements. That was the deal approved by Keller and Burgdorf, unsuccessfully contested by Axelrod and accepted under protest by Bachmann.

  “I can’t afford to fight them on every pissy point of detail, Günther,” Axelrod had insisted with more desperation in his voice than Bachmann would have wished. “If I’ve got to give away a few pawns for their queen, that’s all right by me,” he added, recalling the games of chess that Bachmann and Axelrod used to play in the air-raid shelter underneath the German embassy in Beirut.

  “But the queen is ours, right?” Bachmann had insisted anxiously.

  “On the terms described, yes. If you can get Signpost to your safe flat and if you can talk to him on the lines we agreed, and if he shows signs of playing ball, he’s ours. Does that answer your question?”

  No. It doesn’t. It makes me ask why you need three ifs to say yes.

  It doesn’t explain what Martha was doing at the meeting, or why she brought Newton the throat-slitter of Beirut along with her

  Or who the hatchet-faced ash-blonde with broad shoulders was.

  Or why she had to be smuggled into the conference room like forbidden goods after everybody had sat down and smuggled out afterwards like a hotel hooker.

  And why Axelrod, who resented the American presence as much as Bachmann did, had been unable to prevent it; and why Burgdorf had apparently condoned it.

  The van, unlike the rest of its kind, was not got up as a pantechnicon, or a removals van or a container lorry, but as the lumbering gray street-cleaning leviathan it once had been, complete with its original fittings. It was also, Arni liked to boast, invisible. Nobody questioned its presence, least of all late at night when it was crawling round the city center. It could operate in movement as happily as when stationary. It could patrol a street at three kilometers an hour and nobody could say a thing.

  For its location, Bachmann had chosen a lay-by between the Alster shore and the main road, just half a kilometer from Brue’s bank. Under the glow of the orange streetlights, his team could admire a coppice of chestnut trees through the windscreen and, through concealed arrow slits in the rear, the bronze statue of two little girls eternally about to launch their kites.

  In contrast to Mohr, Bachmann had kept his numbers to a minimum and his game plan simple. To monitor the bank of video screens and satellite imagery, he had recruited, in addition to Maximilian, his inseparable girlfriend, Niki, who spoke fluent Russian and Arabic. To give himself backup in any unforeseen emergency, he had posted two of his street watchers in a souped-up Audi, to sit just outside the exclusion zone until summoned. Bachmann alone, for as long as he remained in the van, would handle all contact with Arni Mohr and with Axelrod at Joint in Berlin. He had implored Erna Frey to accompany him, but once again she had resolutely refused to be talked round.

  “That poor child has had all she can take of me, and much more than she knows,” she had replied. And conscious of his stare upon her, after a prolonged delay: “I lied to her. We said we never would. We said we would never tell her the whole truth, but whatever we did tell her would be true.”

  “And?”

  “I lied to her.”

  “So you said. What about?”

  “Melik and Leyla.”

  “And what, pray, did you tell her about Melik and Leyla that was a lie?”

  “Don’t interrogate me, Günther.”

  “I am interrogating you.”

  “You may have forgotten that I have a Deep Throat in Arni Mohr’s camp.”

  “The bad tennis player. I have not forgotten. What has the bad tennis player to do with lying to Annabel about Melik and Leyla?”

  “Annabel was worried about them. It was the middle of the night. She came to my room and wanted my reassurance that Melik and Leyla were not going to suffer for taking in Issa. For being decent people doing the right thing. She said she’d been dreaming about them. But I think she’d just been lying awake, worrying.”

  “And you said?”

  “That they would
enjoy Leyla’s daughter’s wedding, and come back refreshed and happy, and Melik would beat all comers in the boxing ring, and Leyla would find a new husband and everything would be wonderful for them ever after. It was a fairy tale.”

  “Why was it a fairy tale?”

  “Arni Mohr and Dr. Keller of Cologne have recommended that their permit of residence be withdrawn on the grounds that they have violated its conditions by harboring an Islamist criminal and encouraging militancy in the Turkish community. They propose that the authorities in Ankara be informed. Burgdorf is in agreement, provided their detention in Turkey does not take place in such a way as to endanger the Signpost operation.”

  Upon which she had demonstratively closed down her computer, locked her papers in the steel cupboard and removed herself to the safe flat on the harbor front to prepare for Signpost’s late-night arrival.

  Alone and sick with anger, Bachmann appealed once more to Axelrod. The response was as bad as he feared.

  “For Christ’s sake, Günther! How many battles do you want me to fight up here? Do you want me to barge in on Burgdorf and tell him we’ve been spying on the protectors?”

  Over the past two hours operational intelligence had been flowing into the van at a steady rate and all of it was good.

  Signpost’s tour of the previous night had evidently been an aberration, since according to his known behavior pattern he did not use pay phones. Neither was it his habit to leave his house, wife and children unguarded in the hours of darkness. Tonight he proposed to follow his customary practice of calling on the services of a retired civil engineer, obliging friend and neighbor: a Palestinian named Fuad, who liked nothing better in life than to chauffeur the great religious scholar on his rounds and exchange profundities with him. Last night, Fuad had been attending a lecture at his local cultural institute. Tonight he was free, and Signpost’s two minders could remain on guard at the house, where they belonged.

  But where would Signpost stay the night in Hamburg after his conference at the bank—or where did he think he was going to stay? If friends were awaiting him—if he had booked a hotel—if he proposed to drive home late and sleep in his own bed—Bachmann’s license of eight hours with him might be reduced to three or four.

  But on this point at least the gods had smiled on the planners. Signpost had accepted an invitation to sleep at the house of Fuad’s brother-in-law, an Iranian named Cyrus, where he often stayed, and Cyrus had provided Fuad with a house key since he and his family were visiting friends in Lübeck and would not be back till morning.

  Better still, Signpost would make his own way there once his business at the bank was concluded. Fuad had begged to be allowed to wait outside the bank for him, but Signpost had been adamant.

  “You will please go immediately to your dear brother-in-law, whom God preserve, and be at ease, Fuad,” he had urged him over his house telephone. “That is my command to you, dear friend. Your heart is too large for your breast. If you are not careful, Allah will pluck you to Him before your time. I shall order myself a taxi directly from the bank, don’t worry yourself.”

  Hence the empty taxi, parked alongside the van.

  Hence Bachmann’s mug shot mounted in cellophane on the city license above the taxi’s dashboard.

  Hence Bachmann’s humble jacket and seaman’s cap hanging on the door to the belly of the van. If everything went according to plan, this was the garb he would be wearing when he delivered the hijacked Signpost to the safe flat on the harbor front for his forced conversion to the path of righteousness.

  “I need three wishes to come true by first light,” Erna Frey had told him, before she made her demonstrative exit. “I need Signpost in the bag. I need Felix and that poor girl to be put back into the wild and I need you sitting in the train with a one-way ticket to Berlin. Economy class.”

  “And for yourself?”

  “My pension and my oceangoing yacht.”

  Signpost was due at Brue Frères at 22:00 hours.

  At 20:30, according to incoming reports from Mohr’s watchers, Fuad had driven up to Signpost’s door in his brand-new BMW 335i coupe, the pride of his life. Word of its intended use had arrived too late for it to be bugged.

  Emerging from his house, Signpost appeared in good spirits. His instruction to his wife and family, picked up from directional microphones across the road, was to be vigilant and praise God. The listeners claimed to detect a “sense of occasion” in his voice. One said “foreboding,” another that he spoke “like he was going on a long journey and didn’t know when he’d be back.”

  At 21:14, helicopter surveillance reported the safe arrival of the BMW in a northwestern suburb of the town, where it pulled into a parking area for the presumed purposes of prayer and killing time until Signpost’s appointment at the bank. Contrary to Arab custom, Signpost was known to be obsessively punctual.

  At 21:16—two minutes later, therefore—Bachmann’s street watchers signaled the safe pickup of Felix and Annabel for transfer to Brue’s bank by the limousine that Felix had insisted on, and Arni Mohr had been happy to provide.

  From his exclusion zone Mohr confirmed their safe arrival. This was totally unnecessary, since Bachmann had watched it on Maximilian’s screen, but then Arni Mohr had never been a stranger to duplication.

  At 21:29, Bachmann learned from no less a source than Axelrod in Berlin that Ian Lantern had contrived to wangle himself inside the exclusion zone and was parked in a cul-de-sac with a ringside view of the bank and one unidentified passenger in the front seat of his Peugeot.

  Aghast, but by now in operational mode, Bachmann knew better than to scream in outrage. Instead, he asked Axelrod over the encrypted phone, quietly and collectedly, on whose precise authority Lantern had been invited to attend the party.

  “He’s got as much right to be there as you have, Günther,” Axelrod pointed out.

  “More, apparently.”

  “You’ve got your girl to worry about, he’s got his banker.”

  But this explanation made no sense to Bachmann. Granted Lantern was Brue’s controller. But was he also on standby to hold Brue’s hand and help him with his lines if he fluffed? The only job left to Lantern that Bachmann was aware of was to scoop up his joe as soon as the meeting finished, mop his brow, debrief him and tell him how great he was. And for that, he did not need to hang around like a pregnant father just a hundred meters from the target house. And who in heaven’s name was his passenger? How did he or she get in on the act?

  But Axelrod had rung off, and Maximilian was holding up his arm. Fuad the retired engineer had delivered Signpost to Brue Frères Bank.

  15

  Inside Tommy Brue’s upstairs sanctum, the preparations he had made were at last paying off. By assigning his grandfather’s chair to Our Esteemed Interpreter, as he insisted on calling her, he had been able to wheedle her into center position. She sat, exactly as he had wanted her to, bolt upright on the cushions. To her left sat Issa and to her right Dr. Abdullah, facing Brue across his desk. At the sight of him, Issa had once more become a changed man, uncertain, shy and confused to discover that he possessed no common language with which to address his newfound mentor. Dr. Abdullah had greeted him first in Arabic, then French, English and German in quick order. He even found a few words of Chechen for Issa, who for a moment sparked, then stared shamefully downward as his fluency ran dry.

  Dr. Abdullah too was in Brue’s eyes a changed man since yesterday. Nervous himself, Brue had not imagined Abdullah could be more nervous still. Advancing gingerly on Issa with his arms lifted for the Arab embrace, he had seemed until the last minute uncertain whether he should go through with the greeting. His speech, once he had settled for German and Annabel’s translation, displayed a guarded reverence, but it was also searching.

  “Our good friend Mr. Brue rightly declines to reveal your name to me, sir. And so he should. You are Mr. X, I may not know where from. But you and I need have no secrets from each other. I have my sources. You
too have your sources, or you would not have sent your English banker to examine me. Well, what you have heard of me is true, Brother Issa. I am before and after all things a man of peace. That is not to say I stand aside from our great struggle. I am no friend of violence, but I respect those returning to us from the battlefield. They have seen the smoke. As I have. They have been tortured for the Prophet and for God. They have been beaten and imprisoned, as I have, but not broken. The violence is not of their making. They are its victims.”

  Waiting for an answer, he peered at Issa, examining with both compassion and curiosity the impact of his words. But Issa, having listened to Annabel’s translation, only bowed his head.

  “Therefore, I must believe you, sir,” Abdullah went on. “It is my duty before God. If God wishes to endow us with such riches, who am I, His poor servant, to refuse them?”

  But then, exactly as Brue remembered it from the day before, Abdullah’s voice hardened.

  “Therefore tell me, brother, be so kind. By what munificence of Allah, by what ingenious means, are you at liberty in this country? How is it that we are able to sit with you and speak to you and touch you when, according to certain information that has reached me over the Internet and by other means, half the world’s policemen would like to clap you in irons?”

  Issa turned to Annabel for her translation, then back to Abdullah while she herself supplied the answer that Brue suspected her handlers had prewritten.

  “My client’s situation in Germany is precarious, Dr. Abdullah,” she said, first in German, then afterwards, sotto voce, in a Russian précis. “By German law, he may not be returned to a country that practices torture or exacts the death penalty. Unfortunately, it is a law that the German authorities, in common with other Western democracies, frequently ignore. We shall nevertheless apply for asylum in Germany.”