A Most Wanted Man

by John le Carré

  Another waft of baby powder. Abdullah was pressing in on him. Next thing I know, he’ll be sitting on my bloody lap. And all those small ones—three? Four? Plus one in the garden? Must be an extraordinary thing, to breed like that. To breed without thinking, practically. Just hammering away, doing God’s will.

  Abdullah’s index finger had slipped down a couple of lines. Some shipping company in Cyprus. What the hell has that got to do with anything? One minute a world-renowned Muslim charity with headquarters in Riyadh, and the next some Mickey Mouse shipping company in Nicosia. Partly to escape Abdullah’s proximity, and partly for reassurance, Brue swung round to Annabel.

  “This one okay for you two?” he asked in German. “Doesn’t seem to have a tick against it. All I’ve got is the amount. Fifty thousand U.S. The Seven Friends Navigation Company, Nicosia.”

  “Ah. Now this one would be very essential for the afflicted of Yemen,” Abdullah explained to Brue before Annabel could put the question to Issa. “If your client is concerned to distribute medical relief throughout the Umma, this is a most efficient means of achieving his objective.”

  His hands resting either side of the keyboard, Brue listened to Annabel’s translation into Russian: “Dr. Abdullah says the people of Yemen are greatly afflicted by poverty. This trusted shipping company has long experience of getting assistance to them. Do you want to do this one, or not?”

  Issa deliberated, now yes, now no, now a shrug. Then enlightenment came to him. “In my Turkish jail there was a Yemeni who was so sick he died! Now this will not happen again. Do it, do it, Mr. Tommy!”

  Obediently, Brue typed in the shipping company’s particulars, and in his imagination followed them into the ether: first to the clearing bank through which Frères was obliged to make its transfers—in precomputer days, the name Brue alone would have been enough—then to Ankara, then to some flea-bitten Turkish-Cypriot bank in Nicosia that probably looked like an outside toilet with a lot of mangy dogs sunning themselves on the doorstep. Annabel was tapping his shoulder. Other than a handshake, she had never touched him before.

  “That’s an ampersand. You’ve put a slash.”

  “Have I? Where? Good lord, so I have. Too stupid of me. Thanks.”

  He put an ampersand. He had done his job. Fourteen bloody banks and one pissy shipping firm. All he needed to do now was press the GO tit.

  “Have we done the deed then, Frau Richter?” he asked jovially, his hand hovering over the keyboard, his middle finger protruding.

  “Issa?” she inquired.

  Issa gave a distracted nod and returned to his musings.

  “Dr. Abdullah, no worries?”

  “Thank you, sir, I am naturally most content.”

  All hundred percent of you? Brue wondered.

  Still peering down at the GO key, he deliberated what gesture he should make, and what mood his face should be expressing as he touched it.

  Was he a happy banker because he was about to unload twelve and a half million dollars’ worth of his bank’s assets? Scarcely.

  Was he happy to be performing a service for the son and heir of a long-standing client of the bank?

  Or happiest to be rescuing Annabel from a god-awful jam and Issa from endless incarceration and worse?

  Actually the last, but for safety’s sake he put on his boardroom face and in his anticipated relief hit GO harder than he meant to.

  Bang goes the last Lipizzaner. Good-bye, Edward Amadeus, OBE. And good-bye Ian Lantern and God help you and all who sail in you.

  He had only one more duty to perform.

  “Dr. Abdullah, sir. Allow me to call you a taxi at the bank’s expense.”

  And without waiting for the good doctor’s answer, dialed the number that Lantern had given him for this moment.

  Driving through the invisible cones of Mohr’s exclusion zone, past mysteriously immune cars at street corners, and burly pedestrians with nothing to do but look innocent and engineers with night lamps toiling unpersuasively at junction boxes, Bachmann parked his taxi in the raised forecourt of Brue Frères Bank, pulled up the collars of his workman’s jacket and, like any waiting cabbie, settled down to listen to his radio and stare vacuously through the windscreen—and less vacuously at the satellite navigation panel discreetly flickering low down on his dashboard. He had image, but at the last minute Mohr’s technicians had screwed up, and failed to provide him with sound.

  No sooner had he parked his taxi than his two watchers parked their Audi in the street half a level below. They were there for the unwelcome eventuality that Signpost did not take kindly to being hijacked to an unfamiliar destination. Their remit, drummed into them by Bachmann, was to remain inside their car until he called on them. No muddling with Mohr’s men on pain of excommunication.

  Bachmann made a covert survey of the houses up and down the row and was horrified to discern two shadowy figures on a rooftop and two more at the opening to a cul-de-sac running up from the Binnen Alster shore. The silent pictures on his navigation panel showed Annabel and Felix dawdling in the hall while Brue first escorted Signpost to the downstairs cloakroom, then went upstairs, presumably for the same purpose, or maybe he needed a quick drink.

  On-screen Annabel and Felix are facing each other two yards apart and laughing a little fixedly. It’s the first time Bachmann has seen Annabel in a headscarf. It’s the first time he has seen her laugh. Felix spread his arms, raises them above his head and performs a little jig. Bachmann assumes it is a bit of Chechen dance. Annabel in long skirt cautiously partners him. Dance ends before it has begun.

  Bachmann closed his eyes and opened them, and yes, he was still here, still waiting for the positively last green light, still in direct default of Axelrod’s orders, but Günther Bachmann was a famous chancer and nothing was ever going to change that. The man on the ground knows best: Bachmann’s Law. But why oh why the delay, and more delay, why, why? Unless Berlin had fucked up—which admittedly was always entirely possible—Abdullah was compromised to hell and back and the operation was a triumph. So why wasn’t the orchestra playing full blast, and why wasn’t he getting the green light with only minutes to go?

  His cell phone was ringing. Niki, speaking for Maximilian: “It’s a written order. It’s just come in.”

  “Read it,” Bachmann murmured.

  “‘Project delayed. Evacuate area now and return to Hamburg station.’”

  “Who signed it, Niki?”

  “Joint Steering. Your symbol at the top, Joint Steering’s at the bottom.”

  “No name?”

  “No name,” Niki confirmed.

  A consensus decision then, the only kind Joint took. No matter who was pulling the strings.

  “And project, right? Project delayed? Not operation delayed?”

  “Project is correct. No reference to operation.”

  “And nothing about Felix?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Or Signpost?”

  “Nothing about Signpost. I’ve given you the whole message.”

  He tried to call Axelrod on his cell phone and got voice mail. He tried the direct line to the Joint Committee and got engaged. He tried the switchboard and got no reply. On the screen at his knees, Brue is returning from upstairs. Now all three of them are standing in the hall, waiting for Signpost to come out of the cloakroom.

  Project delayed, they had said.

  For how long? Five minutes, or forever?

  Axelrod’s been outmaneuvered. He’s been outmaneuvered but they let him draft the order and he deliberately obscured the wording so that I could misunderstand.

  Not Signpost, not Felix, not operation, just project. Axelrod is telling me to use my own initiative. If you can go, go, but don’t say I told you, just say you didn’t understand the message. No repeat yes.

  Issa and Annabel and Brue were still waiting for Signpost to come out of the cloakroom, and so was Bachmann.

  What the hell’s he doing in there all this time? Preparing himself
for martyrdom? Bachmann remembered the look on his face as he advanced on Issa for that first embrace: Am I embracing a brother or my own death? He’d seen the same expression on the faces of the crazies in Beirut before they went out to get themselves killed.

  He’s out. Signpost has at last emerged from the cloakroom. He is wearing a fawn Burberry raincoat but no white skullcap. Has he left it in the cloakroom, or put it in his briefcase? Or is he telling us something? Is he saying what he has been thinking all along: Take me. I have knowingly walked into your baited trap, because how else could I reconcile myself with God, so take me?

  Signpost has placed himself in front of Issa and is staring up at him, adoring him. Issa peers down at him in puzzlement. Signpost reaches out his arms and warmly embraces Issa, patting his shoulders: my son. Signpost strokes Issa’s face, cradles his hands, holds them tenderly against his breast while the two Westerners watch across the cultural divide. Issa is belatedly thanking and honoring his guide and mentor. Annabel Richter is interpreting. It’s becoming a long good-bye.

  “No word, Niki?”

  “It’s dead. Our screens, everything.”

  I’m on my own, where I always am. The man on the ground knows best. Fuck them.

  But Bachmann’s screen is still miraculously functioning, even if it has no sound. The hall is empty. All four have vanished. Mohr’s technicians strike again. No video coverage of the entrance lobby.

  The bank’s front door opening. Cameras and screen irrelevant. Naked eye takes over at last. Overbright intruder lights illuminate the steps and surrounding pillars. First out is Signpost. Unsteady walk. He’s frightened shitless.

  Issa has noticed his frailty too, and is walking at his side, one hand under the master’s arm. Issa grinning.

  Annabel behind him grinning too. Free air at last. Stars. A moon even. Annabel and Brue bringing up the rear. Everybody, Brue included, grinning now. Only Abdullah looking unhappy, which is fine by me. First I’ll tell him that his worst fears have come true, then I’ll be his best and only friend in need.

  They’re heading towards me. Issa and Annabel are chatting away to him and he’s smiling somehow, but he’s wobbly as a leaf.

  Bachmann slowly lifts his capped head to the little group approaching his cab, a studied performance. I’m a sleepy Hamburg taxi driver, one more job and that’s it for the night.

  Brue leading now. Brue the English gentleman thrusting his way ahead of the group in order to usher his departing guests.

  Bachmann in his cap and shabby jacket—who only fifteen seconds earlier switched off his satellite navigation system—lowers his window and gives Brue the kind of none-too-deferential greeting that any late-night taxi driver might give.

  “Taxi for Brue Frères?” Brue inquires merrily, leaning into Bachmann’s open window, one hand to the rear door handle. “Fantastic!” And, turning back to Signpost in the same hearty manner—“So where are we off to tonight, Doctor, if I may ask? If it’s all the way home, that’s perfectly all right by the bank. I just wish all our business could be conducted in such a friendly manner, sir.”

  But Abdullah had no time to answer, or if he had, Bachmann never heard him. A high-sided white minibus had careered into the forecourt, smashing into Bachmann’s cab, skewing it sideways, starring the side window and crumpling the driver’s door. Showered with broken glass and sprawled across the passenger seat, Bachmann had a slow-motion vision of Brue leaping for safety, the jacket of his suit billowing as if floating on water. Hauling himself half upright, he saw one black-windowed Mercedes pulling up tight behind the minibus, and a second reversing at high speed and taking up a position directly in front of it. Dazed as he was by the impact and the headlights, he saw as if by broad daylight the hatchet face and ash-blonde hair of the woman seated beside a masked driver in the windscreen of the first Mercedes as it shrieked to a halt hard behind the white minibus.

  First Annabel dreamed it, then she knew it was for real. She took a step and discovered she was alone. Abdullah too had stopped dead and was standing with his little feet together and turned inward, while he stared past her down the street. If he hadn’t been a great Muslim scholar she’d have obeyed her instincts and grabbed him by the forearm, because he had started swaying, and she feared he was having a seizure of some kind and was about to keel over.

  But he didn’t.

  To her relief he righted himself, only to go on staring down the street with a look of anguished recognition and horror on his face, the look of a man whose worst fears have come to visit him. She noticed also that his skinny head had sunk into his shoulders in a self-protective cringe, as if he imagined that someone was already hammering blows on him from behind, although there was nobody behind him to do it.

  By now she was looking across Abdullah to Issa, wanting to catch his eye and refer her anxiety to him, but instead she found herself looking past him in the direction that both Issa and Abdullah were staring already, and she saw at last what they saw, although the sight didn’t immediately strike terror into her in the way it had struck terror into Abdullah.

  In the course of her work at the Sanctuary, it was true, she had heard reports of men who had to be physically restrained and a few who had to be beaten to make them submit to expulsion. And the memory of Magomed waving from the window of his departing plane would stay with her till she died.

  But that was about the limit of her experience of such matters, which was why her mind wasn’t quick enough to grasp the unimaginable yet entirely concrete fact: not only that the forecourt had become the scene of a complicated traffic accident involving a parked cream-colored taxi and two stray Mercedes with blackened windows, but that the white minibus that had clearly caused the accident was standing sideways to her with its doors wide open, and four—no, five—men in balaclavas and black tracksuits and sneakers were climbing out of it at their leisure.

  And because she was so slow on the uptake, it was sheer child’s play for them. They had snatched Abdullah from beside her as neatly as if they were snatching her handbag; whereas Issa, being more advanced in his awareness of brute force, clung onto his mentor for dear life, binding his spindly arms round him and sagging to his knees with him, to give him extra protection.

  But that was only until the four or five masked men formed a cluster round the pair of them—a kind of testudo as the Romans had called it in her Latin lessons—and dragged and carried them to the minibus, threw them inside and jumped after them, then slammed the doors on themselves for privacy.

  She saw Brue come running up beside her and heard him shouting after the masked men in English at the top of his voice, and she wondered why English. Then she remembered that the masked men had spoken staccato curse words to each other in American English, which would explain why Brue chose English to shout back at them, though he might as well have saved his breath for all the notice they took of him.

  And it was probably Brue’s presence beside her that enabled her to recover her wits, and set her free to run full pelt at the minibus as it pulled away, with every intention of placing herself in front of it, if only she could get between its dented bonnet and a Mercedes that had backed itself up against it.

  Clawing himself out of the passenger door with his right arm, Bachmann half ran, half limped along the side of the minibus, beating its white wall with his good fist. Flopping onto the bonnet of the leading Mercedes, he punted himself feet-first across it to the indifference of two men in balaclava helmets seated in the front. The minibus was pulling away, its side doors were sliding shut, but not before Bachmann had a glimpse of standing men in black balaclavas and jumpsuits and two prone bodies spread-eagled facedown on the floor at their feet, the one in a long black overcoat and the other in a fawn Burberry. He heard screams and realized they were Annabel’s, and saw that she had grabbed a side door handle and was allowing herself to be pulled along while she yelled, “Open the door, open the door, open the door,” in English, on and on.

  The chase Mercedes w
ith the masked driver and the hatchet-faced ash-blonde in the passenger seat had pulled alongside and was trying to edge her out of the way and the minibus was accelerating but Annabel was still hanging on, shouting, “Bastards, bastards,” also in English. Then he heard her screaming again, I’ll get you back!—but in Russian, and realized that this time she was addressing Issa, not his abductors. “I’ll get you back if it’s the last”—and presumably she was going to say if it was the last thing she did in her whole life, but by then she was quite literally beating the air, for Brue had grabbed hold of her, and broken her grasp on the door handle. But even when he stood her on her feet, her arms were stretched out to the minibus in an effort to bring it back.

  Bachmann made his way down the forecourt’s slipway to the main road, where his two watchers sat motionless in their Audi, still waiting for his call. Continuing along the pavement, he kept walking as best he could until he reached the cul-de-sac where he had spotted Arni Mohr’s control car. It had gone, but Arni Mohr was standing on the pavement under a street lamp, chatting with Newton from Beirut days. Next to them, waiting to be let in, stood little Ian Lantern, smiling as usual, so Bachmann assumed that Newton had been the unidentified passenger in Lantern’s car.

  At Bachmann’s approach, Arni Mohr assumed an expression of studious detachment and needed to make a phone call that required him to walk away down the road, but Newton with his spade of new black beard stepped affably forward to greet his old mate.

  “Well, Günther Bachmann, for Christ’s sakes! How come you got your nose under the wire? We thought you were Mike Axelrod’s little boy. Did Brother Burgdorf give you a ringside seat after all?”