The Spy Who Came in From The Cold

by Le Carre, John

"Did you fly or come by sea?"

  "We flew," Kiever said; "a very smooth flight." He might have owned the airline.

  "I'll make your lunch," she declared, "a special lunch. I'll make you something specially good. What shall I bring you?"

  "Oh, for God's sake," said Leamas under his breath, and the doorbell rang. The woman went quickly into the kitchen; Kiever opened the front door.

  He was wearing a mackintosh with leather buttons. He was about Leamas' height, but older. Leamas put him at about fifty-five. His face had a hard, gray hue and sharp furrows; he might have been a soldier. He held out his hand.

  "My name is Peters," he said. The fingers were slim and polished. "Did you have a good journey?"

  "Yes," said Kiever quickly, "quite uneventful."

  "Mr. Leamas and I have a lot to discuss; I do not think we need to keep you, Sam. You could take the Volkswagen back to town."

  Kiever smiled. Leamas saw the relief in his smile.

  "Good-bye, Leamas," said Kiever, his voice jocular. "Good luck, old man."

  Leamas nodded, ignoring Kiever's hand.

  "Good-bye," Kiever repeated and let himself quietly out of the front door.

  Leamas followed Peters into a back room. Heavy lace curtains hung at the window, ornately frilled and draped. The windowsill was covered with potted plants--great cacti, tobacco plant and some curious tree with wide, rubbery leaves. The furniture was heavy, pseudo-antique. In the center of the room was a table with two carved chairs. The table was covered with a rust-colored counterpane more like a carpet; on it before each chair was a pad of paper and a pencil. On a sideboard there was whisky and soda. Peters went over tQ it and mixed them both a drink.

  "Look," said Leamas suddenly, "from now on I can do without the goodwill, do you follow me? We both know what we're about; both professionals. You've got a paid defector--good luck to you. For Christ's sake don't pretend you've fallen in love with me." He sounded on edge, uncertain of himself.

  Peters nodded. "Kiever told me you were a proud man," he observed dispassionately. Then he added without smiling, "After all, why else does a man attack tradesmen?"

  Leamas guessed he was Russian, but he wasn't sure. His English was nearly perfect, he had the ease and habits of a man long used to civilized comforts.

  They sat at the table.

  "Kiever told you what I am going to pay you?" Peters inquired.

  "Yes. Fifteen thousand pounds to be drawn on a Bern bank."

  "Yes."

  "He said you might have follow-up questions during the next year," said Leamas. "You would pay another five thousand if I kept myself available."

  Peters nodded.

  "I don't accept that condition," Leamas continued. "You know as well as I do it wouldn't work. I want to draw the fifteen thousand and get clear. Your people have a rough way with defected agents; so have mine. I'm not going to sit on my fanny in St. Moritz while you roll up every network I've given you. They're not fools; they'd know who to look for. For all you and I know they're on to us now."

  Peters nodded. "You could, of course, come somewhere. . . safer, couldn't you?"

  "Behind the Curtain?"

  "Yes."

  Leamas just shook his head and continued: "I reckon you'll need about three days for a preliminary interrogation. Then you'll want to refer back for a detailed brief."

  "Not necessarily," Peters replied.

  Leamas looked at him with interest. "I see," he said, "they've sent the expert. Or isn't Moscow Centre in on this?"

  Peters was silent; he was just looking at Leamas, taking him in. At last he picked up the pencil in front of him and said, "Shall we begin with your war service?"

  Leamas shrugged.

  "It's up to you."

  "That's right. We'll begin with your war service. Just talk."

  "I enlisted in the Engineers in 1939. I was finishing my training when a notice came around inviting linguists to apply for specialist service abroad. I had Dutch and German and a good deal of French and I was fed up with soldiering, so I applied. I knew Holland well; my father had a machine tool agency at Leiden; I'd lived there for nine years. I had the usual interviews and went off to a school near Oxford where they taught me the usual monkey tricks."

  "Who was running that setup?"

  "I didn't know till later. Then I met Steed-Asprey, and an Oxford don called Fielding. They were running it. In forty-one they dropped me into Holland and I stayed there nearly two years. We lost agents quicker than we could find them in those days--it was bloody murder. Holland's a wicked country for that kind of work--it's got no real rough country, nowhere out of the way you can keep a headquarters or a radio set. Always on the move, always running away. It made it a very dirty game. I got out in forty-three and had a couple of months in England, then I had a go at Norway--that was a picnic by comparison. In forty-five they paid me off and I came over here again, to Holland, to try and catch up on my father's old business. That was no good, so I joined up with an old friend who was running a travel agency business in Bristol. That lasted eighteen months, then we went bankrupt. Then out of the blue I got a letter from the Department: would I like to go back? But I'd had enough of all that, I thought, so I said I'd think about it and rented a cottage on Lundy Island. I stayed there a year contemplating my stomach, then I got fed up again so I wrote to them. By late forty-nine I was back on the payroll. Broken service, of course--reduction of pension rights and the usual crabbing. Am I going too fast?"

  "Not for the moment," Peters replied, pouring him some more whisky. "We'll discuss it again of course, with names and dates."

  There was a knock at the door and the woman came in with lunch, an enormous meal of cold meats and bread and soup. Peters pushed his notes aside and they ate in silence. The interrogation had begun.

  Lunch was cleared away. "So you went back to the Circus," said Peters.

  "Yes. For a while they gave me a desk job, processing reports, making assessments of military strengths in Iron Curtain countries, tracing units and that kind of thing."

  "Which section?"

  "Satellites Four. I was there from February fifty to May fifty-one."

  "Who were your colleagues?"

  "Peter Guillam, Brian de Grey and George Smiley. Smiley left us in early fifty-one and went over to Counterintelligence. In May fifty-one I was posted to Berlin as D.C.A.--Deputy Controller of Area. That meant all the operational work."

  "Who did you have under you?" Peters was writing swiftly. Leamas guessed he had some homemade shorthand.

  "Hackett, Sarrow and de long. De long was killed in a traffic accident in Fifty-nine. We thought he was murdered but we could never prove it. They all ran networks and I was in charge. Do you want details?" he asked drily.

  "Of course, but later. Go on."

  "It was late fifty-four when we landed our first big fish in Berlin: Fritz Feger, second man in the D.D.R. Defense Ministry. Up till then it had been heavy going--but in November fifty-four we got on to Fritz. He lasted almost exactly two years, then one day we never heard any more. I hear he died in prison. It was another three years before we found anyone to touch him. Then, in 1959, Karl Riemeck turned up. Karl was on the Praesidium of the East German Communist Party. He was the best agent I ever knew."

  "He is now dead," Peters observed.

  A look of something like shame passed across Leamas' face.

  "I was there when he was shot," he muttered. "He had a mistress who came over just before he died. He'd told her everything--she knew the whole damned network. No wonder he was blown."

  "We'll return to Berlin later. Tell me this. When Karl died you flew back to London. Did you remain in London for the rest of your service?"

  "What there was of it, yes."

  "What job did you have in London?"

  "Banking section; supervision of agents' salaries, overseas payments for clandestine purposes. A child could have managed it. We got our orders and we signed the drafts. Occasionally there was a secu
rity headache."

  "Did you deal with agents direct?"

  "How could we? The Resident in a particular country would make a requisition. Authority would put a hoof-mark on it and pass it to us to make the payment. In most cases we had the money transferred to a convenient foreign bank where the Resident could draw it himself and hand it to the agent."

  "How were agents described? By cover names?"

  "By figures. The Circus calls them combinations. Every network was given a combination: every agent was described by a suffix attached to the combination. Karl's combination was eight A stroke one."

  Leamas was sweating. Peters watched him coolly, appraising him like a professional gambler across the table. What was Leamas worth? What would break him, what attract or frighten him? What did he hate; above all, what did he know? Would he keep his best card to the end and sell it dear? Peters didn't think so: Leamas was too much off balance to monkey about. He was a man at odds with himself, a man who knew one life, one confession, and had betrayed them. Peters had seen it before. He had seen it, even in men who had undergone a complete ideological reversal, who in the secret hours of the night had found a new creed, and alone, compelled by the internal power of their convictions, had betrayed their calling, their families, their countries. Even they, filled as they were with new zeal and new hope, had had to struggle against the stigma of treachery; even they wrestled with the al most physical anguish of saying that which they had been trained never, never to reveal. Like apostates who feared to bum the Cross, they hesitated between the instinctive and the material; and Peters, caught in the same polarity, must give them' comfort and destroy their pride. It was a situation of which they were both aware; thus Leamas had fiercely rejecte4 a human relationship with Peters, for his pride precluded it. Peters knew that for those reasons Leamas would lie; lie perhaps only by omission, but lie all the same, for pride, from defiance or through the sheer perversity of his profession; and he, Peters, would have to nail the lies. He knew, too, that the very fact that Leamas was a professional could militate against his interests, for Leamas would select where Peters wanted no selection; Leamas would anticipate the type of intelligence which Peters required--and in doing so might pass by some casual scrap which could be of vital interest to the evaluators. To all that, Peters added the capricious vanity of an alcoholic wreck.

  "I think," he said, "we will now take your Berlin service in some detail. That would be from May 1951 to March 1961. Have another drink."

  Leamas watched him take a cigarette from the box on the table and light it. He noticed two things: that Peters was left-handed, and that once again he had put the cigarette in his mouth with the maker's name away from him, so that it burned first. It was a gesture Leamas liked: it indicated that Peters, like himself, had been on the run.

  Peters had an odd face, expressionless and gray. The color must have left it long ago--perhaps in some prison in the early days of the Revolution--and now his features were formed and Peters would look like that till he died. Only the stiff gray hair might turn to white, but his face would not change. Leamas wondered vaguely what Peters' real name was, whether he was married. There was something very orthodox about him which Leamas liked. It was the orthodoxy of strength, of confidence. If Peters lied there would be a reason. The lie would be a calculated, necessary lie, far removed from the fumbling dishonesty of Ashe.

  Ashe, Kiever, Peters; that was a progression in quality, in authority, which to Leamas was axiomatic. of the hierarchy of an intelligence network. It was also, he suspected, a progression in ideology. Ashe the mercenary, Kiever the fellow traveler, and now Peters, for whom the end and the means were identical.

  Leamas began to talk about Berlin. Peters seldom interrupted, seldom asked a question or made a comment, but when he did, he displayed a technical curiosity and _expertise_ which entirely accorded with Leamas' own temperament. Leamas even seemed to respond to the dispassionate professionalism of his interrogator--it was something they had in common.

  It had taken a long time to build a decent East Zone network from Berlin, Leamas explained. In the earlier days the city had been thronging with second-rate agents: intelligence was discredited and so much a part of the daily life of Berlin that you could recruit a man at a cocktail party, brief him over dinner and he would be blown by breakfast. For a professional it was a nightmare: dozens of agencies, half of them penetrated by the opposition, thousands of loose ends; too many leads, too few sources, too little space to operate. They had their break with Feger in 1954, true enough. But by '56 when every Service department was screaming for high-grade intelligence, they were becalmed. Feger had spoiled them for second-rate stuff that was only one jump ahead of the news. They needed the real thing--and they had to wait another three years before they got it.

  Then one day de long went for a picnic in the woods on the edge of East Berlin. He had a British military number plate on his car, which he parked, locked, on a gravel road beside the canal. After the picnic his children ran on ahead, carrying the basket. When they reached the car they stopped, hesitated, dropped the basket and ran back. Somebody had forced the car door--the handle was broken and the door was slightly open. De long swore, remembering that he had left his camera in the glove compartment. He went and examined the car. The handle had been forced; de Jong reckoned it had been done with a piece of steel tubing, the kind of thing you can carry in your sleeve. But the camera was still there, so was his coat, so were some parcels belonging to his wife. On the dnving seat was a tobacco tin, and in the tin was a small nickel cartridge. De Jong knew exactly what it contained: it was the film cartridge of a subminiature camera, probably a Minox.

  De Jong drove home and developed the film. It contained the minutes of the last meeting of the Praesidium of the East German Communist Party, the S.E.D. By an odd coincidence there was collateral from another source; the photographs were genuine.

  Leamas took the case over then. He was badly in need of a success. He'd produced virtually nothing since arriving in Berlin, and he was getting past the usual age limit for full-time operational work. Exactly a week later he took de Jong's car to the same place and went for a walk.

  It was a desolate spot that de Jong had chosen for his picnic: a strip of canal with a couple of shell-torn piliboxes, some parched, sandy fields, and on the east-. em side a sparse pinewood lying about two hundred yards from the gravel road which bordered the canal. But it had the virtue of solitude--something that was hard to find in Berlin--and surveillance was impossible. Leamas walked in the woods. He made no attempt to watch the car because he did not know from which direction the approach might be made. If he was seen watching the car from the woods, the chances of retaining his informant's confidence were ruined. He need not have worried.

  When he returned there was nothing in the car so he drove back to West Berlin, kicking himself for being a damned fool; the Praesidium was not due to meet for another fortnight. Three weeks later he borrowed de long's car and took a thousand dollars in twenties in a picnic case. Ho left the car unlocked for two hours and when he returned there was a tobacco tin in the glove compartment. The picnic case was gone.

  The films were packed with first-grade documentary stuff. In the next six weeks he did it twice more, and the same thing happened.

  Leamas knew he had hit a gold mine. He gave the source the cover name of "Mayfair" and sent a pessimistic letter to London. Leamas knew that if he gave London half an opening they would control the case direct, which he was desperately anxious to avoid. This was probably the only kind of operation which could save him from superannuation, and it was just the kind of thing that was big enough for London to want to take over for itself. Even if he kept them at arm's length there was stifi the danger that the Circus would have theories, make suggestions, urge caution, demand action. They would want him to give only new dollar bills in the hope of tracing them, they would want the film cartridges sent home for examination, they would plan clumsy tailing operations and tell
the Departments. Most of all they would want to tell the Departments; and that, said Leamas, would blow the thing sky-high. He worked like a madman for three weeks. He combed the personality files of each member of the Praesidium. He drew up a list of all the clerical staff who might have had access to the minutes. From the distribution list on the last page of the facsimiles he extended the total of possible informants to thirty-one, including clerks and secretarial staff.

  Confronted with the almost impossible task of identifying an informant from the incomplete records of thirty-one candidates, Leamas returned to the original material, which, he said, was something he should have done earlier. It puzzled him that in none of the photostated minutes he had so far received were the pages numbered, that none was stamped with a security classification, and that in the second and fourth copies words were crossed out in pencil or crayon. He came finally to an important conclusion: that the photo copies related not to the minutes themselves, but to the _draft_ minutes. This placed the soUrce in the Secretariat and the Secretariat was very small. The draft minutes had been well and carefully photographed: that suggested that the photographer had had time and a room to himself.

  Leamas returned to the personality index. There was a man called Karl Riemeck in the Secretariat, a former corporal in the Medical Corps, who had served three years as a prisoner of war in England. His sister had been living in Pomerania when the Russians overran it, and he had never heard of her since. He was married and had one daughter named Carla.

  Leamas decided to take a chance. He found out from London Riemeck's prisoner of war number, which was 29012, and the date of his release which was December 10, 1945. He bought an East German children's book of science fiction and wrote in the fly leaf in German in an adolescent hand: _This book belongs to Carla Riemeck, born December 10, 1945, in Bideford, North Devon. Signed Moonspacewoman 29012_, and underneath he added, _Applicants wishing to make space flights should present themselves for instruction to C. Riemeck in person. An application form is enclosed. Long Live the People's Republic of Democratic Space!_