A Delicate Truth

by John le Carré

  ‘So, dear man, where in God’s name is your nice new master? We seek him here, we seek him there. We tried to get him to come and talk to us the other day. The swine stood us up.’

  By us, Toby assumes the Joint Intelligence Committee, of which Oakley is some sort of ex-officio member. How this should be is not something Toby asks. Does the man who ran up a seditious joint letter to the Foreign Secretary urging him not to go after Saddam, thereafter earn himself a seat at the Office’s most secret councils? – or is he treated, as other rumours have it, as some kind of licensed contrarian, now cautiously admitted, now shut out? Toby has ceased to marvel at the paradoxes of Oakley’s life, perhaps because he has ceased to marvel at his own.

  ‘I understand my minister had to go to Washington at short notice,’ he replies guardedly.

  Guarded because, whatever Foreign Office ethic says, he is still, somehow, the minister’s Private Secretary.

  ‘But he didn’t take you with him?’

  ‘No, Giles. He didn’t. Not this time.’

  ‘He carted you around Europe with him. Why not Washington?’

  ‘That was then. Before he started making his own arrangements without consulting me. He went to Washington alone.’

  ‘You know he was alone?’

  ‘No, but I surmise it.’

  ‘You surmise it why? He went without you. That’s all you know. To Washington proper, or the Suburb?’

  For ‘Suburb’ read Langley, Virginia, home of the Central Intelligence Agency. Again Toby has to confess he doesn’t know.

  ‘Did he treat himself to British Airways First Class in the best traditions of Scottish frugality? Or slum it in Club, poor chap?’

  Starting to yield despite himself, Toby takes a breath:

  ‘I assume he travelled by private jet. It’s how he went there before.’

  ‘Before being when exactly?’

  ‘Last month. Out on the sixteenth, back on the eighteenth. On a Gulfstream. Out of Northolt.’

  ‘Whose Gulfstream?’

  ‘It’s a guess.’

  ‘But an informed one.’

  ‘All I know for a fact is he was driven to Northolt by private limo. He doesn’t trust the Office car pool. He thinks the cars are bugged, probably by you, and that the chauffeurs listen in.’

  ‘The limo being the property of –?’

  ‘A Mrs Spencer Hardy.’

  ‘Of Texas.’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Better known as the mountainously wealthy Miss Maisie, born-again benefactress of America’s Republican far right, friend of the Tea Party, scourge of Islam, homosexuals, abortion and, I believe, contraception. Currently residing in Lowndes Square, London SW. One entire side of it.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Oh yes. One of her many residences worldwide. And this is the lady, you tell me, who supplied the limousine to take your nice new master to Northolt airport. I have the right lady?’

  ‘You do, Giles, you do.’

  ‘And in your estimation it was therefore the same lady’s Gulfstream that conveyed him to Washington?’

  ‘It’s a guess, but yes.’

  ‘You are also aware, no doubt, that Miss Maisie is the protectress of one Jay Crispin, rising star in the ever-growing firmament of private defence contractors?’

  ‘Broadly.’

  ‘Jay Crispin and Miss Maisie recently paid a social call on Fergus Quinn in his Private Office. Were you present for those festivities?’

  ‘Some of them.’

  ‘With what effect?’

  ‘I seem to have blotted my copybook.’

  ‘With Quinn?’

  ‘With all of them. There was talk of asking me aboard. It didn’t happen.’

  ‘Consider yourself fortunate. Did Crispin accompany Quinn to Washington in Miss Maisie’s Gulfstream, do you suppose?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Did the lady herself go?’

  ‘Giles, I just don’t know. It’s all guesswork.’

  ‘Miss Maisie sends her bodyguards to Messrs Huntsman on Savile Row to have them decently dressed. You didn’t know that either?’

  ‘Actually, no, I didn’t.’

  ‘Then drink some of that Calvados and tell me what you do know for a change.’

  *

  Rescued from the isolation of half-knowledge and suspicions that until now he has been unable to share with a living soul, Toby flops back in his armchair and basks in the luxury of confession. He describes, with growing indignation, his sightings in Prague and Brussels, and recounts Horst’s probings in the garden of Café Einstein, until Oakley cuts him short:

  ‘Does the name Bradley Hester sound familiar?’

  ‘I’ll say it does!’

  ‘Why the humour?’

  ‘He’s the Private Office house pet. The girls adore him. Brad the Music Man, they call him.’

  ‘We’re speaking of the same Bradley Hester, I take it: assistant cultural attaché at the US Embassy?’

  ‘Absolutely. Brad and Quinn are fellow music nuts. They’ve got a project going – transatlantic orchestral exchanges between consenting universities. They go to concerts together.’

  ‘Quinn’s diary says so?’

  ‘When last seen. Used to,’ Toby replies, still smiling at the recollection of tubby, pink-faced Brad Hester with his signature shabby music case chatting away to the girls in his queeny East Coast drawl while he waits to be admitted to the presence.

  But Oakley doesn’t warm to this benign image:

  ‘And the purpose of these frequent visits to the Private Office is to discuss musical exchanges, you say.’

  ‘They’re written in stone. Brad’s the one date of the week that Quinn never breaks.’

  ‘Do you handle the paperwork that results from their discussions?’

  ‘Good Lord, no. Brad takes care of all that. He has people. As far as Quinn’s concerned, their project is extramural, not to be done in office hours. To his credit, he’s quite particular about it,’ Toby ends, slowing down as he meets Oakley’s frigid stare.

  ‘And you accept that preposterous notion?’

  ‘I do my best. For want of any other,’ Toby says, and grants himself a cautious sip of Calvados while Oakley contemplates the back of his left hand, turning his wedding ring, testing it against the knuckle for looseness.

  ‘You mean you really don’t smell a rat when Mr Bradley Hester, Assistant Cultural Attaché, marches in with his music case or whatever he brings? Or you refuse to?’

  ‘I smell rats all the time,’ Toby retorts sulkily. ‘What’s the difference?’

  Oakley lets this go. ‘Well, Toby, I hate to disillusion you, if that’s what I’m doing. Mr Cultural Attaché Hester is not quite the amiable clown you appear determined to take him for. He’s a discredited freelance intelligence pedlar of the far-right persuasion, born again, not to his advantage, and grafted on to the Agency’s station in London at the behest of a caucus of wealthy American conservative evangelicals convinced that the Central Intelligence Agency is overrun with red-toothed Islamic sympathizers and liberal faggots, a view your nice new master is disposed to share. He is notionally employed by the United States government, but in practice by a fly-by-night company of defence contractors trading under the name of Ethical Outcomes Incorporated, of Texas and elsewhere. The sole shareholder and chief executive officer of this company is Maisie Spencer Hardy. She, however, has devolved her duties to one Jay Crispin, with whom she is having a ball. Jay Crispin, besides being an accomplished gigolo, is the intimate of your distinguished minister, who appears determined to outdo the militarist zeal that informs his late great leader, Brother Blair, though not, it seems, his luckless successor. Should Ethical Outcomes Incorporated ever find itself supplementing the feeble efforts of our national intelligence agencies by mounting a privately funded stealth operation, your friend the Music Man will be tasked with supplying the offshore logistics.’

  And while Toby is
digesting this, Oakley, as so often, changes direction:

  ‘There’s an Elliot somewhere in the mix,’ he muses. ‘Is Elliot a name to you? Elliot? Carelessly dropped? Overheard at the keyhole?’

  ‘I don’t listen at keyholes.’

  ‘Of course you do. Albanian-Greek renegade, used to call himself Eglesias, ex-South African Special Forces, killed some chap in a bar in Jo’burg and came to Europe for his health? That sort of Elliot? Sure?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Stormont-Taylor?’ Oakley persists, in the same dreamy tone.

  ‘Of course!’ Toby cries in relief. ‘Everyone knows Stormont-Taylor. So do you. He’s the international lawyer’ – effortlessly evoking the strikingly handsome Roy Stormont-Taylor, Queen’s Counsel and television idol, with his flowing white mane and too-tight jeans, who three times in the last few months – or is it four? – has, like Bradley Hester, been warmly received by Quinn before being spirited behind the mahogany door.

  ‘And what, so far as you are aware, is Stormont-Taylor’s business with your nice new master?’

  ‘Quinn doesn’t trust government lawyers, so he consults Stormont-Taylor for an independent opinion.’

  ‘And on what particular matter, do you happen to know, does Quinn consult the bold and beautiful Stormont-Taylor, who happens also to be an intimate of Jay Crispin?’

  A fraught silence while Toby asks himself just who is being held to account here – Quinn or himself.

  ‘How the fuck should I know?’ he demands irritably – to which Oakley offers only a sympathetic ‘How indeed?’

  The silence returns.

  ‘So, Giles,’ Toby announces finally, ever the first to break on such occasions.

  ‘So what, dear man?’

  ‘Who the hell – or what the hell – is Jay Crispin in the scheme of things?’

  Oakley pulls a sigh and shrugs. When he offers a reply, it comes in grudging fragments:

  ‘Who’s anybody?’ he demands of the world at large, and breaks into grumpy telegramese. ‘Third son of a posh Anglo-American family. Best schools. Sandhurst at second attempt. Ten years of bad soldiering. Retirement at forty. We’re told voluntary, but one doubts it. Bit of City. Dumped. Bit of spying. Dumped. Sidles up alongside our burgeoning terror industry. Rightly observes that defence contractors are on a roll. Smells the money. Goes for it. Hullo, Ethical Outcomes and Miss Maisie. Crispin charms people,’ he goes on in puzzled indignation. ‘All sorts of people, all the time. God alone knows how. Granted, he does a lot of bed. Probably goes in both directions – good luck to him. But bed doesn’t last the whole drink through, does it?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ Toby agrees, his mind darting uncomfortably to Isabel.

  ‘So tell me,’ Oakley continues, executing yet another unannounced change of direction. ‘What possessed you to spend precious hours of the Queen’s time trawling through Legal Department’s archives and pulling out files on such obscure places as Grenada and Diego Garcia?’

  ‘My minister’s orders,’ Toby retorts, refusing to be surprised any longer either by Oakley’s omniscience or his penchant for dealing questions from the bottom of the pack.

  ‘Orders delivered to you personally?’

  ‘Yes. He said I should prepare a paper on their territorial integrity. Without the knowledge of Legal Department or the special advisors. Actually, without the knowledge of anyone’ – now that he came to think of it. ‘Classify it top secret, bring it to him by Monday 10 a.m. without fail.’

  ‘And you prepared such a paper?’

  ‘At the cost of a weekend, yes.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Spiked.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘My paper went out on submission, didn’t have the traction and was spiked. According to Quinn.’

  ‘Do you mind treating me to a short precis of its contents?’

  ‘It was just a résumé. The alphabet. An undergraduate could do it.’

  ‘Then tell me the alphabet. I’ve forgotten it.’

  ‘In 1983, following the assassination of Grenada’s leftist president, the Americans invaded the island without our say-so. They called the operation Urgent Fury. The fury was mainly ours.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘It was our patch. A former British colony, now a member of the Commonwealth.’

  ‘And the Americans invaded it. Shame on them. Go on.’

  ‘The American spies – your beloved Suburb – had fantasies that Castro was about to use Grenada’s airport as a launch pad. It was bullshit. The Brits had helped build the airport and weren’t best pleased to be told it was a threat to America’s lifeblood.’

  ‘And our response, in a word?’

  ‘We told the Americans, please be so good as never to do anything like that again on our turf without our permission in advance, or we’ll be even more cross.’

  ‘And they told us?’

  ‘To go fuck ourselves.’

  ‘And did we?’

  ‘The American point was well taken’ – resorting to sarcastic Foreign Office mode. ‘Our grip on our Crown territories is so tenuous that the State Department considers it’s doing us a favour by acknowledging it. They only do it when it suits them, and in the case of Grenada it didn’t suit them.’

  ‘So go fuck ourselves again?’

  ‘Not quite. They rowed back and an entente was hacked out.’

  ‘To what effect, this entente? Go on.’

  ‘In future, if the Americans were going to do something dramatic on our turf – a special op under the guise of going to the assistance of the oppressed inhabitants, et cetera – they had to ask us nicely first, get our approval in writing, invite us to be part of the action and share the product with us at the end of the day.’

  ‘By product, you mean intelligence.’

  ‘I do, Giles. That’s what I mean. Intelligence by another name.’

  ‘And Diego Garcia?’

  ‘Diego Garcia was the template.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, Giles!’

  ‘I am unencumbered by background knowledge. Kindly tell me exactly what you told your nice new master.’

  ‘Ever since we obligingly depopulated Diego Garcia for them back in the sixties, the Americans have our permission to use it as a convenience for their blind-eye operations, but only on our terms.’

  ‘The blind eye being in this case a British one, I take it.’

  ‘Yes, Giles. I see I can get nothing past you. Diego Garcia remains a British possession, so it’s still a British blind eye. You know that much, I trust?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  It is a principle of Giles when negotiating never to express the smallest satisfaction. Toby has watched him apply it in Berlin. Now he is watching him apply it to Toby.

  ‘Did Quinn discuss the finer aspects of your paper with you?’

  ‘There weren’t any.’

  ‘Come. It would only be courteous. What about the application of the Grenada experience to more substantial British possessions?’

  Toby shakes his head.

  ‘So he didn’t discuss with you, even in the broadest brush, the rights and wrongs of an American intrusion into British Crown territory? On the basis of what you had unearthed for him?’

  ‘Not even.’

  A stage pause, of Oakley’s making.

  ‘Does your paper point a moral?’

  ‘It limps to a conclusion, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘That any unilateral action by the Americans on British-owned territory would have to have a British fig leaf for cover. Otherwise, it would be no go.’

  ‘Thank you, Toby. So what or who, I wonder, in your personal judgement, sparked this enquiry?’

  ‘Honestly, Giles, I’ve no idea.’

  Oakley raises his eyes to Heaven, lowers them, sighs:

  ‘Toby. Dear man. A busy minister of the Crown does not instruct his gifted young Private
Secretary to burrow his way through dry-as-dust archives in search of precedent without first sharing his game plan with said underling.’

  ‘This one fucking well does!’

  And there you have Giles Oakley, the consummate poker player. He springs to his feet, tops up Toby’s Calvados, sits back and declares himself content.

  ‘So tell me’ – all-confiding now that they are at ease with each other again – ‘what on earth does one make of your nice new master’s bizarre request of the Office’s hard-pressed Human Resources Department?’

  And when Toby protests yet again – but meekly this time because, after all, they are so relaxed – that he hasn’t a clue what Oakley is talking about, he is rewarded with a satisfied chuckle.

  ‘For a low flyer, Toby! Come! He’s looking for a low flyer by yesterday. You must know that! He’s got half our resourceful humanoids standing on their heads, looking for the right fellow. They’ve been calling round the houses, asking for recommendations.’

  Low flyer?

  For a fleeting moment Toby’s mind wrestles with the spectre of a daredevil pilot gearing up to fly under the radar of one of Britain’s vanishing protectorates. And he must have said something of this, because Giles almost laughs aloud and vows it’s the best thing he’s heard in months.

  ‘Low as opposed to high, dear man! A reliable has-been from the ranks of our own dear Service! Job qualifications: an appropriately lacklustre record, his future behind him. An honest-to-God Foreign Service dobbin, no frills, one shot left in his locker before retirement. You in twenty-eight years’ time or whatever it is,’ he ends teasingly.

  So that’s it, thinks Toby, trying his best to share Giles’s little joke. He’s telling me, in the gentlest possible way, that Fergus Quinn, not content with cutting me out of the loop, is actively seeking my replacement: and not just any replacement, but a has-been who will be so scared of losing his pension that he will bend whichever way he is ordered by his nice new master.

  *

  The two men stand side by side on the doorstep, waiting in the moonlight for Toby’s cab. Toby has never seen Oakley’s face more earnest – or more vulnerable. The playfulness in his voice, the little grace notes, are gone, replaced by a note of urgent warning: