John LeCarre - A New Collection of Three Novels Part 23

"What time?"

"It must have been around eleven. Lucy was still doing her homework. I won't let her work after eleven as a rule but she was doing a French mock O-level. He was in a phone box."

"Cash?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"He didn't say. He just said, 'Rick's dead. I wish we'd had a child.

"That all?"

"He said he'd always hated himself for marrying me. Now he was reconciled. He understood himself. And he loved me for trying so hard. Thanks."

"That all?"

"'Thanks. Thanks for everything. And please forgive the bad parts.' Then he rang off."

"Did you tell Nigel this?"

"Why do you keep asking me that? I didn't think it was Nigel's business. I didn't want to say he was being drunk and sentimental on the phone late at night just at the time when they were considering him for promotion. Serves him right for deceiving me."

"What else did Nigel ask you?"

"Just character stuff. Had I ever had any reason to suppose Magnus might have had Communist sympathies. I said Oxford. Nigel said they knew about that. I said I didn't think university politics meant much anyway. Nigel agreed. Had he ever been erratic in any way? Unstable--alcoholic-- depressive? I said no again. I didn't reckon one drunken phone call const.i.tuted drunkenness, but if it did I wasn't going to tell four of Magnus's colleagues about it. I felt protective of him."

"They ought to have known you better, Belinda," said Brotherhood. "Would you have given him the job yourself, by the way?"

"What job? You said there wasn't one." She was being sharp with him, belatedly suspecting him too of duplicity.

"I meant suppose there had been a job. A high-level, responsible job. Would you give it to him?"

She smiled. Very prettily. "I did, didn't I? I married him."

"You're wiser now. Would you give it to him today?"

She was biting her forefinger, frowning angrily. She could change moods in moments. Brotherhood waited but nothing came so he asked her another question: "Did they ask you about his time in Graz, by any chance?"

"Graz? You mean his army time? Good heavens, they didn't go back that far."

Brotherhood shook his head as if to say he would never be equal to the wicked ways of the world. "Graz is where they're trying to say it all started, Bel," he said. "They've got some grand theory he fell among thieves while he was doing his National Service there. What do you make of that?"

"They're absurd," she said.

"Why are you so sure?"

"He was happy there. When he came back to England he was a new man. 'I'm complete,' he kept saying. 'I've done it, Bel. I've got my other half together.' He was proud he'd done such good work."

"Did he describe the work?"

"He couldn't. It was too secret and too dangerous. He just said I would be proud of him if I knew."

"Did he tell you the name of any of the operations he was mixed up in?"

"No."

"Did he tell you the names of any of his Joes?"

"Don't be absurd. He wouldn't do that."

"Did he mention his C.O.?"

"He said he was brilliant. Everyone was brilliant for Magnus when they were new."

"If I said 'Greensleeves' to you in a loud voice, would that ring any bells?"

"It would mean English traditional music."

"Ever hear of a girl called Sabina?"

She shook her head. "He told me I was his first," she said.

"Did you believe him?"

"It's hard to tell when it's the first for you too."

With Belinda, he remembered, the quiet was always good. If her charges into the lists had something comic about them, there was always dignity to the calm between.

"So Nigel and his friends went away happy," he suggested. "Did you?"

Her face against the window was in silhouette. He waited for it to lift or turn to him, but it didn't.

"Where would you look for him?" he said. "If you were me?"

Still she did not move or speak.

"Some place by the sea somewhere? He had these fantasies, you know. He chopped them up and gave a bit to each person. Did he ever give a version to you? Scotland?

Canada? The migration of the reindeer? Some kind lady who'd take him in? I need to know, Belinda. I really do."

"I won't talk to you any more, Jack. Paul's right. I don't have to."

"Not whatever he's done? Not to save him perhaps?"

"I don't trust you. Specially when you're being nice. You invented him, Jack. He'd have done whatever you told him. Who to be. Who to marry. Who to divorce. If he's done wrong it's as much your fault as his. It was easy to get rid of me--he just gave me the latch key and went to a lawyer. How was he supposed to get rid of you?"

Brotherhood moved towards the door.

"If you find him, tell him not to ring again. And Jack?" Brotherhood paused. Her face was soft again, and hopeful. "Did he write that book he was always on about?"

"Which book was that?"

"The great autobiographical novel that was going to change the world."

"Should he have done?"

"'One day I'm going to lock myself away and tell the truth.' 'Why do you have to lock yourself away? Tell it now,' I said. He didn't seem to think he could. I'm not going to let Lucy marry early. Nor's Paul. We're going to put her on the pill and let her have affairs."

"Lock himself away where, Belinda?"

The light once more faded from her face. "You brought it on yourselves, Jack. All of you. He'd have been all right if he'd never met people like you."

Wait, Grant Lederer told himself. They all hate you. You hate most of them. Be a clever boy and wait your turn. Ten men sat in a room inside a room. In the false walls, false windows looked onto plastic flowers. From places like this, thought Lederer, America lost her wars against the little brown men in black pyjamas. From places like this, he thought--from smoked-gla.s.s rooms, cut off from humankind--America will lose all her wars except the last. A few yards beyond the walls lay the placid diplomatic backwaters of St. John's Wood. But here inside they could have been in Langley or Saigon.

"Harry, with the greatest possible respect," Mountjoy of the Cabinet Office piped with very little respect at all.

"These early indicators of yours could perfectly easily have been dumped on us by an unscrupulous opposition, as some of us have been saying all along. Is it really fair to trot them out yet, again? I thought we put all this stuff to bed back in August."

Wexler stared at the spectacles he was holding in both hands. They are too heavy for him, thought Lederer. He sees too clearly through them. Wexler lowered them to the table and scratched his veteran's crew cut with his stubby fingertips. What's holding you up? Lederer demanded of him silently. Are you translating English into English? Are you paralysed by jet-lag after flying Concorde all the way from Washington? Or are you in awe of these English gentlemen who never tire of telling us how they set up our service in the first place and generously invited us to sup at their high table? You're a top man of the best intelligence agency in the world, for Christ's sake. You're my boss. Why don't you stand up and be counted? As if in response to Lederer's silent pleading, Wexler's voice started functioning again with all the animation of a machine that speaks your weight.

"Gentlemen," Wexler resumed--except that he said "junnlemen." Reload, aim again, take your time, thought Lederer. "Our position, Sir Eric," Wexler resumed, with something unpleasantly close to a bow in the direction of Mountjoy's knighthood, "that is--the ah Agency position overall on this thing--at this important meeting, and at this moment in time--is that we have here an acc.u.mulation of indicators from a wide range of sources on the one hand, and new data on the other which we consider pretty much conclusive in respect of our unease." He moistened his lips. So would I, thought Lederer. If I'd spoken that mouthful, I'd spit at least. "It looks to us therefore that the ah logistics here require us to go back over the ah course a little distance and--when we've done that--to ah slot the new stuff in where we can all take a good look at it in light of what has--ah latterly gone before." He turned to Brammel and his lined but innocent face broke into an apologetic smile. "You want to do it different in any way, Bo, why don't you just say so and see if we can accommodate you?"

"My dear chap, you must do exactly whatever makes you feel most comfortable," said Brammel hospitably, which was what he had been saying to everybody all his life. So Wexler went back to his brief, first centering the folder before him on the table then tilting it cautiously to the right, as if landing it on one wingtip. And Grant Lederer III, who has the impression that the inside surfaces of his skin have been afflicted by an itchy rash, tries to lower his pulse rate and his blood heat and believe in the high level of this conference. Somewhere, he argues to himself, there is worth and secrecy and an all-knowing intelligence service. The only trouble is, it's in Heaven.

The British had fielded their usual intractable, over-fluent team. Ingram, seconded from the Security Service, Mountjoy from the Cabinet Office and Dorney from the Foreign Office all lolled in varying positions of disbelief or outright contempt. Only the placement had changed, Lederer noticed: whereas Jack Brotherhood had hitherto been placed symbolically at Brammel's side, today that position had gone to Brammel's bagman, Nigel, and Brotherhood had been promoted to head of the table, where he presided like an old grey bird glowering down on his prey. On the American side of the table they were a mere four. How typical that in our Special Relationship the Brits should outnumber the Americans, thought Lederer. In the field the Agency outguns these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds by about ninety to one. In here we're a persecuted minority. To Lederer's right, Harry Wexler, having cleared his throat not before time, had at last begun wrestling with the intricacies of what he insisted on calling the ongoing ah situation. To Lederer's left lounged Mick Carver, Head of the London Station, a spoilt Bostonian millionaire considered brilliant on no evidence Lederer was aware of. Below him the egregious Artelli, a distraught mathematician from Signals Intelligence, looked as though he had been hauled from Langley by his hair. And, between them, here sit I, Grant Lederer III, unlovable even to myself, the pushy law boy from South Bend, Indiana, whose tireless efforts in the interest of his own promotion have dragged everyone together this one more time to prove what could have been proved six months ago: namely, that computers do not fabricate intelligence, do not sidle over to the opposition in return for favours, do not voluntarily compose slanders against men in high standing in the British service. They tell the disgraceful truth without regard to charm, race or tradition and they tell it to Grant Lederer III, who is busy making himself as unpopular as possible.

As Lederer listened impotently to Wexler's floundering, he decided that it was himself not Wexler who was the alien. Here is the great Harry E. Wexler, he reasoned, who in Langley sits at the right hand of G.o.d. Who has been featured in Time as America's Legendary Adventurer. Who played a star part in the Bay of Pigs and fathered some of the finest intelligence f.u.c.k-ups of the Vietnam War. Who has destabilised more bankrupt economies in Central America than are dreamed of, and conspired with the greatest in the land from the heads of the Mafia downwards. And here is me, an ambitious jerk. And what am I thinking? I am thinking that a man who cannot speak clearly cannot think clearly. I am thinking that self-expression is the companion to logic and that Harry E. Wexler is by this criterion circ.u.mcised from the neck up, even if he does hold my precious future in his hands.

To Lederer's relief, Wexler's voice suddenly acquired new confidence. This was because he was reading directly from Lederer's brief. "In March '81 a reliably a.s.sessed defector reported that..." Cover name Dumbo, Lederer remembered automatically, himself becoming the computer: resettled Paris with a hooker supplied by Resources Section. A year later, it was the hooker who defected. "In May '81 Signals Intelligence reported that,.." Lederer glanced at Artelli, hoping to catch his eye, but Artelli was hearing signals of his own. "In March again of '82 a source inside Polish Intelligence while on a liaison visit to Moscow was advised that..." Cover name Mustapha, Lederer recalled with a fastidious shiver: died of overenthusiasm while a.s.sisting Polish security in its enquiries. With a fumble and a near fall the great Wexler delivered his first punchline of the morning and managed not to fluff it. "And the burden of these indicators, junnlemen, is in every case the same," he announced, "namely that the entire Balkan effort of an unnamed Western intelligence service is being orchestrated by Czech Intelligence in Prague, and that the leak is occurring under the noses of the Anglo-American intelligence fraternity in Washington." n.o.body leaps in the air however. Colonel Carruthers does not remove his monocle to exclaim "By G.o.d, the fiendish cunning!" The sensational force of Wexler's revelation is six months old. The sedge is withered from the case and no spooks sing.

Lederer decided to listen instead to what Wexler does not say. Nothing about my interrupted tennis training, for example. Nothing about my imperilled marriage, my truncated s.e.x-life, my total noncontribution as a father, starting the morning they hauled me off all other duties and a.s.signed me to the great Wexler as his superslave for twenty-five hours a day. "You have a lawyer's training, you have Czech language and Czech expertise," Personnel had told him in as many words. "More appropriately you have a thoroughly sleazy mind. Apply it, Lederer. We expect terrible things of you." Nothing about the night hours in front of my computer while I typed my d.a.m.ned fingers off, feeding in acres of disconnected data. Why did I do it? What got into me? Mom, I just felt my talent striding out inside of me, so I got on its back and rode away to my destiny. Names and records of all Western intelligence officers past or present in Washington with access to the Czech target, whether central or peripheral consumers: Lederer cans the whole ridiculous a.s.sembly in four days cold. Names of all their contacts, details of their travel movements, behaviour patterns, s.e.xual and recreational appet.i.tes: Lederer nets them all in a manic Friday-to-Monday while Bee does the praying for both of us. Names of all Czech couriers, officials, legal and illegal travellers pa.s.sing in and out of the United States, plus separately entered personal descriptions to counteract false pa.s.sports. Dates and ostensible purpose of such journeys, frequency and duration of stay. Lederer delivers them bound and gagged in three short days and nights while Bee convinces herself he is making it with Maisie Morse from Collation, who has pot smoke coming out of her ears.

Still disdaining these and the many other n.o.ble sacrifices of his subordinate, Wexler has embarked on a disastrous paragraph about "incorporating our general awareness of the Czechoslovak methodology in regard to the servicing of and the ah communication with their agents in the field." An impressed silence follows while the meeting mentally paraphrases.

"Ah, you mean tradecraft, Harry," says Bo Brammel, who never could resist a quip if he thought it would adorn his reputation, and little Nigel next to him restrains his laughter by patting down his hair.

"Well, yes, sir, I guess that is what I do mean," Wexler confesses, and Lederer to his surprise feels a yawn of nervous excitement pa.s.s over him as the tousled Artelli takes the stage.

Artelli uses no notes and has a mathematician's frugality with words. Despite his name, he speaks with a slight French accent that he disguises beneath a Bronx drawl. "As the indicators continued to multiply," he says, "my section was ordered to make a reappraisal of clandestine radio transmissions beamed from the roof of the Czech Emba.s.sy in Washington as well as from certain other identified Czech facilities in the United States, throughout the years '81 and '82, notably their consulate in San Francisco. Our people reconsidered skip distances, frequency variations and probable reception zones. They backtracked over all intercepts of that period though we had not been able to break them at the time of their original transmission. They prepared a schedule of such transmissions so that they could be matched against the movements of eligible suspects."

"Hold on a minute, will you?"

Little Nigel's head snaps round like a weathervane in a gale. Even Brammel shows distinct signs of human interest. From his exile at the end of the table, Jack Brotherhood is pointing a .45-calibre forefinger straight at Artelli's navel. And it is symptomatic of the many paradoxes of Lederer's life that of all the people in the room, Brotherhood is the one whom he would most wish to serve, if ever he had the opportunity, even though--or perhaps because--his occasional efforts to ingratiate himself with his adopted hero have met with iron rebuff.

"Look here, Artelli," Brotherhood says. "You people have made rather a lot out of the point that every time Pym left the precincts of Washington, whether on leave or in order to visit another town, a particular series of coded transmissions from the Czech Emba.s.sy was discontinued. I suspect you are going to make that point again now."

"With embellishments, yes, I am," says Artelli pleasantly enough.

Brotherhood's forefinger remains trained on its mark. Artelli keeps his hands on the table. "The a.s.sumption being that if Pym was out of range of their Washington transmitter, the Czechs wouldn't bother to talk to him?" Brotherhood suggests.

"This is correct."

"Then every time he came back to the capital they'd pop up again. 'Hullo it's you and welcome home.' Correct?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well turn it round for a moment, will you? If you were framing a man, isn't that precisely what you would do too?"

"Not today," he says equably. "And not in 1981 or '82. Ten years ago, maybe. Not in the eighties."

"Why not?"

"I wouldn't be that dumb. We all know it's standard intelligence practice to continue transmitting whether or not the party is listening the other end. It's my hunch they--" He stops. "Maybe I should leave this one to Mr. Lederer," he says.

"No you don't--you tell it to them yourself," Wexler orders without looking up.

Wexler's terseness is not unexpected. It is a feature of these meetings, known to everybody present, that a curse, if not an outright embargo, hangs over the use of Lederer's name. Lederer is their Ca.s.sandra. n.o.body ever asked Ca.s.sandra to preside over a meeting on damage limitation.

Artelli is a chess-player and takes his time. "The communication techniques we were required to observe here were out of fashion even at the time of their use. You get a feel. A smell. A smell of age. A sense of long habituation, one human being to another. Years of it maybe."

"Well now that's very special pleading," Nigel exclaims, quite angry, and continues to sit bolt upright before keeling towards his master, who appears to be trying to shake his head and nod at the same time. Mountjoy says "Hear, hear." A couple of Brammel's supporters' club are making similar farmyard noises. There is hostility in the air, and it is forming on national lines. Brotherhood says nothing but has coloured. Whether anyone apart from himself has noticed this, Lederer does not know. He has coloured, he has lowered his fist, and for a second he appears to have dropped his guard entirely. Lederer hears him growl, "Fanciful twaddle," but misses the rest because Artelli has decided to continue.

"Our more important discovery relates however to the types of code in these transmissions. As soon as we had the notion of an older type of system, we subjected the transmissions to different a.n.a.lytical methods. Like you don't immediately look for a steam engine inside the hood of a Cadillac. We decided to read the messages on the a.s.sumption they were being received by a man or woman in the field who is of a certain generation of training, and who cannot or dare not store modern coding materials. We looked for more elementary keys. We looked in particular for evidence of non-random texts that would serve as base keys for transposition."

If anybody here understands what he's saying, they "are not showing it, thinks Lederer.

"When we did this, we at once began to detect a progression in the structure. Right now it's still algebra. But it's there. It's a logical linguistic progression. Maybe it's a piece of Shakespeare. Maybe it's a Hottentot nursery rhyme. But there is a pattern emerging that is based upon the continuous text of some such a.n.a.logue. And that a.n.a.logue is in effect the codebook for those transmissions. And we feel-- maybe it's a little mystical--that the a.n.a.logue is--well, like a bond between the field and base. We see it as having almost a human ident.i.ty. All we need is one word. Preferably but not necessarily the first. After that it's only a question of time before we identify the rest of the text. Then we'll break those messages wide open."

"So when will that be?" says Mountjoy. "About 1990, I suppose."

"Could be. Could be tonight."

Suddenly it becomes apparent that Artelli means more than he is saying. The hypothetical has become the specific. Brotherhood is the first to take him up on his innuendo.

"So why tonight?" he says. "Why not 1990?"

"There's something very peculiar going on with the Czech transmissions overall," Artelli confesses with a smile. "They're throwing stuff out at random everywhere. Last night Prague Radio put out a world-wide spook call using some phoney professor who doesn't exist. Like a cry for help to somebody who's only in a position to receive spoken word. Then all around the clock we get Mayday calls--for example a high-speed transmission from your Czech Emba.s.sy here in London. For four days now, they've been b.u.mping high-speed signals into your mainline BBC transmissions. It's as if the Czechs had lost a kid in the forest and were shouting out any messages that might conceivably get through to him."

Even before Artelli's echoless voice has died, Brotherhood is speaking. "Of course there's a London transmission," he declares vehemently, laying his fist on the table like a challenge. "Of course the Czechs are stirring it. My goodness, how many times do we have to put this to you? For two d.a.m.ned years, there have been Czech transmissions in any part of the globe where Pym sets foot and they do, naturally, coincide with his movements. It's a radio game. That's how you play the radio game when you're framing a man. You persist and you repeat and you wait till the other fellow's nerve cracks. The Czechs are not fools. Sometimes I think we are."

Unbothered, Artelli turns his twisted smile to Lederer as if to say, "See if you can impress them." At which Grant Lederer allows himself an irrelevant memory of his wife Bee splayed above him in her naked glory, making love to him like all the angels in Heaven.

"Sir Michael, I have to start the other end," Lederer says brightly in a prepared opening, straight at Brammel. "I have to pick up in Vienna just ten days ago, if you don't mind, sir, and track back from there to Washington."

n.o.body is looking at him. Start wherever you must, they were saying, and get it over with.

A different Lederer has broken loose inside him and he greets this version of himself with pleasure. I am the bounty hunter, shuttling between London, Washington and Vienna with Pym perpetually in my sights. I am the Lederer who, as Bee vociferously complained when we were safe from microphones, took Pym into bed with us every night, woke sweating with self-doubt in the fitful hours, woke again in the morning with Pym once more firmly between us: "I'll get you, boy. I'll nail you." The Lederer who for the last twelve months--ever since Pym's name began to wink at me from the computer screen--has tracked him first as an abstraction, then as a fellow screwball. Has posed with him on spurious committees as his earnest and admiring colleague. Shared jolly drunken picnics with family Pym in the Vienna woods, then rushed back to my desk and set to work with fresh vigour to rip apart what I have just enjoyed. I am the Lederer who too easily attaches himself, then punishes whatever holds him tight; the Lederer who is grateful for every wiry smile and casual pat of encouragement from the great Wexler, my master, only to round on him minutes later, lampooning him, degrading him in my overheated mind, punishing him for being yet another disappointment to me.