Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré Read Free Book Online

and how, when a rowdy bunch at the bar had tried to take the mickey out of him, he’d gone on hammering away at me till he’d got what he wanted and, implicitly telling them to go screw themselves, pushed off.
    *
    If you love mountains as much as I do, coming down from them is always going to be depressing, but the sight of a run-down three-storey red-brick eyesore in a Camden back streetat nine a.m. on a rain-drenched Monday when you haven’t got the least idea of what you’ll do with it when you get inside takes some beating.
    How any substation came to finish up in this neck of the woods was a mystery in itself. How it had acquired the ironic sobriquet of
the Haven
was another. There was a theory the place had been used as a safe house for captured German spies in the ’39–’45war; another that a former Chief had kept his mistress here; and yet another that Head Office, in one of its endless policy lurches, had decreed that security was best served by scattering its substations across London, and the Haven by its sheer insignificance had got overlooked when the policy was scrapped.
    I mount the three cracked steps. The peeling front door opens before I have a chanceto insert my aged Yale key. Directly in front of me stands the once redoubtable Giles Wackford, overweight and leaky-eyed, but in his day one of the smartest agent-runners in the Office stable, and just three years older than myself.
    ‘My dear fellow,’ he declares huskily through last night’s whisky fumes. ‘Punctilious to the minute as ever! My warmest salaams to you, sir. What an honour! Can’tthink of a better chap to succeed me.’
    Then meet his team, which is dispersed in two-man outposts up and down a narrow wooden staircase:
    Igor
, depressed sixty-five-year-old Lithuanian, one-time controller of the best Cold War Balkan network the Office ever ran, now reduced to handling a stable of tame office cleaners, doormen and typists employed by soft foreign embassies.
    Next,
Marika
, Igor’sreputed Estonian lover, widow of a retired Office agent who died in Petersburg when it was still Leningrad.
    Then
Denise
, a tubby, feisty, Russian-speaking Scottish daughter of part-Norwegian parents.
    And last little
Ilya
, a sharp-eyed Russian-speaking Anglo-Finnish boy I had recruited as a double agent in Helsinki five years ago. He had gone on to work for my successor on the promise of resettlementin the UK. At first Head Office wouldn’t go near him. It was only after my repeated representations to Bryn Jordan that they agreed to take him on as a member of the lowest form of secret life: junior clerical assistant cleared to Grade C. With cries of Finnish joy, he seizes me in a Russian-style embrace.
    And on a top floor condemned to eternal darkness, my ragtag support staff of clerical assistantswith bicultural backgrounds and elementary operational training.
    Only after we have seemingly completed our grand tour and I am beginning to wonder whether my promised number two exists at all does Giles rap ceremoniously on a stippled-glass door that leads from his own musty office, and there in what I suspect was once a maid’s room I have my first sight of the youthful, bold-faced, statelyfigure of Florence, fluent Russian-speaker, second-year probationer, latest addition to substation Haven and, according to Dom, its white hope.
    ‘Then why hasn’t she gone straight to Russia department?’ I had asked him.
    ‘Because we deemed her a trifle
callow
, Nat,’ Dom had replied loftily in his borrowed speak, implying that he had been at thecentre of the decision. ‘Talented yes, but we thoughtwe should give her another year to settle.’
    Talented but needs to settle
. I had asked Moira for a sight of her personal file. True to form, Dom had filched the best line.
    *
    Suddenly everything the Haven undertakes is Florence-driven. Or so it is in my memory. There may have been other deserving projects, but from the moment my eye lighted on draft
Operation