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

Astra’s favourite. She will also up her cultivation of the night porter at the target building. DisregardingDom, I authorize a sweetener of five hundred pounds to that end. Under my guidance Florence will also draft a formal application for a first covert reconnaissance of the interior of Orson’s duplex to be conducted by a stealth team from Operations Directorate. By involving the Directorate at this early stage, we are signalling serious intent.
    *
    My initial instinct has been to enjoy Florence withcaution: one of those upper-class girls who’ve grown up with ponies and you never quite know what’s going on inside. Steff would loathe her on sight, Prue would worry. Her eyes are large, brown and unsmiling. To cover her shape in the workplace she favours baggy woollen skirts, flat shoes, no make-up. According to her file, she lives with her parents in Pimlico and has no designated partner. Hersexual orientation is by her own wish
undeclared
.As what I take to be a keep-out sign, she sports a man’s gold signet ring on her wedding finger. She has a long stride and a slight lilt with every step. The same lilt is replicated in her voice, which is pure Cheltenham Ladies’ College laced with bricklayers’ expletives. My first experience of this unlikely pairing occurs during a discussion ofOperation Rosebud. We are five: Dom, Percy Price and myself, a pompous Office burglar named Eric and Florence, probationer. The issue of the moment is whether a power cut might usefully be staged as a diversion while Eric’s boys and girls are conducting their reconnaissance inside Orson’s duplex. Florence, who until now has remained quiescent, springs to life:
    ‘But
Eric
,’ she objects. ‘Whateverdo we think Orson’s computers run on? Fucking torch batteries?’
    An urgent problem awaiting me is to excise the note of moral outrage that permeates her draft submission to Operations Directorate. I may not be the Office’s uncrowned king of paperwork – my personal reports suggest the opposite – but I do know what raises the hackles of our dear planners. When I tell her this in plain English sheflares. Is this Steff I’m dealing with, or my number two?
    ‘Oh
Jesus
,’ she sighs. ‘You’re about to tell me you’ve got a thing about adverbs.’
    ‘I’m telling you nothing of the kind. I’m telling you that it’s a matter of embuggerance, as you would say, to Ops Directorate
and
Russia department whether Orson is the most debased man on the planet or a paragon of the virtues. We therefore delete allreferences to just causes and obscene sums of money stolen from the world’s oppressed. We do intent, dividend, risk level and deniability and we make bloody sure the Haven’s symbol is watermarked on every page and not mysteriously replaced by anyone else’s.’
    ‘Such as Dom’s?’
    ‘Such as anybody’s.’
    She stalks back to her cubbyhole and slams the door. No wonder Giles fell in love with her: he hasn’tgot a daughter. I call Percy, tell him the Rosebud draft proposal is in the pipeline. When all my excuses for delay have run out, I give Dom a full and frank account of our progress to date – by which I mean, enough to keep him quiet. On the Monday evening, with a pardonable sense of self-satisfaction, I wish goodnight to the Haven and set course for the Athleticus and my long-delayed badmintonencounter with Edward Stanley Shannon, researcher.

5
    According to my engagements diary, which has never in its life contained information I would not be prepared to leave on a bus or at home, Ed and I played in all fifteen gamesof badminton at the Athleticus, mainly but not always on Mondays, and sometimes twice weekly, fourteen before the Fall, one after it. My use of
Fall
is arbitrary. It has nothing to do with the autumn season or Adam and Eve. I’m not sure the word covers the case but I have looked in vain for a better.
    If I am approaching the Athleticus from the north, it is my pleasure to cover the last lap