Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré Read Free Book Online

perhaps? Another thought came to Bill Roach. Recently, Jim had acquired an old typewriter, a wrecked Remington that he had put right with his own hands. Had he typed his own letter on it? Was he so lonely that he wrote himself letters, and stole other people’s as well? Roach fell asleep.

4
    G uillam drove languidly but fast. Smells of autumn filled the car, a full moon was shining, strands of mist hung over open fields, and the cold was irresistible. Smiley wondered how old Guillam was and guessed forty, but in that light he could have been an undergraduate sculling on the river; he moved the gear lever with a long flowing movement as if he were passing it through water. In any case, Smiley reflected irritably, the car was far too young, for Guillam. They had raced through Runnymede and begun the run up Egham Hill. They had been driving for twenty minutes and Smiley had asked a dozen questions and received no answer worth a penny, and now a nagging fear was waking in him that he refused to name.
    “I’m surprised they didn’t throw you out with the rest of us,” he said, not very pleasantly, as he hauled the skirts of his coat more tightly round him. “You had all the qualifications: good at your work, loyal, discreet.”
    “They put me in charge of scalp-hunters.”
    “Oh, my Lord,” said Smiley with a shudder, and, pulling up his collar round his ample chins, he abandoned himself to that memory in place of others more disturbing: Brixton, and the grim flint schoolhouse that served the scalp-hunters as their headquarters. The scalp-hunters’ official name was Travel. They had been formed by Control on Bill Haydon’s suggestion in the pioneer days of the cold war, when murder and kidnapping and crash blackmail were common currency, and their first commandant was Haydon’s nominee. They were a small outfit, about a dozen men, and they were there to handle the hit-and-run jobs that were too dirty or too risky for the residents abroad. Good intelligence work, Control had always preached, was gradual and rested on a kind of gentleness. The scalp-hunters were the exception to his own rule. They weren’t gradual and they weren’t gentle either, thus reflecting Haydon’s temperament rather than Control’s. And they worked solo, which was why they were stabled out of sight behind a flint wall with broken glass and barbed wire on the top.
    “I asked whether ‘lateralism’ was a word to you.”
    “It most certainly is not.”
    “It’s the ‘in’ doctrine. We used to go up and down. Now we go along.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “In your day, the Circus ran itself by regions. Africa, satellites, Russia, China, South East Asia, you name it: each region was commanded by its own juju man; Control sat in heaven and held the strings. Remember?”
    “It strikes a distant chord.”
    “Well, today everything operational is under one hat. It’s called London Station. Regions are out, lateralism is in. Bill Haydon’s Commander London Station, Roy Bland’s his number two, Toby Esterhase runs between them like a poodle. They’re a service within a service. They share their own secrets and don’t mix with the proles. It makes us more secure.”
    “It sounds a very good idea,” said Smiley, studiously ignoring the innuendo.
    As the memories once more began seething upward into his conscious mind, an extraordinary feeling passed over him: that he was living the day twice, first with Martindale in the club, now again with Guillam in a dream. They passed a plantation of young pine trees. The moonlight lay in strips between them.
    Smiley began, “Is there any word of—” Then he asked, in a more tentative tone, “What’s the news of Ellis?”
    “In quarantine,” said Guillam tersely.
    “Oh, I’m sure. Of course. I don’t mean to pry. Merely, can he get around and so on? He did recover; he can walk? Backs can be terribly tricky, I understand.”
    “The word says he manages pretty well. How’s