The Looking Glass War by John le Carré
Avery watched them come in; Woodford first, then Sandford, Dennison and McCulloch. They had all heard about Taylor. It was easy to imagine the news going round the Department, not as headlines, but as a small and gratifying sensation, passed from room to room, lending a briskness to the day’s activity, as it had to these men; giving them a moment’s optimism, like a rise in pay. They would watch Leclerc, watch him as prisoners watch a warder. They knew his routine by instinct, and they waited for him to break it. There would not be a man or woman in the Department but knew they had been called in the middle of the night, and that Leclerc was sleeping in the office.
They settled themselves at the table, putting their cups in front of them noisily like children at a meal, Leclerc at the head, the others on either side, an empty chair at the farther end. Haldane came in, and Avery knew as soon as he saw him that it would be Leclerc versus Haldane.
Looking at the empty chair, he said, ‘I see I’m to take the draughtiest place.’
Avery rose, but Haldane had sat down. ‘Don’t bother, Avery. I’m a sick man already.’ He coughed, just as he coughed all year. Not even the Summer could help him, apparently; he coughed in all seasons.
The others fidgeted uncomfortably; Woodford helped himself to a biscuit. Haldane glanced at the fire. ‘Is that the best the Ministry of Works can manage?’ he asked.
‘It’s the rain,’ Avery said. ‘The rain disagrees with it. Pine’s had a go but he made no difference.’
‘Ah.’
Haldane was a lean man with long, restless fingers; a man locked in himself, slow in his movements, agile in his features, balding, spare, querulous and dry; a man seemingly contemptuous of everything, keeping his own hours and his own counsel; addicted to crossword puzzles and nineteenth-century water colours.
Carol came in with files and maps, putting them on Leclerc’s desk, which in contrast to the remainder of his room was very tidy. They waited awkwardly until she had gone. The door securely closed, Leclerc passed his hand cautiously over his dark hair as if he were not quite familiar with it.
‘Taylor’s been killed. You’ve all heard it by now. He was killed last night in Finland, travelling under another name.’ Avery noticed he never mentioned Malherbe. ‘We don’t know the details. He appears to have been run over. I’ve told Carol to put it about that it was an accident. Is that clear?’
Yes, they said, it was quite clear.
‘He went to collect a film from … a contact, a Scandinavian contact. You know whom I mean. We don’t normally use the routine couriers for operational work, but this was different; something very special indeed. I think Adrian will back me up there.’ He made a little upward gesture with his open hands, freeing the wrists from his white cuffs, laying the palms and fingers vertically together; praying for Haldane’s support.
‘Special?’ Haldane repeated slowly. His voice was thin and sharp like the man himself, cultivated, without emphasis and without affectation; an enviable voice. ‘It was different, yes. Not least because Taylor died. We should never have used him, never,’ he observed flatly. ‘We broke a first principle of intelligence. We used a man on the overt side for a clandestine job. Not that we have a clandestine side any more.’
‘Shall we let our masters be the judges of that?’ Leclerc suggested demurely. ‘At least you’ll agree the Ministry is pressing us daily for results.’ He turned to those on either side of him, now to the left, now to the right, bringing them in like shareholders. ‘It is time you all knew the details. We are dealing with something of exceptional security classification, you understand. I propose to limit to Heads of Sections. So far, only Adrian Haldane and one or two of his staff in Research have been initiated. And John Avery as my aide. I wish to emphasize that our sister service knows nothing whatever about it. Now about our own arrangements. The operation has the codeword Mayfly.’ He was speaking in his clipped, effective voice. ‘There is one action file, which will be returned to me personally, or to Carol if I am out, at the end of each day; and there is a library copy. That is the system we used in the war for operational files and I think you are all familiar with it. It’s the system we shall use henceforth. I shall add Carol’s name to the subscription list.’
Woodford pointed at Avery with his pipe, shaking his head. Not young John there; John was not familiar with the system. Sandford, sitting beside Avery, explained. The library copy was kept in the cypher-room. It was against regulations to take it away. All new serials were to be entered on it as soon as they were made; the subscription list was the list of persons authorised to read it. No pins were allowed; all the papers had to be fast. The others looked on complacently.
Sandford was Administration; he was a fatherly man in gold-rimmed spectacles and came to the office on a motorbike. Leclerc had objected once, on no particular grounds, and now he parked it down the road opposite the hospital.
‘Now, about the operation,’ Leclerc said. The thin line of his joined hands bisected his bright face. Only Haldane was not watching him; his eyes were turned away towards the window. Outside, the rain was falling gently against the buildings like Spring rain in a dark valley.
Abruptly Leclerc rose and went to a map of Europe on the wall. There were small flags pinned to it. Stretching upwards with his arm, riding on his toes to reach the northern hemisphere, he said, ‘We’re having a spot of trouble with the Germans.’ A little laugh went up. ‘In the area south of Rostock; a place called Kalkstadt, just here.’ His finger traced the Baltic coastline of Schleswig-Holstein, moved east and stopped an inch or two south of Rostock.
‘To put it in a nutshell, we have three indicators which suggest – I cannot say prove – that something big is going on there in the way of military installations.’
He swung round to face them. He would remain at the map and say it all from there, to show he had the facts in his memory and didn’t need the papers on the table.
‘The first indicator came exactly a month ago when we received a report from our representative in Hamburg, Jimmy Gorton.’
Woodford smiled: good God, was old Jimmy still going?
‘An East German refugee crossed the border near Lübeck, swam the river; a railwayman from Kalkstadt. He went to our Consulate and offered to sell them information about a new rocket site near Rostock. I need hardly tell you the Consulate threw him out. Since the Foreign Office will not even give us the facilities of its bag service it is unlikely’ – a thin smile – ‘that they will assist us by buying military information.’ A nice murmur greeted this joke. ‘However, by a stroke of luck Gorton got to hear of the man and went to Flensburg to see him.’
Woodford would not let this pass. Flensburg? Was not that the place where they had located German submarines in ’forty-one? Flensburg had been a hell of a show.
Leclerc nodded at Woodford indulgently, as if he too had been amused by the recollection. ‘The wretched man had been to every Allied office in North Germany, but no one would look at him. Jimmy Gorton had a chat with him.’ Implicit in Leclerc’s way of describing things was an assumption that Gorton was the only intelligent man among a lot of fools. He crossed to his desk, took a cigarette from the silver box, lit it, picked up a file with a heavy red cross on the cover and laid it noiselessly on the table in front of them. ‘This is Jimmy’s report,’ he said. ‘It’s a first-class bit of work by any standard.’ The cigarette looked very long between his fingers. ‘The defector’s name,’ he added inconsequentially, ‘was Fritsche.’
‘Defector?’ Haldane put in quickly. ‘The man’s a low-grade refugee, a railwayman. We don’t usually talk about men like that defecting.’
Leclerc replied defensively, ‘The man’s not only a railwayman. He’s a bit of a mechanic and a bit of a photographer.’
McCulloch opened the file and began methodically turning over the serials. Sandford watched him through his gold-rimmed spectacles.
‘On the first or second of September – we don’t know which because he can’t remember –
This impressed them. Woodford said it was typical of the Germans.
‘It’s the Russians we’re fighting,’ Haldane put in.
‘He’s an odd fish, our man. He seems to have argued with them. He told them he was as reliable as they were, a good German and a Party member. He showed them his union card, photographs of his wife and Heaven knows what. It didn’t do any good, of course, because they just told him to obey orders and keep away from the sheds. But he must have caught their fancy because when they brewed up some soup at ten o’clock they called him over and offered him a cup. Over the soup he asked them what was going on. They were cagey, but he could see they were excited. Then something happened. Something very important,’ he continued. ‘One of the younger ones blurted out that whatever they had in the sheds could blow the Americans out of West Germany in a couple of hours. At this point an officer came along and told them to get back to work.’
Haldane coughed a deep, hopeless cough, like an echo in an old vault.
What sort of officer, someone asked, was he German or Russian?
‘German. That is most relevant. There were no Russians in evidence at all.’
Haldane interrupted sharply. ‘The refugee saw none. That’s all we know. Let us be accurate.’ He coughed again. It was very irritating.
‘As you wish. He went home and had lunch. He was disgruntled at being ordered around in his own station by a lot of young fellows playing soldiers. He had a couple of glasses of schnapps and sat there brooding about the dumping shed. Adrian, if your cough is troubling you … ?’ Haldane shook his head. ‘He remembered that on the northern side it abutted with an old storage hut, and that there was a shutter-type ventilator let into the party wall. He formed the notion of looking through the ventilator to see what was in the shed. As a way of getting his own back on the soldiers.’
Woodford laughed.
‘Then he decided to go one further and photograph whatever was there.’
‘He must have been mad,’ Haldane commented. ‘I find this part impossible to accept.’
‘Mad or not, that’s what he decided to do. He was cross because they wouldn’t trust him. He felt he had a right to know what was in the shed.’ Leclerc missed a beat then took refuge in technique. ‘He had an Exa-two camera, single lens reflex. East German manufacture. It’s cheap housing but takes all the Exakta-range lenses; far fewer speeds than the Exakta, of course.’ He looked inquiringly at the technicians, Dennison and McCulloch. ‘Am I right, gentlemen?’ he asked. ‘You must correct me.’ They smiled sheepishly because there was nothing to correct. ‘He had a good wide-angle lens. The difficulty was the light. His next shift didn’t begin till four, by which time dusk would be falling and there would be even less light inside the shed. He had one fast Agfa film which he’d been keeping for a special occasion; it had a DIN speed of twenty-seven. He decided to use that.’ He paused, more for effect than for questions.
‘Why didn’t he wait till next morning?’ Haldane asked.
‘In the report,’ Leclerc continued blandly, ‘you’ll find a very full account by Gorton of how the man got into the hut, stood on an oil drum and took his photographs through the ventilator. I’m not going to repeat all that now. He used the maximum aperture of two point eight, speeds ranging from a quarter of a second to two seconds. A fortunate piece of German thoroughness.’ No one laughed. ‘The speeds were guesswork, of course. He was bracketing an estimated exposure time of one second. Only the last three frames show anything. Here they are.’
Leclerc unlocked the steel drawer of his desk and extracted a set of high-gloss photographs twelve inches by nine. He was smiling a little, like a man looking at his own reflection. They gathered round, all but Haldane and Avery, who had seen them before.
Something was there.
You could see it if you looked quickly; something hidden in the disintegrating shadows; but keep looking and the dark closed in and the shape was gone. Yet something was there; the muffled form of a gun barrel, but pointed and too long for its carriage, the suspicion of a transporter, a vague glint of what might have been a platform.
‘They would put protective covers over them, of course,’ Leclerc commented, studying their faces hopefully, waiting for their optimism.
Avery looked at his watch. It was twenty past eleven. ‘I shall have to go soon, Director,’ he said. He still hadn’t rung Sarah. ‘I have to see the accountant about my air ticket.’
‘Stay another ten minutes,’ Leclerc pleaded, and Haldane asked, ‘Where’s he going?’
Leclerc replied, ‘To take care of Taylor. He has a date at the Circus first.’
‘What do you mean, take care of him? Taylor’s dead.’
There was an uncomfortable silence.
‘You know very well that Taylor was travelling under an alias. Somebody has to collect his effects; recover the film. Avery is going out as next of kin. The Ministry has already given its approval; I wasn’t aware that I needed yours.’
‘To claim the body?’
‘To get the film,’ Leclerc repeated hotly.
‘That’s an operational job; Avery’s not trained.’
‘They were younger than he in the war. He can look after himself.’
‘Taylor couldn’t. What will he do when he’s got it; bring it back in his sponge bag?’
‘Shall we discuss that afterwards?’ Leclerc suggested, and addressed himself once more to the others, smiling patiently as if to say old Adrian must be humoured.
‘That was all we had to go on till ten days ago. Then came the second indicator. The area round Kalkstadt had been declared a prohibited area.’ There was an excited murmur of interest. ‘For a radius of – as far as we can establish – thirty kilometres. Sealed off; closed to all traffic. They brought in frontier guards.’ He glanced round the table. ‘I then informed the Minister. I cannot tell even you all the implications. But let me name one.’ He said the last sentence quickly, at the same time flicking upwards the little horns of greying hair that grew above his ears.
Haldane was forgotten.
‘What puzzled us in the beginning’ – he nodded at Haldane, a conciliatory gesture at a moment of victory, but Haldane ignored it – ‘was the absence of Soviet troops. They have units in Rostock, Witmar, Schwerin.’ His finger darted among the flags. ‘But none – this is confirmed by other agencies – none in the immediate area of Kalkstadt. If there are weapons there, weapons of high destructive capacity, why are there no Soviet troops?’
McCulloch made a suggestion: might there not be technicians, Soviet technicians in civilian dress?
‘I regard that as unlikely.’ A demure smile. ‘In comparable cases where tactical weapons were being transported we have always identified at least one Soviet unit. On the other hand, five weeks ago a few Russian troops were seen at Gustweiler, farther south.’ He was back to the map. ‘They billeted for one night at a pub. Some wore artillery flashes; others had no shoulder-boards at all. One might conclude they had brought something, left it and gone away again.’
Woodford was becoming restless. What did it all add up to, he wanted to know, what did they make of it over at the Ministry? Woodford had no patience with riddles.
Leclerc adopted his academic tone. It had a bullying quality as if facts were facts and could not be disputed. ‘Research Section have done a magnificent job. The overall length of the object in these photographs – they can compute it pretty exactly – is equal to the length of a Soviet
He had them.
‘It was at this point,’ Leclerc explained, ‘that the Ministry felt entitled to authorize an overflight. As you know, for the last four years the Department has been limited to aerial photographs along orthodox civilian or military air routes. Even these required Foreign Office approval.’ He drifted away. ‘It really was too bad.’ His eyes seemed to be searching for something not in the room. The others watched him anxiously, waiting for him to continue.
‘For once the Ministry agreed to waive the ruling, and I am pleased to say the task of mounting the operation was given to this Department. We selected the best pilot we could find on our books: Lansen.’ Someone looked up in surprise; agents’ names were never used that way. ‘Lansen undertook, for a price, to go off course on a charter flight from Düsseldorf to Finland. Taylor was dispatched to collect the film; he died at the landing field. A road accident, apparently.’