The Night Manager by John le Carré
He shouted, “Look out! Move over!” but they ignored him. The van behind was riding tight against the rear bumpers of the other two. Its windscreen was grubby, obscuring the driver’s face. The vans on either side had drawn so close that if he had turned the handlebar, it would have knocked against one or the other of them.
Rising in his saddle, Goodhew drove his gloved fist against the panel of the van to his left, then pushed himself away from it to recover his balance. The dead eyes in the wing mirror studied him without curiosity. He attacked the van to his right in the same way. It responded by inching nearer.
Only a red traffic light saved him from being crushed. The vans stopped, but Goodhew, for the first time in his life rode over on red, narrowly escaping death as he skimmed in front of the polished nose of a Mercedes.
The same afternoon, Rex Goodhew rewrites his will. Next day, using his in-house wiles, he circumnavigates the laborious machinery of his own ministry—and his master’s private office—and sequesters part of the top floor, a rambling set of attic rooms, already a museum piece, packed with electronic stay-behind equipment installed against the day, just around the corner, when Britain will be overrun by Bolshevism. The likelihood is now past, but the gray men of Goodhew’s Administration Section have yet to be advised of this, and when Goodhew requests the floor for secret purposes, they could not be more helpful. Overnight, millions of pounds’ worth of obsolete equipment is sent to rot in a lorry park in Aldershot.
Next day Burr’s little team becomes the tenant of twelve musty attic rooms, two malfunctioning lavatories the size of tennis courts, a denuded signals room, a private staircase with a marble balustrade and holes in the linoleum treads, and a steel door by Chubb, with a turnkey’s peephole. On the day after, Goodhew has the place electronically swept and removes all telephone lines susceptible to River House tampering.
In the matter of extracting public money from his ministry, Goodhew’s quarter-century before the Whitehall mast is not in vain. He becomes a bureaucratic Robin Hood, fiddling the government’s accounts in order to ensnare its wayward servants.
Burr needs three more staff and knows where he can find them? Hire them, Leonard, hire them.
An informant has a tale to tell but needs a couple of thousand up front? Pay him, Leonard, give him whatever he needs.
Rob Rooke would like to take a brace of watchers with him to Curaçao? Is a brace enough, Rob? Wouldn’t a foursome be a safer bet?
Gone as if they had never been are Goodhew’s niggling objections, the quips, the fey asides. He has only to pass through the steel door to Burr’s new attic eyrie for the persiflage to fall from him like the cloak it always was. Each evening, at the close of the day’s official play, he presents himself for what he modestly calls his night work, and Burr is pressed to match the energy with which he goes about his business. On Goodhew’s insistence, the dingiest room has been set aside for him. It lies at the end of a deserted corridor, its windows give onto a parapet colonized by pigeons. Their billing and cooing would have driven a lesser man crazy, but Goodhew barely hears them. Determined not to trespass on Burr’s operational territory, he emerges only to grab another handful of reports or make himself a cup of rose hip tea and exchange courteous pleasantries with the night staff. Then back to his desk and his review of the enemy’s latest dispositions.
“I intend to sink their Operation Flagship with all hands, Leonard,” he tells Burr with a twitch of his head that Burr has not seen him do before. “Darker won’t have a Mariner left when I’ve done with him. And your Dicky Blasted Roper will be safe behind bars, you mark my words.”
Burr marks them but is uncertain of their truth. It is not that he doubts Goodhew’s strength of purpose. Nor does he have any problem believing that Darker’s people deliberately set out to harass, scare or even hospitalize their adversary. For months, Burr himself has been maintaining a careful watchfulness over his own movements. Whenever possible he has driven his children to school in the mornings, and always arranged for their collection in the evenings. Burr’s concern is that, even now, Goodhew is unaware of the scale of the octopus. Three times in the last week alone, Burr has been denied access to papers that he knows to be in current circulation. Three times in vain he has protested. On the last occasion he presented himself in person to the Foreign Office Registrar in his lair.
“I fear you are misinformed, Mr. Burr,” said the registrar, who wore an undertaker’s black tie, and black protectors on the sleeves of his black jacket. “The file in question was cleared for destruction many months ago.”
“You mean it’s Flagship classified. Why don’t you say so?”
“It’s what, sir? I don’t think I follow you. Do you mind explaining yourself more clearly?”
“Limpet is my case, Mr. Atkins. I personally opened the file that I am now requesting. It’s one of half a dozen Limpet-related files opened and cross-referred by my department: two subject, two organization, two personal. There’s not one of them that’s been in existence above eighteen months. Who ever heard of a registrar authorizing the destruction of a file eighteen months after it went into action?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Burr. Limpet may indeed be your case. I have no reason to disbelieve you, sir. But as we say in Registry, just because you own the case, you don’t always own the file.”
Nevertheless, the flow of information continues at an impressive rate. Both Burr and Strelski have their sources:
The deal is firming up . . . the Panama connection is on line . . . six Panama-registered container ships on charter to Ironbrand of Nassau are heading across the South Atlantic bound for Curaçao, estimated date of arrival five to eight days from now. Between them they carry close to four hundred containers en route for the Panama Canal . . . the description of their freight varies from tractor parts to agricultural machinery to mining equipment to miscellaneous luxury goods. . . .
Handpicked military trainers, including four French paras, two Israeli ex-colonels of special forces, and six ex-Soviet Spetsnaz, met in Amsterdam last week for a munificent farewell rijstafel in the city’s best Indonesian restaurant. Afterwards they were flown to Panama. . . .
Tales of large orders of matériel by Roper’s nominees have been circulating in the arms bazaars for several months, but there has been a new gloss, which is to say that Palfrey’s predictions of a switch in Roper’s shopping list have found independent confirmation. Strelski’s Brother Michael alias Apostoll has been talking to a fellow cartel lawyer named Moranti. The said Moranti operates out of Caracas and is held to be the mainstay of the shaky alliance between the cartels.
“Your Mr. Roper is going patriotic,” Strelski announces to Burr over the secure telephone. “He’s buying American.”
Burr’s heart sinks, but he plays unconcerned. “That’s not patriotic, Joe! A Brit should be buying British.”
“He’s selling a new message to the cartels,” says Strelski, undeterred. “If their perceived enemy is Uncle Sam, they’re best off using Uncle Sam’s toys. That way they have direct access to spares, they have captured enemy weapons they can assimilate, they are familiar with the enemy’s techniques. British Starstreak HVMs, shoulder-held, British flag grenades, British tech, that’s part of the package. Sure. But their mainstream toys, they have to be a mirror image of the perceived enemy. Some Brit, the rest American.”
“So what do the cartels say?” Burr asks.
“They love it. They’re in love with American technology. British too. They love Roper. They want the best.”
“Does anybody explain what brought on this change of heart?”
Burr detects a concern comparable with his own below the surface of Strelski’s voice.
“No, Leonard. Nobody explains a fucking thing. Not to Enforcement. Not in Miami. Maybe not in London either.”
The story was confirmed a day later by a dealer of Burr’s acquaintance in Belgrade. Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, well known as Roper’s signer in the shadier marketplaces
“I don’t care whether they’re buying American guns or Chinese peashooters, Leonard. I don’t care whether they’re stripping the British bare. It’s drugs for arms whichever way you look at it, and there’s not a court on earth will condone it.”
Burr noticed that as Goodhew said this he flushed and seemed to have difficulty keeping his temper.
Still, the information pours in.
No location for the exchange of goods has so far been agreed upon. Only the two principals will know the final details in advance. . . .
The cartels have set aside the port of Buenaventura on the west coast of Colombia as the point of departure for their shipment, and past practice suggests that the same port will be used as the reception point for the incoming matériel. . . .
Well-armed if incompetent units of the Colombian army in the cartels’ pay have been dispatched to the Buenaventura area to provide cover for the transaction. . . .
A hundred empty army trucks are mustered in the dockside warehouses—but when Strelski requests a sight of the satellite photographs that could confirm or deny this information, so he tells Burr, he hits a brick wall. The espiocrats of Langley decree that he does not possess the necessary clearance.
“Leonard, will you please tell me something? What the fuck is Flagship in all this?”
Burr’s head reels. It is his understanding that in Whitehall, code name Flagship is doubly restricted. Not only is it confined to those who are Flagship cleared, it is graded Guard, keep away from Americans. So what on earth is Strelski doing, an American, being refused access to code name Flagship by the barons of Pure Intelligence in Langley, Virginia?
“Flagship is nothing but a fence to keep us out,” Burr fumes to Goodhew, minutes later. “If Langley can know about it, why can’t we? For Flagship read Darker and his friends across the pond.”
Goodhew is deaf to Burr’s indignation. He pores over shipping maps, draws himself routes in colored crayons, reads up on compass bearings, stopover times and port formalities. He buries himself in works on maritime law and beards a grand legal authority he was at school with: “Now, what do you know, Brian, if anything,” Burr hears him piping down the bare corridor, “about interdiction at sea? Certainly I’m not going to pay your ridiculous fees! I’m going to give you a very bad lunch at my club and steal two hours of your grossly inflated professional time in the interest of your country. How’s your wife putting up with you now you’re a lord? Well, give her my sympathy and meet me on Thursday prompt at one.”
You’re coming on too strong, Rex, thinks Burr. Slow down. We’re still a long way from home.
Names, Rooke had said: names and numbers. Jonathan is providing them by the score. To the uninitiated his offerings might seem at first glance trivial: nicknames culled from place cards at the dinner table, fugitive conversations partly overheard, the glimpse of a letter lying on Roper’s desk, Roper’s jottings to himself about the who, the how much, the how and when. Taken singly, such snippets made poor fare beside Pat Flynn’s clandestine photographs of Spetsnaz-turned-mercenaries arriving at Bogotá airport; or Amato’s hair-raising accounts of Corkoran’s secret rampages in the Nassau fleshpots; or intercepted bank drafts from respectable financial houses, showing tens of millions of dollars homing on Roper-related offshore companies in Curaçao.
Yet properly assembled, Jonathan’s reports provided revelations that were as sensational as any great dramatic coup. After a night of them, Burr declared that he felt seasick. After two, Goodhew remarked that he would not be surprised to read of his own high-street bank manager showing up in Crystal with a suitcase full of clients’ cash.
It was not so much the tentacles of the octopus as its ability to enter the most hallowed shrines that left them aghast. It was the involvement of institutions that even Burr had till now presumed inviolate, of names above reproach.
For Goodhew, it was as if the very pageantry of England was dying before his eyes. Dragging himself homeward in the small hours, he would pause to stare feverishly at a parked police car and wonder whether the daily stories of police violence and corruption were true after all, not the invention of journalists and malcontents. Entering his club, he would spot eminent merchant bankers or stockbrokers of his acquaintance and—instead of flapping a hand at them in cheery greeting, as he would have done three months ago—would study them from under lowered brows across the dining room, asking them in his mind: Are you another of them? Are you? Are you?
“I shall make a démarche,” he declared at one of their late-night threesomes. “I’ve decided. I’ll convene Joint Steering. I’ll mobilize the Foreign Office for a start; they’re always good for a fight against the Darkists. Merridew will stand up and be counted, I’m sure he will.”
“Why should he?” said Burr.
“Why shouldn’t he?”
“Merridew’s brother is top man in Jason Warhole, if I remember rightly. Jason’s put in for five hundred bearer bonds in the Curaçao company at half a million a crack last week.”
“Dreadfully sorry about this, old boy,” Palfrey whispered, from the shadows that seemed always to surround him.
“About what, Harry?” said Goodhew kindly.
Palfrey’s haunted eyes glanced past him at the doorway. He was sitting in a North London pub of his own choosing, not far from Goodhew’s house in Kentish Town. “Panicking. Ringing your office. Distress rocket. How did you get here so fast?”
“Bike, of course. What’s the matter, Harry? You look as though you’ve seen a ghost. They haven’t been threatening your life too, have they?”
“Bike,” Palfrey repeated, taking a pull of Scotch and immediately wiping his mouth with a handkerchief as if to remove the guilty traces. “About the best thing anyone can do, bike. Fellows on the pavement can’t keep up. Fellows in cars have to keep going round the block. Mind if we go next door? Noisier.”
They sat in the games room, where there was a jukebox to drown their conversation. Two muscular-looking boys with crew cuts were playing bar billiards. Palfrey and Goodhew sat side by side on a wooden settle.
Palfrey struck a match and had difficulty bringing the flame to his cigarette. “Things are hotting up,” he murmured. “Burr’s getting a bit warm. I warned them, but they wouldn’t listen. Time to take the gloves off.”
“You warned them, Harry?” Goodhew said, mystified as ever by the complexity of Palfrey’s systems of betrayal “Warned whom? Not Darker? You don’t mean you warned Darker, do you?”
“Got to play both sides of the net, old boy,” said Palfrey, wrinkling his nose and casting another nervous glance around the bar. “Only way to survive. Got to keep up your credibility. Both ends.” A frantic smile. “Tapping my phone,” he explained, pointing at his ear.
“Who is?”
“Geoffrey. Geoffrey’s people. Mariners. Flagship people.”
“How do you know?”
“Oh, you don’t. Can’t tell. No one can. Not these days. Not unless it’s sort of Third World. Or the police doing it with their feet. No way.” He drank, shaking his head. “It’s hitting the fan, Rex. Getting a bit big.” He drank again, quick sips. He muttered “Cheers,” forgetting he had said Cheers already. “They tip me the word. Secretaries. Old buddies from Legal Department. They don’t say it, you see. Don’t have to. Not, ‘Excuse me, Harry, my boss is tapping your phone.’ It’s hints.” Two men in motorcycle leathers had begun a game of shove-halfpenny. “I say, would you mind
There was an empty trattoria opposite the cinema. The time was six-thirty. The Italian waiter despised them.
“The boys have done over my flat too,” Palfrey said, sniggering as if he were relating a smutty joke. “Didn’t pinch anything. My landlord told me. Two chums of mine. Said I’d given them the key.”
“Had you?”
“No.”
“Have you given a key to anyone else?”
“Well, you know. Girls and things. Most of ’em give ’em back.”
“So they have been threatening you; I was right.” Goodhew ordered spaghetti and a bottle of Chianti. The waiter pulled a sour face and yelled through the kitchen door. Palfrey’s fear was all over him. It was like a breeze plucking at his knees and taking his breath away before he spoke.
“Bit hard to unlock oneself, actually, Rex,” Palfrey explained apologetically. “Habits of a lifetime I suppose. Can’t get the tooth-paste back in the tube once you’ve sat on it. Problem.” He ducked his mouth to the brim of his glass to catch the wine before it spilled. “Need a helping hand, as it were. Sorry about that.”
As so often with Palfrey, Goodhew felt he was listening to a faulty broadcast of which the meaning came only in garbled bursts “I can’t promise you anything, Harry. You know that. There are no free dispensations in life. Everything has to be earned. I believe that. I think you do too.”
“Yes, but you’ve got the guts,” Palfrey objected.
“And you’ve got the knowledge,” said Goodhew.
Palfrey’s eyes popped wide in amazement. “That’s what Darker said! Bang on! Too much knowledge. Dangerous knowledge. My bad luck! You’re a marvel, Rex. Bloody clairvoyant.”
“So you’ve been talking to Geoffrey Darker. What about?”