A Most Wanted Man

by John le Carré

  “A lawyer and Russian speaker, Günther. Excellent family. Works for Sanctuary North, a Hamburg foundation. Some of them a bit leftish, but never mind. Do-gooders. Assistance for asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, getting residence for them, helping them with their applications. Et cetera.”

  It was the et cetera that gave the dismissive edge.

  “And Brue?”

  “Banker. British. Hamburg-based.”

  “What sort of banker?”

  “Private. For the best people only. Fleet owners. Big tonnage.”

  “Anyone got any idea what he was doing there?”

  “A total mystery, Günther. Soon maybe we shall be asking him. With Dr. Keller’s approval, naturally. This bank had some problems in Vienna,” he added. “A bit of a dark character, by the sound of him. Are you ready?”

  “For what?”

  Holding up an impresario’s index finger for silence, Mohr delved in a briefcase and retrieved a brown envelope. From the envelope he drew a couple of pages of electronic type. Bachmann stole a look at Keller: not a flicker. Erna Frey had closed her folder and was sitting back, tense with anger, glowering at the floor.

  “From Russia with Love,” Mohr announced in creaking English, setting out the pages before him. “Fresh from our translation section this morning. You permit me, Frau Frey?”

  “I permit you, Herr Mohr.”

  He began reading.

  “‘In 2003, an investigation was launched by organs of Russian state security into unprovoked armed attacks by militant bandits on law-enforcement officers in the region of Nalchik, capital of the Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria,’” Mohr intoned, in a voice pregnant with significance. He looked up, making sure he had their attention.

  “‘The ringleader of the criminal group, which consisted entirely of dissident jihadists from neighboring Chechnya, was identified as one Dombitov, director of a local mosque known for propagating extreme radical views. Stored in the memory of this Dombitov’s cell phone were the name and telephone number of’”—pause—“‘subject Felix’”—huge emphasis—“‘together with the names and numbers of other criminal members of the gang. Under interrogation, Dombitov confessed that all names in his cell phone belonged to a militant Salafi group committed to violent acts with the aid of’”—significant pause—“‘explosive devices, homemade, low quality, but highly effective.’”

  Erna Frey’s head lifted slightly. “They were tortured,” she explained, in a deliberately matter-of-fact tone. “We spoke to Amnesty. We do not ignore open sources, Herr Mohr. According to Amnesty’s eyewitnesses, they beat them and put electrodes on them. First they tortured Dombitov, then they tortured everybody he’d named, which was everybody who’d attended his mosque. There wasn’t an ounce of real evidence against any of them.”

  Mohr was visibly annoyed. “You have read this, Frau Frey?”

  “Yes, Herr Mohr.”

  “You have cut across my authority and gone directly to my translators, Frau Frey?”

  “Our researcher downloaded the Russian police report last night, Herr Mohr.”

  “You speak Russian?”

  “Yes. Herr Bachmann speaks it also.”

  Mohr had recovered himself. “Then you know the record of this Felix.”

  The irritable voice of Dr. Keller interposed itself: “Read it, please. Read it now you’ve started.”

  As Mohr resumed, Bachmann reached out his foot and put it softly on Erna Frey’s. But she took her own foot away, and he knew there was no restraining her.

  “‘The inflammatory opinions and terrorist activities of Felix were confirmed by his accomplices, who described him as a bad shepherd,’” Mohr read doggedly. “‘The criminal Felix was accordingly placed in a pretrial detention center for fourteen months while he faced two charges of attacking the local road police station, and a further charge of inciting his fellow Muslims to commit terrorist acts. He confessed his guilt on all charges.’”

  “He was forced to,” Erna Frey said, her voice thickening.

  “You are suggesting that this is all fabrication, Frau Frey?” Mohr demanded. “You are unaware that we have excellent working relations with Russia in the fields of crime and terror?”

  Receiving no answer, Mohr continued.

  “‘In 2005, equipped with false papers in the name of Nogerov, the criminal Felix was arrested by officers of state security regarding the sabotage of a gas pipeline in the region of Bugulma in the Russian republic of Tatarstan. Swift action by the local organs identified the presence of a group of antisocial dissidents living in squalid conditions in an isolated barn close to the scene of the outrage.’”

  “The pipeline was old and rotten, like every other pipeline in Russia,” Erna Frey explained, in a tone of superhuman forebearance. “The manager of the local power station was a drunk who bribed the police to call it sabotage. The police hauled in the nearest group of Muslim dropouts and forced them to denounce Felix as the ringleader. According to Human Rights Watch, the police put a store of explosives under the floorboards of the barn, discovered it, then rounded up the group, tortured them one by one and made the others watch. The longest anyone lasted was two days. They asked Felix whether he thought he could beat the record. He tried, but didn’t make it.”

  Bachmann was praying that she might stop there but her righteous fury drove her to continue.

  “The barn was nowhere near the scene of the explosion, Herr Mohr. It was in a field forty kilometers up the road and the kids hadn’t a bicycle or a bus fare between them, let alone a car. It was the month of Ramadan. When the police came to get them they were playing an improvised game of hockey with homemade sticks to cheer themselves up, Herr Mohr.”

  Now, it was Dr. Otto Keller of Cologne who was leading the meeting.

  “So you contest this report, Bachmann?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “What’s the yes?”

  “Other people will not contest it in the same way, if at all.”

  “What people?”

  “The people who are predisposed to believe it.”

  “And for you there is no middle way? You don’t allow that the case against Felix might be partially true? For instance, that he is a jihadi, as they suggest?”

  “If we’re going to use him, all the better if he is.”

  “So a dyed-in-the-wool jihadi will be happy to collaborate with you? Is that what you’re saying, Bachmann? We have not had much success so far in that field.”

  “I mean he may not have to collaborate with us,” Bachmann retorted, feeling his throat tighten. “It may be better that he doesn’t. We let him go his own way, with our help.”

  “This is total speculation, naturally.”

  “As Felix stands now, he makes no sense. You have our report on the man known as the Admiral who was summoned to help him at the railway station. You have the report on Felix’s lorry driver. The boy’s escape must have cost a fortune but he sleeps on the street. He’s a Chechen, but he’s not a real Chechen. If he was, he’d go looking for other Chechens. He’s Muslim but he can’t tell the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite mosque. In one night he’s visited by a civil rights lawyer and a British banker. It had to be Hamburg for him. Why? He’s here with a mission. What is it?”

  Mohr leapt in. “With a mission! Yes! A mission to make contact with a terrorist woman and her son and establish a sleeper cell of jihadi clean-skins here in Hamburg! He’s a terrorist on the run, he hides out with a Turkish thug who was inspired by an Islamist rabble-rouser and grew a beard, then cut it off and pretended to go Western. He slips away with a German woman lawyer in the middle of the night, carrying God knows what in his bag, and you want to exploit him unconsciously?”

  Issuing his judgment from the throne, Keller’s arid voice had the starkness of a death sentence:

  “No responsible security officer can ignore a clear and present threat in order to humor a vague operational ambition. It is my view that a search-and-fin
d operation resulting in high-profile arrests will serve as a deterrent to Islamist sympathizers, and restore confidence in those responsible for seeking them out. Some cases cry out for a solid conclusion. This is such a case. I’m therefore proposing you set aside whatever interests you may imagine you have invested in this case, and we pass it over to the Federal Police for due process under the Constitution.”

  “You mean arrest?”

  “I mean whatever the case merits under the law.”

  And whatever wins you brownie points with your far right-wing friend Burgdorf of Joint Steering, thought Bachmann. Whatever annoints you as the intelligence superbrain behind the plonking Federal Police. And leaves me nowhere, which is where you want me to be.

  But for once he managed not to say all this.

  Side by side, Erna Frey and Bachmann walked back across the courtyard to their unit’s humble riding stables. Reaching his office, Bachmann slung his jacket over the arm of the sofa, and called Michael Axelrod at Joint on the encrypted line.

  “Tell him it was all my fault,” Erna Frey said, head in hands.

  But to their shared surprise, Axelrod sounded a great deal less disturbed than he should have been.

  “Have you two eaten?” he inquired, in his usual debonair way, when he had heard Bachmann out. “Then get yourselves a sandwich and stay where you are.”

  They waited for Keller’s helicopter to take off, but it didn’t, which only depressed them further. They had no appetite for sandwiches. It was four in the afternoon by the time the encrypted phone rang.

  “You’ve got ten days,” Axelrod said. “If you haven’t got a good argument after ten days, they get their arrest. That’s the way things work up here. Ten days, not eleven. You’d better be lucky.”

  6

  I’m doing this for my client Magomed, she told herself as she fought for clarity in the mayhem of her mind.

  I’m doing it for my client Issa.

  I’m doing it for life over law.

  I’m doing it for me.

  I’m doing it because Brue the banker gave me money, and the money gave me the idea. But that’s not true at all! The idea was growing inside me long before Brue’s money. Brue’s money only tipped the scales. The moment I sat down with Issa and heard his story, I knew that this was where the system stops, that this was the unsavable life I must save, that I must think of myself not as a lawyer but as a doctor like my brother Hugo and ask myself: What is my duty to this injured man, what sort of a German lawyer am I if I leave him in the legal gutter to bleed to death like Magomed?

  As long as I think like that, I’ll keep my courage.

  It was crack of dawn. Sullen strips of blue-black cloud were smeared across the pink city sky. Annabel was leading by a meter and Issa, contrary to Muslim manners, was stalking close behind her in his long black overcoat, and the two of them in her imagining were a pair of eternal refugees: she with a rucksack, he with his saddlebag. The yammer of their final scene in Leyla’s house was still ringing in her head:

  With Melik standing mutely beside her, Leyla has suddenly no idea why Issa is leaving! Her screams are cries to heaven. She didn’t even know he was leaving! Why had nobody told her? Where in God’s name is Annabel taking him at this time of night? Friends? What friends? If she’d known, she’d have prepared food for his journey! Issa is her son, her gift from Allah, her house is his house, he can stay forever!

  Five hundred dollars? Leyla won’t accept a penny of them! She has done nothing for money, only for Allah, and for love of Issa. And where in Allah’s name did he get the money from anyway? That rich Russian who came and went? Besides, nobody accepts fifty-dollar bills these days! They’re all forged. And if Issa wants to give her money, why has he hoarded it for two weeks instead of coming out with it straightaway like a man?

  After which Melik, all tears himself now, must beg Issa’s forgiveness and pledge his eternal friendship, and in evidence of which bestow on him his precious Azan pager, the Muslim novelty, given to him by a beloved uncle, that electronically signals the prayer hours.

  “Take it, my dear brother. It is yours, keep it beside you at all times. It’s foolproof. You’ll never miss.”

  And while he demonstrates how it works—Issa being unversed in such things—Annabel stands in Melik’s place beside the window and resumes her watch of the frozen food van parked fifty meters down the road, and still nobody has got out of it, which was why, the moment they reached the street, she turned not to left or right but, under full view of the van, marched him at random across the road and down an alley and, as luck would have it, through a narrow gateway to a wider, parallel road with traffic and a bus stop. At first Issa was stiff with fear and Annabel had to pull at his coat sleeve—only the sleeve, mind, not his actual arm, not even through the cloth—to get him moving.

  “Do you know where we are going, Annabel?”

  “Of course I do.”

  But we go there cautiously. We don’t take the rational route. The nearest underground station is ten minutes’ walk away.

  “We shall not talk together on the train, Issa. If someone addresses you, point at your mouth and shake your head.” And, observing his acquiescence, she thought: I’m just another of Anatoly’s mafiosi arranging his latest escape.

  The train was packed with migrant office cleaners. Directed by Annabel, Issa took his place among them, head down like the rest, while she stared into the black window, watching his reflection. We are not a couple. We are two single people who just happen to be in the same carriage, and that’s how we are in life, and we’d both better believe it. At each stop he raised his eyes to her, but she ignored him until the fourth. A line of cream-colored cabs stood in the station forecourt. Taking the first, she opened the back door, climbed in and left it open for him to join her. But to her momentary horror he vanished, to reappear on the front seat beside the driver, presumably so that he could avoid physical contact with her. His skullcap was pulled so low over his brow that all that was left for her to contemplate was his muffled head and the mystery of what was going on inside it. At a crossroads five hundred meters from her street she paid the driver off and again they walked. There’s still time, she thought, as the bridge came into sight and her courage failed again. All I have to do is walk him over the bridge, turn him in at the police station, earn the thanks of a grateful community and live out the rest of my life in shame.

  Annabel’s mother was a district judge, her father a retired lawyer-diplomat in the German foreign service. Her sister, Heidi, was married to a public prosecutor. Only her elder brother, Hugo, whom she adored, had managed to beat the legal rap and become, first a general practitioner, and now a brilliant if wayward psychiatrist who claimed to be the last pure Freudian on earth.

  That Annabel, the family rebel, had ever succumbed to the law herself was a continuing mystery to her. Was it to please her parents? Never. Perhaps she had imagined that by entering their profession she could demonstrate her difference from them in language they understood; that she would wrench the law out of the grasp of the rich and easy, and take it to the people who had most need of it. If so, nineteen months at the Sanctuary had told her how wrong she was.

  Sitting out the pitiful kangaroo tribunals, biting her lip as she listened to her clients’ horror stories being picked over by low-ranking bureaucrats whose experience of the outside world amounted to two weeks in Ibiza, she must have known a moment would come—a client would come—that would cause her to abandon every professional and legal principle she had ever reluctantly embraced.

  And she was right. Come the day, come the client: Issa.

  Except that before Issa, Magomed had come, and it was Magomed—stupid, trusting, abused, not particularly truthful Magomed—who had taught her, never again.

  Never again the too-late dawn rush to the airport; or the plane for Petersburg standing on the runway with its passenger door open; or the trussed figure of her client being bundled up the steps; or the hands—were they
real or imagined?—the cuffed hands helplessly waving good-bye to her through the cabin window.

  Therefore don’t tell her that she had made an impulsive, spur-of-the-moment decision about Issa. Her decision had been taken that day at Hamburg airport, as she watched Magomed’s tumbrel disappear into low cloud. As soon as she had set eyes on Issa last week in Leyla’s house and prised his story out of him, she had known: This is the one I have been waiting for ever since Magomed.

  First, forcing herself to observe the family forum’s rules of engagement, she had calmly set out for herself the givens of the case:

  From the moment he landed in Sweden, Issa became unsavable.

  There is no legal process available to him that offers more than an outside hope of salvation.

  The poor, brave people who are harboring him are putting themselves at risk. He can’t stay here much longer.

  After that, she had made straight for the practicalities: How in pure terms, how in reality, given the situation as it stands, does Annabel Richter, law graduate of the universities of Tübingen and Berlin, perform her solemn duty to her client?

  How best does she hide, house, and feed said client, it also being a precept of the family forum that the fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing?

  We lawyers are not put on earth to be icebergs, Annabel, her father liked to preach: he of all men! Our job is to acknowledge our feelings and control them.

  Yes, dear Father. But has it ever occurred to you that by controlling them you destroy them? How many times can we say sorry before we don’t feel sorry anymore?

  And what—forgive me—do you mean exactly by control? Do you mean, finding the right legal reasons for doing the wrong thing? And if you do, isn’t that what our brilliant German lawyers did during the Great Historical Vacuum, otherwise known as the Nazi era—all twelve years of it—that for some reason finds so little mention in our forum’s deliberations? Well, from this moment on, I control my feelings.