The Night Manager

by John le Carré

  Pen in hand, Rooke continued studying the papers before him “Your man Bradshaw’s been cooking the books,” he remarked in the tone of one clubman censuring another. “Ripping off the Roper while he does his shopping for him.”

  Burr peered over Rooke’s shoulder. On the desk lay a summary of the illegal purchases of American weapons by Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw in his capacity as Roper’s nominee. And beside it lay a full-plate photograph taken by Jonathan, showing penciled figures from Roper’s filing tray in the state apartments. The discrepancy amounted to an informal commission of several hundred thousand dollars in Bradshaw’s favor.

  “Who’s seen this?” Burr asked.

  “You and I.”

  “Keep it that way.”

  Burr summoned his secretary and in an angry rush dictated a brilliant précis of the Limpet case, no adjectives. Leaving orders that he was to be informed of every development, he went back to his wife, and they made love while the children bickered downstairs. Then he played with the children while his wife did her rounds. He returned to his office and, having examined Rooke’s figures in the privacy of his room, called up a set of intercepted faxes and telephone conversations between Roper and Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw of Newbury, Berkshire. Then he drew Bradshaw’s voluminous personal file, starting in the sixties when he was just another new recruit to the illegal arms business, part-time croupier, consort of wealthy older women, and the unloved but zealous informant of British Intelligence.

  For the rest of the night Burr remained at his desk before the mute telephones. Three times Goodhew called for news. Twice Burr said, “Nothing.” But the third time he turned the tables:

  “Your man Palfrey seems to have gone off the air a bit too, hasn’t he, Rex?”

  “Leonard, that is not a subject we discuss.”

  But for once Burr was not interested in the niceties of source protection.

  “Tell me something. Does Harry Palfrey still sign the River House’s warrants?”

  “Warrants? What warrants? You mean warrants to tap telephones, open mail, put in microphones? Warrants must be signed by a minister, Leonard. You know that very well.”

  Burr swallowed his impatience. “I mean, he’s still the legal wallah there. He prepares their submissions, makes sure they fall within the guidelines.”

  “That is one of his tasks.”

  “And occasionally he does sign their warrants. When the Home Secretary’s stuck in traffic, for instance. Or the world’s ending. In dire cases, your Harry is empowered to use his own judgment and square it with the minister later. Right? Or have things changed?”

  “Leonard, are you wandering?”

  “Probably.”

  “Nothing has changed,” Goodhew replied, in a voice of restrained despair.

  “Good,” said Burr. “I’m glad, Rex. Thank you for telling me.” And he returned to the lengthy record of Joyston Bradshaw’s sins.

  27

  The crisis meeting of the full Joint Steering Committee was set for ten-thirty next day, but Goodhew arrived early to make sure everything in the basement conference room was as it should be, and set out agenda sheets and the minutes of the previous meeting. Life had taught him that you delegated these things at your peril.

  Like a general before the decisive battle of his life, Goodhew had slept lightly, and the dawn had found him clear-minded in his purpose. His soldiers were many, he was convinced. He had counted them, he had lobbied them, and to sharpen their allegiance he had presented each of them with a copy of his original paper to the Steering Committee, entitled “A New Era,” in which he had so famously demonstrated how the United Kingdom was more secretively governed, had more laws for the suppression of information and more unaccountable methods of concealing the nation’s business from its citizens than any other Western democracy. He had warned them, in a covering note to Burr’s report, that the committee faced a classic testing of its powers.

  The first person to arrive in the conference room after Goodhew himself was his mawkish schoolfriend, Padstow, the one who had made a point of dancing with the plainest girls in order to give them confidence.

  “I say, Rex, you remember that personal top-secret and whatnot letter you sent me, to cover my rear end while your man Burr was staging his frolics in the West Country? For my very own file?” As usual, Padstow’s lines could have been written by P. G. Wodehouse on a bad day.

  “Of course I do, Stanley.”

  “Well, you don’t have a copy, by any chance, do you? Only I can’t quite lay the old hands on it. I could have absolutely sworn I put it in my safe.”

  “As I remember, the letter was handwritten,” Goodhew replied.

  “But you didn’t sort of bung it under a copier before you sent it round?”

  Their conversation was curtailed by the arrival of two assistant secretaries from the Cabinet Office. One gave Goodhew a reassuring smile; the other, Loaming, was too busy dusting his chair with his handkerchief. Loaming’s one of them, Palfrey had said. He’s got some theory about the need for a world underclass. People think he’s joking. They were followed by the heads of the Armed Services Intelligence branches, then by two barons from Signals and Defence, respectively. After them again came Merridew of the Foreign Office Northern Department. His sidekick was a grave woman called Dawn. Word of Goodhew’s new appointment had been thoroughly leaked. Some arrivals shook his hand. Others mumbled awkward encouragement. Merridew, who had played wing forward for Cambridge to Goodhew’s fly half for Oxford, went so far as to pat his upper arm—at which Goodhew, in an exaggerated piece of histrionics, affected frightful pain and cried, “Oh, oh, I think you’ve broken it, Tony!”

  But the forced laughter was cut dead by the arrival of Geoffrey Darker and his reassuring deputy, Neal Marjoram.

  They steal, Rex, Palfrey had said. They lie . . . they conspire . . . England’s too small for them . . . Europe’s a Balkan Babel . . . Washington’s their only Rome . . .

  The meeting begins.

  “Operation Limpet, Minister,” Goodhew declares as dully as he knows how. Goodhew, as usual, is secretary; his master is ex officio chairman. “Several quite pressing issues to be resolved, I’m afraid. Action this day. The situation is set out in Burr’s summary; nothing has changed that we know of, as of an hour ago. There is also the competence of interested departments to be settled.”

  His master appears to have lapsed into a mood of sullen resentment. “Where the hell is Enforcement?” he grumbled. “Pretty odd, isn’t it, an Enforcement case, no one from Enforcement here?”

  “Enforcement is still a co-opted agency, I regret to say, Minister, although some of us have been struggling to have it upgraded. Only chartered bodies and heads of department are represented at full Steering sessions.”

  “Well, I think we should have your man Burr here. Damn silly, if he’s been running the show, knows it inside out and we haven’t got him here to talk about it. Isn’t it? Well, isn’t it?” Looking round.

  Goodhew has not expected such a golden opportunity. Burr, he knows, is sitting only five hundred yards away. “If that is your view, Minister, will you allow me to summon Leonard Burr to this meeting, and will you allow me to record that a precedent has now been established whereby co-opted agencies engaged in matters central to your committee’s deliberations may be regarded as chartered, pending their elevation to chartered status?”

  “Objection,” Darker snaps. “Enforcement’s the thin end of the wedge. If we let Burr in, we’ll end up with every Mickey Mouse agency in Whitehall. Everybody knows these small outfits are up for grabs. They start trouble, then they haven’t got the clout to end it. We’ve all seen Burr’s background paper. Most of us know the case from other angles. The agenda says we’re going to be talking command and control. The last thing we need is the subject of our discussions sitting here, listening in.”

  “But, Geoffrey,” says Goodhew lightly, “you are the constant subject of our discussions.”

  T
he minister mutters something like “Oh, all right, leave things as they are for the moment,” and the first round is a draw, with both protagonists slightly bloodied.

  A few minutes of English chamber music while the heads of Air and Naval Intelligence describe their respective successes in tracking the Horacio Enriques. When they have completed their reports they proudly circulate full-plate photographs.

  “Looks like a perfectly ordinary tanker to me,” says the minister.

  Merridew, who detests espiocrats, agrees. “Probably is,” he says.

  Somebody coughs. A chair creaks. Goodhew hears a kind of nasal bray from higher up the scale than he is ready for, and recognizes it as the familiar sound of a senior British politician prefacing a point of argument.

  “Why is this one ours, anyway, Rex?” the minister wishes to know. “Bound for Poland. Panamanian ship, Curaçaoan company. Not our baby at all, far as I can see. You’re asking me to push it upstairs to number 10. I’m asking why we’re sitting here talking about it at all.”

  “Ironbrand’s a British company, Minister.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s Bahamian. Isn’t it Bahamian?” Business, while the minister, with the mannerisms of a much older man, makes a show of rummaging through Burr’s three-thousand-word summary. “Yes. It’s Bahamian. Says so here.”

  “Its directors are British, the men committing the crime are British, the evidence against them was gathered by a British agency under the aegis of your ministry.”

  “Then give our evidence to the Poles, and we can all go home,” says the minister, very pleased with himself. “Splendid plan, if you ask me.”

  Darker smiles in icy admiration of the minister’s wit, but prefers to take the unprecedented step of correcting Goodhew’s English. “Can we say testimony, please, Rex? Rather than evidence? Before we all get carried away.”

  “I am not carried away, Geoffrey, nor shall I be, unless it is feet first,” Goodhew retorts too loudly, to the discomfort of his supporters. “As to passing our evidence to the Poles, Enforcement will do that at its discretion, and not before a decision has been agreed on how to proceed against Roper and his accomplices. Responsibility for seizing the shipment of arms has already been ceded to the Americans. I do not propose to cede the rest of our responsibility to the Poles unless those are my instructions from the minister. We are talking of a rich and well-organized crime syndicate in a very poor country. The perpetrators chose Gdansk because they think they can control it. If they’re right, it will make no difference what we tell the Polish government; the cargo will be landed anyway, and we shall blow Burr’s source for nothing except the pleasure of warning Onslow Roper that we are on his trail.”

  “Perhaps Burr’s source is blown already,” Darker suggests.

  “Always a possibility, Geoffrey. Enforcement has many enemies, some across the river.”

  For the first time, Jonathan’s ghostly shadow has fallen across their table. Goodhew has no personal knowledge of Jonathan, but he has shared enough of Burr’s travail to share it again now. And perhaps this awareness fuels his sense of outrage, for once more he undergoes a startling change of color as he resumes his argument, his voice a little above its customary level.

  Under the agreed rules of Joint Steering, he says, every agency however small is sovereign in its sphere.

  And every agency however large is obliged to provide support in aid of every other agency, while respecting its rights and freedoms.

  In the Limpet case, he continues, this principle has come under repeated fire from the River House, who are demanding control of the operation on the grounds that such control is demanded by its counterpart in the United States—

  Darker has interrupted. It is Darker’s strength to possess no middle gears. He has smoldering silence. He has, in extremis, the capacity to reverse his position when a battle looks irretrievably lost. And he has attack, which is what he uses now.

  “What do you mean, demanded by its counterpart in the United States?” he cuts in scathingly. “Control of Limpet has been granted to the Cousins. The Cousins own the operation. The River House doesn’t. Why not? It’s like to like, Rex. Your own pedantic rule. You drafted it. Now you’ve got to live with it. If the Cousins are running Limpet over there, so should the River House be over here.”

  Having struck, he sits back, waiting for a chance to strike again. Marjoram waits with him. And although Goodhew behaves as if he has not heard, Darker’s onslaught has stung him. He moistens his lips. He glances at Merridew, an old accomplice, hoping he will say something. Merridew is silent. Goodhew returns to the charge but makes a fatal error. That is to say, he departs from the march route he has mapped for himself and speaks ex tempore.

  “But when we invite Pure Intelligence,” Goodhew resumes, with too much ironic emphasis, “to explain to us just why the Limpet case needs to be taken out of Enforcement’s hands”—he looks angrily round him and sees his master affecting boredom, staring at the white brick wall—“we are asked to share in a mystery. It is called Flagship, an operation so secret, and so wide-flung, apparently, that it permits almost any act of vandalism in the civil service calendar. It is called geopolitics. It is called . . .” He seems to wish he could escape the rhythms of his rhetoric, but he is launched and unable to pull back. How dare Darker stare at him like this? That smirking Marjoram! Those crooks! “It is called normalization. It is called chain reactions too intricate to describe. Interests that cannot be divulged.” He hears his voice shaking but cannot stop it. He remembers urging Burr not to go this very path. But he can’t help himself. “We are told of some larger picture that we cannot see because we are too lowly. In other words, Pure Intelligence must swallow up Limpet and be damned!” There is water in Goodhew’s ears, and water in front of his eyes, and he has to wait a moment before his breathing settles down.

  “Okay, Rex,” says his master. “Nice to hear you in form. Now let’s talk turkey. Geoffrey, you sent me a minute. You say this whole Limpet thing as perceived by Enforcement is a load of baloney. Why?”

  Goodhew unwisely leaps in: “Why did I not see a copy of this minute?”

  “Flagship,” Marjoram replies in the dead silence. “You’re not Flagship cleared, Rex.”

  Darker offers a more detailed explanation, not to ease Goodhew’s pain but to increase it: “‘Flagship’ is the code name for the American end of this, Rex. They gave us a very tight need-to-know as a condition of cutting us in. Sorry about that.”

  Darker has the floor. Marjoram hands him a file. Darker opens it and licks a prim finger and turns a page. Darker has timing too. He knows when eyes are on him. He could have been a bad evangelist. He has the gloss, the stance, the curiously prominent rump. “Mind if I ask you a few questions, Rex?”

  “I believe it is a maxim of your service that only the answers are dangerous, Geoffrey,” Goodhew counters. But levity is not his ally. He sounds ill-tempered and silly.

  “Did the same source who told Burr about the dope tell him about the arms shipment to Buenaventura?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did the same source get this whole thing going in the first place? Ironbrand—drugs for arms—a deal’s being cooked up?”

  “That source is dead.”

  “Really?” Darker sounds interested rather than concerned. “So that all came from Apostoll, did it? The dope lawyer who was playing all ends against the middle so that he could buy himself out of prison?”

  “I am not prepared to discuss sources by name in this manner.”

  “Oh, I think it’s all right when they’re dead. Or bogus. Or both.”

  Another stage pause while Darker considers Marjoram’s file. The two men have a peculiar affinity with each other.

  “Is Burr’s source the one that’s been putting out all the hair-raising stuff about the alleged involvement of certain British finance houses in this whole deal, then?” Darker inquires.

  “A single source provided that information and has provided mu
ch else besides. I do not think it appropriate that we should discuss Burr’s sources any further,” says Goodhew.

  “Sources or single source?”

  “I refuse to be drawn.”

  “Is the single source live?”

  “No comment. Live, yes. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “He or she?”

  “Pass. Minister, I must object.”

  “So you’re saying that one live source—he or she—fingered the deal to Burr, fingered the dope to Burr, fingered the weapons to Burr, the ships, the money laundering and the participation of British finance. Yes?”

  “You are missing the point—I suspect deliberately—that a great number of technical sources have supplied collateral at almost every turn, and all of it has substantiated the intelligence provided by Burr’s live source. Unfortunately, much of the technical product has recently been denied to us. I intend to raise that matter formally in a moment.”

  “Us meaning Enforcement?”

  “In this case, yes.”

  “Always a problem, you see, when one’s handing hot material to these little agencies you’re so fond of, to know whether they’re secure.”

  “I would have thought their smallness made them more secure than much larger agencies with questionable connections!”

  Marjoram takes over, but it could easily have been Darker speaking still, for Darker’s eyes remain fixed on Goodhew’s, and Marjoram’s voice, though silkier, has the same accusatory tone.

  “Nevertheless, there have been times when there has been no collateral,” Marjoram suggests, with a tremendously sympathetic smile round the table. “Times when the source has, as you might say, spoken alone. Has given you things that were in effect not checkable. ‘Here you are,’ as it were. ‘Take it or leave it.’ And Burr has taken it. And so have you. Yes?”

  “Since you deny us so much of the recent collateral, we have learned to make do without it. Minister, is it not in the nature of any source who produces original material that his product will not be provable in every particular?”