A Delicate Truth

by John le Carré

  A flash-glimpse of cannons, then of war memorials, one British, one American. Welcome to Ocean Village, hellish canyon of apartment blocks with balconies of blue glass for ocean waves. Enter a private road with gates and a guard-box, no sign of a guard. Below, a forest of white masts, a ceremonial, carpeted landing bay, a row of boutiques and the Chinese restaurant where Aladdin has booked his slap-up dinner.

  And out to sea in all her splendour, the Rosemaria, lit overall with fairy lights. The windows on her middle deck blacked out. The salon windows translucent. Burly men hovering among the empty tables. Alongside her, at the foot of a gold-plated ship’s ladder, a sleek motorboat with two crew in white uniforms waiting to ferry Aladdin and his guests ashore.

  ‘Aladdin is basically a mixed-race Pole who has taken out Lebanese citizenship,’ Elliot is explaining, in the little room in Paddington. ‘Aladdin is the Pole I personally would not touch with a barge, to coin a witticism. Aladdin is the most unprincipled fucking merchant of death on the face of this earth bar none, plus also the chosen intimate of the worst dregs of international society. The principal item on his list will be Manpads, I am given to understand.’

  Manpads, Elliot?

  ‘Twenty of them at last count. State of the art, very durable, very deadly.’

  Allow time for Elliot’s bald, superior smile and slippy glance.

  ‘A Manpad is, technically, your man-portable air-defence system, Paul, Manpad being what I call an acronym. As a weapon known by the same acronym, your Manpad is so lightweight that a kid can handle one. It also happens to be just the item if you are contemplating bringing down an unarmed airliner. Such is the mentality of these murderous shits.’

  ‘But will Aladdin have them with him, Elliot, the Manpads? Now? On the night? On board the Rosemaria?’ he asks, playing the innocent because that’s what Elliot seems to like best.

  ‘According to our leader’s reliable and exclusive intelligence sources, the Manpads in question are part of a somewhat larger inventory of sale comprising top-of-the-range anti-tanks, rocket-propelleds, and best-brand assault rifles from state arsenals around the known bad world. As in the famous Arabian fairy tale, Aladdin has stashed his treasure in the desert, hence the choice of name. He will notify the successful bidder of its whereabouts when – and only when – he has cut the deal, in this case with none other than Punter himself. Ask me what is the purpose of the meeting between Aladdin and Punter and I will reply that it is in order to set the parameters of the deal, the terms of payment in gold, and the eventual inspection of goods prior to handover.’

  *

  The Toyota had left the marina and was negotiating a grass roundabout of palm trees and pansies.

  ‘Boys and girls neat and tidy, everyone in place,’ Kirsty was reporting in a monotone over her cellphone.

  Boys, girls? Where? What have I missed? He must have asked her:

  ‘Two parties of four watchers sitting in the Chinese, waiting for the Aladdin party to show up. Two walk-by couples. One tame taxi and two motorcyclists for when he sneaks away from the party,’ she recited, as to a child who hasn’t been paying attention.

  They shared a strained silence. She thinks I’m surplus to requirements. She thinks I’m the Limey know-nothing striped-pants parachuted in to make difficulties.

  ‘So when do I get to meet up with Jeb?’ he insisted, not for the first time.

  ‘Your friend Jeb will be ready and waiting for you at the rendezvous as per schedule, like I told you.’

  ‘He’s why I’m here,’ he said too loud, feeling his gall rising. ‘Jeb and his men can’t go in without my say-so. That was the understanding from the start.’

  ‘We’re aware of that, thank you, Paul, and Elliot’s aware of it. The sooner you and your friend Jeb hook up and the two teams are talking, the sooner we can get this thing squared away and go home. Okay?’

  He needed Jeb. He needed his own.

  The traffic had gone. The trees were shorter here, the sky bigger. He counted off the landmarks. St Bernard’s Church. The Mosque of Ibrahim-al-Ibrahim, its minaret lit white. The shrine to Our Lady of Europe. Each of them branded on his memory thanks to mindless leafings through the greasy hotel guidebook. Out to sea, an armada of lighted freighters at anchor. The seaborne boys will operate out of Ethical’s mother ship, Elliot is saying.

  The sky had vanished. This tunnel is not a tunnel. It’s a disused mineshaft. It’s an air-raid shelter. Crooked girders, sloppy walls of breeze block and rough-cut cliff. Neon strips flying overhead, white road markings keeping pace with them. Festoons of black wiring. A sign saying LOOK OUT FOR FALLING STONES! Potholes, rivulets of brown flood water, an iron doorway leading to God knew where. Has Punter passed this way today? Is he hovering behind a doorway with one of his twenty Manpads? Punter’s not just high value, Paul. In the words of Mr Jay Crispin, Punter is stratospheric: Elliot again.

  Pillars like the gateway to another world coming at them as they emerge from the belly of the Rock and land on a road cut into the cliff. A hefty wind is rattling the coachwork, a half-moon has appeared at the top of the windscreen and the Toyota is bumping along the nearside verge. Beneath them, lights of coastal settlements. Beyond them, the pitch-black mountains of Spain. And out to sea, the same motionless armada of freight ships.

  ‘Sides only,’ Kirsty ordered.

  Hansi dowsed the headlights.

  ‘Cut the engine.’

  To the furtive mutter of wheels on crumbling tarmac, they rolled forward. Ahead of them, a red pin-light flashed twice, then a third time, closer at hand.

  ‘Stop now.’

  They stopped. Kirsty slammed back the side door, letting in a blast of cold wind, and the steady din of engines from the sea. Across the valley, moonlit cloud was curling up the ravines and rolling like gun smoke along the Rock’s ridge. A car sped out of the tunnel behind them and raked the hillside with its headlights, leaving a deeper darkness.

  ‘Paul, your friend’s here.’

  Seeing no friend, he slid across to the open door. In front of him, Kirsty was leaning forward, pulling the back of her seat after her as if she couldn’t wait to let him out. He started to lower his feet to the ground and heard the scream of insomniac gulls and the zip-zip of crickets. Two gloved hands reached out of the darkness to steady him. Behind them hunched little Jeb with his paint-dappled face glistening inside his pushed-back balaclava, and a lamp like a cyclopic eye stuck to his forehead.

  ‘Good to see you again, Paul. Try these for size, then,’ he murmured in his gentle Welsh lilt.

  ‘And jolly good to see you, Jeb, I must say,’ he answered fervently, accepting the goggles and grasping Jeb’s hand in return. It was the Jeb he remembered: compact, calm, nobody’s man but his own.

  ‘Hotel okay then, Paul?’

  ‘The absolute bloody pits. How’s yours?’

  ‘Come and have a see, man. All mod cons. Tread where I tread. Slow and easy. And if you see a falling stone, be sure and duck, now.’

  Was that a joke? He grinned anyway. The Toyota was driving down the hill, job done and goodnight. He put on the goggles and the world turned green. Raindrops, driven on the wind, smashed themselves like insects in front of his eyes. Jeb was wading ahead of him up the hillside, the miner’s torch on his forehead lighting the way. There was no track except where he trod. I’m on the grouse moor with my father, scrambling through gorse ten feet high, except that this hillside had no gorse, just stubborn tufts of sand grass that kept dragging at his ankles. Some men you lead, and some men you follow, his father, a retired general, used to say. Well, with Jeb, you follow.

  The ground evened out. The wind eased and rose again, the ground with it. He heard the putter of a helicopter overhead. Mr Crispin will be providing the full American-style coverage, Elliot had proclaimed, on a note of corporate pride. Fuller than you will ever be required to know, Paul. Highly sophisticated equipment will be standard for all, plus a Predator drone for observation purposes is by no means
beyond his operational budget.

  The climb steeper now, the earth part fallen rock, part windblown sand. Now his foot struck a bolt, a bit of steel rod, a sheet-anchor. Once – but Jeb’s hand was waiting to point it out to him – a stretch of metal catch-net that he had to clamber over.

  ‘You’re going a treat, Paul. And the lizards don’t bite you, not in Gib. They call them skinks here, don’t ask me why. You’re a family man, right?’ – and getting a spontaneous ‘yes’ – ‘Who’ve you got then, Paul? No disrespect.’

  ‘One wife, one daughter,’ he replied breathlessly. ‘Girl’s a medical doctor’ – thinking, oh Christ, forgot I was Paul and single, but what the hell? – ‘How about you, Jeb?’

  ‘One great wife, one boy, five years old next week. Cracker-jack, same as yours, I expect.’

  A car emerged from the tunnel behind them. He made to drop into a crouch, but Jeb was holding him upright with a grip so tight he gasped.

  ‘Nobody can spot us unless we move, see,’ he explained in his same comfortable Welsh undertone. ‘It’s a hundred metres up and pretty steep now, but not a bother for you, I’m sure. A bit of a traverse, then we’re home. It’s only the three boys and me’ – as if there were nothing to be shy of.

  And steep it was, with thickets and slipping sand, and another catch-net to negotiate, and Jeb’s gloved hand waiting if he stumbled, but he didn’t. Suddenly they had arrived. Three men in combat gear and headsets, one of them taller than the rest, were lounging on a tarpaulin, drinking from tin mugs and watching computer screens as if they were watching Saturday-afternoon football.

  The hide was built into the steel frame of a catch-net. Its walls were of matted foliage and shrub. Even from a few feet away, and without Jeb to guide him, he might have walked clean past it. The computer screens were fixed at the end of pipe casings. You had to squint into the pipes to see them. A few misty stars glowed in the matted roof. A few strands of moonlight glinted on weaponry of a kind he’d never seen. Four packs of gear were lined up along one wall.

  ‘So this is Paul, lads. Our man from the ministry,’ said Jeb beneath the rattle of the wind.

  One by one, each man turned, drew off a leather glove, shook his hand too hard and introduced himself.

  ‘Don. Welcome to the Ritz, Paul.’

  ‘Andy.’

  ‘Shorty. Hullo, Paul. Make the climb all right, then?’

  Shorty because he’s a foot taller than the rest of them: why else? Jeb handing him a mug of tea. Sweet with condensed milk. A lateral arrow-slit was fringed by foliage. The computer pipes were fixed below it, allowing a clear view down the hillside to the coastline and out to sea. To his left the same pitch-black hills of Spain, bigger now, and closer. Jeb lining him up to look at the left-hand screen. A rolling sequence of shots from hidden cameras: the marina, the Chinese restaurant, the fairy-lit Rosemaria. Switch to a shaky hand-held shot inside the Chinese restaurant. The camera at floor level. From the end of a long table in the window bay, an imperious fifty-year-old fat man in a nautical blazer and perfect hair gesticulates to his fellow diners. On his right, a sulky brunette half his age. Bare shoulders, showy breasts, diamond collar and a downturned mouth.

  ‘Aladdin’s a twitchy bugger, Paul,’ Shorty was confiding. ‘First he has a run-in with the head waiter in English because there isn’t any lobster. Now his lady friend’s getting it in Arabic, and him a Pole. I’m surprised he doesn’t give her a thick ear, the way she’s carrying on. It’s like at home, right, Jeb?’

  ‘Come over here a minute, Paul, please.’

  With Jeb’s hand on his shoulder to guide him, he made a wide step to the middle screen. Alternating aerial and ground shots. Were they courtesy of the Predator drone that was by no means beyond Mr Crispin’s operational budget? Or of the helicopter that he could hear idling overhead? A terrace of white houses, faced with weatherboarding, perched on the cliff’s edge. Stone staircases to the beach dividing them. The staircases leading down to a skimpy crescent of sand. A rock beach enclosed by jagged cliff. Orange street lamps. A metalled slip road leading from the terrace to the main coast road. No lights in the windows of the houses. No curtains.

  And through the arrow-slit, the same terrace in plain sight.

  ‘It’s a tear-down, see, Paul,’ Jeb was explaining in his ear. ‘A Kuwaiti company’s going to put up a casino complex and a mosque. That’s why the houses are empty. Aladdin, he’s a director of the Kuwaiti company. Well now, according to what he’s been telling his guests, he’s got a confidential meeting with the developer tonight. Very lucrative, it will be. Shaving off the profits for themselves, according to his lady friend. You wouldn’t think a man like Aladdin would be so leaky, like, but he is.’

  ‘Showing off,’ Shorty explained. ‘Typical fucking Pole.’

  ‘Is Punter already inside the house then?’ he asked.

  ‘Let’s say, if he is, we haven’t spotted him, Paul, put it that way,’ Jeb replied in the same steady, deliberately conversational tone. ‘Not from the outside, and there’s no coverage inside. There hasn’t been the opportunity, so we’re told. Well, you can’t bug twenty houses all in one go, I don’t suppose, can you, not even with today’s equipment? Maybe he’s lying up in one house and sneaking into another for his meeting. We don’t know, do we, not yet? It’s wait and see and don’t go down there till you know who you’re taking on, ’specially if you’re looking for an al-Qaeda kingpin.’

  Memories of Elliot’s clotted description of the same elusive figure come sweeping back to him:

  I would basically describe Punter as your jihadist Pimpernel par excellence, Paul, not to say your will-o’-the-wisp. He eschews all means of electronic communication, including cellphones and harmless-seeming emails. It’s word of mouth only for Punter, and one courier at a time, never the same one twice.

  ‘He could come at us from anywhere, Paul,’ Shorty was explaining, perhaps to wind him up. ‘Over the mountains there. Up the Spanish coast by small boat. Or he could walk on the water if he felt like it. Right, Jeb?’

  Cursory nod from Jeb. Jeb and Shorty, the tallest and the shortest men in the team: an attraction of opposites.

  ‘Or smuggle himself across from Morocco under the noses of the coastguards, right, Jeb? Or put on an Armani suit, and fly in Club on a Swiss passport. Or charter a private Lear, which is what I’d do, frankly. Having first ordered my special menu in advance from the highly attractive hostess in a mini-skirt. Money to burn, Punter’s got, according to our amazing top-of-the-range source, right, Jeb?’

  From the seaward side, the pitch-dark terrace was forbidding against the night sky, the beach a blackened no-man’s-land of craggy boulders and seething surf.

  ‘How many men in the boat team?’ he asked. ‘Elliot didn’t seem sure.’

  ‘We got him down to eight,’ Shorty replied, over Jeb’s shoulder. ‘Nine when they head back to the mother ship with Punter. They hope,’ he added drily.

  The conspirators will be unarmed, Paul, Elliot was saying. Such is the degree of trust between a pair of total bastards. No guns, no bodyguards. We tiptoe in, we grab our man, we tiptoe out, we were never there. Jeb’s boys push from the land, Ethical pulls from the sea.

  Side by side with Jeb once more, he peered through the arrow-slit at the lighted freighters, then at the middle screen. One freighter lay apart from her companions. A Panamanian flag flapped from her stern. On her deck, shadows flitted among the derricks. An inflatable dinghy dangled over the water, two men aboard. He was still watching them when his encrypted cellphone began cooing its stupid melody. Jeb grabbed it from him, dowsed the sound, handed it back.

  ‘That you, Paul?’

  ‘Paul speaking.’

  ‘This is Nine. All right? Nine. Tell me you hear me.’

  And I shall be Nine, the minister is solemnly intoning, like a Biblical prophecy. I shall not be Alpha, which is reserved for our target building. I shall not be Bravo, which is reserved for our location. I shall be Nine, w
hich is the designated code for your commander, and I shall be communicating with you by specially encrypted cellphone ingeniously linked to your operational team by way of an augmented PRR net, which for your further information stands for Personal Role Radio.

  ‘I hear you loud and clear, Nine, thank you.’

  ‘And you’re in position? Yes? Keep your answers short from now on.’

  ‘I am indeed. Your eyes and ears.’

  ‘All right. Tell me precisely what you can see from where you are.’

  ‘We’re looking straight down the slope to the houses. Couldn’t be better.’

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Jeb, his three men and myself.’

  Pause. Muffled male voice off.

  The minister again:

  ‘Has anyone any idea why Aladdin hasn’t left the Chinese yet?’

  ‘They started eating late. He’s expected to leave any minute. That’s all we’ve heard.’

  ‘And no Punter in sight? You’re absolutely sure of that? Yes?’

  ‘Not in sight as yet. I’m sure. Yes.’

  ‘The slightest visual indication, however remote – the smallest clue – possibility of a sighting –’

  Pause. Is the augmented PRR breaking up, or is Quinn?

  ‘– I expect you to advise me immediately. Understood? We see everything you see, but not so clearly. You have eyes-on. Yes?’ – already sick of the delay – ‘Plain sight, for fuck’s sake!’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Plain sight. Eyes-on. I have eyes-on.’