John Le Carré - The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Perhaps it was true. Perhaps there was somebody else. Perhaps this was the special interest whom Control was so anxious to protect from Mundt. That would mean that Karl Riemeck had collaborated with this special interest and provided what both of them had together obtained. Perhaps that was what Control had spoken to Karl about, alone, that evening in Leamas' flat in Berlin.

Anyway, tomorrow would tell. Tomorrow he would play his hand.

He wondered who had killed Elvira. And he wondered why they had killed her. Of course—here was a point, here was a possible explanation—Elvira, knowing the identity of Riemeck's special collaborator, had been murdered by that collaborator...No, that was too farfetched. It overlooked the difficulty of crossing from East to West: Elvira had after all been murdered in West Berlin.

He wondered why Control had never told him Elvira had been murdered. So that he would react suitably when Peters told him? It was useless speculating. Control had his reasons; they were usually so bloody tortuous it took you a week to work them out.

As he fell asleep he muttered, "Karl was a damn fool. That woman did for him, I'm sure she did." Elvira was dead now, and serve her right. He remembered Liz.

Peters arrived at eight o'clock the next morning, and without ceremony they sat down at the table and began.

"So you came back to London. What did you do there?"

"They put me on the shelf. I knew I was finished when that ass in Personnel met me at the airport. I had to go straight to Control and report about Karl. He was dead—what else was there to say?"

"What did they do with you?"

"They said at first I could hang around in London and wait till I was qualified for a proper pension. They were so bloody decent about it I got angry—I told them that if they were so keen to chuck money at me why didn't they do the obvious thing and count in all my time instead of bleating about broken service? Then they got cross when I told them that. They put me in Banking with a lot of women. I can't remember much about that part—I began hitting the bottle a bit. Went through a bad phase."

He lit a cigarette. Peters nodded.

"That was why they gave me the push, really. They didn't like me drinking."

"Tell me what you do remember about Banking Section," Peters suggested.

"It was a dreary setup. I never was cut out for desk work, I knew that. That's why I hung on in Berlin. I knew when they recalled me I'd be put on the shelf, but Christ!"

"What did you do?"

Leamas shrugged.

"Sat on my behind in the same room as a couple of women. Thursby and Larrett. I called them Thursday and Friday." He grinned rather stupidly. Peters looked uncomprehending.

"We just pushed paper. A letter came down from Finance: 'The payment of seven hundred dollars to so and so is authorized with effect from so and so. Kindly get on with it' —that was the gist of it. Thursday and Friday would kick it about a bit, file it, stamp it, and I'd sign a check or get the bank to make a transfer."

"What bank?"

"Blatt and Rodney, a chichi little bank in the City. There's a sort of theory in the Circus that Etonians are discreet."

"In fact, then, you knew the names of agents all over the world?"

"Not necessarily. That was the cunning thing. I'd sign the check, you see, or the order to the bank, but we'd leave a space for the name of the payee. The covering letter or what have you was all signed and then the file would go back to Special Dispatch."

"Who are they?"

"They're the general holders of agents' particulars. They put in the names and posted the order. Bloody clever, I must say."

Peters looked disappointed.

"You mean you had no way of knowing the names of the payees?"

"Not usually, no."

"But occasionally?"

"We got pretty near the knuckle now and again. All the fiddling about between Banking, Finance and Special Dispatch led to cockups, of course. Too elaborate. Then occasionally we came in on special stuff which brightened one's life a bit."

Leamas got up. "I've made a list," he said, "of all the payments I can remember. It's in my room. I'll get it."

He walked out of the room, the rather shuffling walk he had affected since arriving in Holland. When he returned he held in his hand a couple of sheets of lined paper torn from a cheap notebook.

"I wrote these down last night," he said. "I thought it would save time."

Peters took the notes and read them slowly and carefully. He seemed impressed.

"Good," he said, "very good."

"Then I remember best a thing called Rolling Stone. I got a couple of trips out of it. One to Copenhagen and one to Helsinki. Just dumping money at banks."

"How much?"

"Ten thousand dollars in Copenhagen, forty thousand D-Marks in Helsinki" Peters put down his pencil.

"Who for?" he asked.

"God knows. We work Rolling Stone on a system of deposit accounts. The Service gave me a phony British passport; I went to the Royal Scandinavian Bank in Copenhagen and the National Bank of Finland in Helsinki, deposited the money and drew a passbook on a joint account—for me in my alias and for someone else—the agent I suppose in his alias. I gave the banks a sample of the co-holder's signature, I'd got that from Head Office. Later, the agent was given the passbook and a false passport which he showed at the bank when he drew the money. All I knew was the alias." He heard himself talking and it all sounded so ludicrously improbable.

"Was this procedure common?"

"No. It was a special payment. It had a subscription list."

"What's that?"

"It had a code name known to very few people."

"What was the code name?"

"I told you—Rolling Stone. The operation covered irregular payments often thousand dollars in different currencies and in different capitals."

"Always in capital towns?"

"Far as I know. I remember reading in the file that there had been other Rolling Stone payments before I came to the Section, but in those cases Banking Section got the local Resident to do it."

"These other payments that took place before you came: where were they made?"

"One in Oslo. I can't remember where the other was."

"Was the alias of the agent always the same?"

"No. That was an added security precaution. I heard later we pinched the whole technique from the Russians. It was the most elaborate payment scheme I'd met. In the same way I used a different alias and of course a different passport for each trip." That would please him, help him to fill in the gaps.

"These faked passports the agent was given so that he could draw the money: did you know anything about them—how they were made out and dispatched?"

"No. Oh, except that they had to have visas in them for the country where the money was deposited. And entry stamps."

" Entry stamps? "

"Yes. I assumed the passports were never used at the border—only presented at the bank for identification purposes. The agent must have traveled on his own passport, quite legally entered the country where the bank was situated, then used the faked passport at the bank. That was my guess."

"Do you know of a reason why earlier payments were made by the Residents, and later payments by someone traveling out from London?"

"I know the reason., I asked the women in Banking Section, Thursday and Friday. Control was anxious that—"

" Control? Do you mean to say Control himself was running the case?"

"Yes, he was running it. He was afraid the Resident might be recognized at the bank. So he used a postman: me."

"When did you make your journeys?"

"Copenhagen on the fifteenth of June. I flew back the same night. Helsinki at the end of September. I stayed two nights there, flew back around the twenty-eighth. I had a bit of fun in Helsinki." He grinned but Peters took no notice.