John le Carre: Our kind of traitor

Not even the rouged and powdered little old lady in weeds and dark glasses sitting motionless as a doll on the balcony with her hands in her lap attracted comment. Swiss resorts have been receiving such people ever since the tourist trade began. And should any passer-by chance, of an evening, to glimpse between the curtains a big man in a woollen ski cap bowed over a chessboard opposite two adolescent opponents – with Perry as referee and Gail and the girls in another corner watching DVDs bought from Photo Fritz – well, if that house hadn't had a family of chess-fiends before, it had had everything else. Why should they know or care that, pitched against the combined intellect of his precocious sons, the world's number-one money-launderer could still outsmart them?

And if the same adolescent boys were seen next day, in their carefully different outfits, scrambling up the precipitous rock path that ran from the back garden all the way up to Mannlichen ridge, with Perry out ahead urging them on, and Alexei vowing that he was going to break his neck any fucking minute, and Viktor insisting that he'd just stared down a full-grown stag, even if it was only a chamois – well, what was so remarkable about that? Perry even roped them together. He found a handy bit of overhang, hired boots and bought ropes – ropes, he explained severely, being for a mountaineer both personal and sacrosanct – and taught them how to dangle over an abyss, even if the abyss was only twelve feet deep.

As to the two young women – one sixteen-ish and the other maybe ten years older, both beautiful – stretched out on deckchairs with their books under a spreading maple tree that had somehow escaped the developer's bulldozer – well, if you were a Swiss male, perhaps you'd look and then pretend you hadn't looked, or if you were an Italian, you might have looked and applauded. But you wouldn't have rushed to the telephone and whispered to the police that you had seen two suspicious women reading in the shade of a maple tree.

Or so Luke told himself, and so Ollie told himself, and so Perry and Gail as co-opted members of the neighbourhood watch agreed – how could they do otherwise? – which didn't mean that any of them, even the small girls, ever quite got rid of the notion that they were in hiding and living against the clock. When Katya asked at breakfast over Ollie's pancake, bacon and maple syrup, 'Are we going to England today?' – or Irina, more plaintively, 'Why haven't we gone to England yet?' – they were speaking for everyone round the table, starting with Luke himself, the hero of the party by virtue of having his right hand in plaster after falling down the steps of his hotel in Berne.

'You gonna sue that hotel, Dick?' Viktor demanded aggressively.

'I shall be consulting my lawyer on the subject,' Luke replied with a smile for Gail.

As to precisely when they were going to London: 'Well, perhaps not today, Katya, but maybe tomorrow, or the next day,' Luke assured her. 'It's just a question of when your visas come through. And we all know what apparatchiks are like, even English ones, don't we?'

*

But when, oh when?

Luke asked himself the same question every waking and half-sleeping hour of the day or night as Hector's breathless bulletins piled in: now a couple of cryptic sentences between meetings, now a whole jeremiad in the small hours of another endless day. Bewildered by the barrage of contradictory reports, Luke at first resorted to the officially unforgivable sin of keeping a written log of them as they came in. With the lurid fingertips of his right hand poking from the plaster, he scribbled away painstakingly in his own quaint shorthand on single sheets of A4 bought by Ollie from the village stationer's, one side only.

In the approved training-school manner, he purloined the glass from a picture frame to press on, wiping it clean after each page, and caching the product behind a water tank against the remote possibility that Viktor, Alexei, Tamara or Dima himself might take it into their heads to search his room.

But as the speed and complexity of Hector's messages from the front began to overwhelm him, he prevailed on Ollie to get him a pocket recorder, much like Dima's, and connect it to his encrypted mobile – another mortal sin in the eyes of Training Section, but a godsend when he was lying wakefully in bed waiting for the next of Hector's idiosyncratic bulletins: – It's a knife-edge, Lukie, but we're winning. – I'm bypassing Billy Boy and going straight to the Chief. I've said it's got to be hours not days. – The Chief says talk to the Vice-Chief. – The Vice-Chief says if Billy Boy won't sign off on it, nor will he. He won't sign off on it alone. He's got to have the whole fourth floor behind him or it's no deal. I've said bugger that. – You're not going to believe this but Billy Boy's coming round. He's kicking like hell, but even he can't stay away from the truth when it's rammed up his hooter.

All this within the space of the first twenty-four hours after Luke had sent the cadaverous philosopher spinning down the staircase, a feat Hector initially greeted as sheer genius, but on reflection said he didn't think he'd be bothering the Vice-Chief with it for the time being.

'Did our boy actually kill Niki, Luke?' Hector inquired, in the most casual of tones.

'He hopes he did.'

'Yes. Well, I don't think I heard any of that, did you?'

'Not a sound.'

'It was two other blokes, and any similarity is purely coincidental. Deal?'

'Deal.'

*

By mid-afternoon on day two, Hector sounded frustrated but not yet downhearted. The Cabinet Office had ruled that a quorum of the Empowerment Committee must after all be convened, he said. They were insisting that Billy Boy Matlock must be fully apprised – repeat fully – of all operational details that Hector had hitherto held close to his chest. They would settle for a four-man working party comprising one representative each from the Foreign and Home offices, Treasury and Immigration. Excluded members would be invited to ratify the recommendations post facto, which the Cabinet Office predicted would be a formality. With every kind of reluctance, Hector had accepted their terms. Then quite suddenly – it was in the evening of the same day – the weather changed, and Hector's voice rose a notch. Luke's illicit recorder played the moment back to him: H: The buggers are ahead of us somehow. Billy Boy's just had the tip-off from his City sources. L: Ahead of us how? How can they be? We haven't made a move yet. H: According to Billy Boy's City sources, the Financial Services Authority is shaping to block the Arena application to open a major bank and we're the boys who've put the knife in. L: We? H: The Service. All of it. The big City institutions are screaming foul. Thirty cross-bench MPs on the oligarch payroll are drafting a rude letter to the Secretary to the Treasury accusing the Financial Services Authority of anti-Russian prejudice and demanding that all unreasonable obstacles to the application be removed forthwith. The usual suspects in the House of Lords are up in arms. L: But that's utter bullshit! H: Try telling that to the Financial Services Authority. All they know is, the central banks are refusing to lend to each other despite the fact that they've been given billions of public money to do exactly that. Now, lo and behold, along comes Arena to the rescue on its white horse, offering to put hundreds of bloody billions into their hot little hands. Who gives a shit where the money comes from? [Is this a question? If so, Luke has no answer to it.] H [sudden outburst]: There aren't any unreasonable obstacles, for fuck's sake! Nobody's even begun to erect any unreasonable obstacles! As of last night, Arena's application was rotting in the FSA's pending tray. They haven't met, they haven't conferred, they've hardly started their regulatory inquiries. But none of that has stopped the Surrey oligarchs from beating their war drums, or the financial editors being briefed that if Arena's application is rejected, the City of London will end up a poor fourth behind Wall Street, Frankfurt and Hong Kong. And whose fault will that be? The Service's, led up the garden path by one Hector bloody Meredith!