THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM ThE COLD by Le Carre, John

He ruled some lines on a sheet of writing paper, made columns for name, address and age, and wrote at the bottom of the page:

_Each candidate will be interviewed personally. Write to the usual address stating when and where. you wish to be met. Applications will be considered in seven days_.

C.R.

He put the sheet of paper inside the book. Leamas drove to the usual place, still in de long’s car, and left the book on the passenger seat with five used onehundred dollar bills inside the cover. When Leamas returned, the book was gone, and there was a tobacco tin on the seat instead. It contained three rolls of film. Leamas developed them that night: one film contained as usual the minutes of the Praesidium’s last meeting; the second showed a draft revision of the East German relationship to COMECON; and the third was a breakdown of the East German Intelligence Service, complete with functions of departments and details of personalities.

Peters interrupted. “Just a minute,” he said. “Do you mean to say all this intelligence came from Riemeck?”

“Why not? You know how much he saw.”

“It’s scarcely possible,” Peters observed, almost to himself. “He must have had help.”

“He did have later on; I’m coming to that.”

“I know what you are going to tell me. But did you never have the feeling he got assistance from _above_ as well as from the agents he afterwards acquired?”

“No. No, I never did. It never occurred to me.”

“Looking back on it now, does it seem likely?”

“Not particularly.”

“When you sent all this material back to the Circus, they never suggested that even for a man in Riemeck’s position the intelligence was phenomenally comprehensive?”

“No.”

“Did they ever ask where Riemeck got his camera from, who instructed him in document photography?”

Leamas hesitated.

“No . . . I’m sure they never asked.”

“Remarkable,” Peters observed drily. “I’m sorry– do go on. I did not mean to anticipate you.”

Exactly a week later, Leamas continued, he drove to the canal and this time he felt nervous. As he turned into the gravel road he saw three bicycles lying in the grass and two hundred yards down the canal, three men fishing. He got out of the car as usual and began walking toward the line of trees on the other side of the field. He had gone about twenty yards when he heard a shout. He looked around and caught sight of one of the men beckoning to him. The other two had turned and were looking at him too. Leamas was wearing an old mackintosh; he had his hands in the pockets, and it was too late to take them out. He knew that the men on either side were covering the man in the middle and that if he took his hands out of his pockets they would probably shoot him; they would think he was holding a revolver in his pocket. Leamas stopped ten yards from the center man.

“You want something?” Leamas asked.

“Are you Leamas?” He was a small, plump man, very steady. He spoke English.

“Yes.”

“What is your British national identity number?”

“PRT stroke L 58003 stroke one.”

“Where did you spend VJ night?”

“At Leiden in Holland in my father’s workshop, with some Dutch friends.”

“Let’s go for a walk, Mr. Leamas. You won’t need your mackintosh. Take it off and leave it on the ground where you are standing. My friends will look after it.”

Leamas hesitated, shrugged and took off his mackintosh. Then they walked together briskly toward the wood.

“You know as well as I do who he was,” said Leamas wearily, “third man in the Ministry of the Interior, Secretary to the S.E.D. Praesidium, head of the Co-ordinating Committee for the Protection of the People. I suppose that was how he knew about de long and me: he’d seen our counterintelligence files in the Abteilung. He had three strings to his bow: the Praesidium, straightforward internal political and economic reporting, and access to the flIes of the East German Security Service.”

“But only _limited_ access. They’d never give an outaider the run of all their files,” Peters insisted.

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