A Delicate Truth by John le Carré Page A

As if by the same hand,
     the two remaining computer screens went blank.
    At first he refused to accept this simple
     truth. He pulled on his night-vision glasses, took them off, then put them on again and
     roamed the computers’ keyboards, willing the screens back to life. They would not
     be willed.
    A stray engine barked, but it could as well
     have been a fox as a car or the outboard of an inflatable. On his encrypted cellphone,
     he pressed ‘1’ for Quinn and got a steady electronic wail. He stepped out of
     the hide and, standing his full height at last, braced his shoulders to the night
     air.
    A car emerged at speed from the tunnel, cut
     its headlights and screeched to a halt on the verge of the coast road. For ten minutes,
     twelve, nothing. Then out of the darkness Kirsty’s Australian voice calling his
     name. And after it, Kirsty herself.
    ‘What on earth happened?’ he
     asked.
    She steered him back into the hide.
    ‘Mission accomplished. Everyone ecstatic.
     Medals all round,’ she said.
    ‘What about
Punter
?’
    ‘I said everyone’s ecstatic,
     didn’t I?’
    ‘So they got him? They’ve taken
     him out to the mother ship?’
    ‘You get the fuck out of here now and
     you stop asking questions. I’m taking you down to the car, the car takes you to
     the airport like we planned. The plane’s waiting. Everything’s in place,
     everything’s hunky-dory. We go
now
.’
    ‘Is Jeb all right? His men?
     They’re okay?’
    ‘Pumped up and happy.’
    ‘What about all this stuff?’ –
     he means the metal boxes and computers.
    ‘This stuff will be gone in three
     seconds cold just as soon as we get you the fuck out of here. Now move it.’
    Already they were stumbling and sliding into
     the valley, with the sea wind whipping into them and the hum from engines out to sea
     louder even than the wind itself.
    A huge bird – perhaps an eagle – scrambled
     out of the scrub beneath his feet, screaming its fury.
    Once, he fell headlong over a broken
     catch-net and only the thicket saved him.
    Then, just as suddenly, they were standing
     on the empty coast road, breathless but miraculously unharmed.
    The wind had dropped, the rain had ceased. A
     second car was pulling up beside them. Two men in boots and tracksuits sprang out. With
     a nod for Kirsty and nothing for himself, they set off at a half-run towards the
     hillside.
    ‘I’ll need the goggles,’
     she said.
    He gave them to her.
    ‘Have you got any papers on you –
     maps, anything you kept from up there?’
    He hadn’t.
    ‘It was a triumph. Right? No casualties.
     We did a great job. All of us. You, too. Right?’
    Did he say ‘Right’ in return? It
     no longer mattered. Without another glance at him, she was heading off in the wake of
     the two men.



2
    On a sunny Sunday early in that same
     spring, a thirty-one-year-old British foreign servant earmarked for great things sat
     alone at the pavement table of a humble Italian café in London’s Soho,
     steeling himself to perform an act of espionage so outrageous that, if detected, it
     would cost him his career and his freedom: namely, recovering a tape recording,
     illicitly made by himself, from the Private Office of a Minister of the Crown whom it
     was his duty to serve and advise to the best of his considerable ability.
    His name was Toby Bell and he was entirely
     alone in his criminal contemplations. No evil genius controlled him, no paymaster,
     provocateur or sinister manipulator armed with an attaché case stuffed with
     hundred-dollar bills was waiting round the corner, no activist in a ski mask. He was in
     that sense the most feared creature of our contemporary world: a solitary decider. Of a
     forthcoming clandestine operation on the Crown Colony of Gibraltar he knew nothing:
     rather, it was this tantalizing ignorance that had brought him to his present pass.
    Neither was he in appearance or by nature
     cut out to be a felon. Even now, premeditating his criminal