A Most Wanted Man by John le Carré

foundation was in the form of bearer bonds lodged with Frères.
    These bonds were to be surrendered to the approved claimant on production of the relevant account number, satisfactory papers of identity and what was coyly defined as “the necessary instrument of access.”
    For further details, see account owner’s personal file, except that you can’t because it went up in smoke on the same day that Edward Amadeus Brue, OBE, formally handed his son the keys to the bank.
    In short, no formal transfer and, as near as made no odds, no due process: just a “hullo-it’s-me” from the lucky owner of the reference number, a driving license and the so-called i nstrument, and an undeclared slide of junk bonds from one grimy paw to another had taken place—your money launderer’s dream scenario.
     
    “Except,” Brue muttered aloud.
    Except that, in the case of Colonel Grigori Borisovich Karpov, formerly of the Red Army, the “approved claimant”—if that’s what he turns out to be—is one of the wretched of the earth who detests the fact that his approach is necessary, and half the time would rather starve. He’s also drowning, and all I have to do is hold out my hand. He believes that I am his salvation, and without me he will return to hell.
    But it was Annabel Richter’s hand he was remembering: no rings, the fingernails childishly short.
    The traffic had died. Friday. Mitzi’s bridge night. Brue glanced at his watch. Good lord, where had the time gone? However did it get so late? But what’s late? Sometimes their games went on into the wee hours. He hoped she was winning. It mattered to her. Not the money, the winning. His daughter, Georgie, was all the other way. A softie, Georgie was. Never happy unless she was losing. Dump her blindfold in a roomful of chaps and, if there’s one of them who’s a surefire no-hoper, you can bet your boots she’ll have palled up with him in minutes.
    And Annabel Richter of Sanctuary North, which are you? A winner or a loser? If you’re saving the world, probably the latter. But you’ll go down with all guns blazing, that’s for sure. Edward Amadeus would have loved you.
    Without further thought Brue once more dialed her cell phone.

3
    The first intimation of Issa’s presence in the city penetrated the cramped quarters of the Foreign Acquisitions Unit of Hamburg’s grandly named Office for the Protection of the Constitution—in plain language, domestic intelligence service—on the late afternoon of his fourth day of roaming the city, at about the moment when he was shivering and perspiring on Leyla’s doorstep, begging to come in.
    The Unit, as it was disparagingly known to its reluctant hosts, was housed not in the main body of the protectors’ out-of-town complex, but on the farthest side of the courtyard from it, and as close to the razor-wire perimeter as anyone could get without actually cutting himself. The unlovely home of the sixteen-strong team, with its skimpy complement of researchers, watchers, listeners and drivers, was a disused former SS riding stables with a defunct clock tower and an unobstructed view of car tires and garden allotments gone wild.
    Wished on the protectors by Berlin’s recently formed Joint Steering Committee, which claimed as its mission the remodeling of Germany’s fragmented and famously inept intelligence community, the Unit was regarded as the harbinger of a plan to do away with precious demarcations in the name of a streamlined, integrated organization. Though on paper under local command and lacking the powers granted to the Federal Police, they were accountable neither to the protectors’ Hamburg station, nor to their headquarters in Cologne, but to the same vaporous, all-powerful body in Berlin that had imposed them on the protectors in the first place.
    Of whom or what was this omnipotent body in Berlin then composed? Its very existence struck fear into the heart of Germany’s entrenched espiocracy. In name, true, Joint