A Most Wanted Man by John le Carré Page B

Beirut?—namely to trawl, recruit and run, by any means, live agents in the field, which is the gold standard of real intelligence gathering. Eventually even Beirut became too hot for him, and a desk in Hamburg seemed suddenly the safest place—if not to Bachmann, then to his masters in Berlin.
    But Bachmann was never the one to be put out to grass. Those who said that Hamburg was a punishment posting didn’t know what they were talking about. Now stuck in his midforties, he was a scruffy, explosive mongrel of a man, stocky in the shoulders and frequently with ash on the lapels of his jacket until it was brushed off by the egregious Erna Frey, his long-standing workmate and assistant. He was driven, charismatic and compelling, a workaholic with a knockout smile. He had a mop of sandy hair that was too young for the crisscross wrinkles on his brow. Like an actor, he could blandish, charm or intimidate. He could be sweet-tongued and foul-mouthed in the same sentence.
    “I want to keep him loose and keep him walking,” he told Erna Frey as they stood shoulder to shoulder in the researchers’ dank den in the SS riding stables, watching Maximilian, their star hacker, conjuring successive images of Issa onto his screens. “I want him to talk to whoever he was told to talk to and pray where he was told to pray and sleep wherever they told him to sleep. I don’t want anybody interfering with him before we do. Least of all those arseholes across the courtyard.”
     
    The first sighting of Issa, if it could be called one, had been of no apparent interest to anybody. It was a search notice issued under European treaty rules by Swedish police headquarters in Stockholm advising all signatories that an illegal Russian immigrant, name, photograph, particulars supplied, had evaded Swedish custody, present whereabouts unknown. A single day might produce half a dozen such notices. In the protectors’ operations center across the courtyard, it was duly acknowledged, downloaded, added to rows of similar notices adorning the walls of the recreation room and ignored.
    Yet Issa’s features must have lodged themselves on the retina of Maximilian’s inner eye, because over the next hours, as the atmosphere inside Bachmann’s researchers’ den thickened, team members from other corners of the stables began to trickle in to share the excitement. At the age of twenty-seven, Maximilian had a near-total stammer, a memory like a twelve-volume lexicon and an intuition for cobbling together extraneous scraps of information. But it was long past suppertime before he flopped back in his chair and linked his long, freckled fingers behind his ginger head.
    “Play it again, please, Maximilian,” Bachmann ordered, breaking the churchlike silence with a rare snatch of English.
    Maximilian blushed and played it again:
    Issa’s Swedish police mug shot, full-face, both profiles, with WANTED blazoned over it and his name in capitals like a warning: KARPOV, Issa.
    A ten-line text in thick type describing him as an escaped Muslim militant, born Grozny, Chechnya, twenty-three years ago, reportedly violent, approach with caution.
    Lips pressed tight together. No smile offered or permitted.
    Eyes stretched wide open in pain after days and nights in the stinking blackness of the container. Unshaven, emaciated, desperate.
    “How do we know he gave his real name?” Bachmann asked.
    “He didn’t.” Erna Frey this time, while Maximilian was still struggling to answer. “He gave a Chechen name but his mates from the container ratted on him. ‘He’s Issa Karpov,’ they said. ‘The escaped Russian aristocrat.’”
    “Aristocrat?”
    “It’s in the report. His mates decided he was stuck-up. Special somehow. How you can be stuck-up in a container is a secret we have yet to learn.”
    Maximilian had overcome his stammer. “The Swedish police reckon he went back to the ship and paid off the crew,” he burst out, in a great splash of words. “And the