Everywhere that air of conspiracy which generates among people who have been up since dawn—of superiority almost, derived from the common experience of having seen the night disappear and the morning come.

This placed the source in the Secretariat and the Secretariat was very small. The draft minutes had been well and carefully photographed: that suggested that the photographer had had time and a room to himself. Leamas returned to the personality index. There was a man called Karl Riemeck in the Secretariat, a former corporal in the Medical Corps,

accepted in silence the filthy rebuke of a warder who knew quite well what had happened.

“Nothing like half an hour. I caught sight of you in Marble Arch and I thought you were Alec Leamas, a man I borrowed some money from. I used to be in the BBC in Berlin and there was this man I borrowed some money from. I’ve had a conscience about it ever since and that’s why I followed you. I wanted to be sure.”

Leamas remembered Control’s wife, a stupid little woman called Mandy who seemed to think her husband was in the Coal Board. He supposed she had knitted it.

Or, as a loyal servant of his corporation, assuring us that smoking is harmless to the health of the Third World and great banks are there to serve the public. What have I learned over the last fifty years? Come to think of it, not much. Just that the morals of the secret world are very like our own.

“Who’s Mr. Ironside?” Leamas asked. “I don’t think he exists,” she replied. “He’s her big gun when she’s stuck for an answer. I asked her once who he was. She went all shifty and mysterious, and said ‘Never mind.’ I don’t think he exists.” “I’m not sure Miss Crail does,” said Leamas and Liz Gold smiled.

He looked like a man who could make trouble, a man who looked after his money, a man who was not quite a gentleman.

you don’t trust her it’s too late anyway,” he’d said, and Leamas took the hint and shut up. But he went carefully after that, told Karl much less, used more of the hocus-pocus of espionage technique. And there she was, out there in her car, knowing everything, the whole network, the safe house, everything; and Leamas swore, not for the first time,