A Delicate Truth A Novel - By John Le Carre Page 0,20

risk of being pompous, should you.’

And while Toby is fumbling for an answer:

‘Another thing, while I have you alone, if I may. My beloved wife Hermione tells me, in her capacity as the eyes and ears of Berlin’s diplomatic shenanigans, that you are conducting an inappropriate dalliance with the spouse of the Dutch military attaché, she being a notorious tart. True or false?’

Toby’s posting to the British Embassy in Madrid, which has unexpectedly discovered a need for a junior attaché with Defence experience, follows a month later.

*

Madrid.

Despite their disparity in age and seniority, Toby and Giles remain in close touch. How much this is due to Oakley’s string-pulling behind the scenes, how much to mere accident, Toby can only guess. Certain is that Oakley has taken to Toby in the way that some older diplomats consciously or otherwise foster their favoured young. Intelligence traffic between London and Madrid meanwhile was never brisker or more crucial. Its subject is not any more Saddam Hussein and his elusive weapons of mass destruction but the new generation of jihadists brought into being by the West’s assault on what was until then one of the more secular countries in the Middle East – a truth too raw to be admitted by its perpetrators.

Thus the duo continues. In Madrid, Toby – like it or not, and mainly he likes it – becomes a leading player in the intelligence marketplace, commuting weekly to London, where Oakley flits in the middle air between the Queen’s spies on one side of the river and the Queen’s Foreign Office on the other.

In coded discussions in Whitehall’s sealed basement rooms, new rules of engagement with suspected terrorist prisoners are cautiously thrashed out. Improbably, given Toby’s rank, he attends. Oakley presides. The word enhance, once used to convey spiritual exaltation, has entered the new American dictionary, but its meaning remains wilfully imprecise to the uninitiated, of whom Toby is one. All the same, he has his suspicions. Can these so-called new rules in reality be the old barbaric ones, dusted off and reinstated, he wonders? And if he is right, which increasingly he believes he is, what is the moral distinction, if any, between the man who applies the electrodes and the man who sits behind a desk and pretends he doesn’t know it’s happening, although he knows very well?

But when Toby, nobly struggling to reconcile these questions with his conscience and upbringing, ventures to air them – purely academically, you understand – to Giles over a cosy dinner at Oakley’s club to celebrate Toby’s thrilling new appointment on promotion to the British Embassy in Cairo, Oakley, from whom no secrets are hidden, responds with one of his doting smiles and hides himself behind his beloved La Rochefoucauld:

‘Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, dear man. In an imperfect world, I fear it’s the best we can manage.’

And Toby smiles back appreciatively at Oakley’s wit, and tells himself sternly yet again that he must learn to live with compromise – dear man being by now a permanent addition to Oakley’s vocabulary, and further evidence, were it needed, of his singular affection for his protégé.

*

Cairo.

Toby Bell is the British Embassy’s blue-eyed boy – ask anyone from the ambassador down! A six-month immersion course in Arabic and, blow me, the lad’s already halfway to speaking it! Hits it off with Egyptian generals and never once gives vent to his callow personal opinions – a phrase that has lodged itself permanently in his consciousness. Goes diligently about the business in which he has almost accidentally acquired expertise; barters intelligence with his Egyptian opposite numbers; and under instruction feeds them names of Egyptian Islamists in London who are plotting against the regime.

At weekends, he enjoys jolly camel rides with debonair military officers and secret policemen and lavish parties with the super-rich in their guarded desert condominiums. And at dawn, after flirting with their glamorous daughters, drives home with car windows closed to keep out the stench of burning plastic and rotting food as the ragged ghosts of children and their shrouded mothers forage for scraps in filthy acres of unsorted rubbish at the city’s edge.

And who is the guiding light in London who presides over this pragmatic trade in human destinies, sends cosy personal letters of appreciation to the reigning head of Mubarak’s secret police? – none other than Giles Oakley, Foreign Office intelligence broker extraordinaire and mandarin at large.

So it’s no surprise to anyone, except perhaps young Bell himself, that even while