The Secret Pilgrim

PRAISE FOR
THE SECRET PILGRIM

#1
NEW YORK TIMES
BESTSELLER A
NEW YORK TIMES
NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“Mr. le Carré's most magisterial accomplishment.”

—
New York Times Book Review

“Le Carré is writing at the top of his form. . . . Secrets abound . . . wonders abound.”

—
Ed McBain,
Los Angeles Times

“This consummate and enthralling mosaic is also Smiley's nunc dimittis.”

—The Observer

“Masterfully recreates Smiley's world. . . . [Le Carré's] use of language, which is what distinguishes his volumes from their many imitators, is superb. . . . Like
Moby Dick
,
The Secret Pilgrim
can be read at several levels. It's a crackling good spy story, but it's also the epitaph for a generation.”

—Peter C. Newman,
The Globe and Mail

“Le Carré's wit is as provocative as ever.”

—
Chatelaine

“Le Carré writing at his exceptional best.”

—
Mail on Sunday

“John le Carré has created a fictive world which he has made almost as familiar as that of Dickens. . . . In terms of scope, skill, and ideas, it is streets ahead of most contemporary fiction.”

—
Daily Telegraph

“Insights give
The Secret Pilgrim
a moral weight that moves it from simple entertainment towards the realm of art. . . . The le Carré of
The Secret Pilgrim
is one of the most accomplished writers in the English language.”

—
Maclean's

“Extraordinary.”

—
USA Today

“The world's foremost writer of spy fiction.”

—
Toronto Star

“This is as brilliant and satisfying a novel as le Carré has written . . .”

—
London Free Press

PENGUIN CANADA

THE SECRET PILGRIM

JOHN LE CARRÉ
was born in 1931. He was educated at the Universities of Bern and Oxford, taught at Eton College, and served as second secretary at the British Embassy in Bonn and British Consul in Hamburg during the Cold War. His third novel,
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
, secured him a wide reputation, which was consolidated by his trilogy
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy;
and
Smiley's People.
His recent work includes
The Constant Gardener
and
The Mission Song
. His new novel,
A Most Wanted Man
, will be published in autumn 2008.

ALSO BY JOHN LE CARRÉ

Call for the Dead

A Murder of Quality

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

The Looking Glass War

A Small Town in Germany

The Naïve and Sentimental Lover

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

The Honourable Schoolboy

Smiley's People

The Little Drummer Girl

A Perfect Spy

The Night Manager

Our Game

The Tailor of Panama

Single & Single

The Constant Gardener

Absolute Friends

The Mission Song

JOHN
LE CARRÉ

THE SECRET
PILGRIM

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),

a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1991

Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),

a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1991

Published in this edition, 2008

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright © David Cornwell, 1990

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher's note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in Canada.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Le Carré, John, 1931–

The secret pilgrim / John le Carré.

ISBN 978-0-14-316956-7

I. Title.

PR6062.E42S42 2008 823'.914 C2008-902725-6

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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For Alec Guinness with affection and thanks

THE SECRET PILGRIM

1

Let me confess to you at once that if I had not, on the spur of the moment, picked up my pen and scribbled a note to George Smiley inviting him to address my passing-out class on the closing evening of their entry course—and had Smiley not, against all my expectations, consented—I would not be making so free to you with my heart.

At the most, I would be offering you the sort of laundered reminiscence with which, if I am honest, I was a bit too inclined to regale my students: feats of secret chivalry, of the dramatic, the resourceful and the brave. And always, of course, the useful. I would be enthralling you with memories of night drops into the Caucasus, hazardous crossings by fast boat, beach landings, winking shore lights, clandestine radio messages that ceased in midtransmission. Of silent heroes of the Cold War who, having made their contribution, modestly went to earth in the society they had protected. Of defectors-in-place snatched in the nick of time from the jaws of the opposition.

And to a point, yes, that is the life we lived. In our day we did those things, and some even ended well. We had good men in bad countries who risked their lives for us. And usually they were believed, and sometimes their intelligence was wisely used. I hope so, for the greatest spy on earth is worth nothing when it isn't.

And for the lighter note, over a second whisky in the Probationers' Mess, I would have picked out for them the occasion when a
three-man reception team from the Circus, operating inside East Germany, and gallantly led by myself, lay freezing on a ridge in the Harz Mountains, praying for the flutter of an unmarked plane with its engines cut, and the blessed black parachute floating in its wake. And what did we find when our prayer was answered and we had slithered down an icefield to claim our treasure? Stones, I would tell my wide-eyed students. Chunks of honest Argyll granite. The despatchers at our Scottish airbase had sent us the training cannister by mistake.

That tale, at least, found a certain echo, even if some of my other offerings tended to lose their audience halfway through.

I suspect that my impulse to write to Smiley had been brewing in me longer than I realized. The idea was conceived during one of my regular visits to Personnel to discuss the progress of my students. Dropping in on the Senior Officers' Bar for a sandwich and a beer, I had bumped into Peter Guillam. Peter had played Watson to George's Sherlock Holmes in the long search for the Circus traitor, who turned out to be our Head of Operations, Bill Haydon. Peter had not heard from George for—oh, a year now, more. George had bought this cottage in North Cornwall somewhere, he said, and was indulging his dislike of the telephone. He had some kind of sinecure at Exeter University, and was allowed to use their library. Sadly I pictured the rest: George the lonely hermit on an empty landscape, taking his solitary walks and thinking his thoughts. George slipping up to Exeter for a little human warmth in his old age while he waited to take his place in the spies' Valhalla.

And Ann, his wife? I asked Peter, lowering my voice as one does when Ann's name comes up—for it was an open secret, and a painful one, that Bill Haydon had counted among Ann's many lovers.

Ann was Ann, said Peter, with a Gallic shrug. She had bits of family with grand houses on the Helford Estuary. Sometimes she stayed with them, sometimes she stayed with George.

I asked for Smiley's address. “Don't tell him I gave it you,” said Peter as I wrote it down. With George, there had always been that certain kind of guilt about passing on his whereabouts—I still don't quite know why.

Three weeks later Toby Esterhase came down to Sarratt to give us his celebrated talk on the arts of clandestine surveillance on unfriendly soil. And of course he stayed for lunch, which was greatly enhanced for him by the presence of our first three girls. After a battle lasting as long as I had been at Sarratt, Personnel had finally decided that girls were all right after all.

And I heard myself trailing Smiley's name.

There have been times when I would not have entertained Toby in the woodshed, and others when I thanked my Maker I had him on my side. But with the years, I am pleased to notice, one settles to people.

“Oh look here, my God, Ned!” Toby cried in his incurably Hungarian English, smoothing back his carefully pomaded mane of silver hair. “You mean you haven't heard?”

“Heard what?” I asked patiently.

“My dear fellow, George is chairing the Fishing Rights Committee. Don't they tell you anything down here in the sticks? I think I better take this up with the Chief actually, one to one. A word in his ear at the Club.”

“Perhaps you'd tell me first what the Fishing Rights Committee is,” I suggested.

“Ned, you know what? I think I get nervous. Maybe they took you off the list.”

“Maybe they did at that,” I said.

He told me anyway, as I knew he would, and I duly acted astonished, which gave him an even greater sense of his importance. And there is a part of me that remains astonished to this day. The Fishing Rights Committee, Toby explained for the benefit of the unblessed, was an informal working party made up of officers from Moscow Centre and the Circus. Its job, said Toby—who I really believe had lost any capacity to be surprised—was to identify intelligence
targets of interest to both services and thrash out a system of sharing. “The idea actually, Ned, was to target the world's trouble spots,” he said with an air of maddening superiority—“I think they fix first the Middle East. Don't quote me, Ned, okay?”

“And you're telling me Smiley
chairs
this committee?” I asked incredulously when I had attempted to digest this.

“Well, maybe not much longer, Ned—Anno Domini and so forth. But the Russians were so frightfully keen to meet him, we brought him in to snip the tape. Give the old fellow a treat, I say. Stroke him a bit. Bunch of fixers in an envelope.”