A Legacy of Spies

by John Le Carré

But we haven’t yet said whose name, or which former member, we might be talking about. I say we because, if you’ve ever done a stint of interrogating and find yourself in the hot seat, there’s a complicity that puts you and your inquisitors together on one side of the table, and the issues to be thrashed out on the other.

I hadn’t clapped eyes on Jim Prideaux since Control had sent him on the abortive mission to Czecho that had cost him a bullet in the back and the unsleeping attention of a Czech torture team. By birth, we were both mongrels: Jim part Czech and part Norman, where I’m Breton. But there the comparison stopped. The Slav in Jim ran deep. As a boy, he had run messages and cut German throats for Czech Resistance. Cambridge may have educated him, but it never tamed him. When he joined the Circus, even Sarratt’s close-combat instructors learned to be wary of him.