TINKER, TAILOR, SMILEY, MOLE

George sat back wearily and removed his glasses, wiping the slightly scratched lenses deliberately and precisely with his handkerchief before putting them back on and resuming his intense gaze at the dejected, sad and crumpled figure facing him.

As he looked across at the broken man who was now openly weeping in front of him, George took a few moments to think about what had brought them to this point. Things had not been the same here at the Big Top since the budget cuts had meant that the three rings of the circus had been streamlined into the current amalgamated one. Ironically, but to no real surprise to anyone in the so-called “magic” inner circle, they had become so much easier for the agents from the other side to penetrate since nobody had to jump through those various hoops any more.

Snow White knew that one of his staff was a mole. Again. They had been leaking far too much, far too quickly in recent months. It seemed as if no-one truly cared any more and the prospect of a fast buck was just too tempting for these young ambitious minds as they brazenly photocopied their files before stuffing them into their briefcases and strutting out of the revolving doors that had replaced Cyril in all his gold-embroidered pomp, leaving a cheery and cheeky  “Goodnight George” floating on the night air.

“One of his staff was a mole.” Honestly! He’d have been more surprised to find out that one of them wasn’t a mole, but Snowy was a bit of a stickler about such things. If he didn’t know about it, then fair enough. But if he did, well that was another matter entirely and, as sure as eggs are recepticles for getting microdots past security,  George’s phone would be ringing.

George thought back for a moment to those long ago days of the cold war, when betrayal was done on principle because you thought something was right, not because some oligarch had a fat wallet and a private island to move you on to. Those traitors whom they still referred to in the Service as the “first” to “fourth” men, none of them had ended up living in the lap of luxury with a private pool and a host of ex-footballer’s wives to tend to their more delicate requirements, had they?

Nowadays if George did have to order up a “wet” job, he had to fill in so many forms and get so many committees and focus groups to agree to it, that the poor bugger was just as likely to die of old age before he’d finally got the chit for the “bullet (rubber), quantity one” that he was likely to have had approved so that they could go through the motions “just for show” to prove to nobody in particular that “we” were still “players” on the international stage and had to let “them” know it.

He sighed. He knew that we weren’t fooling anyone any more.

Meanwhile, Snow White was absolutely certain that he knew one of the little people under his immediate control was the one, but, as usual, he wasn’t sure which one, and so he’d called George back in once again, dragged back in the middle of the night from dealing with that tricky little matter in Eastbourne, which remained unsolved, although he’d sent Peter to sit on things for a while with orders to call him if anything so much as moved.

He didn’t really think that any of them was really capable of doing such a thing, of course, or perhaps they all were. He was getting too old and too tired for all this intrigue in the small hours. He had read through the files and thought about which of them it was. “Doc”, the master manipulator, the puppet master, pulling all the departmental strings and a finger in every pie had seemed the most obvious place to start, but then Doc was still in Instanbul dealing with that little diamond problem and couldn’t be dragged back for at least eight hours even if he’d wanted him to be.

Anyway, Doc was far too obvious.

“Sleepy” however was another matter. Never appearing too ambitious, he’d been passed over for promotion time and again, but then, it had never seemed to bother him and he seemed contented enough with his station, but knew could tell what resentments burned beneath the surface. But his codename was far too obvious for him to be the sleeper, surely. Unless it was a bluff, or a double bluff or even a triple…

George took off his glasses again and rubbed his eyes. This kind of thing was getting far to complicated, even for him, and he was getting a headache. No, in the end Sleepy was far too set in his ways to want to make the leap to Moscow Central, he was convinced of that, and he had set the file aside to concentrate upon the more likely prey.

“Grumpy” he had dismissed immediately because no-one could ever really take him seriously. He talked the talk all right, but was unlikely ever to walk the walk. Deep down, Grumpy was far too happy with his lot to want to change it. You could tell that he was simply because he complained about it so much. “Bashful”, however, was a far trickier customer. If he had a few tricks up his sleeve there was bound to be a woman behind it somewhere. “It was always the quiet ones…” George had mused, before deciding that Bashful was definitely one to watch in the future.

“Happy” meanwhile. What about Happy…? Miserable sod. He definitely had something to hide, but quite what it was, George wasn’t really sure about. If he knew people, though, and he was pretty sure that he did, nobody going around the place being that cheerful all the time could possibly be truly trusted. As for “Sneezy”, well, he would probably leak all over the place if you let him, but luckily he’d always been held in check by the firm decongestant hand that Doc had played, but with Doc in Istanbul…?

All his investigations, whilst barely started, had proved redundant however because there had always been the sniveling wretch sitting in front of him right now. “Dopey” by codename, idiotic by temperament and blindly stupid in thought, word and deed.

George had only popped into the records office to jog his memory as to who was who, and he had been there, with various files almost brazenly strewn about the place, mini camera fixed firmly to his eye and he had almost dismissively greeted George as he carried on about his dark business. Almost as many files again were almost bursting out of his briefcase which sat open on top of another filing cabinet, emblazoned with his initials and with his name clearly marked inside.

“These public school types…” thought George to himself, shaking his head sadly. The final idiotic touch had been the “hammer and sickle” enamel badge that he had been wearing on his lapel. The dark arts had once been so subtle but now, it seemed, they had been marketed and branded just like everything else.

Oh, what a circus.