(3 of 10)
An opportunity for vengeance occurs one afternoon when attention is drawn to a "gold seam"—a flood of currency—spilling out of Moscow and into Southeast Asia. Is it bankrolling enemy operatives? Is it used to push heroin in the People's Republic of China? Is Drake Ko, an amoral Hong Kong millionaire, a conduit? Drake's brother Nelson is one of the two dozen most important men in Peking and perhaps also a Karla mole, one even more important than Haydon had been. Are the siblings estranged? Or is their relationship thicker then blood? Smiley backtracks through archives and files to find names, places, references once suppressed by Haydon. Midway through the paper chase, coherence emerges. A devious plan unfolds, vouchsafed piecemeal to the anxious reader. The opening moves are made with Jerry Westerby, an aristocratic refugee from occasional Circus assignments now living in the Tuscany hills, where his bookish habits have earned him the sobriquet "the Schoolboy." Westerby carries the spy's classic cards of identity: robust health, womanizing instincts and moral numbness. With words that could have been set to music by Sir Edward Elgar, Smiley reminds his operative of a historian who "wrote of generations that are born into debtors' prisons and spend their lives buying their way to freedom. I think ours is such a generation. Don't you?" Jerry laughs: "Sport, for heaven's sake. You point me and I'll march. Okay?"
The aging adventurer is pointed to Hong Kong, then to Southeast Asia and programmed intrigues—and unexpected sellouts. The Schoolboy's odyssey is both official and personal. As colleagues perish, as the enigmatic Ko brothers become more comprehensible, as loyalties dissolve, Jerry finds himself questioning his own motives and, finally, his orders, the discipline of his "tradecraft." The object of his sudden, intense affection is Drake Ko's beautiful mistress, Lizzie Worthington, an involvement that jeopardizes Westerby's entire mission. The carefully engineered defection of Nelson Ko becomes a ploy within a ploy with apocalyptic result.