PART ONE
In Sarratt's back field an ember glows red in the dark.
For some reason a fragment of memory from the early Circus days comes back to him. It's an image, a set of Russian nesting dolls on a second-floor back-room shelf, sitting beside a stack of outdated directories. Matryoshka, bright glossy red, cheap, the kind one might pick up in an airport on the way home. Probably a gag gift in bad taste. He'd put down the directory he'd been looking for and opened the first doll. The brittle red lacquer crackled and stuck to his palm.
Always anticlimactic, these things, he remembered thinking. Never a surprise. Always the same little wooden peanut smiling up at you in the end. He stacked the halves on the shelf in descending order as he opened them, like a cup game.
Second to last doll. Funny how sloppy the painter had become further in. This one's little face only a hasty jumble of lines and red dots. He opened it and then he frowned into his hands. There was no ending doll. It had been taken, or was never there to begin with.
After all that, you were empty, he chided it, crossly, and clapped it back together. Then, a voice passing in the corridor: female, nasal, querying.
Jim went back to work.
.
Now he is crouching in the cold night and the tiny red ember is lighting, just faintly, a man's profile. They've both been there some time. The man is sitting on a bench and Jim is squatting in the tall grass to the left, waiting.
He's needing to concentrate to manage his breathing. He allows himself time, silent in the dark, knowing that allowing the delay to become intolerable will eventually help him forward. There is only one thing to be done. The punchline, who will do it, he's known in spite of himself the entire time. He now understood what Control was actually requesting of him when he'd sent him after Stevcek's single word. Control's last wish. All Jim had been willing to see, sitting in the dim yellow smoke-hazed cabin of the Paris flight, were the faint lines of the equation; even then he'd shied away from acknowledging what calculation it was built on. Control had placed all the bets on Jim. First, on his honor; next, his instinct toward discretion. Last, his capacity for pain. Now here he was, sewn up inside Control's meticulous, unscrupulous denouement. Everyone in their places, working in the dark, caught in one another's schemes, towards this end result- a cigarette glowing in a field.
Had anyone mentioned his personal feeling, had anyone suggested that Control's selection of Jim for this final act stemmed from Control's reptilian but wholly accurate concept of love as the most exploitable source of destructive power, Jim would have rebelled. But no one had, or would, or will.
He clears his throat, softly, and the ember turns in a slow revolve towards him. In the near-perfect dark, Bill Haydon lifts a hand in welcome.
In the end it only takes a second. When it is over he smoothes Bill's hair back into place where his grip ruffled it; he can't help himself. He doesn't make a sound then or afterward, nor on the way back to where the car is parked. He is silent by habit, not self-preservation.
His next months are a misery. Smiley never comes calling; that's the single grace he's given.