'So think what it's doing for Moscow,' an old burrower murmurs out of turn.
'The Chinese are supposedly developing their own version of the Russian G-2 class submarine,' di Salis explains. 'No one knows a lot about it. Have they their own design? Have they two or four tubes? Are they armed with sea-to-air missiles or sea-to-sea? What is the financial appropriation for them? There's talk of a Han class. We had word they laid one down in seventy-one. We've never had confirmation. In Dairen in sixty-four they allegedly built a G class armed with ballistic missiles, but it still hasn't been officially sighted. And so forth and so on,' says di Salis deprecatingly, for like most of the Circus he has a rooted dislike of military matters and would prefer the more artistic targets. 'For hard and fast detail on those subjects the Cousins would pay a fortune. In a couple of years Langley could spend hundreds of millions in research, overflights, satellites, listening devices and God knows what — and still not come up with an answer half as good as one photograph. So if Nelson -' He lets the sentence hang, which is somehow a lot more effective than making it finite. Connie whispers 'Well done, Doc,' but still for a while nobody else speaks. They are held back by Smiley's jotting, and his continued examination of the folder.
'Good as Haydon,' Guillam mutters. 'Better. China's the last frontier. Toughest nut in the trade.'
Smiley sits back, his calculations apparently finished.
'Ricardo made his trip a few months after Nelson's formal rehabilitation,' he says.
Nobody sees fit to question this.
'Tiu travels to Shanghai and six weeks later Ricardo -'
In the far background, Guillam hears the bark of the Cousins' telephone switched through to his room, and it is a thing he afterwards avers most strongly — whether in truth or with hindsight — that the unlovable image of Sam Collins was at this point conjured out of his subconscious memory like a djini out of a lamp, and that he wondered yet again how he could ever have been so unthinking as to let Sam Collins deliver that vital letter to Martello.
'Nelson has one more string to his bow, Chief,' di Salis continues, just as everyone is assuming he is done. 'I hesitate to offer it with any confidence, but in the circumstances I dare not omit it altogether. A barter report from the West Germans, dated a few weeks ago. According to their sources, Nelson is lately a member of what we have for want of information dubbed The Peking Tea Club, an embryonic body which we believe has been set up to coordinate the Chinese intelligence effort. He came in first as an adviser on electronic surveillance, and was then co-opted as a full member. It functions, so far as we can fathom, somewhat as our own Steering Group. But I must emphasise that this is a shot in the dark. We know absolutely nothing about the Chinese services, and nor do the Cousins.'
For once at a loss for words, Smiley stares at di Salis, opens his mouth, closes it, then pulls off his glasses and polishes them.
'And Nelson's motive?' he asks, still oblivious to the steady bark of the Cousins' bell. 'A shot in the dark, Doc? How would you see that?'
Di Salis gives an enormous shrug, so that his tallow hair bucks like a floor mop. 'Oh, anybody's guess,' he says waspishly. 'Who believes in motive these days? It would have been perfectly natural for him to respond to recruitment overtures in Leningrad, of course, provided they were made in the right way. Not a disloyal thing at all. Not doctrinally, anyway. Russia was China's big elder brother. Nelson needed merely to be told he had been chosen as one of a special vanguard of vigilantes. I see no great art to that.'
Outside the room, the green phone just goes on ringing, which is remarkable. Martello is not usually so persistent. Only Guillam and Smiley are allowed to pick it up. But Smiley has not heard it, and Guillam is damned if he will budge while di Salis is extemporising on Nelson's possible reasons for becoming Karla's mole.
'When the Cultural Revolution came, many people in Nelson's position believed that Mao had gone mad,' di Salis explains, still reluctant to theorise. 'Even some of his own generals thought so. The humiliations Nelson suffered made him conform outwardly, but inwardly, perhaps, he remained bitter — who knows? — vengeful.'
'The alimony payments to Drake started at a time when Nelson's rehabilitation was barely complete,' Smiley objects mildly. 'What is the presumption there, Doc?'
All this is just too much for Connie and once again she brims over.
'Oh George, how can you be so naïve? You can find the line, dear, course you can! Those poor Chinese can't afford to hang a top technician in the cupboard half his life and not use him! Karla saw the drift, didn't he, Doc? He read the wind and went with it. He kept his poor little Nelson on a string and as soon as he started to come out of the wilderness again he had his legmen get alongside him: It's us, remember? Your friends! We don't let you down! We don't spit on you in the street! Let's get back to business! You'd play it just the same way yourself, you know you would!'
'And the money?' Smiley asks. 'The half million?'
'Stick and carrot! Blackmail implicit, rewards enormous. Nelson's hooked both ways.'
But it is di Salis, Connie's outburst notwithstanding, who has the last word:
'He's Chinese. He's pragmatic. He's Drake's brother. He can't get out of China -'
'Not yet,' says Smiley softly, glancing at the folder again.
'- and he knows very well his market value to the Russian service. You can't eat politics, you can't sleep with them, Drake liked to say, so you might as well make money out of them -'
'Against the day when you can leave China and spend it,' Smiley concludes, and — as Guillam tiptoes from the room — closes the folder and takes up his sheet of jottings. 'Drake tried to get him out once and failed, so Nelson took the Russians' money till... till what? Till Drake has better luck perhaps.'
In the background, the insistent snarling of the green telephone has finally ceased.
'Nelson is Karla's mole,' Smiley remarks at last, once more almost himself. 'He's sitting on a priceless crock of Chinese intelligence. That alone we could do with. He's acting on Karla's orders. The orders themselves are of inestimable value to us. They would show us precisely how much the Russians know about their Chinese enemy, and even what they intend toward him. We could take backbearings galore. Yes, Peter?'
In the breaking of tragic news there is no transition. One minute a concept stands; the next it lies smashed, and for those affected the world has altered irrevocably. As a cushion, however, Guillam had used official Circus stationery and the written word. By writing his message to Smiley in signal form, he hoped that the sight of it would prepare him in advance. Walking quietly to the desk, the form in his hand, he laid it on the glass sheet and waited.
'Charlie Marshall, the other pilot, by the way,' Smiley asked of the gathering, still oblivious. 'Have the Cousins run him to earth yet, Molly?'
'His story is much the same as Ricardo's,' Molly Meakin replied, glancing queerly at Guillam: Still at Smiley's side, he looked suddenly grey and middle-aged and ill. 'Like Ricardo, he flew for the Cousins in the Laos war, Mr Smiley. They were contemporaries at Langley's secret aviation school in Oklahoma. They dumped him when Laos ended and have no further word on him. Enforcement says he has ferried opium, but they say that of all of the Cousins' pilots.'
'I think you should read that,' Guillam said, pointing firmly at the message.