Free A Most Wanted Man by John le Carré

does Hamburg send out to your average Islamist anti-Zionist terrorist bent on fucking up the Western world? Centuries of anti-Semitism? Hamburg has them. Concentration camps just up the road? Hamburg had them. All right, I’ll grant you: Hitler wasn’t born in Blankenese. But don’t think he couldn’t have been. The Baader-Meinhof gang? Ulrike Meinhof, born not far from here, was Hamburg’s proud adopted daughter. She even got herself Arab trained. Partied with their crazies and went hijacking with them. Maybe Ulrike was some kind of signal. Too many Arabs love Germans for the wrong reasons. Maybe our hijackers did. We never asked them. And now we never shall.”
    He let the silence last awhile, then seemed to take heart.
    “And then there’s the good news about Hamburg,” he resumed cheerfully. “We’re sea people. We’re a world-wise, liberal-left, wide-open city-state. We’re world-class traders with a world-class port and a world-class nose for profit. Our foreigners aren’t strangers to us. We’re not some one-horse inland town where foreigners look like Martians. They’re part of our landscape. For centuries, millions of Mohammed Atta lookalikes have drunk our beer, screwed our hookers and gone back on their ships. And we haven’t said hello and good-bye to them, or asked them what they’re doing here, because we take them for granted. We’re Germany, but we’re aside from Germany. We’re better than Germany. We’re Hamburg, but we’re also New York. Okay, we don’t have Twin Towers. But then neither does New York anymore. But we’re attractive. We still smell right to the wrong people.”
    Another silence while he weighed what he had just said. “But if we’re talking signals, I think I’d blame our newfound, arse-licking tolerance of religious and ethnic diversity. Because a guilty city making amends for its past sins—parading its inexhaustible, amazing, indiscriminate tolerance—well, that’s a signal of a kind too. It’s practically an invitation to come and test us out.”
    He was homing in on his pet subject, the one they were all waiting for, the reason they had been dragged out of Berlin or Munich and relegated to a run-down SS stables in Hamburg. He was chafing against the dismal failure of Western intelligence services—and the German service most of all—to recruit a single decent live source against the Islamist target.
    “You think everything changed after 9/11?” he demanded, furious with them, or himself. “You think that on 9/12, our fine foreign intelligence service, fired by a global vision of the terror threat, put on their kaffiyehs and went down to the souks of Aden and Mogadishu and Cairo and Baghdad and Kandahar and bought themselves a little retail information about where and when the next bomb would go off and who would be pushing the button? Okay, we all know the bad joke: you can’t buy an Arab, but you can rent one. We couldn’t even rent one, for fuck’s sake! With a couple of noble exceptions I won’t bore you with, we had shit for live sources then. And we have shit for live sources now.
    “Oh sure, we had any number of gallant German journalists and businessmen and aid workers on our payroll, and even some who weren’t German, but only too happy to sell us their industrial waste for an untaxable second income. But they’re not live sources. They’re not venal, disenchanted, radical imams, or Islamist kids halfway to the bomb belt. They’re not Osama’s sleepers, or his talent spotters, or his couriers or his quartermasters or paymasters, not even at fifty removes. They’re just nice dinner guests.”
    He waited till the laughter had subsided.
    “And when we woke up to what we hadn’t got, we couldn’t find it.”
    We, they noticed. We in Beirut. We in Mogadishu and Aden. The Bachmann royal we. Bachmann had found live sources, real ones, good ones, all the secret world said so. Bought them or rented them, who cared? But perhaps he had lost