Absolute Friends (48 page)

Ingenious Russia, though worn down by economic cares, achieved a double benefit: the silencing of the last remaining voices of "antisocial" opposition to the government, whether in the media or parliament, on the grounds that irresponsible protest was the basis of all terror; and Washington's unstinted encouragement to pursue, with even greater vigor than hitherto, its murderous war on the people of Chechnya.

A final postscript was provided by the two dead terrorists themselves. Both men, it transpired, had made a will. Perhaps all terrorists do that. Both had expressed a wish to be buried alongside their respective mothers: Sasha the German in Neubrandenburg, and Mundy the Englishman on a sunbaked hillside in Pakistan. An intrepid journalist tracked down Mundy's final resting place. The mist, she reported, never quite lifts, but the broken Christian masonry makes it a popular place for children to stage their mock battles.

_Cornwall, June 9, 2003__

The End

Acknowledgments

MY SINCERE THANKS to Sandy Lean, Ann Martin, Tony McClenaghan and Raleigh Trevelyan for their British India and Pakistan, to Imama Halima Krausen for her generous instruction in Islamic practices, to Anthony Barnett of openDemocracy. net and Judith Herrin for their radical Britain in the sixties and seventies, to Timothy Garton Ash, Gunnar Schweer and Stephan Strobel for historical and editorial advice far beyond the call of friendship, to Konrad Paul for his Weimar and Lothar Menne for his Berlin and much more, to Michael Buselmeier for his Heidelberg and John Pilger for his words of wisdom over dinner. I must also confess my indebtedness to the superb _Plain Tales from the Raj__ by Charles Allen.

My apologies to the peerless administrators of King Ludwig's Linderhof, who in real life employ none but the best-informed guides, have no plant room in their basement, and whose only visitors are of the highest discernment and sobriety.

Cover Blurb

By chance and not by choice, Ted Mundy, eternal striver, failed writer and expatriate son of a British Army officer, used to be a spy. But that was in the good old Cold War days when a cinder-block Wall divided Berlin, and the enemy was easy to recognize.

Today, Mundy is a down-at-heel tour guide in South Germany, dodging creditors, supporting a new family, and keeping an eye out for trouble while in spare moments vigorously questioning the actions of the country he once bravely served.

And trouble finds him, as it has before, in the shape of his old German student friend, radical, and one-time fellow spy, the crippled Sasha, seeker after absolutes, dreamer and chaos addict.

After years of trawling the Middle East and Asia as an itinerant university lecturer, Sasha has yet again discovered the true, the only answer to life--this time in the form of a mysterious billionaire philanthropist named Dimitri. Thanks to Dimitri, both Mundy and Sasha will find a path out of poverty, and with it their chance to change a world that both believe is going to the devil. Or will they?

Who is Dimitri? Why does Dimitri's gold pour in from mysterious Middle Eastern bank accounts? And why does his apparently noble venture reek less of starry idealism than treachery and fear?

Some free gifts are too expensive to accept. Could this be one of them? With a cooler head than Sasha's, Mundy is inclined to think it could. In Absolute Friends, John le Carré delivers the masterpiece he has been building to since the fall of Communism: an epic tale of loyalty and betrayal that spans the lives of two friends from the riot-torn West Berlin of the 1960s to the grimy looking-glass of Cold War Europe to the present day of terrorism and new alliances. This is the novel le Carré fans have been waiting for--a brilliant, ferocious, heartbreaking work for the ages.