A Most Wanted Man

A gaunt young man in a long black overcoat turns up in Hamburg after being smuggled into the country. He is half Chechen, half Russian, carries a purse of cash around his neck, and bears the marks of torture from Russian and Turkish prisons. He calls himself Issa. He attaches himself to Melik Oktay, a young Turkish boxer, and Melik’s widowed mother Leyla, who reluctantly hide him in their attic. Issa says he wants to study medicine.

Annabel Richter, a young lawyer with a refugee charity called Sanctuary North, takes up his case. Issa is entitled to a fortune left by his father, Colonel Grigori Karpov, a corrupt Red Army officer. The money sits in a secret “Lipizzaner” account at Brue Frères, a struggling private bank in Hamburg now run by Tommy Brue, an Englishman of about 60. The account dates from the days of Tommy’s father, who ran the bank as a laundry for Soviet money with the help of British intelligence.

When Brue meets Issa, the young man says he wants nothing for himself and would rather the money went to Chechen causes. Brue is drawn to Annabel and starts helping her, at real risk to himself.

Issa has not gone unnoticed. German intelligence has flagged him as an escaped Islamist suspect who entered Europe illegally. Günther Bachmann, who runs a small, unofficial German intelligence unit in Hamburg, sees an opening. He wants Issa’s money to pass through Dr Faisal Abdullah, a respected Muslim scholar and philanthropist whom Bachmann suspects of diverting a small slice of his charity funds to terrorist groups. If Abdullah signs the transfer, Bachmann can turn him into an informant and work his way up the network.

Bachmann picks Annabel off the street and pressures her into cooperating, promising that Issa will get legal residence in Germany. British intelligence presses Brue into line as well. Meanwhile, rival German agencies and the CIA watch the operation closely, and each has its own idea of how it should end.

On the day of the handover, Issa collects his inheritance at the bank and Abdullah signs off on the distribution, including a payment to a suspect shipping company. Bachmann, disguised as a taxi driver, waits to collect Abdullah. Before he can pull away, vehicles box in the taxi and masked men drag Abdullah and Issa into a van. An American officer tells the stunned Bachmann that this is American justice and asks if he has heard of extraordinary rendition. Bachmann’s promises to Annabel and his long game both fall apart.

Le Carré based parts of the story on the case of Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen raised in Germany who was arrested in Pakistan in 2001 and held at Kandahar and Guantanamo Bay until 2006.