Our Game
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Our Game is a novel by John le Carré published in 1995. The title refers to Winchester College Football, as the two main characters were at Winchester long before the setting of the novel.
[edit] Plot Summary
The disappearance of Dr. Larry Pettifer from his teaching position at Bath University shouldn't have concerned a great many people, especially a retired Treasury boffin like Tim Cranmer. But when Detective Inspector Bryant and Sergeant Luck of the Bath Police call upon Cranmer at his Somerset manor house and erstwhile vineyard late on a Sunday evening, Cranmer finds himself facing repercussions from his secret and not-to-distant past. Pettifer, the reader eventually learns, was a British Secret Intelligence Service operative during the Cold War and Cranmer was his handler for some twenty years.
The Cold War is over, the Berlin Wall has come down and SIS has put Cranmer and his agent Pettifer out to pasture. Pettifer turns to teaching at Bath University and Cranmer is content to settle at his inherited estate in Somerset, growing wine and making love to his beautiful young mistress Emma. Not content with staying cloistered in Bath, Larry begins paying visits to Honeybrook (Cranmer's estate in Somerset) and soon becomes a permanent fixture in their lives. At least, that is, until both Larry and Emma disappear.
Panicked by his encounter with the Bath Police, Cranmer contacts his former employers and is summoned to London where he learns that, not only has Larry disappeared, he's absconded with some ₤37 million bilked from the Russian Government with the help of one his former Soviet agents. Cranmer finds himself suspected as Larry's accomplice by the Bath Police--and later "The Office," or SIS--and must track down his protégé and his former mistress.
But why would a quixotic intellectual like Larry, a man who had no interest in money, suddenly wish to steal ₤37 million from the Russians? To solve this mystery, Cranmer begins calling on old contacts from Oxford to the arms trade to find out what his former agent and his purloined mistress have been up to in their disappearance. He also visits his secret archive of Office files, stashed away in the abandoned church of St. James the Less, bequeathed to him by the same Uncle Bob who left him Honeybrook. As he peruses his cache of documents, he begins to uncover the plot between Larry and Konstantin Checheyev, his former Soviet agent. Checheyev, it seems, is not Russian but Ingush, a native of the high Caucasus and begrudged of the Russians who have displaced him and his people from their rightful homes. The Ingush are primed for an uprising against their Russian oppressors and Larry's the man to arm them.
Cranmer begins his journey, first to an arms dealer in Macclesfield, England, whom he finds murdered along with his assistants by an Ossetian group called "The Forest." Then to find Emma, who has sought shelter in Paris. Then to Russia to track down his former Soviet contacts in hopes of finding Larry. Then to Ingushetia to find his friend and try to save him; from the Russians, from the Ossetians, from himself.
