The Night Manager is an espionage/detective novel by John le Carré, published in 1993. It is his first post-Cold War novel, detailing an undercover operation to nab an international criminal.
The novel follows Jonathan Pine, a former British soldier turned night auditor for a luxurious hotel. One night, Pine encounters Sophie, a French-Arab woman who has ties to Richard Onslow Roper, an English black marketeer who has made a fortune from the sale of weapons. Sophie provides Pine with incriminating documents, which Pine forwards to a friend in British intelligence. Despite Pine's best efforts to help her, Sophie's betrayal is discovered and she is subsequently murdered. Six months later, Pine is approached by intelligence operatives Leonard Burr and Rex Goodhew, who are planning a carefully detailed sting operation against Roper. Eager to avenge Sophie, Pine agrees to go undercover to infiltrate Roper's vast criminal empire, but the operation is jeopardized by an inter-agency turf war within the intelligence community.
As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Pine has won the confidence of Roper, through an adroit tactic in which Pine saves his child. Pine is assigned a position within the Roper organization, to act as the head of a special purpose entity - a device sometimes employed by modern corporations. As the head of the company, Pine is tasked with the assignment of executing a large transaction in which shipping containers full of "Colombian coffee" (happy children juggling on the label) are exchanged for arms. The drugs are piled high, and packed into their respective containers - and Pine signs for them. Meanwhile, operation 'Flagship' accomplishes a betrayal of Pine's identity by a group of questionable individuals in the employ of the Intelligence agencies. Seeing Pine discredited, and in full knowledge of the danger to his life - Burr executes a daring tactic to save him, at a cost of scale to the sting operation.
The novel ends with Pine alive, having survived being badly tortured. He is leaving Roper's ship "The Iron Pasha" in a launch, and he voices to himself the feeling that he has somehow lost and Roper won. He wonders if Roper, men and corporations like him - will not leave this earth until they have scarred it so badly that the destruction they have wrought by their action - burns the whole world and them along with it.
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