Frank Harkness

Who they are

An American, ex-CIA by his own account, who for more than twenty years ran the house in the woods near Angevin that everyone in Spook Street calls Les Arbres. He is named late and arrives later: first as “the American called Frank” whom the residents obeyed and who threatened Natasha Reverde off the property, then through David Cartwright’s memory, and only in C12 in person, waiting under a shelter on the Embankment. By then three separate witnesses have described him, and each description is a warning.

Spook Street’s account of his career has a hole in the middle of it. JK Coe offers the version taught on a course — an American who came to the Park with a proposal to turn Project Cuckoo from a way of raising perfect foreign simulacra into a way of manufacturing a fanatic, and who was exposed as former CIA, “burned for unreliability”, and shown the door. Cartwright’s version is that the British refused him on pragmatic grounds as the Cold War ended and told him to sling his hook; Lamb’s is that Harkness went through the back door with Cartwright holding it open. Both cannot be true; C15 settles it in Harkness’s favour, confirming that Les Arbres was funded and resourced by the Service, which is to say that the man supposedly shown the door was kept inside it.

What he built there is consistent across every witness: a regimented house with eight male adults — Russian, English, German and Czech, including an ex-KGB man calling himself Yevgeny — and six or seven boys at the end, the eldest two present from the beginning, raised on the premises, taught by a Frenchman called Jean, and disciplined by a cellar into which each boy was locked on his twelfth birthday until he asked to be let out. Patrice lasted a month. Bertrand lasted seventeen days.

On the page he is charming, unhurried and entirely without contrition. He greets Patrice with a kiss on each cheek, receives River’s accusations with a laugh, describes the bombing of a shopping centre as “an exercise in what is possible”, concedes only that mistakes were made, and ends the interview by embracing his son, kissing him on the lips and throwing him into the Thames. His accent is American, worn down by European exile; he smokes French cigarettes.

What they want

Stated: River. Asked what the mission is now that Les Arbres has burned, he answers that the mission is River, and his pitch is a job — Slough House is a cul de sac, River is wasted there, and there is a place for him in what began in France. Under the recruitment is the older project: a network of ex-Soviet-bloc operators — his “rainbow coalition” — raising men who believe their own cover stories, and a Service that paid for the house and then looked away.

What Spook Street shows him working for is narrower and less romantic: deniability and continuation. Westacres is folded into an argument about a subordinate who “went over the edge”, Bertrand’s death into “he knew the risks”, the fire at Les Arbres into a necessary failure. He will not be blamed, and he will not be stopped; by C15 he has been debriefed, found “cooperative”, and lost again within ten minutes of being back on the street.

Book 4 — Spook Street

• C07 — Named for the first time by Natasha Reverde: the American everyone at Les Arbres obeyed, who later threatened her off the property. She also identifies Bertrand as Frank’s son.
• C09 — David Cartwright names Frank Harkness as the ex-Agency American who wanted Cuckoo adapted to raise extremists, while JK Coe supplies the rumour that he was burned for unreliability. Jackson Lamb concludes he went through the back door with Cartwright holding it open.
• C10 — Present only as a voice on the phone: he takes Patrice’s report that the package is undelivered and tells him Bertrand’s passport has lit up at St Pancras. Patrice’s memory of him includes a seventh birthday present of a photograph of Yves’s mother and a box of matches.
• C11 — The O.B. describes Frank bringing Cuckoo to the Park, being sent away, and turning up at his Bayswater house at the end of summer; pressed on what Frank had on him, he says “Isobel” and weeps.
• C12 — First on the page, at HMS President: he takes Patrice aside, tells River that Bertrand was his brother and that he is River’s father, admits the silence over Isobel was part of a deal, and sends Patrice to Aldersgate Street to kill everyone there.
• C13 — Offstage. The address and the order are his, and Patrice carries them into Slough House.
• C14 — Offers River a job, defends Westacres, refuses blame for Bertrand, then kisses him and throws him into the river. The older man Emma Flyte arrests on the maintenance platform is never named.
• C15 — Debriefed, “cooperative”, and taken alive against Diana Taverner’s preference; Whelan admits the Service funded and resourced Les Arbres, and that Harkness slipped his escort almost immediately.

Tells

The cigarette, held through the worst of it. The kiss as a punctuation mark — both cheeks for a returning soldier, on the mouth for a son he is about to drown. The laugh that arrives where an answer should. And the courier’s vocabulary he has taught his men: nothing is killed, everything is delivered.

Open questions

Whether he was really CIA, and really burned; Spook Street gives two incompatible accounts and never adjudicates. Why the Service kept paying for Les Arbres after declining the proposal. What he had on Cartwright beyond Isobel, which the O.B. is too far gone to say plainly. How many boys there were, and where the survivors are. And whether he was released or escaped in C15 — Whelan says only that he slipped the leash.