Richard Pynne

Who they are

Richard Pynne is a Hub shift manager at Regent’s Park: the officer who conducted the recorded interview about the material on Lech Wicinski’s laptop, and the man Wicinski knows as Dick the Prick. He is also Hannah Weiss’s handler on Snow White, which the Park rates a low-risk operation — a joe inside the German service, run at arm’s length, the sort of thing that fits into a paragraph of a busy manager’s update.

By the time Frank Harkness surfaces he is a man with nothing to offer and everything to protect. Asked why he did not know a former CIA officer was in the country, he stalls; Diana Taverner tells him he needs a bigger dish, sends him to the DGSI, takes his Snow White update and dismisses him. His afternoon goes on a false alarm over a missing Park contractor — a fiasco that ends with Taverner telling him to go home — and his evening in a pub off Great Portland Street, where the man whose career he ended finds him at the next stool.

The book judges him by his own decisions rather than by anyone’s speech. He promises Wicinski he will do the right thing, decides before the glass is empty to do nothing, and files him privately as a problem he can fix.

What they want

To keep his patch, his joe and his pension, in that order. He wants the Wicinski business to be someone else’s problem, the Harkness question answered by the DGSI, and a technician’s inconvenient finding kept out of a funding bid.

Book 6 — Joe Country

• C02 — He conducts the recorded interview that ends Wicinski’s career; the chapter gives him no doubt and Wicinski no defence, and Wicinski is walked out of the Park afterwards.
• C05 — With Harkness in-country he has nothing at all, and is dismantled in a sentence and sent to check with the DGSI; his own operation is taken as an update between more urgent things.
• C06 — Wicinski approaches him in a pub in breach of his HR letter and asks him to run a name through GCHQ’s trigger list; Pynne sets his rape alarm on the bar, bluffs him out, promises to do the right thing, and decides to do nothing.
• C08 — A technician tells him the material cannot be shown to have been downloaded by the certified user and that a state operator may have planted it, at twenty percent likelihood at most. He tells her not to mention it in her funding bid, deletes her email, and later gives Taverner a truncated version. The case he built has become a case he is protecting.
• C11 — He is named to Jackson Lamb as Wicinski’s Park contact, and the pub meeting becomes the thread that leads to the Kahlmann name.
• C14 — Taverner tasks him with establishing who Peter Kahlmann was: the name he was asked to run and refused is now his assignment, and the chapter records the task, not the result.

Tells

• The rape alarm, produced on a pub bar as a way of not answering a question.
• “A problem he can fix” — how he files a man whose life he has already broken.
• Paperwork as a weapon in both directions: a truncated report upwards, an email deleted from his own inbox, a technician told what not to put in a bid.
• Gin and tonic and the wish to be elsewhere; on the night that matters he would rather have been meeting Hannah.

Open questions

• What his truncated report to Taverner actually said is not given, only that it was shorter than the truth.
• Whether the suppressed finding ever reaches Wicinski’s hearing is left open; C14 hands Pynne the Kahlmann task and records no consequence for the suppression.
• Whether the Kahlmann assignment produces anything is unknown — the task is issued and the book moves on.