Anton Moser

Who they are

One of the three men Frank Harkness brings into Wales. C05 names him when JK Coe’s face recognition matches three other passengers off the same ferry against Annex C: Anton Moser, Lars Becker and Cyril Dupont. C10 supplies the career — eight years in the BND after six in the military — and calls him a contractor.

He is the one Louisa Guy knocks down at the crossroads on the first night, and he carries the marks of it: C10 opens with his face still sore from being stamped on. He speaks German with Lars, argues about tactics, and is unimpressed by the snow, by the amateurs around him and by being told to search barns.

C14 supplies the rest of the file: a former BND head-breaker turned freelancer, identified by Coe, and afterwards bought back by Jackson Lamb — offered a return to the fold — to kill Harkness.

What they want

The job done like a soldier’s job, and to be treated as a professional rather than a doorkicker. He wants a second meeting with the woman who dropped him to go differently. By C14 he wants back in, and Lamb has the price.

Book 6 — Joe Country

• C07 — In a disused barn a mile outside a Welsh town, briefed by Harkness with Lars and Cyril: the woman from Slough House is to be killed if she appears, with no guns and nothing that looks like murder.
• C09 — Blamed with Lars and the concussed Cyril for losing the boy, then sent to the family’s holiday cottage with a Sig Sauer; he and Lars work out in German how to share the one car.
• C10 — Face still sore, he argues that the Park would have sent guns if it had answered; Harkness makes him repeat the reasoning and posts him to the barns inland from the pickup point.
• C12 — Checks empty barns, finds one occupied by a local woman and her cows who offers to feed him, judges the hunt a shambles, and waits by a door with his gun drawn.
• C13 — Cannot raise Cyril and decides the barn and the crew’s car must be burned; reaching the barn, he finds Cyril dead and helps Lars drag the bodies inside before the fire.
• C14 — Named as the man who shot Harkness once in the head in a parked car in Poitiers, having been turned through Kreutzmer and offered a return to the fold for doing it.

Tells

The professional’s grievance: he argues about the shape of the job, never the job itself, and resents the men who think they should be giving the orders. German with Lars, a Sig Sauer with no spare magazines, and the assumption that a second encounter will go better.

Open questions

Whether the return to the fold is real or one more Service promise — C14 reports the offer, not its delivery. What a BND head-breaker did before he was one is not described.