The Night Manager by John LeCarre

Once I got about 3/4 of the way through, I started having a lot of trouble with this book. I could only read a page or two, or sometimes less, before I would have to put it down for a bit. I am not sure why. Perhaps because the situation was getting tense. It was really kind of odd.
The story had some similarities to the Bond movie Never Say Never Again: big wheeler dealer, big yacht, beautiful girl. I suppose the yacht was the key point. Most of the book revolves around internal political struggles between the various British spy agencies, in particular one run by the nefarious Darker and the other run by the straight arrow Goodhew. Goodhew's agency is concerned with enforcement, Darker's interest is "pure" intelligence. The villain is trying to broker a deal to swap modern weapons to Columbia in exchange for a boatload of cocaine. Darker's agency sees no problem with letting the deal go down, after all they're getting a cut, which is going straight to their offshore accounts. They throw up a smoke screen of reasons for not interfering, not our jurisdiction, can't expect any real cooperation from Columbia ("it's propping up the governments of Columbia and Peru"), it's bringing money into the country - they're buying weapons from our manufacturers.
One of weapons they are selling is the Stinger anti-aircraft missile. Raytheon charges the US Government $40,000 for each one. These are the weapons that convinced the Soviets to leave Afghanistan (Charlie Wilson's War). After the Soviets left, the Americans tried to buy back any left over Stingers. They were offering a hundred thousand dollar premium. No telling how many they got back, or more importantly, how many they didn't get back. All this makes me wonder what they are worth on the black market. I mean, if you were under attack by modern military aircraft, how much would it be worth to you to be able to knock one of out the sky? I suppose it would depend on how much damage they could do to you. If they are shooting at you in particular it might be worth all you have to stop them. In a battle like this though, one is unlikely to be sufficient.