mole

The children thought it all a great game; by turns they pretended they were moles in dark tunnels, or explorers charting an unmapped jungle, or Postal Tygers delivering the mail along an unfamiliar route.

Penelope frowned, for this indeed was the last and deepest mole hole in her scheme, and the one in which she feared they were most likely to step and twist an ankle, so to speak.

Mr. Munson seeds the otherwise ordinary setting with ominously recurring symbols and side characters—a mysterious bowler hat, a man with a mole near his mouth.

Like John le Carré, he creates his own jargon: safe houses are “coops,” spycraft is “artifice,” freelance agents are “units” and deep-cover moles are “termites.”

The update will also see the “Animal Crossing” world’s familiar grumpy mole, Resetti, offering a “reset service” to clean up a player’s island.