Kitabı oku: «The Daniel Marchant Spy Trilogy: Dead Spy Running, Games Traitors Play, Dirty Little Secret», sayfa 4

6

Marchant watched from his bedroom in the safe house as the train pulled out from the village for London. He thought again of Pradeep dying on the bridge. For a moment he wondered if one of the two bullets had missed its intended target. Did they mean to shoot him as well as Pradeep? It was the right moment to fire–Pradeep collapsing in his arms–if they weren’t bothered about collateral.

Below him a Land Rover was making its way along the road that ran along the valley. He assumed it was heading into the village, but the driver turned off onto the track that led up to the safe house. It was a tatty, dark-blue Defender, and as it bumped its way towards the house, Marchant could make out the local electricity board’s logo on both sides. Downstairs he could hear movement. His babysitters were stirring, ready to confront the driver, play out whatever cover story they had been given.

Next to the safe house was a small electricity sub-station for the village, enclosed by spiked green metal fencing and with its own orange windsock, billowing gently in the early-morning wind. The compound also housed an old nuclear bunker. A small sign, put up by the local history society, explained that it was used by the Royal Observer Corps during the Cold War, and could house three people for up to a month.

The surrounding area was all fields. Marchant assumed that the Land Rover belonged to the electricity board’s maintenance staff. It must be a routine check on the sub-station, he thought, but as it parked up below his window, he recognised the man who stepped out of the front passenger seat. It was Marcus Fielding, his father’s successor.

From the moment he had joined the Service, fifteen years earlier, Fielding had been marked out as a future Chief. The media had branded him the leader of a new generation of spies, Arabists who had joined after the Cold War and grown up with Al Qaeda. They had learnt their trade in Kandahar rather than Berlin, cutting their teeth in Pakistani training camps rather than Moscow parks, wearing turbans rather than trenchcoats.

‘I don’t suppose anyone has actually thanked you yet,’ Fielding said, as they walked down a path in the Savernake Forest. Marchant wasn’t fooled by the bonhomie. Fielding had always been supportive of Marchant, dismissing his suspension as a temporary setback in the escalating turf war between MI5 and MI6. But the events during the marathon would have tested his loyalty, ratcheting up another notch the tension between the services.

All around them rainwater dripped off the leaves, resonating like polite applause through the trees. Marchant glanced back to where the Land Rover was parked. Two men from the safe house stood quietly at the foot of a monument to George III which rose out of a clearing in the woods.

‘It was quite a show you put on,’ Fielding continued. ‘Saved a lot of lives. The Prime Minister asked me to pass on his personal thanks. Turner Munroe will be in touch, too.’

‘He probably just wants his watch back. MI5 weren’t quite so appreciative.’

‘No, I’m sure they weren’t.’

They walked on together for a while through the ancient wood, watched by its sentinel oaks. Fielding was lean and tall, professorial in appearance, with a high, balding forehead and hair swept back at the sides. His face was oddly childish, almost cherubic. To compensate, he wore steel-rimmed glasses, which added to his donnish air and broke up the expanse of forehead. Colleagues had been quick to dub him the Vicar. He had been a choral scholar at Eton, and it was easy to imagine him still in a cassock and collar. He didn’t drink, nor was he married. Prayer, though, had played little part in his rise to the top.

‘I’m sorry about Sunday,’ he continued. ‘We tried to get you out of Thames House as soon as we could, but, well, you’re not strictly our man at the moment. MI5 insisted you were their guest.’

‘You would have thought I was the one wearing the belt.’

‘Nothing too unpleasant, I hope?’

‘Six hours of amateur Q and A. First they suggested I was helping the bomber, then they thought it was a set-up by MI6 to get my job back. No wonder they didn’t see it coming.’

‘That’s just it, I’m afraid. The whole incident doesn’t reflect well on them. Or on us, to be honest. Everyone had assumed that last year’s attacks were over. No one saw it coming. You’re certain he was from South India?’

‘Kerala, born and bred.’

‘We were all hoping that threat was over. The one person to come out of this with any credit is you, and you shouldn’t have been there.’

‘Can’t it be spun as a general intelligence-led operation?’

‘The media’s not the problem. It’s the PM. He can’t understand why a suspended officer was all that stood between a marathon and carnage. I’m not sure I fully understand either.’

That had always been Fielding’s way: his subjects rarely realised that they were being interrogated, such was his seeming politeness. But just when you had dropped your guard, he hit you hard with a disguised uppercut of meticulous accuracy.

‘Leila signed us up at the last minute. A friend of hers works for one of the sponsors. It was stupid, we hadn’t done enough training. On race day, I saw a dodgy belt and did something about it. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t.’

‘And you had no warning? You’ve heard that Cheltenham picked up some chatter on the Saturday?’

‘No warning, no.’ There was little point in mentioning Leila, he thought. It would sound wrong, as if she had said more than she had, when in fact she had barely told him anything. It had been a passing remark, no hard information. It worried him, though, that Fielding also doubted that it had been an entirely chance encounter.

‘I couldn’t have done it without Leila,’ Marchant added. ‘You know that?’

‘She did very well. A bright future should lie ahead of her. Ahead of you, too, if that’s what you want.’

Marchant knew Fielding was referring to his behaviour of the past few months, when old demons had broken free again, unchecked by the discipline of intelligence work. Fielding stopped at one of the Savernake’s oldest oaks. Storms had removed the upper boughs, leaving only the trunk, strained and contorted, as if in pain. He bent down to look at the base of the tree, putting one hand to the small of his back. Sometimes his pain was so severe that he would take to lying down in his office, conducting meetings supine.

‘Spring morels,’ he said, pulling aside some brambles to get a better look. Marchant stooped to study them more closely. ‘Exquisite fried in butter.’ Everyone in Legoland knew how seriously Fielding took his food. An invitation to one of his gourmet dinners at his flat in Dolphin Square was better than a pay rise. He stood up again, both hands now pressed against his back, as if he was about to address his congregation. They both stared out across the woods, the sun streaming through gaps in the canopy, forming spotlit pools of limelight on the forest floor.

‘Tell me, are you still committed to pursuing your own inquiries into your father’s case?’

Marchant didn’t like his tone. In a quiet moment at his father’s funeral, two months earlier, Fielding had told him to let his office know if he turned up anything. All he had asked was that he went about his inquiries quietly. Become another whistleblower like Tomlinson or Shayler and he would throw the book at him. His father would have said the same: he despised renegades too. Only once had Marchant lost it, at a pub near Victoria, when an evening had ended in a brawl. A junior desk officer had been dispatched to the police station to release him and smooth things over.

‘Wouldn’t you want to know what happened?’ Marchant replied.

‘I have a pretty good idea already. Tony Bancroft has almost finished his report.’

‘But he’s not going to clear my father, is he?’

‘None of us wanted him to go, you know that? He was a much-loved Chief.’

‘So why did we let MI5 get one over us? There was never any evidence, no proof against him.’

‘I know you’re still angry, Daniel, but the quickest way to get you working again is for you to keep your head down and let Tony finish his job. MI5 don’t want you back, but I do. Once Bancroft is on record saying you pose no threat, there’s nothing anyone can do about it.’

‘But Bancroft won’t clear my father’s name, will he?’ Marchant repeated.

They walked on, Fielding a few yards ahead of him. Marchant had met with Lord Bancroft and his team, answered their questions, and knew that he had no case to answer. He knew his father was innocent, too, but the Prime Minister had needed someone to blame. Mainland Britain had been subjected to an unprecedented wave of terrorist attacks during the past year. Nothing spectacular, but there was enough public fear to keep MI5 on a critical state of alert: electricity sub-stations, railway depots, multi-storey car parks. The evidence soon pointed to a terrorist cell based in South India, drawn from workers who had taken poorly-paid jobs in the Gulf.

The pressure to nullify the threat had grown, but the terrorists always seemed to be one step ahead. Soon the talk was of a mole, high up in MI6, helping the hunted. Daniel’s father had become obsessed with the theory, but he had never managed to prove it, or to halt the bombings. Suspicion had finally fallen on him. When his position as Chief became untenable, the Joint Intelligence Committee, guided by Harriet Armstrong, MI5’s Director General, recommended that he be retired early. The attacks had stopped.

Fielding paused at the point where their path met another. As Marchant joined him, they instinctively looked both ways before crossing, even though the forest was empty. A muntjac deer barked in the distance.

‘Are you still drinking?’ Fielding asked.

‘When I can,’ Marchant said.

‘I’m not sure we can bail you out a second time.’

‘How long will I be kept at the safe house?’

‘It’s for your own security. Someone out there’s not happy you thwarted their attack.’

They walked on together, both at ease with the forest’s noisy dampness. ‘There are no surprises in what I’ve read of Bancroft’s report, no moles uncovered,’ Fielding said, as they began on a loop back towards the car. ‘It’s not Tony’s style, not why he was appointed. Just a summing up of what happened on your father’s watch and a measured assessment of whether anything more could have been done. There were too many attacks, we all know that.’

‘And someone had to take the bullet.’

‘The PM’s a former Home Secretary. He was always going to favour MI5 over us.’

Marchant had heard all this before, but he knew from Fielding’s manner that he was holding something back.

‘Unfortunately, the Americans have been pushing for more, day and night, trying to establish that it was conspiracy rather than complacency on your father’s part. We’ve resisted, of course, but the PM is indulging them. And now it seems they’ve persuaded him to hold back on the report’s publication, saying the CIA have something specific.’

‘On my father? What?’

‘How much do you know about Salim Dhar?’

‘Dhar?’ Marchant hesitated, trying to think clearly. ‘On the shortlist for masterminding last year’s UK bombings, but no evidence to link him directly. Always been more anti-American than British. It’s a while since I read his file.’

‘Educated in Delhi, the American school, then disappeared,’ Fielding said. ‘The Indians arrested him two years later in Kashmir, and banged him up in a detention site in Kerala, where he should be now. Only he isn’t.’

‘No?’

‘He was one of the prisoners released in the Bhuj hijack exchange at the end of last year.’

It wasn’t his region, but Marchant knew the incident had been an almost exact copy of the Indian Airlines hijacking at Kandahar in 1999. Then, Omar Sheikh had been released, amid much international condemnation. It was never made public who was freed at Bhuj.

‘AQ must have rated him,’ Marchant said, wondering where his father fitted in.

‘We had Dhar down as a small-time terrorist until Bhuj. They wanted something spectacular in return for his freedom. Within a month, Dhar was launching RPGs into the US compound in Delhi.’

Marchant had read about the attack, in the blur of grief. It had taken place just after his father had died, before the funeral. Nine US Marines had been killed.

‘What’s this got to do with my father?’

Fielding paused before answering, as if in two minds whether to proceed. ‘The Americans would very much like to find Salim Dhar. After Delhi, he went on to attack their compound in Islamabad, killing six more US Marines And now the CIA has established that a senior-ranking officer from MI6 visited Dhar in Kerala shortly before he was released in the hostage exchange.’

Marchant looked up. ‘And they think it was my father?’

‘They’re working on a theory that it was, yes. I’m sorry. There’s no official record of any visits. I’ve checked all the logbooks, many times.’

Marchant didn’t know what to think. It wouldn’t be unusual for the local station head from Chennai, say, to bluff his way into seeing someone like Dhar, but it would be extremely unorthodox for the Chief of MI6 to make an undeclared visit from London.

‘In the context of MI5’s own inquiries, I’m afraid it doesn’t look good,’ Fielding added. ‘There are those who are convinced that Dhar masterminded the British bombings, despite his preference for killing Americans.’

‘What do you think?’ Marchant asked. ‘You knew my dad better than most.’

Fielding stopped and turned to Marchant. ‘He was under a lot of pressure last year to clean up MI6’s act. The talk at the time, remember, was all about an inside job, infiltration at the highest level by terrorists with some sort of South Indian connection. Even so, why talk to Dhar personally?’

‘Because he couldn’t trust anyone else?’ Marchant offered. For whatever reason, he knew that it must have been an act of desperation on his father’s part.

‘The good news is that details of this visit haven’t crossed Bancroft’s desk yet, and they might never,’ Fielding said. ‘His job was to draw a line under your father’s departure, not to open the whole affair up again. He’ll need to be sure of the evidence before presenting it to the JIC, and there isn’t a lot at the moment.’

‘Is there any?’

‘Dhar’s jailer, the local police chief in Kerala. Someone blackmailed him to gain access to Dhar. It had all the hallmarks of an old-school sting.’

‘Moscow rules?’

‘Textbook. Indian intelligence found the compromising photos hidden in the policeman’s desk drawer. They were taken with one of our cameras. An old Leica.’ He paused. ‘The last time it was checked out was in Berlin, early 1980s. Your father never returned it.’

7

Marchant knew that someone was in his room as he walked up the worn wooden stairs of the safe house. It was one of those intuitive things they couldn’t teach at the Fort. After Fielding had dropped him off on his way back to London, Marchant had checked in with his two babysitters, who were watching porn in the small sitting room. They had hardly acknowledged his return, so he wasn’t overly concerned as he turned the handle on the bedroom door. Besides, he could already smell Leila’s perfume.

‘Dan,’ she said, getting up from the corner of the bed, where a newspaper was spread out across the covers: two pages on the attempted marathon terrorist attack. ‘I was beginning to wonder what you were doing with the Vicar in the woods.’

They made love slowly, their limbs still tender after their morning on the streets of London.

‘A proper debrief,’ he smiled, as she slid his boxers off and eased on top of him.

Neither of them was ready to discuss what had happened at the marathon. When he had still been working they would meet up for snatched weekends whenever they could, in Berne, Seville, Dubrovnik, but never on their own patch. And they always had a rule of not talking about work, which meant they spent a lot of time making love, as they had little life beyond their jobs, only opening up to each other at the airport, minutes before they flew their separate ways. Today, though, would be different, they both knew that.

But first Marchant fell into a deep sleep, something he had rarely been able to do in recent months. His brain must have concluded that lying in a protected safe house in the depths of Wiltshire, with Leila by his side, was as secure an environment as he could hope for. Fielding had authorised her visit, she said, which added to the sense of sanctuary.

When he awoke, he felt less rested than he had hoped. No nightmares, but a nagging memory of Leila’s hot tears, felt faintly through the layers of tiredness that had enveloped his aching limbs. He sat up, troubled that he had been unable to respond. Leila was taking a shower. The bathroom door was open, and from where he was lying he could see the brown haze of her breasts, a fuzz of pubic hair, blurred by the steamy glass of the shower cubicle.

As she tilted her head back, smoothing her long hair in the jet of water, he remembered the first time he saw her, when they were both waiting to be interviewed at Carlton Gardens in London. There had been a mix-up over times, and he had sat next to her in the reception, suspecting she was there for the same reason as him, but unable to ask. Instead they had spoken with agonising formality about the weather, the architecture, anything but the one subject that was occupying both their minds.

When they had met again, on their first day of training at the Fort in Gosport, there had been a palpable frisson between them. The freedom to talk about whatever they liked was intoxicating. An instructor asked all of them to stand up and introduce themselves in turn. (MI6 was no different from the rest when it came to toe-curling corporate practices.) Leila spoke first in English, and then briefly in fluent Farsi, explaining that her father was an Englishman who worked as an engineer in the oil and natural gas industry. He had met and married her mother, a Bahá’í Iranian and university lecturer, while posted to Tehran. After the Revolution in 1979, they had fled to Britain, along with many other Bahá’ís, hounded out by the Revolutionary Guard, who had no time for unrecognised religious minorities.

Leila was born and brought up in Hertfordshire by her mother, while her father worked in various jobs around the Gulf, sometimes joined by his family. Her earliest childhood memories were of the fifty-degree heat in Doha. When she was eight, they all went to live in Houston for two years. For as long as the Ayatollahs ruled, however, there was never a chance of returning to Tehran, because the Bahá’ís remained enemies of an Islamic state that continued to persecute them.

She told the room, in English, how she had applied to the Service in her last year at Oxford, after the master of her college, a former Chief (Stephen Marchant’s predecessor), had invited her for dinner. She feared the worst, not convinced she wanted to join an organisation that still seemed to recruit over a glass of Oxbridge Amontillado, but was surprised by his lack of pomposity, and by the vibrant mix of the four other young people who had been asked along to the same dinner. Only one of them was white, a demographic that was reflected in the room of aspiring spies that day at the Fort. It reminded her of the time she had visited the BBC’s World Service at Bush House.

‘Naturally suspicious, I went back to my room after dinner and sat up all night reading the website, about how people from ethnically diverse backgrounds would be welcome at MI6. I knew MI5 was recruiting multi-racially, but I thought the Service was the last bastion of the white, middle-class, safari-suit-wearing male. People like Daniel here.’ Laughter filled the room. ‘There was a catch, though, as we all know: you had to have at least one British parent. Luckily, my mother always had a thing about English men.’ More laughter. ‘The vetting takes an age, though, didn’t you find? They interviewed my mother for weeks. It must have been the shisha pipe she kept offering round.’

‘Have you ever been back to Iran?’ the instructor asked. He was the only one not laughing.

‘Back? I never lived there.’

‘It must have sometimes felt like home, though,’ the instructor continued. The room’s relaxed atmosphere tensed.

‘I went there once, in my year off,’ she said, fixing the instructor’s eye. ‘I assume everyone here was asked the same question in their first interview, whether they had ever persuaded someone to do something illegal. Well, I told them about my trip to Iran, how I talked a guard on the Turkmenistan border into letting me across to visit the rose harvest in Ghamsar for my PhD on perfume. The gardens were beautiful. I’ll never forget–whole families picking roses in the dawn mist, the dew still wet on the scented petals.’

Marchant had spoken next, knowing that he could never match Leila for presence. Her sassy smile, the sexual poise, that worldly, cosmopolitan voice: sorted rather than arrogant. He explained that he had grown up abroad, moving from one embassy to another around the world until he had been packed off aged thirteen to a boarding school in Wiltshire. He had been told to be upfront about his father, who had recently taken over as Chief, so he joked about keeping it in the family. ‘Spies are like undertakers, they run in families,’ he continued. ‘And I’m in good company, I guess. Kim Philby’s father, St John Philby, had been a senior member of the Service.’ It was a quip he later regretted.

‘After Cambridge, I worked for a couple of years as a hard-up foreign correspondent, stringing from Africa for various British broadsheets and drinking too much cheap Scotch. I landed some of my best stories, including a splash about Gaddafi, thanks to a contact at the High Commission in Nairobi. It was only later that I discovered he worked for I/OPS in Legoland. I was young and naïve at the time, and didn’t realise that it was his job to present the media with stories that helped the national cause. It was on his advice that I eventually returned to London to apply.’

He looked around at his new colleagues, gauging how honest he should be. The room had fallen awkwardly silent. ‘I was in a bad way, to be honest. Rudderless. Broke. You know what hacks are like. There were also a few personal issues that needed resolving.’ He paused again, deciding not to mention his brother. ‘The bloke from I/OPS found me in downtown Nairobi one night, worse for wear. Told me to stop being in denial and apply. I’d always wanted to make my own way in life, not rely on my parents, my father, but I guess the family calling eventually proved too strong.’

Leila came back into the safe-house bedroom, a towel wrapped around her drying hair like a turban. ‘Remember that first day at the Fort, when we all had to stand up and speak?’ Marchant asked, putting on a cotton dressing gown.

‘Yes, why?’

‘We never did find out who was lying.’

After everyone had spoken, their instructor had announced that the life story of one person in the room was entirely false. They had each been told to write down who they thought it was, and why.

‘I don’t think it was any of us,’ Leila said. ‘The only one lying that day was the arsy instructor.’

‘It wasn’t you, then?’ Marchant asked.

‘Me? Is that who you wrote down?’

‘All that Bahá’í back-story. I’m amazed they let you in.’

‘It happens to be true, you cheeky sod,’ she said, kissing his forehead as he lay there on the bed, watching her pull on some knickers. ‘My mother’s an amazing woman. The only reason I made it to Cambridge. I actually found the vetting process very therapeutic, answering all those questions about her, learning more about the Bahá’í faith, her allegiance to Britain.’

‘Were the vetters worried, then?’

‘Not by the time they’d finished. She’d lived in Britain for twenty-five years.’

‘You never talk about her any more.’

Leila fell quiet. He remembered her tears again and reached up to her waist, gently pulling her down to sit beside him on the bed.

‘What is it?’ he asked quietly.

‘Nothing,’ she said, wiping beneath an eye with the back of her hand.

‘The marathon?’

‘No. It’s OK.’ She rested her head on his shoulder, trying not to lose control, taking comfort in his warmth.

The only time Marchant had ever seen Leila cry was when she had come off the phone to her mother in their early days of training at the Fort. She hadn’t wanted to talk about it. When he tried to raise the matter later, she had resisted.

‘Is it your mother?’ he asked. ‘Have you spoken to her recently?’

Leila remained in his arms. She had once told him that her mother often talked of returning to Iran one day. She wanted to be a widow amongst her own family, her people, and to care for her own, ageing mother. But Leila had told her that it was too risky for a Bahá’í to return to Iran while her religion was being systematically persecuted.

Instead, she had been admitted into a nursing home in Hertfordshire, after showing early signs of Alzheimer’s. Leila said that she was bitterly unhappy there, and was soon complaining of being badly treated by the staff, but it was impossible to prove anything or to work out how much was a result of her confused state of mind. Marchant had offered to accompany Leila on a visit, but she didn’t want him to form his only impression of her mother when she was not herself.

‘You did well yesterday, I hope Fielding told you that,’ Leila said, more together now, walking over to the dressing table. ‘You thwarted a twisted plan.’

‘I couldn’t have done it without your help,’ Marchant said, then paused. ‘Pradeep had a son. He showed me a photo.’

The events of the marathon were finally catching up with him, too. Leila sensed the change in his voice. She came back over to the bed and stroked his neck. ‘They were going to kill the boy if he didn’t go through with it,’ Marchant continued. ‘Do you think they did?’

‘He died trying to carry out his mission, and the London Marathon was cancelled for the first time in its history. Probably not.’

Leila had returned to her usual, unsentimental self. Marchant felt relief. Her professional manner put a distance between them, a reminder not to let her break his heart. He had been unsettled by her earlier display of emotion. It had made him want to talk more about the race, the incessant beeping of Pradeep’s GPS, how such an innocent sound could have announced both their deaths, the exhilarating feeling of being on an operation again, the surprising heaviness of Pradeep’s dead body in his arms. But her coolness now made him feel more detached from the events of yesterday. He knew it was the only way they had survived in their jobs.

‘Fielding also talked about my father,’ Marchant said, raising and lowering his aching limbs. ‘My legs are killing me.’

‘Anything new?’ Leila stood up and went back to the dressing table, where she started to dry her hair.

‘The Americans are leaning on Bancroft. Seems they might have something on him after all.’

‘The Americans?’ she said, turning to face him. ‘What’s it got to do with them?’

Marchant told her what Fielding had said, the pressure MI5 was putting on Lord Bancroft to identify his father as the mole, the Americans’ belief that he had met Salim Dhar before last year’s embassy bombings in Delhi and Islamabad.

‘I remember the Leica,’ Marchant continued. ‘It was like a museum piece, beautifully made. He showed it to me once, at Christmas, just after I’d been accepted by the Service.’ He paused. ‘I’m not helping your case, you know that. I think you should keep your distance for a while.’

She glanced at him in the mirror, her eyes flicking down his body. ‘I’m not going to stop screwing you because of MI5.’

‘I appreciate the loyalty, but it’s not going to do you any favours, that’s all I’m saying.’ He got up from the bed and stood behind Leila, cupping her bare breasts in his hands as they looked at their reflection. His chin rested on her shoulder. ‘If they can suspect my dad, they can suspect me, too.’

‘I thought the Vicar wanted you back,’ Leila said, turning her face sideways to kiss him. ‘Particularly after yesterday.’

‘He does, but it might not be up to him if Bancroft finds against my father.’

‘Your dad never really took to me, did he?’ Leila said, unpeeling herself from Marchant’s arms to apply some mascara.

‘That’s not true.’

‘That time when we went to your home for lunch in the country, he was very ill at ease with me. Almost rude.’

‘He was wary of all my girlfriends, suspicious of women generally. Two boys, you see, no daughters. And a distant wife.’

‘Can’t say it runs in the family.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The Wariness of Women gene. I’m not sure he passed it on.’ She smiled at him and he knew she was right, standing there in the evening light. He had never felt less wary of anyone in his life.