by Jon Stock
For a moment at the airport, Marchant thought the Indians had been tipped off about his arrival, but then he discovered the reason for the heightened security. According to a newspaper stand, the US President was due to arrive in Delhi in four days’ time. Marchant felt a surge of unease at the news, at the thought of Salim Dhar being in the same country at the same time. The visit was part of a four-country tour of the subcontinent. Arms deals would be signed between Washington and Delhi in a bid to shore up India’s defences against China.
The capital had set about cleaning its streets and whitewashing its walls in febrile anticipation of the visit. The road from the airport to the Maurya Hotel, where the President’s entourage would be staying, was being transformed into a corridor of cleanliness. The city of Agra was also sprucing itself up. Thousands of litres of cheap perfume had been reportedly emptied into the Jamuna river, beside the Taj Mahal, in an effort to reduce the smell of the city’s effluent. Tigers, too, had been corralled into a corner of Ranthambore wildlife sanctuary to ensure a presidential sighting. Marchant knew he did not have long to find Dhar.
After collecting his tatty rucksack from the luggage carousel, Marchant had taken a deep breath and walked out of the arrivals hall into a wall of heat, knowing that, as a backpacker, he wouldn’t have the budget for a taxi. (The thousand US dollars given to him by Hugo Prentice was carefully split between his money belt and a purse strapped to his shin beneath his cotton trousers.)
A horde of shouting people, mostly in white kurta pyjamas, had jostled for his custom, tugging at his backpack, calling out snatches of German, French and Italian as well as English. He had eventually settled on a Sikh auto-rickshaw driver, for no other reason than that he was bigger and more dignified-looking than his rivals. After an early, unpromising stop for fuel, the driver smiled in the wonky rear-view mirror and drove down the main highway into New Delhi, turning to make inaudible remarks about American presidents.
On either side of the road, road sweepers pushed their straw brushes idly in the heat while painters daubed thick yellow emulsion on the railings that ran down the central reservation, removing shirts and saris that had been hung there to dry. Occasionally, parts of the road itself had been cordoned off for potholes to be filled and new tarmac laid, tribal women trailing damp rags on the big wheels of the steamrollers to keep them moist.
The rickshaw took Marchant all the way to Pahaganj, north of Connaught Place, where his Rough Guide promised cheap accommodation and the company of other backpackers. The Hare Krishna guesthouse wasn’t exactly the Oki Doki, but with its permit room (‘for quenching thirst’) and rooftop restaurant overlooking the bazaar, it was perfect for David Marlowe. His flight from Poland, with a four-hour change at Dubai, had been tiring, and he slept deeply, despite the heat of the night and the rhythmic rattle of the ceiling fan.
Now, as he watched an orange sun set behind Qutb Minar, he knew his search for Salim Dhar must begin. He was wearing the least tatty clothes he could find in the rucksack, and he hoped that the taxi, an extravagance for David Marlowe, would not attract attention when he arrived at the Gymkhana Club.
As he was driven into town, the flow of traffic was busy on the other side of the road as commuters streamed out of the scrubbed-up city towards the suburbs. The sight of an elephant, ambling along in the slow lane, brought back memories of childhood birthdays at the high commission, always shared with Sebastian. He turned back to look at the animal, admiring the unrushed fall of its padded feet. An elephant used to be obligatory at expat parties, a telephone number for bookings written in chalk between its eyes. Children would be lifted up onto the unsteady palanquins to ride around the commission compound, thrilled and scared by the muscular sashay of their mount’s huge haunches.
Marchant remembered the time he fell out of love with the birthday elephant, or at least with the mahouts who brought them up from the slums by the river. He and Sebastian were sitting at the front of a gaggle of children, directly behind the mahout, when he saw the metal spike that had been driven deep into the animal’s thick and bloodied neck. The mahout twisted the spike whenever he barked an order, desperate to assert his waning authority over the animal.
The Gymkhana Club felt as if it had been waning for the past hundred years. A chowkidar at the gate searched under the car with a mirror before waving them on. Marchant told the driver to wait for him in the car park to the side of the whitewashed Lutyens building, explaining that he might be back in five minutes, or maybe an hour. ‘Koi baat nay,’ he replied, rocking his head gently from side to side before driving off.
Marchant paused beneath the large porch, catching the perfume of bougainvillea tumbling over the nearby perimeter wall. Above him, crows were roosting, their cries faintly eerie. He hadn’t been here before, but his father often used to talk about the place. Under British rule it had been known as the Imperial Gymkhana Club, but the Imperial had been dropped after 1947, and now its tennis courts, Lady Willingdon swimming pool, library and bridge drives were for the exclusive use of Delhi’s social elite, many of whom had waited thirty years to become a member.
Non-Indian guests were welcome, but Marchant remembered his father telling him of an unsettling custom at the bar that if a ‘Britisher’ bought a round of drinks, he couldn’t expect the favour to be returned. Marchant’s father had liked his Kalyani Black Label beer, but had found that the only way to quench his thirst was to keep standing rounds for everyone. Buying a drink solely for himself would have caused offence, and given that British diplomats often ventured to the Gymkhana Club to gauge the military’s current level of hostility towards neighbouring Pakistan, a subject about which they were especially prickly, it was important to keep the members onside.
‘I’ve come to talk to Kailash Malhotra,’ Marchant said to the khaki-uniformed man at the colonnaded reception.
‘Colonel Malhotra?’ the man checked him.
Marchant nodded, taking in the colonial setting – high ceilings, the whiff of floor polish, a sign saying that ‘bush’ shirts were prohibited – as the man looked through a list on a clipboard. Marchant could detect cigar smoke coming from somewhere, and it took him a few moments to realise that a distant clinking sound was the noise of billiard balls colliding. Marchant would be back at his Wiltshire boarding school if he smelt boiled cabbage for dinner.
‘He’s playing bridge in the card room,’ the man said finally.
‘I thought they didn’t get underway until eight.’ Marchant had made a call earlier.
The man looked at Marchant’s crumpled shirt for a moment, unable to conceal his disdain, then glanced at a large clock on the wall to his right. ‘Right now they are having sundowners in the bar. Is he expecting you?’
‘Yes. Could you tell him David Marlowe’s here?’
Ten minutes later, Marchant was sitting opposite Colonel Malhotra in a corner of the bar, sipping a ‘burra peg’ of Chivas Regal.
‘When you were a naughty little boy – my God, you were so naughty – you used to call me “uncle”,’ the colonel said, laughing, one hand patting Marchant’s knee. ‘You can still call me uncle. Uncle K. It’s the name your dear father always used.’
Marchant had only very distant memories of Uncle K: watching Mother India and other old Hindi movies on a Sunday afternoon at his house, where he and Sebastian would eat pistachio kulfi and be told off by their mother for complaining that it didn’t taste like real ice cream. Uncle K used to sing along to all the songs, tears often streaming down his face. Afterwards, he would retire with Marchant’s father to another part of the house and talk in low voices while his mother fielded the children.
When Monika had mentioned the name Malhotra at the airport, he couldn’t be certain it was the Uncle K of his early childhood. It was only when the colonel had walked towards him in reception, open-armed, that Marchant knew for sure it was the same man. Now, as they talked, more memories came back: the discreet acceptance of a gift of Scotch brought over from Britain; the bl
underbuss on the wall, once used for shooting tigers; the touché shaking of hands after cracking a gag; Uncle K’s avuncular kindness when Sebastian was killed.
‘Your father was very keen that you didn’t grow up resenting India because of the traffic accident,’ he said. ‘It could have happened anywhere.’
‘He did a good job. It’s great to be back.’
Marchant didn’t tell him that he hadn’t visited Delhi since they had left as a grieving family twenty years ago. He had backpacked through India in his year off, paving the way for David Marlowe, but he had made a point of travelling through the south, and then up into the Himalayas, consciously bypassing Delhi.
‘I fear your mother never got back her health, though,’ Uncle K said.
‘No,’ Marchant replied, but he was no longer listening. His attention had been distracted by a man who had walked up to the bar, briefcase in hand.
‘I still feel bad about your father’s funeral. It just wasn’t possible.’
‘No. Can we talk about our mutual friend?’ Marchant asked, turning back to Uncle K. ‘We might not have much time.’
‘Tell me what you want to know.’
‘Why did my father visit him?’
Uncle K paused, glancing around the bar. ‘I tried to recruit him once, a couple of years back. I was called out of retirement especially, told the whole thing was deniable. There was some sympathy there, but his hatred of America? It was too much. We had to drop him.’
‘Was my father trying to recruit him too?’
Uncle K lost his smile. ‘There’s something else you should know about Salim Dhar, but I’m not the person to tell you. It can only come from him.’
Marchant glanced again at the man at the bar, who was looking back at them. He was still holding his briefcase, gripping the handle too tightly.
‘Can you show me around this place?’ Marchant asked the colonel, interrupting him.
‘What, now?’
‘I need a bit of fresh air.’ He gestured at the table next to him, where a brigadier was drawing on a large cigar.
‘Of course,’ Malhotra said, picking up on Marchant’s anxiety. ‘It’s safe to talk here, I know them all,’ he joked, nodding at the brigadier as he rose from his chair. ‘They’re all far too busy discussing today’s hodgepodge with the cricket to listen to us. But why not? Let me show you round.’
Marchant knew they were too late when the man at the bar looked at them again. All he had time to do was duck.
29
It was Alan Carter’s first visit to Legoland, but after the events in Poland, he knew it wouldn’t be his last. Spiro had been recalled to Langley after he lost Daniel Marchant. The DCIA was furious. Carter had taken over, fast-tracked to the head of the National Clandestine Service, Europe. It was a personal success for him, but he also knew it was a victory for the new thinking that was sweeping through the Company as it tried to refocus on its core business of espionage, following the intelligence disasters of 9/11 and Iraq.
Carter had been present at the interrogation of KSM, and also of Zayn Abu Zubaida, the first of the big-name AQ detainees to be dunked. But waterboarding wasn’t his style. Nor were the freelance deniables who made up the rendition teams. Carter had joined the Agency with a vulpine belief in espionage, that the best way to beat the enemy was to infiltrate its leadership, rather than drown a few hoods. Spiro used to tell him not to worry, that renditions should be judged not by whether they were right or wrong, but by what the President thought. And their former President had preferred not to know.
So when the backlash came, as Carter knew it would, he didn’t feel so bad about having leaked details of Stare Kiejkuty to a few handpicked Washington journalists. And now, with a new President in office, he had no regrets at all about hastening Spiro’s demise. Langley might have spared him if Carter had stopped Marchant’s departure on an international flight out of Frederic Chopin airport. But Carter had said nothing, and Spiro sank.
Instead, he rang the CIA’s station head in Delhi, then put in a call to Langley, recommending that Marchant was followed rather than pulled in when he reached India. Langley told him to talk to the Vicar. It was Carter’s belief that the renegade MI6 officer would try to make contact with Salim Dhar, a far bigger prize for the CIA than Marchant. Then they could both be brought in; but he wouldn’t tell Fielding that, not yet.
‘We’re not interested in Daniel Marchant,’ Carter said, sipping a Bourbon. He was sitting opposite an upright Marcus Fielding in the dining room that adjoined the Vicar’s spacious office. The place had style, he thought, more than he would have guessed from its unpromising location on a busy traffic junction. And he began to understand why they called Fielding the Vicar. Music was playing quietly in the background somewhere: Bach, maybe his second Brandenburg concerto. He even had his own butler, which struck him as very English (even if the butler wasn’t), not to mention a fifty-something PA who wore red pantyhose.
‘Spiro wanted Daniel Marchant’s balls,’ Fielding said. ‘Is he suspended, or just taking a long holiday?’
‘Let’s call it a blood substitution.’
‘It’s never easy when one of your players is withdrawn from the field.’
Carter looked at him for a moment. ‘Marchant was good, I know that. It wouldn’t have been my call.’
‘Nor mine. What about Leila? Was that Spiro too? Did he recruit her personally?’
‘Of course. And I have similar regrets about her.’
‘Don’t we all. Where is she now?’
‘New Delhi station.’
‘I thought she was Spiro’s asset. The Agency’s planning on keeping her, then?’
‘She may prove useful if Marchant forgets the script.’
‘I’m assuming Spiro asked her to set Marchant up,’ Fielding said. ‘Handing him his old TETRA phone during the race.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know the exact details of her recruitment or her role within the Agency, Marcus. Let’s just say her debrief with Spiro after the marathon included some very leading questions.’
‘She told him what he wanted to hear, in other words. That Daniel was as guilty as his father.’ Fielding paused. ‘For the record, who made the first move? Spiro or Leila?’
Carter had been told to take the rap for the Leila operation, but he hadn’t expected someone so apparently cerebral as Fielding to come over all emotional. He was starting to ask questions a husband would put to his cheating wife.
‘Spiro was on the lookout for someone close to Daniel Marchant,’ he said, hoping to move on.
‘Moscow rules?’
‘Money. Her mother wasn’t in the best of health, needed expensive medication. And we’re very keen to support people like Leila’s mother. She’s a Bahá’í, one of the persecuted good guys in Iran.’
‘And you trust Leila?’
‘You obviously did. I’ve read the reports. Copper-bottomed. Only problem was, your vetters never figured her mother had moved back to Iran. Of course Leila should have told you, but she feared for her job. Spiro found out, used it as leverage when he recruited her.’
Carter didn’t want to fall out with Fielding. That wasn’t why he had come. He’d been keen to meet a man who enjoyed something approaching the status of a legend at Langley. Fielding was a very different kind of spy from Stephen Marchant. A fellow believer in espionage, he had the intellectual arrogance shared by all the MI6 officers Carter had ever met, but he had unquestionable form, too: Fielding had helped them to talk Muammar Gaddafi out of his nuclear ambitions, drawing on his enviable knowledge of the Arab world to defuse a delicate situation. If only their previous President had deployed the same tactics with Saddam Hussein.
‘Does our profession ever surprise you, Alan?’ Fielding asked. He had stood up from the table, and was now looking out of the buttressed bay window, his back to Carter. A couple of staff were taking a cigarette break on the open terrace below, the Union flag billowing above them.
‘Every day
.’
‘It often appalled Stephen. He despised the people he turned, the people who made his reputation. Loyalty was something he valued higher than anything, which made traitors the lowest of the low, even if they were betraying the enemy.’
Carter stood up to join Fielding at the window. Outside, in the dark London night, the lights of a passing party boat sparkled on the Thames. It was nearly midnight. Legoland, like Langley, never slept. Up on the roof, the array of aerials and satellite dishes Carter had seen from Vauxhall Bridge linked the building with every time zone in the world.
‘Shall I tell you why I think Stephen took that flight to Kerala?’ Carter asked.
‘Please.’
‘He went out there because I think in Salim Dhar he saw what we’re all after: a senior AQ operative who might just be turned. Sure, we could have brought him in, knocked him about a bit in a remote detention site, found out what he did or didn’t know on the waterboard. That’s what Spiro wanted. But Stephen Marchant had other ideas.’
‘To be honest, I think he just wanted a name – the name of the mole in MI6 who had been making his life a misery.’
‘Come on, Marcus, he wanted much more, you know that. He wanted his own man high up in AQ.’
Carter had read all the files on Stephen Marchant, and knew that one of his biggest regrets was that MI6 had never infiltrated Al Qaeda on his watch. He was a Chief, after all, who had built a brilliant career on penetrating Dzerzhinsky Square, in the days when intelligence officers didn’t dunk the enemy, they blackmailed them with sordid photographs taken in seedy motel rooms. Far more civilised.