Dead Spy Running

by Jon Stock

  ‘It became an obsession for him, didn’t it?’ Carter continued. ‘Someone on the inside. Particularly after 9/11. But we were going the other way. Round them all up rather than recruit them. It’s why the Company grew so suspicious of MI6. We thought you’d fallen asleep at the switch. What were you all doing, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Finding the intelligence to justify your wars,’ Fielding said.

  ‘But you weren’t beating up the bullies. Americans are a very simple people at heart. Somebody hurts us, we want to hurt them back. Publicly. It’s not subtle. And we sometimes hurt back the wrong people. It also puts those of us who believe in more covert methods out of a job.’

  ‘Salim Dhar would never work for the Agency.’

  ‘I realise that.’

  ‘So why do you think you might be able to turn him?’

  ‘I don’t. But he might respond to a British approach.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You tell me. Stephen Marchant knew something.’ Fielding walked away from the window, one hand on the small of his back.

  ‘Do you mind if I lie down?’ he asked.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Carter said. He had heard about the Vicar’s back problems. ‘Lower lumbar?’

  ‘All over.’

  Carter watched as the Chief of MI6 calmly lay down on the floor of his dining-room suite, seemingly unaware of the figure he cut. Or perhaps he just didn’t care.

  ‘Do go on,’ Fielding said from the floor, but the wind had been taken from Carter’s sails. Had Fielding known what he was about to say?

  ‘Salim Dhar’s father worked in the American Embassy compound in the early 1980s,’ Carter continued, not sure where to address his comments. Looking down didn’t feel appropriate. ‘After he’d been sacked by your high commission. We’ve run some checks. It seems that someone was conduiting him a little bit of extra pocket money every month.’

  Carter became aware of some activity outside the dining room, where his lady in red was working late.

  ‘The money came via one State Bank of Travancore in South India,’ Carter continued. ‘At least, it was meant to look that way. Seems like the rupees might have started life as greenbacks in the Cayman Islands. Or maybe even sterling in London.’ He paused. ‘I’ve got only one question, Marcus. Why were the Brits paying a salary to Dhar’s father?’

  ‘The payments stopped in 2001,’ Fielding said calmly, his eyes closed.

  ‘Twenty-one years after he’d quit working for your high commission.’

  It should have been a bombshell, enough to make the British hand over Daniel Marchant, but the Vicar couldn’t have seemed less troubled.

  ‘We only discovered the payments ourselves a few days ago.’

  ‘Let’s hope it’s just you and me who know, then.’ Carter was suddenly annoyed that Fielding had managed to defuse his story by the simple ploy of lying on the floor. It had the effect of belittling everything he said. ‘I hate to think what Lord Bancroft would make of one of the world’s most wanted terrorists drawing down an MI6 salary.’

  ‘While you were funding a generation of mujahideen in Afghanistan.’

  ‘That was Spiro too, as it happens.’

  ‘We really don’t know where Daniel Marchant is,’ Fielding said. Outside the dining room, voices were getting more agitated.

  ‘We do.’

  ‘He needs to be left to find Salim Dhar. And with the greatest respect for your people’s tradecraft, he’s not going to do that with a ten-strong surveillance team on his case.’

  ‘I’m offering you a deal, Marcus. We keep quiet about the Cayman trust fund and let Marchant find Dhar, but when he does, we share the debrief.’

  ‘You’re assuming that Dhar will talk to him?’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  Carter knew that he was. MI6 must be staking everything on it. The discovery of the payments would have changed everything. Salim Dhar really might be one of theirs, one of Stephen Marchant’s most breathtakingly prescient signings. More likely he just got lucky. No one had seen Islamic terrorism coming in the 1980s. Dhar must have been a punt, one of the many people signed up by intelligence agencies around the world on the off-chance of coming good later. But in Dhar, Marchant had come up trumps, one of those breaks that happened once in a career. Would he have risked running him, though? Dhar’s track record of violence against the Americans would have made him a high-risk asset, particularly when the CIA was leading calls for Marchant to stand down as Chief.

  Carter paced around the room, finding it easier to look at Fielding’s long, supine figure from different angles. ‘You don’t have to tell me if it was Stephen Marchant who personally authorised those payments, but I’m working on a wild guess here that it was. I’m also jumping to the crazy conclusion that you don’t know if all that money was well invested or not, which god Dhar prays to at night. From a ringside seat, it doesn’t look too good.’

  Fielding’s eyes remained shut.

  ‘He has, however, only ever targeted Americans, which must give you people hope that he has the good manners not to bite the hand that fed him for the first twenty-one years of his life. And if that’s the case, there’s only one person he might possibly trust to run him: Stephen Marchant’s son, Daniel. We want some of that, Marcus. Salim Dhar could be the best penetration of AQ the West has ever had.’

  There was a pause, Carter’s words hanging in the air, followed by a knock on the dining-room door.

  ‘Come,’ Fielding called out.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Anne Norman began, glancing at Carter, then back to her boss on the floor. ‘We’ve just had Delhi station on the line. There’s been a bomb at the Gymkhana Club.’

  30

  Leila took it as a very public expression of gratitude that the CIA had assigned her to its team in Delhi who were liaising with the Secret Service in advance of the US President’s visit to the city. One of the agents had heard first-hand from a colleague at the London embassy about her role during the London Marathon, an event that seemed to have sealed her reputation as a player. ‘Though Turner Munroe never did get his fancy running watch back,’ he had joked on her arrival in Delhi that morning. ‘Good to have you on board.’

  Neither side was calling it a defection, but relations had sunk so low between Britain’s and America’s intelligence communities that Leila had been told to treat officers from MI6’s Delhi station with the same caution as she would those from more traditionally hostile countries such as Iran and Russia. The paperwork called it a three-month exchange, but she knew there was no chance of her ever working – or living – in Britain again. She told herself that she had always preferred life abroad, and it was true that the sense of not being rooted anywhere was not a new one.

  As she looked out of her room in the American Embassy, taking in the yellow of the laburnum trees lining the roads of Chanakyapuri, she forced herself not to think about Daniel, whether they would ever see each other again. For the past two years she had known that the day would come when she would have to confront the choices she had made in her life. Those choices had become much harder in recent months, but that day had not arrived. Not yet. For the time being she was able to keep his photo face-downwards on the table, to consign their life together to another place, where it could be guarded by the traditional sentinels of the spy’s conscience: if you live the lie, expect to be deceived, just as he had warned.

  In those rare moments when her guard did drop, she could console herself that honesty of a kind had played its part, despite the deceptions. Her mother’s welfare had always been paramount in her life. She just wished she had been asked to get close to someone else, rather than a man she was struggling not to fall in love with.

  Earlier that day, after an introductory meeting with her new colleagues, she had slipped out of the embassy compound and walked through the 40-degree heat of the May morning to a taxi rank. She had seen a public phone booth there when her car from the airport had driven past at dawn. As she dialled the number in
Tehran, she glanced across at the taxi drivers, lying on string charpoys in the shade of a large canvas canopy, limbs hung listlessly as they listened to All India Radio blaring out from a nearby car, its doors flung open.

  ‘Mama,’ she began. The line was faint. ‘It’s Leila. Things will be better soon.’

  But it wasn’t her mother’s voice that replied. ‘Your mother’s in hospital,’ a man said in Farsi. Leila’s stomach tightened. For the past year her mother had been in and out of the Mehr, a private hospital in Tehran, her treatment paid for by the Americans. Each time the doctors had prepared her for the worst. Normally, though, her neighbour had sent a text to tell her that she had been admitted to hospital.

  ‘Who is this?’ she asked. His voice sounded familiar.

  ‘A friend of the family,’ the man said. She could hear other male voices in the background. ‘She’s fine and, inshallah, will have the best treatment dollars can buy.’ The mocking tone was thinly disguised, his words addressed to the others in the room with him.

  ‘I want her looked after, that was always the deal,’ Leila said, trying not to raise her voice. A man outside the telephone booth glanced up at her. She knew she should be at her mother’s bedside, but that was impossible.

  ‘I will tell her you called,’ the voice said, then paused. ‘And that her health rests in your hands.’

  The sun was at its highest as she walked back towards the embassy. In the distance, an unseen nutseller was rattling his spoon rhythmically against a frying pan. Otherwise there was a stillness in the midday air. Even the traffic police at the junction near the embassy had retreated to the shade, where they snoozed on flimsy wooden chairs. She had never minded dry heat. It somehow made her feel closer to her mother, who she knew needed her now more than ever.

  She had just turned nine when she first sensed that all was not well between her parents. They were living in the expat community in Dubai, where her father was working, and he had come home late, as he often did. But this time she was awake. There had been a problem with the electricity in their apartment block – there was not enough power to run the air conditioning, and the sudden warmth had woken her. One of the staff had placed an old fan in the room and she lay there mesmerised by the way it turned as far as it could one way, before sweeping back in the other direction. But above its hum she gradually became aware of shouting downstairs, and then screaming, followed by slammed doors and silence.

  She had found her mother curled up in a corner of the kitchen, their Indian maid holding a bloodied cloth to her forehead. Her mother smiled weakly when she saw Leila, but the maid gestured crossly for her to go back upstairs.

  ‘It’s OK,’ her mother had said, beckoning Leila towards her. She walked tentatively across the kitchen and sat down beside her mother, watched anxiously by the maid. ‘It’s OK,’ her mother repeated, putting a shaking arm around Leila as the maid retreated.

  They must have stayed like that for most of the night, hunched together on the marble floor in the heat of a Dubai night, the weak yellow lights flickering. Her mother explained how her father was under a lot of stress at work and sometimes drank too much whisky, hoping that it would make him feel better. But it just made him angry, and when he was angry he wasn’t himself, and did silly things.

  In the years that followed, Leila and her mother learnt to be out of the way when he was not himself, but Leila knew that he continued to vent his whisky-fuelled fury on his wife. Not even a burqa could disguise the black eyes. Her father’s long hours and frequent trips abroad meant that she had always been closer to her mother than to him, but his violence bonded them further, uniting them in a mixture of shame and solidarity. She had never forgotten that night, the sight of her mother crying, and could never forgive her father, whose light in her life went out.

  All she could do now, slumped on the floor of her bare embassy room, was to fulfil her side of the deal and hope that the voices at the end of the phone in Tehran would honour theirs. But before she could think what that deal might bring, the evening stillness was split by a sound that she knew at once was not thunder.

  31

  Marchant felt the weight of a body lying on top of him, but he didn’t realise it was Uncle K until he tried to move out from under his heavy frame. Other people were stirring on the bar floor all around him. For a moment, in the dark silence, Marchant was back at the marketplace in Mogadishu. But then the moaning started, guttural cries of primitive pain, and he remembered the quicksilver shards dicing the air, the compression, the chilling cacophony of disintegrating glass.

  ‘Uncle K, are you OK?’ Marchant asked, trying to shut out the sweet smell of cauterised flesh. It was a smell he hated more than any other, one that had never left him. Now, five years later, the same nagging thoughts were suddenly back once again: could he have done more about the man at the bar?

  He was kneeling beside Uncle K now, checklisting his own body as he spoke. He put a hand briefly to his face, touching warm blood as he bent over the colonel. The old man’s features were still intact, the plump, putty-faced cheeks and pursed, rosebud mouth, but the angle of his lower body was too jack-knifed for a seventy-year-old.

  Marchant looked at the debris all around him, the lights torn from the ceiling, the upturned tables, shredded curtains. He saw a plastic bottle of mineral water on the floor, a few feet away from him. Reaching over, he dribbled some onto the colonel’s dusty lips, spitting grit out of his own mouth. Slowly, the colonel’s lips began to move. Marchant leant closer, cupping one hand behind his head.

  ‘You must go,’ the colonel whispered. ‘They will try to blame you for this.’

  ‘Who will?’

  But the colonel had lost consciousness again. Marchant put the bottle to his mouth, spilling water over his lips and chin. Blood was seeping now from the corner of his mouth. The colonel opened his eyes, coughing feebly.

  ‘You must go,’ he urged. ‘Om Beach, near Gokarna. Ask for…’ The next word was lost in the blood and saliva. ‘…brother Salim at the Namaste Café.’

  ‘Leila, I want you to get down to the club and slip inside the cordon, assuming the Delhi police have put one up. It’s usually a free-for-all at these things. They might do Golden Temples, but crime-scene golden hours? Give me a break.’

  A ripple of polite laughter moved around the room as Monk Johnson, head of the Presidential Protective Detail, addressed a room of ten officers, a mix of Secret Service and CIA. Behind him, a large TV screen was showing library footage from NDTV of the Gymkhana Club before the blast. Cameras had yet to reach the scene. Leila had been tempted to head out into the Delhi evening as soon as she heard the explosion, but she had been summoned to the meeting within minutes. The station was already on a state of high alert: in seventy-two hours the new President of the United States would be flying in to Palam military airbase, five miles from Delhi, as part of his four-country tour of South Asia.

  ‘I’ve just come off the phone to the Director of the Secret Service,’ Johnson continued. ‘He says POTUS is adamant the tour is still on. The best we can do is buy ourselves a little time: the Islamabad leg could be brought forward, but the Indians won’t like it – they’ve insisted all along that they go first. They tested their nukes before Pakistan, and they want to make damn sure they’re the first to shake the new President’s hand.’

  ‘You’re assuming this is a Pak thing, right?’ asked David Baldwin, head of the CIA’s Delhi station. He was sitting behind Leila.

  ‘You tell us. It’s got to be an option. The Gymkhana Club is a colonial hangover, full of army brass.’

  ‘First up is Salim Dhar. General Casey was due to go there tonight, but cancelled.’

  ‘Thank God,’ Johnson said.

  ‘Vivek?’ Baldwin said, ignoring Johnson.

  ‘Dhar’s exact location on the grid is still to be confirmed, sir,’ Vivek Kumar said, ‘but it has all his hallmarks, particularly if Casey was the target.’

  Leila had already been introduced
to Kumar as a fellow newcomer. One of the Agency’s brightest analysts, he had been flown in from Langley earlier in the week, and knew more than anyone about Salim Dhar. He knew all about Daniel Marchant, too. Marchant, he said, had left Poland and was already somewhere in India.

  ‘Widespread military collateral, high-profile US target,’ Kumar continued. ‘We can’t rule out Daniel Marchant either. Right now, that whole situation’s a little complicated. He’s just become the subject of an ongoing level-five covert run by Clandestine, Europe.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Baldwin said, glancing at Leila. ‘I’m speaking to Alan Carter in ten.’

  ‘OK, let’s re-meet in two hours,’ Johnson said. ‘Unless another bomb goes off. What’s wrong with Texas? Why can’t POTUS go there and shake a few hands?’

  Marchant didn’t know who he was fleeing from as he picked his way through the wreckage of the bar and climbed out of a large broken window. It went against every instinct to leave Colonel K, but there had been an urgency to his voice that persuaded Marchant to leave.

  He stumbled across the lawn, still dazed, glancing back at the wounded building, curtains lolling from its windows like lacerated tongues. No one could blame him. The Gymkhana Club reception would confirm that a respected Indian colonel had signed him in. But Uncle K was an old friend of his father. He was also travelling as David Marlowe, not Daniel Marchant. Uncle K was right. Daniel was on the run, and once his presence at the club had been discovered, his name would be in the frame. If he could be blamed for the marathon, they would try to pin this one on him too. He thought of the look the man at the bar had given him, purposefully catching his eye. Who was he? Who had sent him?

  Marchant had walked through an unmanned side gate and was now on a main road, but the traffic was not as noisy as it should have been. He could barely hear a passing goods lorry, its horn eerily muted. It was then that he realised his ears were resonating with a high-pitched tone that didn’t stop when he shook his head. He looked back towards the club building again, black smoke threading up into the Delhi sky. A rickshaw slowed, its driver eyeing him with a mixture of hope and wariness. Marchant slumped into the back seat and asked for Gokarna.