by Jon Stock
No, but you look like her, Fielding thought. Has anyone ever told you? That in a certain light, your hair falls over your eyes in a way that would have confused even your mothers.
‘How did you get on with Daniel Marchant in Morocco?’
‘Getting along might be stretching it. I don’t blame him. I should have done more to stop Abdul Aziz.’
‘Daniel’s coming back to London today. Quite a toothache, I gather. With respect, can you give me one good reason why he would want to work with you?’
‘Listen, we were wrong about Salim Dhar, and we’ve got six dead Marines to prove it. I don’t know what happened in the High Atlas, but I think the DCIA now accepts that the only person who might be capable of finding Dhar is Daniel Marchant. And to that end, I’m here to help him, to help you.’
‘I suppose we don’t really see your arrival in London in terms of international aid. From where we stand, all the help would seem to be coming from our side. I’m not quite clear what you can give us in return.’
‘I think our Delhi station has just found Dhar’s mother.’
‘Where?’ Fielding struggled not to let his interest show. Dhar had always been very close to his mother, who had been identified by MI6’s profilers as a possible weakness. Once it became clear that it was her son who had tried to assassinate the US President in Delhi, she had gone into hiding, unlike her husband, who had very publicly disowned his wife and son, and reiterated his love of all things American.
‘They’ve traced her to a temple in south India. Madurai. Given your progress with Dhar and our own catastrophic failure, Langley would like it to be a joint operation. They’re closing in on her now.’
40
Marchant walked through arrivals, instinctively checking for cameras, scanning the Heathrow crowds. Prentice was a few yards behind. He had insisted on staying with him after he had picked him up from the far end of the beach, three miles from the resort. He had driven him to Cagliari airport, sat next to him on the plane, made sure no one was offering upgrades. Fielding’s orders. Prentice wasn’t to leave him on his own until he was safely in his Pimlico flat. Marchant couldn’t complain. He’d messed up in Morocco, failed to leave the country under snap cover.
Marchant spotted Monika a moment before she began waving in his direction. There was little that gave her away as the Polish intelligence officer who had helped him to flee Warsaw more than a year ago, sharing joints and her bed with him, all in the line of duty. The gipsy skirt had been replaced by a jacket and jeans, the braided hair disciplined by a tight bun, but she still had the same carefree gait. Marchant had been travelling under the name of David Marlowe at the time, and he knew that she wasn’t really called Monika, but he would always remember her as that, the woman in the hippy hostel with a flower in her hair.
He was about to wave back, surprised by the sudden quickening of his pulse, but then he realised that she wasn’t looking at him.
‘Recognise her?’ Prentice asked, coming up on Marchant’s shoulder with a grin. The next moment, Prentice and Monika were kissing each other across the barrier. Marchant couldn’t believe it was jealousy that made him turn away. He and Monika had both been operating under cover stories when they had met in Poland. He had been on the run from the CIA, she was helping him escape: each living a lie, doing their job.
‘Hello, Daniel,’ Monika said, breaking away from Prentice to give him a kiss on both cheeks. He remembered her smell as their skin brushed, and he wondered for a second if it had been more than duty in Warsaw. ‘I’m sorry about Leila,’ she added more quietly.
‘Do I still call you Monika?’
‘Hey, why not?’
Because that’s not your name, Marchant thought, but he kept silent. Her English was almost perfect, better than when they had met in Poland. And her smile was still too big, her full lips out of proportion with her petite body. She was no more than twenty-five, young enough to be Prentice’s daughter. Marchant should have been pleased for him, an old family friend. But he wasn’t. Something wasn’t right.
‘Did I tell you?’ Prentice asked him when they were a few yards from the main exit. Monika had fallen behind a crowd of arrivals and was out of earshot.
‘What’s there to tell?’ Marchant said, trying to play things down.
‘That I’m sleeping with the enemy.’
‘Were you in Warsaw?’
‘You know me better than that.’
Marchant didn’t miss the sarcasm. Relationships within MI6 weren’t unusual, but they weren’t encouraged, and they seldom ended happily. ‘Don’t poke the payroll’ — it had been one of Prentice’s first bits of advice to Marchant when he had arrived at Legoland. Seeing someone from another intelligence agency was more complicated, but clearly not impossible, particularly for an agent as experienced as Prentice.
‘Last time I checked, Poland was an ally,’ Marchant said.
‘Let’s just say it’s easier now I’m back in London. Listen, sorry to be neckie, but can you get yourself to Pimlico on your own? It will buy me some time with the office. You know how it is. She’s only over here for a few days.’
Monika was standing beside Prentice now, an arm through his, tugging him away. She was playing the sexually outgoing coquette, just as she had with him.
‘Of course I bloody can.’ Marchant had had enough of being chaperoned. And he needed a drink.
‘Is everything OK?’ Monika asked him. He searched her eyes, but he no longer knew what he was looking for, or why he even cared. Was this the real Monika? Screwing an old rake like Prentice? She had never once been herself with him in Poland, not even at the airport, when he hoped their masks might have finally slipped. For a moment, Marchant wondered if he would ever know anyone properly.
‘Everything’s fine,’ he said. ‘I never got the chance to thank you.’
And with that he lost himself in the crowds. He was happy to have left Prentice behind, but by the time he reached the escalator down to the Underground ticket hall he was aware that someone else was following him. When he reached the bottom, he looked at his watch and took the elevator back up again, scanning the faces of the people coming down. Most were looking ahead, but a tall man in a beaten leather jacket had his face turned away, taking too much interest in the electronic advertising posters. If it wasn’t Valentin from Sardinia, he had a twin in London. Hit back hard, Prentice had said.
The thought of Valentin following him to Britain was irritating. Marchant had expected him to have been arrested at the resort in Sardinia and flown back to Russia in disgrace for exposing his leader’s sexual preferences to the world, but here he was, about to follow him home to Pimlico.
Marchant turned and took the elevator back down again. The Russian was now at platform level, peeling off left to the westbound platform. Marchant just had time to clock his shoes: fashionably long with narrowed, flat toes. ‘Look at the footwear,’ his father had always told him. It was something he had never forgotten, whether it was colleagues in Legoland or targets in the field. Often it was the one thing that they failed to change when outfits were swapped, snap covers adopted in a hurry.
By the time Marchant had reached the bottom of the escalator, there was no sign of the Russian. He tried to turn left, but the crowds were almost spilling onto the tracks. He had lost him. He pushed his way to the platform edge. First, he looked left down the long line of people waiting for a train, then to the right. Twenty yards away, a pair of shoes was sticking out beyond everyone else’s. He had found his man.
Marchant moved as quickly as he could through the crowds, feeling the warm wind of an approaching train on his face. Thirty seconds later, he was positioned behind the Russian. It was definitely Valentin. He must have decided to drop off his tail, suspecting that he had been spotted, and was now standing with his legs apart on the platform edge, trying to steady himself against the crush of people swarming in different directions.
A member of the station staff asked over the Tannoy fo
r people to move to the far end of the platform. He was unable to disguise his concern. The station was overcrowding. Marchant glanced at the tourists around him, holding anxiously to their suitcases, and then looked again at Valentin, who was only inches away. His hairline was edged with a thin strip of pale skin, suggesting that he had had his hair cut between leaving Sardinia and arriving in London.
It would be very easy to make it look like an accident, Marchant thought as the train approached, sounding its horn. For a moment, he pictured Valentin rolling onto the live rail, looking back up at him. His father had seen a jumper once, said it was the rancid smoke that had shocked him the most. The image of Valentin’s burnt body wasn’t as unsettling as it should have been. Which friend of his father’s did they want him to meet? And why did they talk about him in that familiar way? He realised now how angry he was, how humiliated he felt by the events in Sardinia. Uncle Hugo had been sent to rescue him. Christ, he wasn’t a new recruit any more. He was thirty, with five years’ experience under his belt, a promising career ahead of him.
A couple of seconds before the train reached the point where they were standing, Marchant looked over his shoulder. ‘Hey, stop pushing,’ he shouted, and grabbed Valentin’s arms as if to steady himself. Then he shoved the Russian forward as hard as he could.
41
‘Betrayal requires a great leap of faith,’ Fielding said, looking out of the window of his office. Marchant was standing beside him, watching the Tate-to-Tate ferry head down the river, trying to understand what Fielding had just told him.
‘You’re sure it’s Primakov who wants to see me?’ he asked.
‘Who else would it be? A good friend of your father suddenly turns up in London after years out in the cold. It’s hard to imagine that they’d want you to meet anyone else.’
Marchant didn’t reply. Before the approach in Sardinia, he had forgotten all about Primakov, but the mention of his name began to sharpen blurred memories. The Russian had been a regular visitor to their house in India, a short man always arriving laden down with gifts for the children, peering over the top of them. It was so long ago. There had been an Indian toy, a mechanical wind-up train that went round a tiny metal track. His mother had taken it away because of its jagged edges.
‘There’s something I need to show you,’ Fielding continued. ‘A document that you would never normally see, not unless you become Chief — an appointment that would first require North America to sink beneath the sea.’
The CIA hadn’t stopped his father becoming Chief, Marchant thought, ignoring Fielding’s attempt at humour. Instead, they had waited until he was in office before humiliating him. Fielding stepped out of the room and told Ann Norman and his private secretary that he didn’t want to be disturbed, then closed the door and went over to his desk. But he didn’t sit down. Instead, he turned to the big safe in the corner behind him.
‘Give me a moment,’ he said, and bent down in front of the combination lock. Marchant instinctively looked away, out of apparent politeness, then watched in the window reflection as Fielding punched in some numbers — 4-9-3-7 — into a digital display and turned a large, well-oiled dial beneath it. His brain processed the movements in reverse: one and a half turns clockwise, two complete opposite turns, a final quarter-turn clockwise. Everyone who had ever been in the Chief’s office had wondered what secrets the safe held, which British Prime Ministers had been working for Moscow, which trade union leaders had been Russian plants.
‘Let’s sit over there,’ Fielding said a moment later, like a don about to discuss a dissertation. In his hand he held a brown Whitehall A4 envelope. He gestured towards two sofas and a glass table at the far end of his office, below the grandfather clock that Marchant had yet to hear ticking. Before he sat down, he placed the envelope on the table and put both hands on the small of his back. ‘The combination changes twice a day, by the way,’ he said, stretching, ‘should you ever think of opening it.’
‘I’d expect nothing less,’ Marchant said, trying to hide his embarrassment. He sat down on the edge of the sofa, watching Fielding unpick the quaint brown string that kept the envelope closed at one end. In addition to the normal security stamps on the front, Marchant saw another one, in faded green, that read ‘For C’s eyes only.’
‘I don’t need to stress the classified nature of what I am about to show you,’ Fielding said.
‘God’s access?’ Marchant asked. Fielding nodded. Product didn’t come more secret.
‘Your father was one of the most gifted officers of his or any other generation. We both know that. He recruited more valuable assets behind the Iron Curtain than anyone else. But the most prized of them all was Nikolai Primakov.’
‘I remember him from Delhi. At least, I remember he used to bring us presents.’ Marchant could also recall big smiles and warm laughter, but he couldn’t trust his memory. Why hadn’t there been the normal household caveats about Primakov, given that he was from a hostile country? After the family had left India for the final time, he had never seen the Russian again, although his father talked of him often.
‘The two of them were well known on the South Asia circuit, celebrated sparring partners who were also close friends.’
‘How did that work?’
‘Such overt friendships were more common in the Cold War. Vasilenko and Jack Platt in Washington, Smith and Krasilnokov in Beirut.’ Fielding paused. ‘Only a handful of people know that Primakov eventually succumbed to your father’s overtures and became one of ours. This is a brief summary of the case.’
He handed Marchant an A4 document that had been typed rather than printed out from a computer, an indication that it was an only copy. Marchant tried to hold it between his hands, but realised they were shaking, so he put the sheet of paper onto the glass table and read. It was a series of bullet points, explaining how his father had recruited Primakov in Delhi and how the Russian had returned to Moscow and eventually risen to become head of K Branch (counter-intelligence) in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. It made impressive reading, but something didn’t stack up. Officers other than Chiefs would have been involved in the running of Primakov, heads of stations, Controllerates back in London.
‘The version in front of you is for general reading,’ Fielding said. ‘It’s the copy new Prime Ministers see when they come to office. This one is a bit more confidential. South of the river only.’
He slid another sheet of paper across the glass table. Marchant recognised his father’s handwriting at once, the green ink faded but legible. He read fast, taking in as much as he could, trying to ignore his hands, which were still trembling. It soon became clear why no one other than fellow Chiefs had read the document. In it was an admission by his father that made Marchant swallow hard.
In order to keep the information flowing from Primakov, Stephen Marchant had let himself be recruited by the Russian. It was the highest stake an agent could play for. Marchant read on, and realised that his father had crossed the sacred line. To keep his enemy handlers happy, he had passed over classified Western documents to Moscow. As far as Marchant could tell, the CX seemed to have been about America, mainly Cuba. He could see nothing that might have directly damaged Britain. He hoped to God he was right.
‘Is this why the CIA went after him?’ he asked.
‘Not unless I’m working for Langley.’ Fielding smiled. ‘No, the Americans never knew. No one knows. But it is why the Russians are going after the son. They’ve seen a pattern, a family gene. Some call it “the treachery inheritance”. In their eyes, your father betrayed America. As for you, they look at the last year and conclude that the CIA is probably not your favourite intelligence agency either.’
Marchant felt a range of emotions, but in amongst them the thought of his father handing over US intel was strangely reassuring. It made his own visceral distrust of the CIA seem more understandable.
‘Cordingley? Has he seen it?’ He was the only previous Chief who was still alive.
‘Someone in Moscow might have told the Americans that an MI6 agent was betraying them.’
‘There’s always that chance. But not in this case. Moscow thought they had the crown jewels, and the operation would have been known only to a very few people. Your father went on to be Chief, after all.’
‘But Primakov was working for us.’
‘And we hope he will again.’ Fielding paused. ‘No one in Moscow Centre knows that he was once loyal to London. He’s approaching you as a seasoned Russian intelligence officer with instructions to recruit an unhappy British agent with family form. And you must close your eyes and jump, let yourself be recruited by him.’
‘Just like that?’ Marchant liked to think of himself offering some resistance.
‘See how he plays it. One or two senior people in the SVR still have reservations about Primakov’s past, his relationship with your father. He knows that. They suspected your father might have been a worthless podstava, and will be quick to dismiss you as a dangle, too. Fight the rod a bit. As I said, betrayal requires faith. Don’t expect the smallest sign that Primakov is one of ours. He’ll give you nothing. When you meet him at the gallery in Cork Street, he’ll be wired. Moscow Centre will be listening. And all you can do, deep down, beneath the cover, is hold on to what you believe to be true: that Nikolai Ivanovich Primakov once worked for your father, and is now hoping to work for you.’
‘And what do we hand Moscow in return?’
Fielding paused. ‘We give them Daniel Marchant, of course.’
Marchant looked at him and then turned away to the window, pressing his nails deep into his palms.
‘No one other than me knows that we’re encouraging Primakov to recruit you. As far as everyone else is concerned, you’re trying to recruit him. It’s important you understand that. Prentice, Armstrong, even Denton — they’ll all think you’re hoping to turn Primakov. No one must suspect the reverse is true.’