Dirty Little Secret

by Jon Stock

  ‘Just like old times, then.’

  ‘Quite. Primakov likes working with Marchants.’

  For the first time, Fielding detected a trace of bitterness in his deputy, the Hull accent less suppressed. Marchant’s father, Stephen, had recruited Primakov in Delhi in the 1980s. It had been a game-changing signing in the Cold War, as good as Oleg Gordievsky, and had fast-tracked Stephen to the top of MI6. Denton, then a young officer in the SovBloc Controllerate, was the contact man, clearing the dead-letter drops and trying – in vain – to keep Primakov sweet. The two men had not warmed to each other.

  ‘As far as I can recall, we never got round to telling the Americans about Primakov,’ Denton said.

  ‘No, and I would ask you, in your new role, that it should stay that way.’

  The last thing Fielding needed was some CIA goon going over the Primakov files.

  ‘That could be a problem. As part of our efforts to rebuild trust with Washington, we’ve agreed to an independent investigation into the events at Fairford and Cheltenham. It’s no secret that the Americans want to throw the book at Marchant and Lakshmi Meena.’

  ‘Then it’s up to us to protect them, isn’t it?’

  Fielding had expected a witch hunt. Top-down, no stone left unturned, the usual Whitehall hysteria: craven civil servants running around doing the Americans’ bidding. It was why he had sent Marchant and Lakshmi to Fort Monckton. They would be safe there, at least for the time being.

  ‘What the Americans are struggling to understand – and I see their point – is why Marchant didn’t eliminate Dhar.’ Fielding thought Denton looked increasingly at home in the Range Rover, sitting back, at ease, elbows out, his sinewy body expanding with new authority. In the past, he had never relaxed when Fielding had given him a lift, perching on the buttermilk leather like a watchful lizard. ‘Once he’d won his trust by defecting,’ Denton continued, ‘there must have been opportunities to kill him. In Russia. On board the plane.’

  Fielding could never tell him the real reason why Marchant hadn’t killed Dhar. He could never tell anyone. He tried to change the focus.

  ‘I think we’re forgetting who we’re dealing with here,’ he said. ‘When Marchant reached Russia, Dhar forced him to shoot Primakov, a family friend, for being a Western spy. The bigger question is why Dhar didn’t kill Marchant. He could have done so at any time. Marchant was exceptionally brave.’

  ‘So why didn’t Dhar kill him?’

  Fielding turned away, looking down the Thames as they drove over Battersea Bridge. It was almost 3 a.m. He always felt depressed when he saw Albert Bridge at night, lit up like a gaudy old whore in pearls. ‘Perhaps he was curious. They’re half-brothers, after all. And Dhar only met his father once, when he was in jail in India. Maybe Marchant reminded him of his father, I don’t know.’

  ‘The Americans want answers, Marcus, not cod bloody psychology.’

  ‘I don’t remember you always being so ready to oblige them.’

  Fielding was struggling to remain civil as the Range Rover drew up outside a nondescript terrace house on Battersea Bridge Road. Denton’s anti-US views had been well known in the Service, causing Fielding enough problems in the past. It appeared that he had put them to one side with the promise of promotion.

  ‘They also want to find Dhar. Marchant was the last person to see him alive. I assume we can circulate his Fort debriefing?’

  ‘It will be on desks in the morning,’ Fielding said.

  Denton got out of the car and leant in through the open door.

  ‘Thanks.’ He tapped the roof, as if he’d just chosen the vehicle in a showroom. ‘For the lift.’

  ‘There’s one thing I can tell you,’ Fielding said. ‘Daniel Marchant’s one of the good guys. Trust me. Let’s not throw him to the lions. Not yet.’

  11

  Marchant lay staring at the vibrating phone. It was still dark outside, and for a moment he didn’t know where he was. He didn’t even know if he was awake. His dreams had been about dead sailors and Dhar. The phone display said that ‘Dad – Home’ was calling. He hadn’t been called from that number since his father had died seventeen months before.

  The call was from the family home at Tarlton, outside Cirencester in the Cotswolds. Nobody lived there any more. The house was closed up, and would remain that way until Marchant decided what to do with the place. As the only surviving member of the family, he had inherited his father’s flat in Pimlico, where he now lived, and the large family house in Tarlton. He could never envisage living there, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to sell it.

  Marchant slid out of bed, checking that Lakshmi was asleep. Her eyes were closed, her breathing uneven. He would call a doctor in the morning, get her wrist checked out. Careful not to wake her, he stepped into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. He was glad the phone was on vibrate, as he could tell himself it was the phone and not his hand that was shaking. Who would call from his home? And at 4 a.m.? Once a month, his father’s cleaning lady dropped by to check on the place, but she would only ring if there was a problem. Perhaps there had been a fire?

  ‘Who is this?’ Marchant said quietly.

  ‘Your pilot.’

  12

  Omar Rashid wasn’t comfortable with promotion. For a start, he had too many people in his SIGINT unit who were twice his age. It was just plain awkward asking a fortysomething analyst at the National Security Agency to work a bit harder. It was like a freshman telling a senior how to hit on girls. But the new job had its perks. Instead of trawling through the real-time night traffic in AfPak, hoping to nail some careless jihadi in an internet café in Karachi, he could sit back in his small office and catch a bit of girl-on-girl action on RedTube while others did the hard work.

  He blamed Salim Dhar, whose voice he had picked up in North Waziristan a few weeks earlier. Only it hadn’t been his voice. Dhar had duped them, strapped a tape recorder to his cell phone and planted it with six kidnapped US Marines. None of them had stood a chance when the Reaper deployed its Hellfire missiles twenty minutes later. His boss had taken the drop, leaving the unit without a leader.

  In all the confusion and recriminations that followed, someone seemed to overlook the fact that it was Rashid who had made the original intercept, and he was given the job. Promotion by incompetence, that’s what he called it. What fiasco would it take for him to reach the top of the NSA?

  ‘Sir, we have a priority level five,’ his PA said, putting her head around the door. He switched browser windows, confident she had seen nothing, and checked out her rear as he followed her into the main room. One day he would be brave enough to ask her out for a drink, maybe the Havana Club in Baltimore.

  ‘What’ve we got?’ Rashid said, an awful sense of déjà vu washing over him. His unit normally sat at separate terminals. Now, though, most of them were gathered around one analyst’s screen. Like everyone else in his department, he had been told to temporarily redirect his unit’s efforts to the UK, where GCHQ was in need of cover after Salim Dhar had run amok. His last known act had been to eject from a Russian jet over the Bristol Channel, from where he was thought to have been picked up by a Russian sub, but nobody was sure. Who said the Cold War was over?

  ‘One hundred per cent voiceprint recognition,’ the analyst said.

  ‘Salim Dhar?’ Rashid’s tentative words hung in the air. For a few brief minutes, the name had brought him fame and the promise of fortune, but now he had come to dread it. They all had.

  ‘On a watchlist number. Calling a cell phone in Portsmouth, UK.’ And then he added, for Rashid’s benefit: ‘Real time two-way.’ This time, in other words, a tape-recorded Dhar was almost impossible.

  ‘Cell IDs?’

  ‘Receiver handset’s encrypted. We’re working on it.’ The analyst looked across at a colleague who was crunching numbers on his screen.

  ‘What about Dhar’s?’

  ‘Sir, signature and profile of a secure hard line. So far no number.
’

  ‘A hard line? What the hell’s he playing at? And no number ID? I thought you said it was on our watchlist.’

  ‘It’s got some heavy-duty masking encryption at the local level. Looks like it’s been rerouted at source. The Brits may have a better idea. Somebody call down to GCHQ?’

  Rashid had seen the images of ‘the doughnut’, and the bomb damage to its central courtyard. It had been showing on the news channels all afternoon. The iconic building had stood up well to the attack, and there had only been one casualty, but its operational capabilities had been affected. GCHQ had a large contingent working on the floor below, where morale had taken a nosedive. He had been down there earlier for a chat, and had returned with one eye on the window, scanning the skies for rogue Russian jets, wondering if the NSA might be next.

  ‘Sir, the cell ID’s location.’

  Rashid walked over to the analyst who was sitting on his own.

  ‘Fort Monckton, MI6 training centre,’ Rashid said, reading from the screen, which was now showing a crystal-clear satellite image of Portsmouth harbour, a pulsating blue icon radiating out from the southern end of the Gosport peninsula.

  ‘And we’ve got the hard-line number for Dhar. It’s presenting as the main switchboard for MI6 headquarters, Vauxhall Cross, central London. Seems like the entire MI6 phone network is on our watchlist.’

  Rashid didn’t want to think about the ethics of eavesdropping on their closest ally. There were other things on his mind. He ran a hand through his hair and wondered what he’d done to deserve Dhar. It was beginning to feel personal between them.

  ‘Is it just me, or does anyone else sense the Brits aren’t being entirely straight with us? Hold that call to GCHQ, and get me the DCIA’s office.’

  13

  Marchant closed the door of his room, confident that Lakshmi was still sleeping, and walked down the corridor to the kitchen at the far end. Nothing had changed. It was here, five years earlier, that he’d first cooked Leila a meal – grilled mackerel, steamed samphire – when they were IONEC recruits, starting out on their careers. They’d eaten it cross-legged on the floor of her room like students. He pulled open a drawer, removed a kitchen knife and slid it inside his jacket before heading down the stairs and out into the courtyard.

  The place was silent, except for the cry of a distant seagull. There was an archway on the opposite side of the courtyard. It was the only entrance into the Fort complex, and beyond it was a grass-roofed gatehouse with a light on inside. He knew most of the guards from his time at the Fort as an IONEC recruit. Hewn from the same granite as Oxbridge porters, they were long-suffering and had seen it all before, their manner a mix of respect and contempt.

  He walked up to the gatehouse and knocked on the glass to get the sleeping guard’s attention. Marchant didn’t blame him. There were no recruits in residence, and it should have been an easy shift.

  ‘I need a car from the pool,’ Marchant said, glancing at the bank of flickering CCTV screens. The guard wasn’t familiar, but Marchant’s face in the window triggered something in him, recognition followed by a crude attempt to disguise it.

  ‘I’ve got orders to let no one in or out.’

  Marchant raised his eyebrows. ‘No one? I thought everyone was in Helmand.’

  ‘You’re not to leave the site, sir.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘It’s for your own safety. Chief’s orders.’

  So Fielding had sent him to the Fort for his personal protection. It was less obvious than Legoland, the staff nickname for MI6’s headquarters in Vauxhall. The Americans wouldn’t come looking for him down here. Things must be worse than he thought between Washington and London. Marchant glanced at the steel gates that rolled open and shut like a modern-day portcullis. Instead of feeling secure, he felt like a prisoner. The Fort was surrounded by twelve-foot-high MoD fencing on all sides, topped with barbed wire and security cameras.

  ‘OK, I’ll ring him in the morning.’

  ‘Anything else I can do for you, sir?’ the guard asked, glancing at the clock to remind Marchant of the unreasonable hour.

  ‘No, it’s fine.’

  ‘Good night, sir,’ the guard said, watching Marchant as he turned to walk back through the archway. There was only one way to escape.

  14

  Fielding had been sleeping fitfully when the phone rang. It wasn’t his mobile, but the secure landline that linked his flat in Dolphin Square with COBRA, the home numbers of key colleagues of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and 10 Downing Street. The ring tone had an urgency that made him get out of bed and walk quickly across the living room to answer the phone.

  ‘Marcus, I need to know what’s going on with Salim Dhar.’

  It was the Prime Minister.

  ‘I’m not quite sure what you mean by “going on”.’

  ‘This is not the time for bloody semantics. The Americans have intercepted a call from Dhar to Fort Monckton in Gosport.’

  Fielding’s brain began to process the PM’s words, assessing the possibilities and implications. It wasn’t in his nature to panic – that was one of the reasons he had risen to become Chief – but the multiple scenarios that were spooling through his mind made him pass the receiver from one hand to the other.

  ‘Daniel Marchant is currently recovering at the Fort,’ he said calmly, starting with what he knew. But he couldn’t help wondering why he was hearing about the intercept from the PM, and not from GCHQ or another intelligence colleague. It had clearly been discussed already, and he had been excluded. This wasn’t an operational call, it was political. ‘Where was Dhar ringing from?’

  ‘According to the Americans, Vauxhall Cross. Your headquarters.’

  Fielding let out a thin, dry laugh. He knew it was impossible for Dhar to be in Legoland. In the course of a life spent in espionage, he had witnessed far more cock-ups than conspiracies. But if that was what the Americans believed, he had a problem.

  ‘And how do they know this?’

  ‘The NSA’s traced the number, and it’s presenting as MI6’s main switchboard.’

  ‘With respect, if I were to ring you from this line and the NSA managed to intercept and trace it, which is unlikely, the number would show as MI6’s switchboard. And Dhar’s definitely not here.’

  Fielding couldn’t resist a quick glance around his flat: Oleg, his Lucas terrier, asleep in his basket in the corner; a flute resting against a sheet of Handel on a music stand in front of the fireplace; a proof copy of the new biography of Lawrence of Arabia open on the Indian coffee table.

  ‘Marcus, the Americans are convinced we’re holding Dhar. The President is calling me in five minutes. I need to give him my word that we’re not.’

  ‘We’re not. Of course we’re bloody not.’

  ‘So why the hell’s he ringing Daniel Marchant from a secure MI6 landline?’

  ‘I have no idea. He might not have been. The last time the NSA supposedly intercepted a call from Dhar, it was a set-up and six US Marines died.’

  ‘They want access to Vauxhall Cross, to search the building floor by floor, room by room. And they want us to arrest Daniel Marchant.’

  ‘I would advise against that. Dhar may call him again, which would be more useful to us.’

  Fielding might be too late to save Marchant, but the Americans would be allowed into Legoland over his dead body. Unfortunately, he suspected he was already dead. Denton would have his job by morning.

  ‘What are Fort Monckton’s orders?’

  ‘To keep Marchant on site. Don’t worry, he’s being closely guarded.’

  ‘I hope he is – for all our sakes.’

  Fielding didn’t have time to feel threatened. ‘What did Dhar say to him?’

  ‘Marchant asked who was speaking, and Dhar said, “Your pilot.” That’s it. As if we needed to remind the Americans of MI6’s role in the Fairford attack. Marchant should have dealt with Dhar when he had a chance.’

  In other words, Fielding tho
ught, ignoring the PM, Dhar’s message wasn’t as important as the fact of the call itself. He was telling Marchant where he was. And it looked as if he was still in Britain, which meant that something must have gone catastrophically wrong with his escape plan.

  There were numerous MI6 facilities across the country, all of which had secure landlines that were routed through the main switchboard. Fielding hadn’t been entirely straight with the PM: although the numbers would show up as MI6, each one had its own unique signature that could be identified by a private-key-encrypted handset. He could only assume that Marchant had seen at once where Dhar was calling from, and had hung up.

  ‘Tell the President that Marchant’s going nowhere, and we haven’t got Dhar.’

  ‘So where the hell is he?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Only one person knew, and that was Daniel Marchant. Fielding would call him now, try to warn him, but he feared it was already too late. ‘It’s important we don’t jump to hasty conclusions, given Dhar’s history of phone calls,’ he continued. ‘You know it won’t look good, the Americans going into Legoland?’

  ‘The truth is, Marcus, I’m not sure I can stop them.’

  15

  Marchant didn’t look back at the gatehouse as he walked away. He knew already that calls would be made, measures taken. What he wasn’t prepared for was the speed with which security would be ramped up on the base. As he passed under the archway and back into the courtyard, he heard voices to his left. Two guards were approaching from the direction of the indoor firing range, stopping to chat outside the main door to the accommodation block. They wore plain blue uniforms, and weren’t the usual ‘MoDplods’ who guarded military bases.