by Jon Stock
It was after an hour and too much Scotch that Marchant saw the dark-haired woman walk up to the bar. He recognised her at once as Lakshmi Meena, the local Operations Officer the CIA had sent to keep an eye on him when he had first arrived in Marrakech. London had briefed him about her. She was a beneficiary of the CIA’s ongoing programme to recruit more people from what it called America’s ‘heritage communities’, particularly those who spoke ‘mission critical’ languages. MI6 had always recruited linguists, unlike the CIA, which had been found wanting after 9/11. Even in its National Clandestine Service, only 30 per cent of CIA staff were fluent in a second language. Meena spoke Hindi, some Urdu and, most importantly, the Dravidian languages of southern India, which had been upgraded to critical in the ongoing hunt for Salim Dhar, whose parents were originally from Kerala.
Marchant had also been told that she was a breath of fresh air, one of the recent intake who had joined the Agency on the back of the new President’s promises of change. He had yet to see any difference, at least in the CIA’s attitude to him.
Meena was young, late twenties, dressed in jeans and a maroon Indian top with mirrorwork that caught the light around her neckline. Officially, she was in Morocco teaching English as a foreign language, working at the American Language Center up in Rabat. Marchant had to admit that she looked the part, one up from his own student cover. He wished he’d thought of it for himself.
Meena walked over to Marchant’s table in the courtyard, checking her mobile phone before putting it away in her shoulder-bag. Marchant was momentarily wrongfooted by the direct approach. They had met face to face only once before, shortly after Marchant had arrived: a cold exchange in the foyer of a hotel.
‘Do what you have to do,’ Marchant had said, trying not to see Leila in Meena’s limpid eyes, her dark olive skin. ‘Just don’t expect any answers from me.’
‘You flatter yourself,’ she had replied. ‘We ask questions later, remember?’
It hadn’t been the beginning of a beautiful friendship. He knew afterwards that he had played it too cool, that she was only doing her job, but he wasn’t in the mood to mix with female field agents, particularly ones who reminded him of a woman who had betrayed him. Meena was taller, her manner more hardened, but there was unquestionably something of Leila in her: an attitude, sexual poise. And Marchant knew that any likeness was no coincidence, that it was a cruel joke by Spiro. Frustrated that he wasn’t allowed to lock Marchant up and torture him again, Spiro had sent someone to remind him of his past. But Marchant ignored the ploy, ignored Meena. For the following few weeks, they had played cat and mouse on the streets of Marrakech, before Meena had finally backed off to Rabat.
‘Mind if I join you?’ she asked, taking a seat.
‘Go ahead,’ Marchant said, concealing his surprise. A waiter was standing beside them. For a moment, he was back in a pub in Portsmouth, chatting up strangers as part of a training exercise. All new recruits at the Fort, MI6’s training base in Gosport, were dispatched to the city’s bars and pubs to chat up unsuspecting locals and solicit private information: bank-card details, National Insurance and passport numbers.
‘Bourbon and Coke, thanks. Daniel?’
Marchant knew Meena was taking in the scene, measuring the milligrams of alcohol in Marchant’s blood, whether his defences were down. The only consolation was that she wasn’t the sort to flirt. He didn’t think he could handle that right now. Leila had used her sexual charms shamelessly, in the office and in the field, but he sensed that Meena did things differently.
‘A Scotch, thanks,’ Marchant replied, nodding at the waiter.
‘I thought you’d given all that up,’ she said, fingering her Indian necklace. ‘Gone native.’
‘Celebrating. I didn’t think you drank either.’ He had read her files: vegetarian, non-drinker, decaffeinated coffee, herbal tea.
‘Celebrating, too.’
Marchant thought her necklace was from south India, similar to one his mother had once worn. He raised his glass, trying to run his own check on himself, calculate the damage. A drinking session after three months’ abstinence wasn’t a good idea, but he was sober enough to extract some leverage from the situation, fool Meena into thinking he was drunker than he was. At least, that was the plan. His dulled brain could think of two reasons why she had stepped out of the shadows tonight. To say goodbye, having heard that Dhar was dead; or to find out if he knew anything about the helicopter in the mountains. He had a problem if it was the latter.
‘You heard the news then,’ she said, glancing around the bar before looking at Marchant, his already empty glass.
‘I heard,’ he said, thinking it could still be either.
‘Mixed feelings, I guess.’
He sat back, relieved that she had come to talk about Dhar.
‘To be honest, I don’t really know what to say,’ she continued, brushing some crumbs off the table. ‘Langley’s kind of over the moon, as you’d expect. But it’s a little more complicated for you guys.’
‘Is it? He tried to kill your President. Now you’ve killed him. End of story.’
‘But, you know, the whole half-brother thing.’ Meena leaned in towards Marchant. ‘I realise you didn’t exactly grow up together, but that could have been new territory, for all of us –’
‘Why did you come here tonight?’ Marchant was suddenly irritated by Meena’s appearance on his last evening in Morocco, riled by how much she knew, her after-work pub manner. He had been about to leave, take one last walk around Djemaâ el Fna. Now he was in an English bar, having a drink with someone he had avoided for the past three months.
‘I figured you’d be pulling out of town,’ Meena said. ‘Thought it would be civil to tie this whole thing off, say goodbye.’
Marchant allowed the awkwardness to linger for a few seconds, in case there was anything else to flush out. But there was nothing. The Americans thought they had killed Dhar, and he was happy to let them. Marchant wasn’t sure if it was the alcohol or sudden empathy for a fellow field officer, but something made him change tack and end the awkwardness, drop his guard.
‘Thanks,’ he said, watching the waiter place their order on the table. ‘You know, for coming. We should have had this drink three months ago.’
She wasn’t so bad, he told himself. He was the one who had been stubborn, too angry with the way he had been treated by the Americans. Meena was younger than him, still believed that she was making a difference. And she could have made his life a lot more difficult.
‘I wasn’t really getting the right vibes,’ she said, smiling, putting her hands up in mock defence. ‘Hey, look, I don’t blame you for not trusting us. Not at all.’
‘I gave up trusting people when I signed up.’
‘We’re not all like Spiro,’ Meena said, sitting back.
‘I wasn’t thinking of Spiro.’ For a moment, Marchant wondered if she would take the bait, begin to talk of Leila, but she didn’t, and he was shocked by his own disappointment.
‘I don’t know about you, but I joined the Agency in search of some light and shade. It’s why I’m here in Morocco and not in some sweaty UAV trailer in Nevada. I can’t pretend I’m sorry Dhar’s dead, but I was open to other ways of winning this war.’
‘I’m sure you were,’ said Marchant. He looked again at Meena, wondering whether he could confide in her, open up, reveal what he had seen in the mountains. But he knew he couldn’t. Despite the unexpected entente, they were working to different agendas.
‘What made you choose the Agency anyway?’ Marchant asked. ‘You don’t strike me as –’
‘– the right colour?’ She laughed.
‘Christ no, I wasn’t going to say that.’
‘The right sex?’ She laughed again, and then they both paused, her words hanging between them. Marchant thought he saw a sadness in her eyes, or maybe he was confused by his own nostalgia.
‘My father wanted me to train as a doctor. Failing that, he wanted me to
marry one. I was studying medicine at Georgetown University, but then, after 9/11, everything changed.’
‘Did you lose someone?’
‘Not directly. Friends of friends, you know.’
‘But it felt personal.’
‘Yeah. And the CIA had always been a part of my life.’
‘Really?’
‘We grew up in Reston, Virginia, not far from Langley. My father used to talk so proudly of the Agency, said it was there to protect all Americans, including ones who had come from India. To prove it, we drove up there one day to take a look, when I was seventeen, maybe eighteen. There’s a public sign on the main highway, next right for the George Bush Center for Intelligence. So we took the exit and drove up through the woods, Mom and Dad in the front, my younger brother and me in the back. We were nearly shot by the guards. I think they thought we were a family of suicide bombers.’
‘What did they do?’
‘Waved their machine-guns at us and shouted at us to leave. I thought they were going to shoot the tyres out.’
‘And your father?’
‘He was mortified. He couldn’t understand why we hadn’t been welcomed with open arms. He’d been naïve to go there, but I hated seeing him so upset.’
‘And that’s why you joined?’
‘One reason. I wanted to prove to him – to me – that we’re welcome in America. That the Agency is there to defend my family as much as anyone else’s. When the Towers came down, they were suddenly looking to recruit from the subcontinent.’
‘Why did it take you so long to sign up?’
‘It took a new President.’
‘And is it everything you hoped?’
‘I’m seeing the world.’
‘But not changing it.’
‘I’m not sure tailing a renegade British agent on compassionate leave through the streets of Marrakech is quite what I had in mind.’
‘You weren’t very committed.’ Marchant matched her smile, thinking back to the first time he had seen her, watching her from across Djemaâ el Fna before giving her the runaround.
‘OK, so you lost me a couple of times in the medina. I salute your superior British tradecraft. But come on, Daniel’ – she was leaning forward now, voice lowered – ‘you didn’t really think Dhar would show up in this place, did you? Maybe I missed him. Maybe he was that guy selling dentures in the main square, the one being photographed day and night by thousands of American tourists.’
‘No, that wasn’t him.’
Marchant thought back to the halaka. Again he wanted to confide in Meena, ask her opinion, but he knew he was drunk. He hadn’t discussed Salim Dhar with anyone since he had arrived in Marrakech. The text he had received on the Thames had haunted him for the first few weeks. He had checked his phone repeatedly, in case Dhar made contact again, but he never had.
Marchant had begged Fielding to let him go to Morocco, but the Americans had insisted he stay in London. After a year of frustration and too much alcohol, he had finally arrived in Marrakech, expecting the trail to have gone cold. But as he settled into his sober new life, working the souks, listening to the storytellers, he had begun to pick up chatter here and there that gave him hope he was still on the right track.
‘Did you listen to any of those guys, the halakas?’ Meena asked.
‘One or two.’ Meena’s interest in the storyteller triggered a distant alarm, like a police siren a few streets away.
‘Terrific tales, although some of the Berber street talk threw me.’
The alarm faded. Marchant was impressed by Meena’s local knowledge. He hadn’t given her enough credit, and chided himself for judging her too swiftly. Again, he wondered whether she had been a missed opportunity, someone he should have nurtured rather than avoided. But he knew why he had kept his distance.
‘Where next for you, then? When I’m gone?’ he asked.
Meena paused. Marchant thought that she too seemed to be weighing up how much to confide, thrown perhaps by how well they were getting on. Up until now, she had hidden behind her words, preferring to spar rather than open up. She sat back, glancing half-heartedly around the bar.
‘I want out, if I’m honest. I thought I’d joined a different Agency, a new one working for a new President.’
‘But you haven’t.’
‘No. I haven’t.’
‘Spiro?’
She paused again. ‘For the record, he wanted me to make your life here not worth living.’
‘But you chose not to.’
‘What did you do to him?’
‘We go back a bit. He thought my father was a traitor. Then he accused me.’
Meena stood up with his empty glass, ready to head to the bar. ‘Must have been that terrorist brother of yours.’
The remark annoyed Marchant, cut through the fog of Scotch. It was a reminder of their differences, confirmation that a junior CIA officer had seen his file. He had hoped that his kinship would remain known only to a few people in Langley and Legoland, but he realised that was wishful thinking. Meena would have been fully briefed before arriving in Morocco, given the full, shocking picture.
He thought again about the text. Let’s make good for we are brothers. The lyrics were by an Arabic singer, Natacha Atlas. Had Dhar known that she was one of Leila’s favourite artists? Marchant was getting sentimental. He couldn’t afford to dwell on Leila, not in his present state. And he couldn’t afford to talk any more with Meena.
By the time she returned to the table with another Scotch, Marchant had gone.
13
Paul Myers wouldn’t have bothered to listen to the audio one more time if it hadn’t been for Daniel Marchant. He knew his old friend had spent the past three months in Marrakech largely because of him. His line manager at GCHQ had dismissed the theory that Dhar had texted Marchant from Morocco, but Myers had thought otherwise. Like Marchant, he didn’t believe Dhar would hang around the Af-Pak region after the assassination attempt. It was too obvious, despite the mountainous terrain and the volatile political climate, both of which made it difficult for the West to search. He could never prove that Marchant’s text had been sent by Dhar, but he had run his own checks on some dodgy proxy networks, and would gladly bet his (unused) gym membership that it had originated in Morocco. And if it was a coincidence that the lyric in the text was by a singer who shared her surname with a North African mountain range, he found it a reassuring one.
So it was guilt more than anything that made him put his headphones back on, adjust the fluorescent band at the base of his ponytail and play the US audio file again. He owed it to Marchant to prove that the Americans were wrong about Dhar. He sat back and yawned, scratching at his slack stomach through his fleece jacket as he looked around the empty office.
His desk, littered with chocolate-bar wrappers and filled-in sudokus from various broadsheet newspapers, was in the inner ring of the GCHQ complex, dubbed the Doughnut because of its circular shape. The Street, a glass-roofed circular corridor, ran around the entire building, separating the inner from the outer circles. Its purpose was to encourage separate departments to share their data. No one on the building’s three floors was more than five minutes’ walk from anyone else, and face-to-face meetings in softly furnished break-out areas were the way forward.
At least, that was the idea. In truth, people kept to themselves. Myers used the Street solely for walking to the Ritazza cafés and deli bars that dotted its orbital route. The workforce at GCHQ, with its mathematicians, cryptanalysts, linguists, librarians and IT engineers, was the most intelligent in the Civil Service, but it was also the most socially dysfunctional, steeped in a long tradition of strictly-need-to-know that dated back to Bletchley Park and its campus of separate huts. Myers wouldn’t have had it any other way.
He looked out onto the secure landscaped gardens in the middle of the building, hidden below which was GCHQ’s vast computer hall. It was down there, in the depths of the basement, that the mathematicians worked, a
nd that the ‘Cheltenham express’, an electric train, shuttled back and forth day and night, carrying files along a track beneath the Street. To the right of Myers’ window was a decked area, where people could walk out from the canteen. Beyond it was a large expanse of lawn that had been nicknamed ‘the grassy knoll’ and was meant for blue-sky meetings. Myers liked to sit there in the summer and take his lunch.
The garden was dark and empty now, its edges bathed in a pale, energy-efficient light spilling out from the offices around it. Myers used to work as an intelligence analyst in the Gulf Region, on the opposite side of the Doughnut, his desk looking out at one of the two pagodas that had been built in the garden for smokers, but he had asked for a transfer to the subcontinent after Leila had died. He had carried a hopeless torch for her, and still hadn’t come to terms with her betrayal, let alone her death. Listening to intercepts in Farsi had proved too painful.
The voice in the headphones was definitely Dhar’s. His American colleagues had run every test there was, subjecting it to a level of spectrographic analysis that had even met with Myers’ jaundiced approval. But what had caught his attention was the lack of data about the background noise. All ears had been tuned to the voice.
Myers listened to the Urdu, noting instinctively that it was a second, possibly third, language, but his eyes were on the computer screen in front of him and the digital sound waves that were rolling across it to the rhythm of Dhar’s speech. When the Urdu stopped, Myers eased forward in his seat and scrutinised the data, watching the waves moving along the bottom of his screen until the segment ended. He moved the cursor back to where the Urdu had stopped and played the final part again, his tired eyes blinking. This time he magnified the wave imagery, boosting the background noise. At the end of the clip, he did the same again, except that he only replayed the final eighth of a second, slowing it down to a deep, haunting drawl.
After repeating the process several more times, he was listening to fragments of sound, microseconds inaudible to the human ear. And then he found it. Moving more quickly now, he copied and pasted the clip and dragged it across to an adjacent screen, where he had loaded his own spectrographic software, much to his IT supervisor’s annoyance. He played the clip and sat back, taking off his headphones, cracking the joints of his sweaty fingers. The ‘spectral waterfall’ on the screen in front of him was beautiful, a series of rippling columns of colour; but the acoustic structure was one of intense pain. At the very end of the second call made by Salim Dhar, there was a sound that Myers had not expected to hear: the opening notes of a human scream.