by Jon Stock
14
Lakshmi Meena didn’t know what to expect as her car pulled up short of the police cordon on the side of the mountain. She parked beside two army lorries and a Jeep and stepped out into the cool night, pulling a scarf over her head. The area beyond the cordon was swarming with uniformed men, one of whom Meena recognised as Dr Abdul Aziz, a senior intelligence officer from Rabat who had left a message on her cell phone half an hour earlier. She had been leaving the bar anglais at the time, wondering what she had said to so upset Marchant. She didn’t like Aziz, disapproved of his methods, his unctuous manner, but he had been the first person on her list of people to meet when she had arrived in Morocco.
Two floodlights had been rigged up on stands, illuminating a patch of rugged terrain where a handful of personnel in forensic boilersuits were searching the ground. Meena talked to a policeman on the edge of the cordon, nodding in the direction of Aziz, who saw her and came over.
‘I got your message,’ she said.
‘Lakshmi, our goddess of wealth,’ Aziz said, smiling. ‘Morocco needs your help.’ He lit a local cigarette as he steered her away from the lights, his hand hovering above her shoulders.
Meena was always surprised by Aziz’s displays of warmth and charm, so at odds with his professional reputation. He had run a black site in Morocco in the aftermath of 9/11, interviewing a steady stream of America’s enemy combatants on behalf of James Spiro, who had dubbed him the Dentist. It was before Meena’s time in the Agency, but she knew enough about Aziz to show respect to a man whose interrogation techniques made the tooth-extractors in Djemaâ el Fna look humane. And Meena hated herself for it, the cheap expedience of her chosen profession.
‘What happened here?’ she asked. ‘The Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group? Last I heard, you had them on the back foot.’
Aziz laughed. His teeth were a brilliant white. ‘Since when did they fly Mi-8s?’
‘Who said anything about helicopters?’
‘The Berbers.’ Aziz nodded to a group of goatherds sitting on the ground in a circle, smoking, djellaba hoods up.
‘Oh really?’
‘Our national airspace was violated tonight, and we’d like to know who by.’
‘Forgive me, but isn’t that what your air force is for?’
‘The country’s radar defences were knocked out. It was a sophisticated system. At least that’s what your sales people told us when we bought it from America last year. Our Algerian brothers don’t have the ability to do that.’
‘Not many people do.’
‘The Berbers are saying the helicopter was white.’
‘Any markings?’
‘None.’
Meena had been down in Darfur the previous year, and had seen the same trick pulled with a white Antonov used for a military raid. But the Sudanese government had gone one step further, painting it in UN markings.
She looked at Aziz, who was lost in thought, drawing hard on his cigarette. She remembered the cocktail party in Rabat when he had enquired about her health. A month earlier, she had checked in to hospital for a small operation, something she had kept from even her closest colleagues. Perhaps his question had been a coincidence, but it had disquieted her.
‘Is that why you called me?’
‘There’s something else. An Englishman was seen heading up here this evening.’
Aziz handed Meena a grainy photograph taken from a CCTV camera. It was of the gas-station forecourt on the road out of Marrakech. Someone who could have been Daniel Marchant was in the foreground, arriving on a moped. The date and time was wrong, but otherwise Meena thought the image looked authentic. It was too much of a coincidence, an odd place to be heading on a bike. Marchant had gone off-piste, and Meena should have known about it. No wonder he had left the bar early. He hadn’t been honest with her.
‘Marchant’s booked on the first flight to London tomorrow,’ Aziz said.
‘I know.’ Meena looked at him. Neither of them wanted to say anything, but each knew the other was thinking the same. The only reason Marchant would have gone to the mountains was if it had something to do with Salim Dhar. And Dhar was meant to be dead.
‘What do you think he was up to?’ Aziz asked.
‘I thought you were watching him.’
‘Both our jobs might be on the line, Lakshmi. Please tell me if you want Marchant delayed.’
Aziz smiled, his teeth glinting in the beam of a passing flashlight.
15
Marchant stepped aside as a donkey cart was led past him by an old man, his face hidden by the pointed hood of his djellaba, his cart stacked high with crates of salted sardines. Marchant headed across the square to the food trestles and benches, where a few butane lamps were still burning, but the crowds and the cooks had long gone, the smoke cleared. The only people in the square now were a handful of beggars, some sweepers in front of the mosque and a woman taking dough to a communal oven in one of the souks.
It was not quite dawn and the High Atlas were barely visible, no more than a reddish smudge on the horizon. Marchant had been walking around the medina since he left the bar anglais, taking a last look at his old haunts, drinking strong coffee at his favourite cafés. Now, as he sat down on a bench in a pool of light, he felt ready to return to Britain. He was more confident of his past, clearer about his relationship with Dhar.
For almost all of his thirty years, Marchant had thought that he only had one brother, his twin, Sebastian, who had been killed in a car crash in Delhi when they were eight. Then, fifteen months ago, on the run and trying to clear his family name, he had met Salim Dhar under a hot south Indian sun and asked why his late father, Stephen Marchant, Chief of MI6, had once visited Dhar, a rising jihadi, at a black site outside Cochin. ‘He was my father, too,’ Dhar had said, changing Marchant’s life for ever.
After the initial shock, the grief of a surviving twin had been replaced by the comfort of a stranger. Marchant was no longer alone in the world. He was less troubled by the discovery of a jihadi half-brother than by the thought of what might have been. There had been a bond when they met in India, an unspoken pact that came with kinship. They were both the same age, shared the same father.
Their lives, though, had run in wildly different directions, one graduating from Cambridge, the other from a training camp in Afghanistan. Marchant knew that Dhar would never spy for the US, but he might work for Britain. It was why Marchant had been so keen to travel to Morocco: to establish where his half-brother’s loyalties lay, and then try to turn him. Dhar was not, after all, a regular jihadi. How could he be, with a British father who had risen to become Chief of MI6? Tonight, though, he had accepted that his plan had failed. Dhar had not come forward, as he had hoped, and agreed to work for the land of his father.
The butane lamp above Marchant flickered and died. Dawn was spreading fast across the city from the east, where the mountains were now bathed in warm, newborn sunlight. Marchant stood up, his aching brain holding on to two things: Dhar was still alive, and he could still be turned. But there was something else. Whether Dhar had chosen to leave Morocco without making contact, or someone had taken him, Marchant couldn’t deny that he felt rejected. When it had come to it, Dhar’s family calling hadn’t been strong enough.
Perhaps that was why, as he left the square, he didn’t at first see Lakshmi Meena standing in the doorway of the mosque, watching him with the same intensity as the hawk that had begun to circle high above the waking city. But then he spotted her, turned off into the medina and ran through its narrow alleys as fast as he could.
16
James Spiro took the call 35,000 feet above the Atlantic, sitting near the front of the Gulfstream V. He had a soft spot for the plane, which he had used regularly in the rendition years. The line wasn’t good, but he knew immediately that it was Lakshmi Meena. He made a mental note not to call her babe.
‘Lakshmi. What have you got for me?’
Meena explained about the unmarked white helicopte
r that had been seen in the mountains, then took a deep breath – another one – and told him about his old friend Dr Abdul Aziz, the Dentist, and what he had said about the GICM and their hideout in the Atlas mountains.
‘Where are we running with this?’ Spiro asked, cutting her short. ‘I’m on the red-eye here.’
Meena sensed that their conversation would be over almost before it had started. Spiro was too full of Dhar’s death to listen to a junior officer phoning in with a hunch. ‘Aziz thinks Daniel Marchant was in the mountains,’ she continued, feeling that she had nothing to lose. ‘Stole a bike, took a ride up there at the same time the helicopter was seen.’
‘Tell me you were with him.’
‘I’d backed off, as instructed. The guy’s done nothing but go jogging and read the Koran for three months.’
Spiro thought for a moment. Reluctantly, Langley had agreed with London to leave Marchant alone after Delhi, but he wasn’t allowed to travel abroad. After a year, Spiro had acceded to Fielding’s demands and let Marchant fly to Morocco. There was no doubt in Spiro’s mind that the kid should have been locked up, just as his father should have been. The subsequent revelation that he was related to Salim Dhar only confirmed his worst fears. Now might be the time to take him out of the equation, particularly if everyone was distracted by news of Dhar’s death. Besides, what the hell was his so-called vacation in Morocco all about? The Vicar had called it a sabbatical. As far as Spiro was concerned, if someone needed some R&R, they headed for Honolulu, not North Africa.
‘Check him in for some root-canal work,’ Spiro said. ‘Aziz could do with the practice.’
‘That would be a breach of existing protocol, sir,’ Meena said.
‘I think you misheard me, Lakshmi.’
‘No, sir, I didn’t.’
There was a pause, a calculation. Spiro knew she was right, but he wasn’t going to let anyone ruin his visit to London, least of all Daniel Marchant. He cut her off.
It had been a good day in Washington, one of the best of his career. He had personally briefed the President about the drone strike on Salim Dhar. Although it was still too early to go public, the signs were good: no collateral for once, just a clean hit on the world’s most wanted. It didn’t get much sweeter. Now he was on his way to Fairford, and would shortly be making Marcus Fielding’s life a misery, something he always enjoyed.
The CIA was already all over MI5, running its own large network of agents and informers in Britain. As Spiro had discussed with the President, a Pakistani entering the US from ‘Londonistan’ on a visa-waiver programme now represented the biggest threat to America. As a result, 25 per cent of the Agency’s resources dedicated to preventing another 9/11 were being directed at Britain. MI5 wasn’t up to the job, and the CIA had recruited half of Yorkshire in the past few years. Immigration security at all major British airports was being coordinated by the Agency, too. Now he was about to rub the Vicar’s nose in it.
His phone rang again. This time he hesitated before answering it. His boss, the DCIA, only called him in the middle of the night if there was a problem.
17
It was two o’clock in the morning, and Marcus Fielding was still in his Legoland office, playing his flute: Telemann’s Suite in A-Minor. It was something of a tradition in MI6. Colin McColl, one of his predecessors, had filled the night air at the old head office in Southwark with his playing. Fielding rarely drank, but tonight was an exception. A bottle of Château Musar from the Bekaa Valley stood on his desk, half empty. He knew Spiro had come to gloat in London and he was determined to deny him the pleasure.
He stood up, arched his stiff back and went over to Oleg, the Service’s newest recruit, a two-year-old border terrier. Fielding had adopted him from Battersea Dogs’ Home the previous month and named him after two great Russian servants of MI6. There had been a few raised eyebrows the first time he brought Oleg into Legoland, but he only accompanied the Chief to work when he had to stay late, like tonight. His driver had brought him across the Thames from his flat in Dolphin Square, Pimlico, walking him along the towpath before handing him over to security at a side gate.
Oleg had undoubtedly made life more tolerable, absorbed some of the stress. His presence broke up the neatness of Fielding’s existence, which he was aware had become an obsession since his return from India. He had almost lost his job helping Daniel Marchant in Delhi. For a few dark days, the Americans had taken over the asylum. Legoland had been raided and he had been on the run, just like Marchant. He was too old for that game, too tired, which was why he had tried to restore some order to his life, a protection against the chaos of the raging world outside.
Tonight, though, that chaos threatened to return, and it had nothing to do with Oleg or the Lebanese wine. His mind had been racing ever since he had spoken with Marchant in Morocco. Normally, he would have dismissed his talk of Moscow as wild speculation from a field agent under pressure. But earlier in the day, a routine memo from MI5 had landed in his in-tray that made Marchant’s words – Nye strelai – hang in the air long after the encrypted line from Marrakech had dropped.
Harriet Armstrong, Fielding’s opposite number at Thames House, had come over the river to talk about it in person. She was no longer on crutches, but she still had a slight limp, the only legacy of her car crash in Delhi. One of her officers in D4, the counter-intelligence branch that monitored the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens, had intercepted a routine diplomatic communication. A man called Nikolai Ivanovich Primakov was about to be posted to London under cultural attaché cover. The young duty officer had run the normal checks, calling up Primakov’s file from the library and cross-referring it with known SVR and GRU agents operating under diplomatic cover.
To the duty officer’s surprise, he found that Primakov had once enjoyed a high-flying intelligence career, but his prospects had suffered when Boris Yeltsin set about disbanding the KGB in 1991. After a three-year stint in the private security business, protecting banks in Moscow, Primakov returned to the SVR, as the KGB’s First Chief Directorate had become, where he continued to rise through the ranks until he suffered a series of sideways moves. His imminent arrival in London was a promotion, prompting the duty officer to conclude in his daily report that it was significant.
At no point did he realise quite how significant it was, but behind the scenes his routine inquiry had triggered a flagged message to drop into Armstrong’s in-box. As Director General of MI5, she was one of only a handful of people who knew that Primakov had once been MI6’s most senior asset in the KGB and later the SVR, on a par with Penkovsky and Gordievsky.
Fielding and Armstrong were allies now, thick as Baghdad thieves, united in their resentment of America’s growing influence in Whitehall. And Fielding sensed the makings of a mutually beneficial plan, a shoring up of defences against Spiro, something that might buy both their Services a little respect again after a torrid year.
He gave Oleg a scratch behind the ears and walked back to his desk. One of Primakov’s restricted MI6 files from the 1980s, known as a ‘no-trace’ because any database search for it would yield nothing, lay in front of the framed photos of Fielding’s favourite godchildren, Maya and Freddie. Beside it was a neat grid of Post-it notes he had been writing all evening.
The file was open on a page that showed a tourist-style photo of Primakov taken in Agra in 1980, standing in front of the Taj Mahal. Beside him was Stephen Marchant, smiling back at the camera. He had good reason to be happy, and not just because his wife had recently given birth to twins, Daniel and Sebastian. It was eight years before disaster would strike, when Sebastian was so cruelly taken from him. Stephen Marchant was already a rising star in MI6, but his recruitment of Primakov, then attached to the Soviet Embassy in Delhi, would propel him all the way to the top of the Service.
Primakov rose swiftly through the KGB, too, on his return to Moscow, specialising in counter-intelligence, much to the satisfaction of Marchant and his MI6 superiors. But his r
elationship with the West was built on personal friendship. He would only agree to be handled by Stephen Marchant, which created problems for everyone. Not for the first time, Primakov began to arouse the suspicion of Moscow Centre, his career stalled and the RX eventually dried up. Primakov’s posting to London marked a return to the fold. And Fielding sensed that it was in some way linked to whatever had happened in Morocco. Patterns again.
A line from the switchboard was flickering on Fielding’s comms console. He had been about to look at another file on Primakov that not even Armstrong knew about. It told a very different story about his friendship with Marchant, but that would have to wait. He took the call, wondering who would be ringing him so late at night.
‘I have a Paul Myers from GCHQ for you, sir,’ the woman on reception said.
The last time he had spoken to Myers had also been in the middle of the night, when he had rung to talk about Leila. It was partly because of Myers that she had been exposed as a traitor, something that Fielding had never forgotten.
‘I assume this is important,’ Fielding began, sounding harsher than he meant. He liked Myers.
‘Sorry for ringing so late, but I thought you should know,’ Myers began. At least he wasn’t drunk this time.