Games Traitors Play

by Jon Stock

  ‘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.

  ‘Yes, but his issues were never with America.’

  ‘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.’

  ‘And the Russians?’ Not for the first time, Marchant was struck by the loneliness of being Chief, the solitude of the spymaster’s lot, unable to trust anyone, even his own deputy.

  ‘Moscow Centre must believe that you’ve been landed, not presented to them on a plate.’

  Marchant nodded. It was unsettling to think that the Russians had believed for so long that his father was theirs.

  ‘I’m sorry, you were right about the Russian-speaking Berbers,’ Fielding continued. ‘We’re now certain that the SVR is protecting Dhar.’

  Marchant had never doubted who had taken Salim Dhar from the High Atlas, but it was still reassuring to hear someone else spell it out.

  ‘The approach in Sardinia confirmed it,’ Fielding added. ‘We know the SVR are not averse to using Islamic militants when it suits them. Roubles and rifles continue to flow freely into Iran and Syria. Moscow controls mosques in Russia that preach jihad against America.’

  ‘And do the Russians know we’re related?’

  ‘It would seem so. We’re back to the treachery inheritance again: the anti-American family gene. If you had to identify the one single thing that defines Dhar, it would be his hatred of the US. Moscow Centre is demonstrating an ambition we haven’t seen from them for a very long time. If they’re successful, they’ll have two brothers on their payroll. One, the world’s most wanted terrorist; the other, the Western intelligence officer charged with finding him. And they share a father who once worked for Moscow, too. A lethal combination, wouldn’t you say? The house of Marchant could do a lot of damage.’

  ‘Which is why they’ve recalled Primakov.’

  ‘He’s the only person in the world who could recruit both of you. He knew your father. Moscow Centre is still wary of Primakov, but they had no choice but to trust him, bring him back in from the cold.’

  ‘And what do you expect Primakov to give us?’

  ‘Advance warning, I hope, of whatever act of proxy terrorism the Russians and Dhar are planning. And given they’re counting on your help, we must assume that this time Dhar’s target will be mainland Britain.’

  42

  It was the incessant rain that Salim Dhar couldn’t bear. He could put up with the canteen food, and the training, morning, noon and night. Even the lack of sunshine was something he felt he could get used to. But the interminable drizzle was like nothing he had ever experienced before. The rain of his childhood had been joyful, thick drops that drenched the dusty streets of Delhi within minutes. He had danced with friends in the downpours, celebrating the monsoon’s long-awaited arrival, washing himself as the warm water cleansed the land all around. This rain penetrated the soul with its leaden persistence.

  The surrounding countryside, deep in the Arkhangelsk oblast of northern Russia, offered little comfort from the misery of the weather: dense dark forests of pine and spruce as far as the eye could see. There was something about pine trees that he found particularly depressing, as if they had been sapped of the very will to live.

  Dhar wondered if he would have been happier in the cold. It had been freez
ing at night in the mountains of Afghanistan, where he had gone after the attack in Delhi. But he had been there many times before, attending and then teaching at training camps, and his familiarity with the terrain seemed to reduce the chill. And winter was also over. It had been much warmer in Morocco’s High Atlas. Mount Toubkal was still tipped with white when he had first arrived more than a year ago, but he had kept below the snowline, moving on every night, holding on to the latent warmth of the previous day, encouraged by the promise of morning.

  There was no respite where he was now, no prospect of a break in the slate-grey skies. His veins felt like roof gutters, flowing with rainwater. The guards said it wasn’t usually so wet. Early July could be beautiful. Some mornings, when he first woke up in his hangar, he wondered if he had travelled back fifty years and been sent to work at the nearby logging Gulag in the forests rather than to Kotlas air base. But as he rolled out his prayer mat on the concrete floor and heard the twin jet engines of a MiG-31 firing up in the damp dawn outside, he knew where he was and what lay ahead.

  Kotlas, better known as Savatiya, was a small military airfield, headquarters of the 458th Interceptor Aviation Regiment. Security was already tight, but it had been discreetly increased around the perimeter fence to protect the airfield’s anonymous guest. Dhar was being kept in a draughty hangar at the northern end of the 2.5-kilometre-long runway, close to a parking sector deep within a wooded enclosure. There was only one other building in the area, a smaller maintenance hut where he carried out most of his training. On the far side of the runway was an alert ramp where two MiG-31s were positioned on permanent standby. The base was also home to MiG-25s and, as one of his guards had told him, was the ‘target of opportunity’ that was destroyed by an American B52 bomber in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove.

  Dhar had been told that today would be different. Not the weather, which showed little sign of lifting, but the daily training: less theory. His personal routine, though, would remain unchanged. Self-discipline was how he had kept his life together, the only constant in his world. It was something that his mother had taught him from an early age, when they were living in the American Embassy compound in Chanakyapuri in Delhi, although in those days it had meant helping with her early-morning pooja rather than praying towards Mecca. He had been born Jaishanka Menon, a Hindu, but by the time he was eighteen he had converted to Islam and was reading the Koran in Arabic. At first, his conversion was about spiting the man he thought was his father, an infidel who had tyrannised his childhood with his demeaning obsession with all things American, but he had soon grown into his new life, first in Kashmir then in Afghanistan.

  His guards knew not to disturb Dhar until he had finished his prayers and ablutions. Sometimes, as he lay awake at night, he heard the stamping of their feet outside, the strike of a match, the rubbing of thick gloves. He felt no sympathy for them. They were part of the FSB, the domestic arm of the former KGB, and had been instrumental in the slaughter of thousands of his Muslim brothers in Chechnya.

  He knocked on the side door of the hangar and waited for the guards to unlock it from the outside. He moved his toes in his oversized flying boots, trying to force warmth into them. In winter, he had been told, there was a place in Siberia called Oymyakon where spit froze before it reached the ground, birds froze in mid-flight. He shivered, glad it was summer.

  By the time the door was opened, Dhar had wrapped a scarf around his face so that only his eyes were visible, and then put on an old pair of mirrored sunglasses. Without even a glance, he walked past the two guards, who stepped back and followed him across the runway towards the training hut.

  To his right, a jet fighter was being prepared in the secluded parking area surrounded by trees. Dhar knew at once what it was: a Sukhoi-25, rugged workhorse of the Soviet air force, the plane he had first seen in Afghanistan as a nineteen-year-old jihadi. That one had been a rusting wreck, a legacy of the Soviet invasion almost thirty years earlier. More than twenty had been brought down by Stinger missiles supplied to the Mujahadeen by the CIA. The pilot had been shot after he ejected, and the remains of the plane covered in camouflage netting, deceiving the Soviet search-and-rescue helicopters that had flown over later.

  For years afterwards, Taleb children had sat and played in its titanium bathtub of a cockpit, until the wingless fuselage was eventually moved to a training camp. When Dhar had first set eyes on it, he too had sat at its controls, transfixed by the possibilities. It was eighteen months before 9/11. Planes and their potential role in the jihadi struggle had always fascinated him. One of the camp leaders had noticed his interest, and encouraged him to start playing flight-simulator games.

  Gaming was widespread amongst jihadis at the time, a way to stave off boredom during the endless hours of concealment. (The only problem was the pirated software, which crashed continually.) There were a few consoles in Dhar’s camp, run off car batteries, and there was talk of a real role for those who excelled at virtual flying.

  Dhar had been one of the best, and he knew his planes. He looked again at the jet on the runway and saw that it was in fact an SU-25UB, similar to the model he had been flying on the simulator for the past week, except that it was a two-seater trainer. It must have flown in overnight, as there had been no plane there before. A mechanic was by the far wing, looking up at the under-side. Dhar turned away when one of the guards gestured at him.

  He felt a thrill ripple through his body as he looked ahead again. He pushed his gloved hand into his coat pocket and felt for the letter, which was still there, a little crumpled. But before he could pull it out and read it again, a voice was calling from the training hut in front of him.

  ‘Today, I watch you fly the Grach, our little rook,’ the man said, using the SU-25’s Russian nickname. ‘Then I must leave for London.’ It was Nikolai Primakov.

  43

  Marchant had been surprised to get a call from Monika. She had wanted them to meet alone for a drink, and they were sitting now in the roof terrace restaurant at Tate Modern, after a whirlwind tour of the galleries. He had thought her interest in art at the Polish guesthouse more than a year earlier had been purely cover, but like all good legends, it was based on fact. Her knowledge was considerable.

  ‘You know what Picasso once said?’ she asked, sipping a glass of rosé. The London skyline was spread out below them, St Paul’s immediately across the river. ‘“Art is a lie that makes us realise truth.” In our work, you and I lie every day, but somehow the truth gets lost along the way.’

  ‘Were you lying in Warsaw?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And there was no truth in what happened?’

  She held his gaze as she put an olive to her full lips. Then she turned away.

  ‘I lost my brother last month. He was with the Agencja Wywiadu, too. A more senior officer than me, always more professional. I tried to do a good job, make sure you had your freedom.’

  ‘And you did.’

  ‘I enjoyed being with you,’ she said, keen to change the subject. ‘You were very gentle.’

  Marchant recalled the brief time they had spent together, making love, smoking joints, each playing out their legends: he the tie-dyed gap-year student, she the hippy hostel receptionist. He had thought about her often since then, her confident sexuality worn so close to her skin.

  ‘But not as gentle as Hugo.’

  She laughed, throaty and heartfelt, then lit a cigarette.

  ‘You’re not jealous, are you, Mr Englishman?’

  Marchant looked away.

  ‘You are.’ She laughed again and prodded him in the ribs. ‘Daniel.’

  It wasn’t what he had expected. For a moment, he wondered if he really was jealous. He had been with Monika for twenty-four hours in Poland, most of it spent in bed. But he knew it was something else – suspicion rather than jealousy – that made him keep probing.

  ‘Of course I’m not jealous.’

  Her smile faded. ‘Hugo’s been a good friend.
Lifted my gloom.’

  Marchant felt a pang of guilt. Prentice had helped him through difficult times, too, particularly when his father had died. He could be a generous colleague, a man who lived life for the moment and wanted others to share in his luck.

  ‘I’m sorry about your brother.’ Marchant sensed that Monika wanted to return to the subject, talk about him some more.

  ‘He was shot by the SVR. Four of our agents have been killed in the past year. Another one was murdered last week.’

  ‘All by the Russians?’

  ‘We think so. Someone’s betraying them. An entire network’s been taken down. The WA’s in turmoil, searching for a mole.’

  ‘Is that why you’re here in London?’

  She paused. ‘No. Hugo wanted to show me off to his friends.’

  ‘I lost a brother once. He was called Sebastian. Sebbie. We were twins. He died when I was eight.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She rested a hand on Marchant’s forearm. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘He died in a car crash. His turn to sit in the front seat. We were living in Delhi at the time.’

  ‘You must miss him. They say the bond of a twin is unbreakable.’

  ‘Every day. I wish I could say it gets easier with time, but it doesn’t. I’m sorry.’

  They sat in silence for a while, her hand resting on his. For once there were no legends, no cover stories. Their grief was real, their own.

  ‘I must go,’ Monika said eventually, ‘otherwise another Englishman will be getting jealous.’

  She stood up from the table, gave Marchant a light kiss on the lips and was gone.

  44

  Prentice and Marchant were standing well back from the first-floor window of the Georgian townhouse, but they could see people walking up and down Savile Row beneath them in the summer-evening sun. Marchant hadn’t been aware that the tailor’s had a connection with the intelligence services, but it was an old arrangement brokered by Prentice, which made sense. He never bought his suits from anywhere else.