Games Traitors Play

by Jon Stock

  ‘Sir, I will manage it, don’t worry.’ The driver grinned in the rear-view mirror.

  Not using the horn would be a good start, Marchant thought, but he knew that would be impossible. He tried to cut out the noise and take in the scenery. The reddish earth was barren and unfarmed, flat and dotted with sparse bushes. In the distance, he could see an outcrop of rock that had had its top sliced off. Earlier, he had passed rainbow-painted trucks carrying quarried rocks back to Madurai.

  ‘Sir, are you knowing about the tourism business?’ the driver asked, in between sustained blasts of the horn, which was beginning to grow hoarse. ‘I have a good friend –’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not,’ Marchant interrupted.

  ‘Cement sector?’

  ‘No. Can we go a bit quicker? Faster?’ It was not something he had ever thought he would ask on Indian roads, but he was worried that Meena hadn’t rung again. He had tried to call but her phone was switched off.

  ‘No problem. Isuzu engine.’

  The taxi might have had Japanese technology under the bonnet, but its Indian suspension had long since gone. Marchant found the discomfort oddly reassuring, taking him back to his childhood, driving out of Delhi on a Friday night, the bright lights of the lorries roaring past, waking up at a remote Rajasthani fort. Then he thought of Sebbie and felt a ball tighten in his stomach. It shocked him how much he still missed his twin brother. He stared out of the window at the scenes of rural-roadside life: a woman shaking the coals out of her iron, a threshing machine, schoolchildren cycling home on oversized bikes, their long legs languid in the heat.

  ‘Sir, am I boring you?’ the taxi driver asked, his face in the mirror now long with concern.

  ‘Not at all. I’m sorry,’ Marchant said, feeling guilty. ‘Please, tell me about the cement sector.’

  63

  Meena’s car turned off the dusty road into what at first looked like scrubland. The area was completely flat, covered in green bushes. Peacocks were strutting about, picking at the dry ground, the green sheen of their feathers glinting in the dying light of the day. She knew the airfield was disused, but she had expected a little more infrastructure. In the distance there were a few low buildings, derelict and overgrown. The control tower had long since been demolished. Towards the far perimeter, near a group of trees, a team of local women were loading long logs into stacks and covering them with tarpaulins. Beside the piles of wood someone had laid out cow dung to dry.

  Meena left Shushma in the car and walked out into the open expanse. Beneath the vegetation the ground was concrete, but it had broken up over the years, and she wondered if a plane would still be able to land there. As she walked out across the wide expanse, she could see where the main runway had been. It was in better condition than the rest of the airfield’s surface. She had been told that a local flying club had been campaigning for years for it to be reopened, and it looked as if volunteers had cleared away some of the vegetation.

  She glanced at her watch and stared up into the dusk sky. There was no sign of a plane. If it didn’t come before nightfall, the operation would be abandoned. A night-time landing was out of the question without any airport lights. She didn’t know whether Delhi was onside or not about the flight, but that wasn’t her problem. She looked again at her watch. A part of her hoped that Marchant would turn up after they had gone, but she owed him an explanation. She turned on her phone and dialled.

  ‘Where are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Ten minutes away,’ Marchant said. ‘I’ve been trying to call.’

  ‘There’s a change of plan.’

  ‘What sort of change?’

  ‘I’ll explain when you get here.’

  She hung up and walked over towards the car, fighting back a tear.

  Marchant saw the plane coming in low over the scrubland. He was still two minutes away, and urged his driver to hurry up. Events were spiralling out of his control. Meena’s tone worried him. Nobody was being straight with anyone. He cursed himself again for going after Valentin, but he had felt better for it.

  Marchant asked the driver to drop him off at the edge of the airfield. He ran across the broken surface, watching the plane turn slowly on the old runway, scattering peacocks. It was a Gulfstream V, the CIA’s preferred choice for renditions after 9/11, the plane Spiro had used to fly him out of Britain the previous year. It had taken him to an old Russian airfield outside Syzmany in northern Poland, where they had waterboarded him. He shut out the thought as he approached Meena. Shushma was standing beside her, their arms too close.

  ‘Glad you made it,’ Meena said, glancing at the plane, which had now drawn up a few feet behind them. The noise of the jet engines made it necessary to speak loudly to be heard. Shushma was not happy, staring at the ground, trying to cut out the world again, or just in shock.

  ‘Are you?’ Marchant asked.

  ‘It was your call to go after the Russian,’ Meena said. ‘The operation was compromised. I had no choice.’

  ‘And if I hadn’t?’

  ‘There was another Russian on our tail, but we lost him. I know how to look after myself, Dan.’

  ‘And her, I see,’ he said, nodding at Shushma’s wrist. It was joined to Meena’s with handcuffs. ‘Comforting.’

  ‘They’re a precaution.’

  ‘I gave my word we’d take care of her, not treat her as an enemy combatant.’

  They both heard the noise of the plane’s door opening behind them. Meena turned around to look, and then faced Marchant again.

  ‘Daniel, I told you, there’s been a change.’

  He detected something dancing in her eyes, but he couldn’t be certain what it was any more: loyalty and deceit had begun to look the same in recent months. Then he glanced up at the open door behind her and saw James Spiro filling the frame, a gun in his hand.

  ‘We need to get out of this hellhole,’ he drawled.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Meena whispered, still looking at Marchant.

  ‘You knew?’ Marchant said, glancing at Spiro again, trying to process the implications.

  ‘Ask Fielding,’ she replied, turning towards the plane. Shushma followed, pulled along by her wrist. Then she stopped and faced Marchant. For a moment, he thought she was going to say something, but instead she spat in his face and walked on.

  ‘Fielding?’ Marchant said, wiping the saliva off his cheek. He couldn’t blame her.

  ‘Send my love to the Vicar,’ Spiro called out. ‘And hey, thanks. We couldn’t have got our hands on this piece of brown shit without you.’

  Marchant wanted to run at the plane, pull Spiro down onto the Indian dirt, but there was nothing he could do, not while the American was armed. He thought about Fielding, who had sanctioned the change of plan without telling him, and wanted to drag him into the dirt too. Dhar’s mother was meant to be flown back to the UK. Now she was heading to Bagram, or worse, with Spiro. A deal had been done. He knew he should never have believed in Meena, but this had been brokered far above her head. She was irrelevant. Why would his own Chief let Salim Dhar’s mother – the only lead the West had – fall into Spiro’s heavy hands? It didn’t make any sense.

  He watched helplessly as the plane taxied down the decrepit runway, shimmering in the heat as peacocks ran in all directions. It turned and then accelerated, lifting up into the evening sky. As it passed him, he picked up a rock and hurled it at the fuselage. On the far side of the airfield, the female workers were watching too, one of them transfixed by the mad ghora, a load of logs still balanced on her head. Marchant started to walk back towards his car, kicking at the dust, thinking fast what he could do, who he should ring. Fielding wouldn’t take his call, but he wanted to challenge him, make sure his anger was logged by the duty officer in Legoland.

  He started to dial London, and then stopped. Up ahead, a black car turned off the dusty road and drove towards him, bumping across the concrete. Marchant stood back as it drew up beside him, a darkened rear window lowering.

&nb
sp; ‘Your American friends were in a hurry to leave,’ a voice said. It was Nikolai Primakov.

  64

  Monika had always been relaxed about sex, ever since her first encounter, as a sixteen-year-old, with an English tutor who was five years her senior. It was something that came easily to her, which was a relief, as she was struggling at the time with other areas of her life. Her mother, a teacher, was desperate for her to achieve academic success and study at the University of Warsaw. Her father, a lecturer, had died when she was younger. She was bright, top of her class in languages, but she had no siblings, and life at home as a teenager with her mother could be claustrophobic, until she discovered sex and the freedom it gave her.

  But she hadn’t enjoyed sleeping with Hugo Prentice, who was lying next to her now. It wasn’t his habit of smoking before they made love – she wasn’t averse to kicking things off with a joint. And she wasn’t upset that she was doing it for work rather than pleasure. She knew when she signed up to the AW that her job would occasionally require it, and in this case there had been a redeeming motive. What had cast a shadow over the sex was an encrypted text message that had come through from General Borowski. She had ignored her phone beside the bed, even though the unique alert tone indicated that it was her boss in Warsaw.

  ‘Work can wait,’ she had said, easing herself on top of him. It hadn’t been easy – Borowski only made contact when it was serious – but she didn’t want to arouse Prentice’s suspicions.

  Now that he was asleep, she peeled away from his heavy limbs and dressed. Watching him all the time, she went to his bathroom, where evidence of Prentice’s single life was everywhere. The small room wasn’t unhygienic, but it wasn’t clean either. The old iron bath had greenish stains where the brass taps dripped, and the sink hadn’t been cleaned after his morning ablutions. A wooden-handled shaving brush lay between the taps, still covered in lather, and the lid hadn’t been put back on a pot of hair-styling wax.

  But none of this bothered her. It was his London pad, and he had been living in Warsaw for the past two years. What worried her was Borowski. She looked at the text again and then replied with a blank message, the agreed protocol. Moving fast, she removed the back of her phone and took out the SIM card, replacing it with another she kept in her purse. It had never been used before. She looked in again on Prentice as the phone rebooted, peering through a gap in the bathroom door. He seemed to stir, scratching himself before going back to sleep. Seconds later, a new message had appeared on the screen.

  Monika stared at the words, barely able to believe what she was reading. Then she bent double over the lavatory and threw up.

  65

  ‘Tell me something,’ Primakov said. ‘What ever made you think you could trust them? After all they’ve done to you?’

  ‘I put my faith in the Vicar,’ Marchant said.

  ‘A mistake your father never made.’

  They were driving back towards Madurai in Primakov’s car. A thick glass partition divided them from the front, where a Russian driver sat without expression. It was evident that he couldn’t hear their conversation. Marchant wasn’t surprised that Primakov had turned up at the airport. More worrying was his lack of concern that Dhar’s mother was now in US custody. Marchant had told him the whole story: Fielding’s assurances about Lakshmi Meena, how the CIA had agreed for Shushma to be taken to the UK. Primakov had been particularly interested in Fielding’s role, asking Marchant to repeat exactly what he had said. Marchant had been happy to tell him. He no longer knew where his own loyalties lay, let alone Primakov’s.

  ‘Did you know that she was working at the temple?’ Marchant asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Why didn’t you do more to stop the Americans from taking her?’

  ‘Like you, we had heard she was bound for Britain. I was also a little under strength. Valentin is in the Apollo hospital.’

  Marchant didn’t believe him. Moscow could have drawn on more resources to stop Shushma’s departure. But for some reason they hadn’t.

  ‘Her son won’t be happy,’ Marchant said, trying to steer the conversation towards Dhar. The only thing he knew for certain was that he needed to see him, discuss their father man to man, brother to brother. Primakov had avoided referring directly to Dhar before, but it would be hard not to now.

  ‘It will confirm his worst fears about the West,’ Primakov said.

  And then Marchant began to see things more clearly. Primakov hadn’t flown to Madurai to prevent Shushma’s exfiltration: he wanted to be sure that she was taken. It was the one act that could be guaranteed to get under Dhar’s skin. Whatever the Russians had planned for him, it suited them if Dhar’s blood was up.

  ‘A son will do anything for his mother,’ Marchant offered.

  ‘Rage is important. It can persuade others to take you seriously. People who had their doubts.’

  For the first time, Primakov looked at Marchant with something approaching knowingness in his moist eyes. Was it a sign at last? A part of Marchant no longer believed Fielding’s reassurances about Primakov’s loyalty to London. The Russian wouldn’t give him anything because there was nothing to give. His brief was simply to keep the jihadi fires stoked in Dhar’s belly, and to persuade Marchant to help his half-brother. There was no hidden agenda, no resurrection of old family ties, no belated clemency for his father. But somewhere inside him, Marchant still hoped he was wrong.

  ‘Are you angry, too?’ Primakov asked.

  ‘Wouldn’t you be? I promised Shushma I’d look after her, only to see her renditioned in front of me by James fucking Spiro.’

  Even as Marchant spat out the expletive, a sickening feeling had started to spread: a realisation that he had been manipulated, that actions he thought were his own had actually been controlled by others. Rage is important. It can persuade others to take you seriously. People who had their doubts. He was the one raging now, against Fielding, Meena, Spiro, the West. And it would be music to Moscow’s ears.

  He closed his eyes. Christ, Fielding could be a cold bastard.

  66

  Even Marcus Fielding, working late, was surprised by the swiftness of Moscow Centre’s response. GCHQ’s sub-station at Bude in Cornwall had intercepted a call from Primakov to Vasilli Grushko, the London Rezident, within half an hour of Lakshmi Meena’s departure from a remote airfield outside Madurai. Fielding played the recording again. Primakov spoke first, then Grushko.

  ‘He has been humiliated, which is always a good moment to strike.’

  ‘And by his own side. Fielding is more heartless than I gave him credit for.’

  ‘I can only assume that he wanted to win favour with Langley. By giving them Salim Dhar’s mother, MI6 has gone some way to restoring a relationship they cannot live without for ever.’

  ‘Where is Marchant now?’

  ‘I dropped him off at a village. There was a wedding. He wanted some time on his own.’

  ‘And has he agreed to help us?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then there is no time to waste. He must meet Dhar.’

  Fielding sat back, poured himself a glass of Lebanese wine and turned on a Bach cantata. It was a rare moment of triumph. Oleg, asleep in the corner, looked up briefly, sensing the change in mood. There was no longer any talk of dangles, no equivocation in Grushko’s voice. Fielding’s only headache was Marchant. It hadn’t been an easy decision to call on Spiro’s services, let alone Lakshmi Meena’s, but it was the only way to provoke Marchant. He wouldn’t want to talk to his Chief, not for a while, which was why he had sent Prentice to pick him up from the airport, take him out for a meal in town, suck some venom from his wounded pride.

  Fielding had told Prentice only the bare essentials of the operation to lift Dhar’s mother. He wouldn’t have expected to be given any detail. Need-to-know was a way of life for both of them. Prentice was unaware of Marchant’s ongoing attempt to be recruited by Primakov, given that it was linked to the Russian’s highly clas
sified past. All he knew was that there had been a change of plan in Madurai, and that Marchant would be upset.

  ‘We had to screw him,’ Fielding had explained. ‘You know how it is.’

  Marchant would be astute enough to work out what had happened, why Fielding had been forced to intervene, pull the strings, but he would still be angry. He could let off steam with Prentice, have a moan about means and ends and Machiavellian bosses.

  After he had calmed down, Fielding would have one last talk with him. Then he would be on his own, free to go off the rails, not turn up for work, drink too much. Marchant had form when it came to falling apart. In the months before he had left for Marrakech he had been a mess. And the Russians would lap it up, reassured that he was ready to be turned. Only then would it be time for him to meet Dhar. He owed it to Marchant to prepare him properly, let him genuinely feel what it was like to hate the West. Dhar would detect a false note at a thousand yards.

  It was as he poured himself a second glass of wine that another encrypted audio file from GCHQ dropped into his inbox.

  67

  Marchant had asked Primakov to drop him off in the centre of Kanadukathan, about ten minutes from the airfield. It was a small village, and Marchant would have described it as poor if it hadn’t been for the vast deserted mansions that dominated the dusty lanes. Meena had talked about them in Madurai. They were the ancestral homes of the Chettiars, a once-wealthy community of money-lenders, merchants and jewellery dealers who had fallen on hard times since the end of the Raj. Used now for storing dowry gifts, the mansions only came alive for family weddings, when the Chettiar diaspora would descend from around the world and fill the pillared courtyards with music and laughter.