Games Traitors Play

by Jon Stock

  ‘You can tell them that if it hadn’t been for the presence of an MI6 agent in the cockpit – and, for the record, Daniel Marchant is no rogue – the damage would have been incalculably worse.’

  ‘There’s only one thing that’s going to make my President happy, and that’s the scalp of Salim Dhar. Are we any closer to knowing how he disappeared?’

  ‘The helicopter that found Marchant reported nobody else in the water. The entire area continues to be searched as we speak, but so far it’s as if Dhar never existed.’

  Fielding was lying, of course. He had no choice. According to Marchant’s debrief, the SVR had arranged for a trawler to be in the area. It had taken it a few minutes to find Dhar, as the plane had fallen short of the agreed ejection zone, but by the time the search-and-rescue helicopter had arrived, Dhar was on the trawler and heading out towards the Irish Sea.

  105

  Marchant still had a sore back from the Zvezda ejection seat, but otherwise he felt fine as he waited in one of the debriefing rooms for Fielding to return for a second visit. At Marchant’s request, the helicopter had taken him to the Fort, MI6’s training facility at Gosport, after picking him up from the Bristol Channel. The pilot had initially objected, but it was eventually agreed after some calls had been put through to Whitehall. Marchant had been given a physical check-up, then allowed to rest in one of the old rooms overlooking the sea, where he had studied as a new recruit with Leila.

  As Marchant had explained to Fielding, he had thought Dhar was dead when he first spotted him in the water, a hundred yards away. He had released himself from his parachute and swum over to him, dreading what he might find. A dead Dhar suited America, but not Britain. But Dhar was fine, if a little groggy. Marchant had doubted whether the trawler would show up, but a forty-foot vessel registered to St Ives was soon approaching from the south-west.

  ‘For a few moments, I thought I was going to drown,’ Dhar had said.

  ‘I know the feeling,’ Marchant had replied. When he had first hit the sea and water had filled his nostrils, memories of being waterboarded had come flooding back.

  ‘You know I cannot take you with me,’ Dhar said.

  ‘I’m not sure I’m invited,’ Marchant replied, glancing at the approaching trawler. They were both shivering, speaking slowly as they trod water. ‘Thanks, by the way.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For letting me come along. And for not destroying Cheltenham. Will the Russians be happy to see you?’

  ‘No. Georgia’s drunken generals will still try to impress America. But it is time for me to move on. Islam is sometimes useful to Russia, but mostly it is a threat.’

  ‘And you never did get to see Tarlton.’

  ‘Next time, perhaps.’

  ‘How will you make contact? The storytellers of Marrakech?’

  Dhar smiled at Marchant. ‘You know me too well. My taxi is here.’

  Marchant swam away as the trawler drew near. He wanted to be at a safe distance in case the SVR had already concluded that he wasn’t such a committed defector after all.

  ‘Our father, he would have approved,’ Marchant called out, hoping that Dhar could still hear him. ‘Family business.’

  Now, as he heard someone approaching the debriefing room at Gosport, Marchant was certain that he had turned Dhar. Last time, after India, he had hoped in vain.

  It was Fielding who knocked and appeared in the doorway.

  ‘I’ve brought someone along to see you,’ he said, slipping away as Lakshmi Meena entered the room.

  ‘Is your arm OK?’ Marchant asked as they embraced. Her wrist was in plaster, and her hug was not quite as warm as his.

  ‘I’m fine. How about you? I went by your flat, brought you some clean clothes.’

  ‘Thanks. Was the door open?’ They both smiled. Then she kissed him gently on the lips.

  ‘I found this, too. It had been delivered. I thought it might be important. The rest of your post was just bills.’

  She held up a padded envelope, addressed to him in unfamiliar handwriting. Marchant looked at it, then put it on a table to one side.

  ‘How’s Spiro?’

  ‘Mad at me for not preventing your so-called defection.’

  ‘Even though I stopped him killing your Defense Secretary and his generals?’

  ‘You still took down a $155-million Raptor. The media lapped that up.’

  ‘I hope they’re keeping me out of it.’

  ‘It’s been agreed by London and Washington to airbrush you from the story. It was getting kind of hard to explain.’

  ‘But it was a two-seater plane.’

  ‘The media are reporting a bold strike at the West by Salim Dhar and a jihadi brother.’

  ‘Half right, at least about the brother.’

  ‘You did well to stop him. I don’t suppose you have any idea where he is now?’

  ‘Is that you asking, or Spiro?’

  ‘Most of the Western world.’

  Marchant hoped that one day he would be able to tell her that Dhar had been turned, that Britain now had an asset at the heart of the global jihad.

  ‘Is his mother safe? Shushma?’ At least he could talk to Lakshmi about her.

  ‘She’s fine. Spiro handed her over to MI6 when we landed back at Brize Norton. That was always the deal with Fielding. He wants a word with you on his own, by the way. I’ll get him.’

  ‘Will you stay after that? Please?’

  ‘Is a graduate of the Farm allowed to stay at the Fort?’

  ‘I’m sure it could be arranged, in the interests of a special relationship.’

  Two minutes later, Fielding and Marchant had stepped outside the debriefing room, leaving Lakshmi on her own, and were walking along the perimeter fence that overlooked the sea. A warm wind blew in off the water, lifting strands of Fielding’s thinning hair. It was greyer than Marchant remembered.

  ‘You did well,’ Fielding said. ‘It was a tough call to make about GCHQ, but the right one. Dhar’s value has soared on the international jihadi markets. The chatrooms were ecstatic after his attempt on the President’s life in Delhi. This time they’re beside themselves. They never thought someone could strike at the heart of Western intelligence.’

  ‘I gather there were some casualties.’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about that. While the government’s been playing down the damage, our stations abroad are exaggerating it to the foreign media. Well-placed sources are talking about cover-ups, crucial computer networks down for months, morale at GCHQ at an all-time low.’

  ‘And the truth?’

  ‘One death, thirty injuries. Minimal structural damage. But I’m afraid Paul Myers took quite a hit.’

  ‘Is he OK?’

  ‘Conscious, a little confused. He should make a full recovery. He’d been in the central garden, but he was hungry, and was on his way back inside to get something to eat when the bomb struck.’

  ‘Saved by a doughnut.’

  They both laughed and walked on, watching the wind whip off the tops of the waves.

  ‘And you’re confident that Dhar is ours?’ Fielding eventually asked.

  ‘This time I am. We found some common ground.’

  ‘Coastguard located a drifting trawler just off the coast, by the way. Three dead Russians on board, no sign of Dhar.’

  Marchant thought back to the sight of Dhar bobbing in the water. Even then, half drowned and semi-conscious, he had been full of confidence.

  ‘If this proves successful, we have your father to thank,’ Fielding continued. ‘You know we couldn’t have done it without him. A long time ago, he realised where the world was heading, and saw in his two sons a possible solution.’

  ‘The old man made some mistakes along the way.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘Trusting Hugo Prentice.’

  ‘We all did that.’

  ‘The silly thing is, I miss Hugo, despite everything he did.’

  ‘For while the treaso
n I detest, the traitor still I love. Lakshmi’s waiting for you. Enjoy your evening. I have a meeting back in London with Denton. If I was a more suspicious man, I might think he was after my job.’

  106

  Marchant couldn’t sleep that night. It wasn’t that the Fort’s beds were more uncomfortable than he had remembered, or because he was sharing his with Lakshmi. They had made love after dinner in the room in a way that had restored his faith in women. In some ways it had been cathartic to sleep with Lakshmi in the place where he had first done so with Leila, the woman who had so wholly deceived him.

  Lakshmi had told him stories of her childhood, and he had opened up about his father and Sebastian in a way he hadn’t done for years. The only person he didn’t talk about was Dhar.

  Now, as he lay there listening to the sea wind rattling the Fort’s old leaded windows, his hand on Lakshmi’s sleeping thigh, he remembered the package she had brought from his flat. He slipped out of bed, careful not to wake her, and unwrapped it by the moonlight of the window.

  His hands turned cold when he saw what was inside. It was the sketch of the nude that had been for sale in Cork Street, number 14, the one that had been used as a signal by Nikolai Primakov. Someone had stuck half a red sticker onto the corner of the glass, like the one that had once denoted that it was under offer and that the meeting with Primakov was on.

  Marchant glanced across at Lakshmi, then turned the picture over.

  There was some writing on the back giving the gallery details, the price and the artist. He inspected it more closely, and saw that the brown adhesive tape had been slit open and resealed down one side. He reached across for a knife from their dinner, the remains of which had not been cleared from the room, and cut the backing open. Inside was a letter. He slid it out and read.

  By the time you read this I will be drinking Bruichladdich and eating grain-fed Nebraskan steak at the great Goodman’s in the sky. I suspect there will be no other way to bring you and Salim together. Have no regrets. I don’t. Your father was a good man who had faith in both of his remaining sons to do the right thing. He had faith in me too, and I hope I have had the courage to repay it. He saw the future, and in his sons he saw a way forward, an opportunity to stop the conflict. It is up to you now.

  What I have to tell you today, as I prepare to leave London for the last time to meet you at Kotlas, is something that I wanted to say in person, but the risks were always too high when we met in London. Moscow Centre has an MI6 asset who helped the SVR expose and eliminate a network of agents in Poland. His codename was Argo, a nostalgic name in the SVR, as it was once used for Ernest Hemingway.

  The Polish thought that Argo was Hugo Prentice, a very good friend of your father, and I believe a close confidant of yours. He was shot dead on the orders of the AW, or at least of one of its agents. Hugo Prentice was not Argo.

  That mistake was a tragedy, destroying his reputation and damaging your father’s. The real Argo is Ian Denton, deputy Chief of MI6. The SVR asked Denton to meet you at the airport on your return from India, but Fielding, by chance, had already sent Prentice. Go carefully. Denton’s treachery is destined to extend much further than Poland.

  Marchant put the letter down. His first thought was to ring Fielding, but there was no knowing if the line was secure. He went over to the door and checked that it was locked. Then he walked to the window and glanced around. It was a full harvest moon, and its reflection stretched out across the water from the horizon. No one was about, and he knew the Fort was secure, but old instincts had kicked in. If Denton was working for Moscow, then no one was safe from the Russians, least of all him. He had tricked the SVR into a false defection, and sabotaged Dhar’s Russian-sponsored attack on the Georgian generals.

  He put the letter back in its hiding place behind the nude sketch, and climbed into bed. Suddenly he felt exhausted, more tired than he had felt for years. Lakshmi was stirring. Marchant lay there, thinking of Prentice and Primakov, friends of his father, both of them now dead. Then he turned and hugged Lakshmi, linking a leg over hers.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ she whispered, half asleep.

  But he didn’t answer. He didn’t want to lie any more, not to her. Instead, he held her head gently between both hands and kissed her warm lips. Eventually, after they had made love again, he sat up in bed.

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ he said, thinking of Dhar, the burden of running him on his own. He could tell her now. She wasn’t like Leila. Hadn’t Fielding said she could be trusted? Then he thought of Denton, the threat he presented. He could tell her about him, too, confide his fears. He wasn’t sure he could cope with the loneliness of deceit any more, the isolation of espionage. He craved companionship, the truth of honest love.

  ‘What is it?’ Lakshmi asked. Marchant paused, looking at her lying naked in the moonlight. Then he spoke.

  ‘There was once a king called Shahryar, whose wife was unfaithful to him. He executed her, and from then on he believed that all women were the same, until finally he met a virgin called Scheherazade, who told a thousand and one stories to save her own life.’

  ‘And did he trust her?’

  ‘He did.’

  Lakshmi looked at Marchant for a moment, her eyes moistening. ‘Was that all you wanted to tell me?’

  ‘That’s all.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to my panel of pilots, Steve Allan, Peter Shellswell, Peter Goodman, Jerry Milsom and Mike Wright. To Andy Tailby for sharing his knowledge of UAVs. To Rob and Mags Hunter, Marilyn Heilman and David Stevenson, who read early proofs. To Jane Bayley at Naturally Morocco and Said Ahmoume, who drove me over the Tizi’n’Test pass in the Atlas mountains, where this story began. To Giuseppe Zara in Sardinia. To Johnnie and all the staff at Visalam in Chettinad, south India. To Mike Strefford for his insights into mobile-phone security. To Ollie Madden and Kevin McCormick at Warner Brothers, and Steve Gaghan. To Sylvie Rabineau at Rabineau Wachter Sanford & Harris. To my agent, Claire Paterson, and Rebecca Folland, Kirsty Gordon and Tim Glister at Janklow & Nesbit. To Patrick Janson-Smith and Laura Deacon at Blue Door, and to my editor, Robert Lacey and Andy Armitage.

  I am also grateful to Andrew Stock, Andrea Stock, Stewart and Dinah McLennan, Giles and Karen Whittell, Christina Lamb, Nick Wilkinson, Rob Fern, Justin Morshead, Ann Scott, C. Sujit Chandrakumar, Neil Taylor, Wendy Lewis, Charlotte Doherty, Jessica Kelly, Len Heath, Hayley, Sheri, Andrew and Deki at Karmi Farm, the three Saras and Susan, Chandar Bahadur, and Abdou id Salah. There are other people who have helped with this book but wish to remain anonymous. They know who they are and that I am indebted to them.

  Finally, a big thank you to my children, Felix, Maya and Jago, and most of all to Hilary, my wife and muse. .

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  GAMES TRAITORS PLAY. Copyright © 2011 by Jon Stock. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.stmartins.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4299-4131-0

  First published in Great Britain by Blue Door, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers