by Jon Stock
He knew MI5 was behind the decision to suspend him, just as it had been the driving force behind his father’s removal as Chief of MI6, which had added an extra degree of tension to his interrogation in the basement.
‘You can see how it looks from our point of view,’ his interrogator was saying, as he walked around Marchant in the plain, whitewashed room, chewing gum. Marchant, sitting on the only chair, didn’t recognise the man, who called himself Wylie. Shortly after his father’s forced retirement, Marchant had been interviewed at Thames House by a panel of officers, but it hadn’t included this man. Wylie was in his late forties, flat-footed with thinning red hair, his skin pale and too dry. If he passed you in the street, Marchant thought, you would guess he was an overworked police officer, or an inner-city school-teacher, someone who saw more paperwork than daylight, knew his colleagues better than his wife.
‘Two men, running together, desperate to reach Tower Bridge for maximum publicity. One of them fresh from the subcontinent, strapped up with explosives. The other –’ Wylie paused, as if his disdain for Marchant had suddenly overwhelmed him – ‘the other, a former member of the intelligence services with “issues”, making sure he reaches his target.’
‘Suspended, not former,’ Marchant said calmly. ‘His target was Turner Munroe, the American Ambassador.’ Wylie, Marchant knew, was employing a standard interrogation strategy: push the less plausible of your two main theories (ex-MI6 man with a grudge) as far as you can, and see how much of your more plausible theory (ex-MI6 man saves MI5’s skin) is validated by the interviewee’s answers. He’d learnt it at the Fort, with Leila.
‘When the order was given to slow down, you both kept on running at the same pace in order to reach your target, which was Tower Bridge,’ Wylie continued, getting into his own stride, chewing faster on his gum. He spoke with an enthusiasm that drew Marchant in, until his ear became tuned to the underlying sarcasm. ‘In fact, you helped to keep this man going, at one point holding his arm to support him.’
Wylie tossed a black-and-white surveillance photo onto the table. It was of Marchant and Pradeep approaching the bridge, taken with a zoom lens. Marchant was shocked at how exhausted he looked: Pradeep seemed to be propping him up. His limbs felt weak again as he shifted his legs under the table.
‘Why didn’t you slow down, as ordered?’ Wylie asked, standing behind Marchant now.
Marchant picked up the photo and took his time to answer, trying to get a measure of the person behind him as he ordered his thoughts. The exact events of the endgame were still not clear in his mind. Had they fired at Pradeep because he wasn’t slowing down? He had thought the shots rang out afterwards, once they were walking.
‘Pradeep was an unwilling suicide bomber,’ Marchant said, talking over his shoulder. ‘My own feeling is that he was coerced into the operation. When I first approached him, he was happy to be helped. It was a primitive response: “How can I stop myself from being killed?” Once his initial survival instincts had been addressed, he started to think of others, in this case his son, who would be killed if he didn’t see his mission through. As we approached the bridge, this concern became paramount in his mind. He didn’t slow down when I asked him to, and as you can see, I had to intervene to reduce his pace.’
Marchant dropped the photo back on the table. Both of them watched in silence as it spun around and came to a halt. Marchant wished there was a fan in the room.
‘Did it ever cross your mind that you had no authority to take the actions you did?’ Wylie asked, still behind him. ‘You were suspended, after all.’
Marchant noted his interrogator’s change of tack. ‘I was behaving like a responsible member of the public.’
‘Responsible?’ Wylie laughed. ‘Everyone knows you’ve gone to seed, Marchant.’
Marchant stared ahead, his tone even. ‘I saw something suspicious, and in this instance, ringing the terrorist hotline wasn’t really an option.’
‘Why not?’ Wylie barked, walking around in front of Marchant. His voice had an odd habit of cracking and rising in pitch when he was angry. The effect should have been funny, but it was unsettling.
‘Why not?’ Marchant echoed, louder now that he could see Wylie again. ‘Because I didn’t have a bloody phone with me.’
Marchant struggled to control his urge to shout. There was no reason to bring Leila into this. She would tell them about her TETRA phone in a separate debrief. He spoke slowly and clearly, emphasising the words as if speaking to a child. ‘I chose to stay with Pradeep. I’m not sure it would have been that easy to identify him again. There were 35,000 runners out there.’
‘Including some of our officers,’ Wylie said.
Flat-footing it along at the back with the fifteen-minute milers, Marchant thought.
‘This attack didn’t come as a complete surprise,’ Wylie added.
‘I’m sure it didn’t.’ And if Marchant was writing the incident up, his report would have made that abundantly clear: MI5 saw it coming, and still screwed up.
‘You knew about it in advance, then?’ Wylie asked, his voice cracking again. This time he pulled out an asthma inhaler and sucked once on it, hard.
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘But your former colleagues knew. They just don’t like sharing information much, do they?’
Then Marchant thought he understood. Wylie was suggesting that his involvement was pre-planned: part of a conspiracy by MI6 to expose MI5’s failings, to get his job back.
‘I can’t answer for MI6,’ he said.
‘No, you’re right, you can’t. But you’d like to. Working for Six kept you sober. We’re seeing the real Marchant now, though, aren’t we? Oh, come on, you were tipped off. One of your old “mates”’ – he exaggerated the word derisively – ‘chose to tell you rather than us. You went out there this morning looking for a man with a belt. You didn’t just stumble across him, the one runner out of 35,000 who wanted to blow himself up.’
Marchant thought of Leila, what she’d said about Paul Myers picking up some chatter just before the marathon, and felt his palms moisten. Had someone logged the call from Myers to her? His chance encounter could begin to look anything but: Cheltenham tells MI6; MI6 informs suspended officer, who thwarts bomb attack under MI5’s nose. Wylie, though, had no idea of the fear he was sowing in Marchant’s mind.
‘So what did this rag-head tell you about himself?’ Wylie asked, changing tack again.
Rag-head? Marchant marvelled at how unreconstructed MI5 still was. He thought it had become more ethnically diverse. ‘He said his name was Pradeep. He was originally from Cochin in Kerala. He called it Kochi, the local name, suggesting he was Indian.’ Marchant had always liked data. Hard facts, unquestionable stats – they were reassuring in his shifting world.
‘South India,’ Wylie said. ‘We all hoped that little terror campaign had gone away.’
Don’t bring my father into this, Marchant thought. Last year’s bombings, believed to have been run from South India, had stopped when his father stood down as Chief at Christmas, a point not lost on his enemies in MI5. ‘Pradeep also had a good knowledge of New Delhi,’ Marchant said, determined to remain calm. ‘He was living there with his wife and son. He seemed to know Chanakyapuri, the diplomatic enclave in the south of the city.’
‘An unusual part of town to know, where all the foreign embassies are.’
‘Possibly. It’s hard to tell. He revealed very little information about himself: spoke good English, with a heavy Indian accent. His child was four, maybe five, wearing a maroon school sweatshirt in a photo he showed me. If you hadn’t shot him, he might have been able to tell you a bit more about himself.’
Marchant saw the punch coming – it had been coming ever since MI6 first looked down its public-school nose at MI5 – and raised his left forearm quick enough to deflect it upwards. His instinct, honed at the Fort, was to strike back at the same moment with his right hand, but he resisted, grabbing Wylie’s upper arm
instead. Their faces were close before Marchant let him go.
‘Next time we’ll take you both down,’ Wylie said, sucking deeply on his inhaler.
5
Paul Myers drew heavily on his third pint of London Pride. ‘Another thirty seconds and the planes would have collided,’ he said. ‘The CAA’s lost the plot, wants to know how many other UK near-misses have been caused by Colorado tinkering with its atomic clocks.’
‘And?’ Leila asked, glancing around the pub. The Morpeth Arms, just across the river from Legoland, was a regular haunt for officers from MI5 and MI6. She recognised one or two colleagues at the bar, waiting to be served by the pub’s Czech and Russian barmaids.
‘Just don’t rely on your Tom-Tom if there’s a war on.’
Leila smiled, sipping at her glass of Sauvignon. She was tired. MI5 had let her go late in the afternoon, after a second day of interviews. The Americans had been present today: James Spiro, the CIA’s London chief, had asked lots of questions about Daniel Marchant, but no one would answer hers. She wanted to be with him, talk through the events of the marathon, hear it from his side, but nobody would admit that they knew where he was. Myers was a consolation prize. He had played his part that day, was proof that it had all actually happened. But it was the chatter that interested her.
‘It was good of you to call me yesterday,’ she said, touching his freckled forearm. Myers was wearing a fleece too big for him, pulled up at the sleeves.
‘We go back a bit, eh? I remember the first day you arrived at the Fort…’
‘Do you remember exactly what you heard? The chatter?’
Myers sat back awkwardly. ‘It was probably nothing. A South Indian we’d been monitoring. Talked about “35,000 runners”. Did you pass it on to anybody?’
‘Only Daniel. Briefly, just before the marathon started.’
Myers smiled, not sure where to look. Like most of the intelligence analysts Leila knew at GCHQ, he was socially dysfunctional, his head hanging too far forward over his pint, which he grasped with big nail-bitten hands. He was a good listener, though, not just to jihadi chatter, but to old friends like Leila. She knew that he still fancied her, partly because of his unsubtle glances at her breasts, but also because of the speed with which he had agreed to come up to London when she needed to talk. She knew, too, that it was wrong of her to exploit his enthusiasm; but she had no choice. The marathon had left her in desperate need of company.
‘I’m still trying to work out how it all happened, why he was the one who spotted the belt,’ Leila said, realising she shouldn’t have another glass of wine.
‘Come on, Leila, he’s always been a jammy little shit. Some people land the best postings, win on penalties, get the girl.’
Myers lifted his head briefly, his thick glasses glinting in the light. He was always at his most lyrical when he’d been on the ale, he thought, stealing another look at Leila’s heavy breasts.
‘I’m worried about him,’ she said. ‘After what happened to his father.’
‘He’ll get his job back. He saved the day, didn’t he?’
‘I hope the Americans see it that way. They never liked Stephen Marchant, and they don’t trust Daniel. I think it’s best neither of us mentions the chatter. It might not look too good for him.’
‘OK by me. I shouldn’t have told you anyway. The guys in Colorado Springs thought he was a bloody hero,’ Myers continued, draining his glass. ‘Any chance of kipping at your place for the night? Missed the last train back to Cheltenham.’
‘You can sleep on the sofa,’ Leila said, surprised by his confidence.
As they walked out onto the empty Embankment, looking for a cab, Leila turned to Myers. ‘You never thought it was true, what they said about his father?’
‘No. We would have known. We hear about everything at Cheltenham, sooner or later. It was political, expedient. They didn’t trust him. The PM. Armstrong. The whole bloody lot of them. Not because he was a traitor. They just didn’t understand him. He was old school, not their type.’
‘I sometimes wonder if there really was ever a mole,’ Leila said, looking out across the water towards Legoland, lit up in the night sky like some sort of rough-hewn pyramid.
‘It wasn’t Stephen Marchant, that’s all I know,’ Myers said, momentarily unsteady as he took in her legs. ‘Or his son. I can’t understand why they suspended him. No, Daniel’s one of the good guys. Good taste in women, too.’
Half an hour later, Leila lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling in her Canary Wharf flat, regretting that she had let Myers stay on her sofabed. He was already fast asleep, his body lying as if he had been dropped from a great height, and snoring loudly.
Leila thought again about her mother, how she had sounded on the phone the night before. The doctor who had first suggested a nursing home had told her not to worry, that she must expect her mother to sound increasingly confused, but it was still alarming. Sunday was not a day she usually called her, but the marathon that morning had left her frightened and tired. Alone in her flat, after four hours of questioning at Thames House, she had felt like a child again. When she was younger and needing to talk, she had never turned to her father, who had made little effort to know her. She had always confided in her mother, but now her voice had scared Leila even more.
‘They came tonight, three of them,’ her mother had begun in slow Farsi. ‘They took the boy – you know him, the one who cooks for me. Beat him in front of my eyes.’
‘Did they hurt you, Mama?’ Leila asked, dreading the answer. The confused stories of mistreatment grew worse each time she rang. ‘Did they touch you?’
‘He was like a grandson to me,’ she continued. ‘Dragged him away by his feet.’
‘Mama, what did they do to you?’ Leila asked.
‘You told me they wouldn’t come,’ her mother said. ‘Others here have suffered, too.’
‘Never again, Mama. They won’t come any more. I promise.’
‘Why did they say my family are to blame? What have we ever done to them?’
‘Nothing. You know how it is. Are you safe now?’
But the line was dead.
Leila wanted to be with Marchant now, to hold him close, talk about her mother. If only they had met in different circumstances, other lives. Marchant had often said the same. But their paths had tangled and could never be undone, even though both had learnt to keep a part of themselves back that no one – agents, colleagues, lovers – could ever touch. Marchant, though, was unlike anyone she had come across before. He was driven, pushing himself to the limits of success and failure. Nothing in his life ever happened in half measures. If Marchant drank, he would keep drinking until dawn. When he needed to sleep deeply, he could lie in until midday. And when he needed to study, he would work all night.
She remembered the day, two weeks into their new entrants’ course at the Fort, when she woke early after a fitful sleep. The wind had been blowing in off the Channel all night, and the old windows of the bleak training centre, a former Napoleonic fort on the end of the Gosport peninsula, were rattling like milk bottles on a float. The three female recruits were in a large, shared room on the north side of the central courtyard, while the seven men were in a block of separate bedsits on the east side, overlooking the sea. She went to the window and saw a light. She couldn’t be sure it was Marchant’s, but she pulled on a jumper, wrapped herself in a dressing gown and made her way quietly across the cold stone courtyard.
When she reached the row of men’s rooms, she knew immediately that it was Marchant’s weak light seeping out from under the old wooden door. She hesitated, shivering. The day before had been dedicated to the theory of recruiting agents. People could generally be persuaded to betray their country for reasons of Money, Ideology, Coercion or Ego: MICE. It had been a long day in the classroom, with only a brief drink in the bar afterwards. Marchant had studiously ignored her then, even though they had been in the same group all day, exchanging what she thought were mea
ningful glances.
She knocked once and waited. There was no sound, and for a moment Leila thought he must be sleeping; or perhaps he was partying down in Portsmouth and had left the light on as a crude decoy. But then the door opened and Marchant was standing there, in a faded surfer’s T-shirt and boxer shorts.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘Can I come in?’ Marchant said nothing, but stood to one side, letting her step into the small room. ‘Aren’t you cold? This dump is freezing.’
‘It stops me falling asleep.’ Marchant picked up a pair of trousers that were slung across the unmade bed, dropped them in the corner and sat back down at his desk. ‘Make yourself at home. I’m afraid there’s only one chair.’
Leila perched herself on the edge of the bed. A pile of papers was stacked up on Marchant’s small desk, bathed in a pool of light from a dented Anglepoise. A half-empty bottle of whisky stood next to the papers. For a few moments they were silent, listening to the plangent wind outside.
‘What are you reading?’ she asked. He turned half away from her, flicking through the printed sheets.
‘Famous traitors. You know Ames is still owed $2.1 million by the Russians? They’re keeping it for him in an offshore account, should he ever escape from his Pennsylvania penitentiary. There was no higher calling, just the need for cash. His wife’s shopping bills were more than his CIA salary. So simple.’
‘It’s four o’clock in the morning.’
‘I know.’
‘Why now?’
Marchant turned back to look at her. ‘It’s not enough for me just to pass out of here. I need to fly out of this bloody place with wings.’
‘Because of who your father is?’
‘You heard the instructor yesterday. It’s quite clear he thinks I’m not here on merit. My dad’s the boss.’
‘That sort of thing doesn’t happen any more. Everyone knows that.’
