by Jon Stock
Staff knew not to disturb their Chief during his swim, taken without exception at 3 p.m. every afternoon, when the pool was clear of the workers who used it during their lunch break. (Fielding didn’t realise it was actually empty because nobody wanted to be in the pool while the Chief was steaming up and down the fast lane.) Now, though, his phone was ringing with an internal tone. He headed for the steps and took the call, trusting that it was important. It was from Fielding’s deputy, Ian Denton, a former head of the East European Controllerate and one of his closest allies. He wanted an urgent meeting. Dripping with water, Fielding told him to come up to his office and wait. He knew Denton tried to deal with as much of the Chief’s day-to-day business as he could, never bothering him unless there was a serious problem.
‘We’ve picked up an undeclared flight into Szymany, northeastern Poland,’ Denton said ten minutes later, as Fielding looked out of his window at a solitary sandpiper bobbing in the Thames mud. Denton had spent much of his early career behind the Iron Curtain, where the fear of being overheard had become an obsession for Western case officers. As a result, his voice was so quiet that it was a struggle for anyone to hear him. But Fielding’s ear was fine-tuned, and he prided himself on never once having asked Denton to speak up.
‘Cheltenham’s analysed the data strings,’ Denton continued in a whisper. ‘ADEP was Fairford, and multiple onward dummy flight plans were filed. It was operating under special status.’
‘There’s a surprise,’ Fielding said, his back still to Denton, who was wrong-footed by the Chief’s apparent lack of concern. Denton – northern grammar school, Oxford, keen on carp fishing – began to regret his request for a meeting. All undeclared CIA flights anywhere in Europe had become a priority for MI6, following a personal request from the Prime Minister, who wasn’t as relaxed about them as his predecessor.
‘What’s strange is that it wasn’t picked up here,’ Denton continued. ‘Usually MI5…’
‘I know.’ Fielding turned and fixed Denton with a wry smile. ‘Leave it with me, Ian. Thanks.’
Denton was so thorough, Fielding thought, as he left the office. He liked that in an officer. His big break had come in the 1980s in Bucharest where, as a junior officer working under diplomatic cover, he had spent every weekend fishing for carp and bream at a lake on the edge of the capital. Nobody knew why until, nine months later, he hooked the head of Romania’s secret police, a fellow carper.
Fielding smiled. Maybe that was why Denton whispered: he didn’t want to scare the fish. Below him a yellow London Duck emerged out of the Thames, water pouring off it, and drove up the slipway that ran alongside Legoland’s outer perimeter wall. It was the only place the Second World War amphibious vehicle could get in and out of the water. Fielding had always wondered what the captain told the tourists as they passed by Legoland. One day he would take a ride and find out. Denton could come along too, with his rod.
Harriet Armstrong took Fielding’s call in her official Range Rover, on her way to spend the weekend at Chequers. Fielding had heard about the invitation, one which had yet to be extended to him.
‘Hope I haven’t disturbed you,’ Fielding began, failing to sound sincere.
‘If you’re calling about Marchant, I can’t help you,’ she said brusquely. ‘We passed him on to Spiro.’
‘I know. And I thought you should know, given you’re seeing him this weekend, that we’ll be filing a report to the PM on an undeclared CIA flight which left Fairford for Poland this morning. I seem to remember he was quite keen to know about such flights.’
‘So keen, he signed this one off himself,’ Armstrong said. ‘I’ll tell him you called.’
Fielding briefly considered phoning Sir David Chadwick, to remind him of their agreement at the Travellers that Marchant wasn’t to leave the country, but other measures were now needed. Armstrong’s increasingly close relationships with Spiro and the PM were beginning to irritate him. She might have removed Stephen Marchant from his post, but he had no intention of giving her the same satisfaction as far as he himself was concerned.
He called through to his secretary. ‘Get me Brigadier Borowski of the AW in Warsaw on the line.’
14
Leila turned the key in the front door and slipped into Marchant’s basement flat in Pimlico, across the river from Legoland. She was shocked by its untidiness, the unmade bed, clothes strewn across the floor, bottles spilling out of the wastepaper basket under his desk. Had the place been searched? She used to be a regular visitor here, and it had always been kept immaculate, almost too tidy. When he was suspended they had stopped staying over at each other’s places, except for the night before the marathon, when she had insisted he stayed. Marchant was determined to limit the fallout from his father’s departure to himself and no one else. They had stolen the occasional night away in the country, but Marchant had found it hard to relax. Until he had cleared his father’s name, he couldn’t be himself.
That self she had fallen for in those early days smiled up at her now from the photo of their final day at the Fort, propped up on his desk in the corner of the room. A group of them were in the SOE memorial room, posing in front of the wall where previous members of the Service had been honoured. Marchant’s arm was slung casually around her shoulders, like a college friend, giving no clue that they had slept together for the first time the night before. Already they were learning to deceive in love, mixing up their jobs with their private lives, just as Marchant had feared.
Next to the group photo was a picture of his father up a ladder in the orchard at Tarlton, in happier, idyllic Cotswold days. An eight-year-old Marchant in shorts was lying in a hammock strung between two apple trees, grinning confidently up at the camera. His twin brother, Sebastian, was lying next to him. They weren’t identical, but they shared the same smile. Sebastian’s face was turned towards his mother, who was standing at the bottom of the ladder, a basket of fruit in her arms. She was strikingly beautiful, confident, at ease with motherhood.
Marchant had only talked about the crash once, after they had both nearly drowned during survival training at the Fort. Sebbie, as Marchant sometimes called him, must have died a few weeks after the photo had been taken, in a traffic accident when they had returned to Delhi at the end of the English summer. Marchant had been in the jeep too when it collided head-on with a government bus, but he and his mother had survived unscathed.
Marchant’s family had stayed on in Delhi until the end of his father’s tour, which surprised colleagues. Later, he told Marchant that he hadn’t wanted to return home immediately because his family would have spent the rest of their lives hating India, and he couldn’t countenance that.
Marchant’s seemingly easy manner, Leila knew, dated back to those Delhi days. Everyone who met him now thought he was relaxed, charming, sociable (his ayah had described him as ‘easy go happy’), but it was his way of protecting a place he wasn’t prepared to go with anyone: a place where he was still an eight-year-old child, staring at his brother beside the wreckage of the car, watching the bus driver flee from the scene; a place she knew he had revisited when his father had died. His father’s death had meant that Marchant was the only one left of his family. She sometimes felt like that too, her mother as good as dead to her, her father no longer alive. He had never been a happy presence in her childhood, either away on work or distant when he was at home, drinking too much at night and showing her mother too little respect.
Leila went over to Marchant’s unmade bed and lay on it, turning her head to one side and inhaling his faint aroma on the pillow. He would try to make contact, let her know he was all right. The confinement of a safe house would drive him crazy, but he was better off there than in the outside world. He was now a marked man, wanted not just by MI5 but by whoever had sent Pradeep.
Sometimes, when they lay side by side after making love, in those brief moments before they headed back to the airport and their separate lives, they had talked about where in the world the
y would most like to be. Marchant always spoke first, about dreams of the Thar Desert, the African savannah – rangy, open spaces, wide skies – or sometimes the shady apple orchards of Tarlton in a Cotswold summer. When it was her turn, she would fall quiet, the memory of her one, all too brief visit to Iran silencing her with its beauty, before she began to speak of the bare mountains that circled Ghamsar’s fertile plains, the scent of rose water, the village workers with cloth bags full of fragrant petals hanging from their necks.
Her mother had painted other pictures of Iran when she was younger, keen to keep the country alive for her daughter. She told her bedtime stories of Isfahan, homilies from the poems of Hafez, and, when she was older, tales of drinking Turkish tea in Tehran’s cafés with elderly academics in berets and black suits. But it was always to Ghamsar’s rose gardens that Leila’s thoughts returned, an aching glimpse of what might have been.
Leila must have been asleep for at least an hour when her phone woke her. For a moment she expected it to be her mother, but it was Paul Myers, on an encrypted call from his mobile.
‘The Americans have got Daniel,’ he said.
‘What?’ Leila sat up on Marchant’s bed, barely awake, confused by her surroundings and now by the sound of Myers’s voice.
‘I can’t say any more,’ he said, choosing his words carefully. Even on an encrypted call, he knew key words might alert someone. ‘Seems he left on a flight to Poland.’
‘When?’ Fielding must have given in to the Americans, been persuaded of a link between the Marchant family and Dhar.
‘Hard to say. Last couple of days?’ Myers paused. ‘It’s not exactly a sight-seeing trip.’
‘No.’
‘He’ll cope, right?’ Myers said, surprising Leila with his sudden, urgent concern. ‘He’s tough as they come, doesn’t everyone say that?’
Leila thought back to that night at the Fort when he sat beside her in the pub, still shaking, barely able to talk after his waterboarding training.
‘I’ll call you.’ She paused. ‘Paul?’
‘Yes?’
‘Thanks.’
Leila hung up and looked around the messed-up room. Her eyes rested on the picture of her and Marchant at the Fort. She walked over to the desk, knowing that she might never see him again. If Fielding had let him go, the Americans could hold him for years. She felt her eyes moisten. Leaning forward, she placed the photograph face down on the desk and slipped quietly out of the flat.
15
For a moment, Marchant wasn’t sure if the explosion was part of the interrogation. His face had just been wrapped in clingfilm, so tightly that it had flattened his nose to one side, when he felt a loud blast to the left of him, followed by shouting in Polish. He couldn’t see anything, because he was wearing the blackened goggles again, but he could hear the Americans choking. Moments later he was being unstrapped from the table, his shackles removed with bolt cutters, and the goggles and clingfilm removed.
He counted six men in the room, wearing gasmasks and army uniforms, all of them with semi-automatic weapons. One of them strapped a mask onto Marchant just as he was starting to taste the rancid tang of teargas, while another checked the two Americans for vital signs. Then he was bundled out of the room and into the back of a waiting black van.
‘Hugo Prentice,’ said a weatherbeaten man sitting opposite him. ‘Warsaw station. Worked with your father in Delhi. Fielding sends his love, apologises for the slap and tickle.’
Fielding glanced at his watch, added an hour for Poland, and wondered how long it would be before Spiro was on the phone. Give him half an hour, he thought, looking at the files spread across his desk. HR had printed out the most recent employment profiles of Leila, Daniel and Stephen Marchant, and he had also requested the South Asia Controllerate’s dossier on Salim Dhar. He glanced down the opening page, marked ‘Confidential, For UK Eyes Only’, and thought, not for the first time, that he was missing something, a piece of information that linked Dhar with his predecessor as head of MI6. What was it that had made Stephen Marchant fly five thousand miles to visit him in Southern India?
Dhar, according to the file, had been born Jaishankar Menon, to a middle-class Hindu couple in Delhi on 12 November 1980. His father worked at the British High Commission as an administrative officer. Shortly before Dhar was born his contract was terminated, but he soon picked up a similar job at the US Embassy. Dhar later attended the American School in Delhi – someone had handwritten ‘employment perk?’ in the file, below another mark that said ‘bullied?’ – but left at sixteen.
The next time Dhar showed up, two years later, he was in Kashmir, where the police arrested him for trying to blow up an army base. His charge sheet listed him as ‘Salim Dhar’. Somewhere between Bangalore and Srinigar, he had converted to Islam and become radicalised, focusing his hatred of the West on America.
At this point, RAW, India’s Research and Analysis Wing, had stepped in and tried briefly to recruit him, sensing an opportunity to play him back into the Kashmiri separatist movement. But Dhar was having none of it. In another report, sent over from RAW as part of Bancroft’s investigation into Stephen Marchant, it was concluded that Salim Dhar was ‘utterly unpersuadable’ and ‘totally unsuitable’ for recruitment. His commitment to the establishment of an Islamic caliphate, starting with the reunification of Kashmir and culminating in the destruction of America, was absolute. A year later, he escaped from jail and went to ground in Pakistan, later resurfacing in Afghanistan.
There was only one thing that caught Fielding’s eye: in the psychological profile of Dhar, attention had been drawn to the poor relationship he had with his father, who unlike his son loved all things American, and hoped one day to emigrate to New York. It was cited as a possible reason Dhar had left school, and Delhi. If Stephen Marchant had tried to recruit Dhar, for whatever reason, had he held some information on Dhar’s father? It was the one possible point of leverage Fielding could find in the file. Salim Dhar appeared to have led a clean life, his only points of conflict inspired by ideology rather than anything more basic. No women, drinking, stealing, corruption – nothing to blackmail him with.
In Fielding’s mind, Stephen Marchant’s tenure in Delhi had been in the late 1970s, while Jimmy Carter had been in the White House. It was there, in the aftermath of ‘Smiling Buddha’, India’s first nuclear test, that Marchant had made a name for himself. Few people in the Service hadn’t heard of him. Partly that was because of his audacious recruitment of a senior player at the Russian Embassy in Delhi, who rose to great heights within the KGB when he returned to Dzerzhinsky Square, but also because of the family tragedy that had engulfed him.
Fielding reopened Marchant’s file and looked through his postings. As he suspected, Marchant had arrived in India in August 1977, as a case officer, moving back to Britain in July 1980 for the birth of his twins (his wife had endured a difficult pregnancy and spent much of it in London, avoiding Delhi’s oppressive heat). But Marchant had returned to India five years later, this time as station head and with his young family in tow. Then, in 1988, disaster had struck when Sebastian was killed in a car accident.
Fielding recalled it all more clearly now. Everyone in the Service had felt wretched about Marchant’s loss, the subsequent deterioration in his wife’s mental health, and his stoic refusal to leave Delhi until his tour of duty was over.
Fielding turned to Dhar’s early life again, checking the dates of his father’s employment at the British High Commission in Delhi. He had started in January 1980, which meant that Marchant and Dhar’s father had overlapped for six months. Delhi was a big mission, second only to the British Embassy in Washington, but there was a chance the two might have come into contact with each other. It wasn’t much to go on, but Fielding knew it was something. He picked up the phone and asked for Ian Denton.
16
After a bone-breaking, hundred-mile drive through the Polish countryside, Marchant found himself in the bar of the brand new Bri
tish Embassy in Warsaw with a glass of Tyskie beer in his hand. He had been unable to speak for most of the journey, retching from the water still in his system and the potholed roads, drifting in and out of sleep. But he did register Prentice explaining that his interrogation had taken place at Stare Kiejkuty, a former outpost of the SS’s intelligence wing during the Second World War.
Fifteen minutes from Szymany airport, the site had subsequently been used by the Soviet Army, when Brezhnev was planning to crush the Prague Spring. More recently it had been occupied by a secret division of the Wojskowe Słužby Informacyjne, Poland’s military intelligence service, who were more than happy to oblige the CIA’s request for a secure facility in which to interrogate their High Value Detainees – in return for cash, of course. It was a canny, if ironic, choice by the Americans, Prentice had explained. The WSI wasn’t subject to the same levels of public scrutiny as civilian agencies such as the new Agencja Wywiadu, and its officials, many of whom were survivors from the old communist era, could claim protection under NATO because of their military status.
‘You’re in good company – Stare Kiejkuty boasts some fine alumni,’ Prentice had added. ‘It’s where they dunked KSM in 2003.’
The dank cell where Marchant had been waterboarded couldn’t have been more different from the airy, glass and steel edifice he now found himself in. He knew that the sleek new building was a blueprint for British embassies of the future. Delayed and redesigned after the bombing of the consulate in Istanbul, it remained accessible to the public but was now built to withstand a major terrorist attack. It also incorporated a security feature required of all new Foreign Office buildings. In the event of a physical assault, an ‘onion’ layering of doors and walls protecting an inner sanctum that should take at least forty minutes to penetrate would allow sensitive documents to be shredded and hard drives wiped.
