by Jon Stock
The bar was empty except for Marchant and Prentice and a couple of local embassy staff. They weren’t sure what to make of the guest who talked strangely through his nose, and had left a pair of king-size, water-soaked nappies in the wastepaper basket of his guest room.
‘Come, we need to have a proper chat,’ Prentice said, stubbing out his Marlboro cigarette. Marchant followed him through the main atrium entrance of the embassy and down a series of pristine white corridors. ‘This place has just been swept, but we should still use the safe-talk room,’ Prentice said. All embassies had one, an interview room lined with lead beneath the plaster, which not even the most powerful bugs could penetrate. Marchant had spent a good deal of time in them over the past few years, and some were more basic than others. This one, with its crisp white walls and sunken lights, felt like a cross between a Swiss bank vault and a Harley Street consulting room.
‘We’re all still cut up about your old man,’ Prentice said, gesturing at one of two chairs on either side of a rectangular glass table. There was a bunch of flowers in a vase on the table, a clear sign that waterboarding was off the agenda. Prentice closed the heavy door behind him and punched a code into the keypad by the handle, activating a further layer of electronic protection. ‘The word in Warsaw was that the Americans were behind it. Armstrong wouldn’t have got her way without their support.’
‘Sounds about right,’ Marchant said, still aware of his nasal tones. Despite the flowers, the two chairs and the table were strictly functional.
‘So imagine our delight when the call came through from London,’ Prentice said.
‘And the Poles were equally overjoyed?’
‘The new government’s through with renditions, been waiting for an excuse ever since they pulled their troops out of Iraq. Stare Kiejkuty’s run by the WSI, hardline communists who knew their time was up and were grateful for the dollars. What can the CIA do? Protest to the UN that one of their black sites has been blown? It was meant to have been closed down months ago.’
Marchant estimated that Prentice was in his late fifties. Chief of Station, Poland, at his time of his life was not immediate evidence of a brilliant career, but Marchant had heard of Hugo Prentice. Everyone who joined the Service had heard of him. Expelled from Eton for selling marijuana to fellow pupils in the 1970s, he had a rakish air, a full head of greying hair swept back and an expensive taste in platinum cufflinks and Patek Philippe watches.
He had never been a career officer, bent on promotion, but one of those rare people who had signed up to the Service because he loved the spy’s life, wanted to be out there turning people on the ground, persuading the waverers of a greater good with a traditional mix of ideology, subterfuge and, even if not always necessary, brutality. For Prentice it was all about the expenses rather than the salary, the mistresses rather than the marriage.
‘How’s life in Legoland, anyway?’ he continued, offering a cigarette to Marchant, who took one. ‘Is it true the Vicar’s banned fags in the bar?’
‘Only inside. On the terrace is fine. It wasn’t Fielding, though. It was the government.’
‘We’re all screwed if the spooks start listening to the politicians. Christ, who’s going to check? Health and Safety? Your father would sooner have died than listen to the government.’ The conversation stalled awkwardly. ‘I’m sorry. Crass.’ Prentice sat back and blew smoke into the air above them.
‘It’s fine,’ Marchant said. ‘Really.’
‘You look a bit like him, you know – same jawline,’ Prentice continued. ‘I’ll be happy if a quarter as many people turn up for my funeral. But what happened to the PM? Why wasn’t he there?’
‘Too busy, officially,’ Marchant said, thinking back to the people spilling out of the small village church. He didn’t recall seeing Prentice there, but staff had flown in from all over the world. There was, however, a noticeable absence of Establishment figures, a reluctance to honour a possible traitor.
‘The bastard.’
‘Are you sending me back to Britain?’ Marchant appreciated Prentice’s solidarity, but wanted to know where the conversation was heading.
‘Not exactly, no,’ Prentice said, his voice quieter, as if he had suddenly recalled a piece of bad news. Marchant picked up on the change of tone and shifted in his seat. The metal table had chafed his lower back. ‘London sent you this,’ Prentice said, pulling out a brown A5 envelope from his jacket pocket and handing it to Marchant. Marchant glanced inside: dollars, an Irish passport, airline ticket, some visa paperwork. ‘We can’t help you any more. You’re too hot.’
‘Meaning?’
‘You tell me. You’re the first serving MI6 officer I’ve ever come across who’s wanted by the CIA and MI5. Watch your back. Give it a couple of hours and Warsaw will be crawling with Yanks looking for you. The WSI might like a little chat, too.’
‘Any message from Fielding?’ Marchant asked.
Prentice leant forward. ‘Go get Salim Dhar.’
‘Where is he?’ Harriet Armstrong asked. Fielding sat back in his chair and looked down the river in the direction of her office at Thames House.
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ he replied, talking on the speakerphone.
‘I’ve just had Spiro on the line,’ Armstrong said, ‘threatening to go public about Dhar and your predecessor.’
‘That could be embarrassing, but not as awkward as a member of the British intelligence services being renditioned by the CIA to Poland. Particularly if the PM nodded it through. I’d hate that to get out.’
‘Where is he, Marcus? He’s a threat to national security.’
‘I’d question that,’ he said. ‘You saw my memo about Dhar? Seems like he had nothing to do with the marathon attack after all. But in answer to your question, I have no idea where he is. You had him last, no?’
Armstrong had already hung up. Fielding swivelled around in his chair, killed the speaker and read through the memo in front of him. The Polish economy would take a hit when the Americans started to pull business contracts. The confidential commercial information he was about to release to Brigadier Borowski, head of the AW, his opposite number in Warsaw, was the least he could do for a friend. The AW was involved in a fierce turf war with the old communist guard at the WSI. Borowski and others seemed to be winning, despite the best efforts of the CIA, whose dollars and High Value Detainees had done much to prolong the careers of its former Cold War enemies in Poland.
The information should give one of Poland’s biggest IT com panies the edge when it made its bid next month for a multi-million-euro e-government contract in Brussels. MI6’s intelligence reports were still known as ‘CX’, after its first Chief, Mansfield Cumming (‘Cumming Exclusively’). Fielding reached for the pen and signed in green ink, another Cumming touch. Borowski would like that.
17
Marchant knew that the best legend for a spy was the one that most closely mirrored his or her own life. After endless hours of interrogation, standing and sleep deprivation, even the mind of the toughest officer became confused and reverted to its default setting. The less that differed from the cover story, the better. Former girlfriends’ names, sexual preferences, gap-year itineraries, favourite music, even the number of sugars in a mug of tea: all should be the same as the spy’s own. As Marchant lay on his hostel bed in Warsaw and read through his new legend, he smiled to himself: he was heading back to India.
Prentice had dropped Marchant off around the corner from the Oki Doki hostel on Plac Dabrowskiego, in the centre of the capital. It was a popular haunt for backpackers, and a crowd of them – English, French, Italians – were in the bar when Marchant had checked in at the reception as David Marlowe, the name on his Irish passport. The hostel had a chic, hippy atmosphere, reminding Marchant of a place he’d once stayed in Haight-Ashbury. Each room or dormitory was designed by a different local artist. Prentice had booked Marchant into Dom Browskiego, the only single room, painted in the colours of spring. For a moment he
wished Leila was here with him, but he pushed the thought away as fast as it had arrived, and swung his rucksack onto the foot of his bed. David Marlowe didn’t know anyone called Leila.
He looked around the room and saw a basin in the corner. As he washed his face and glanced at himself in the mirror, drips of water falling off his unshaven chin, he was back at Stare Kiejkuty. He forced himself to think of something else. Clearly, he was the subject of a struggle between MI6 and MI5, who had handed him over to the CIA at the safe house. The arrival of Prentice at the black site meant that Fielding had not washed his hands of him altogether, which was encouraging. But Prentice had made it clear to him that MI6’s help was limited. The passport, the money (a thousand US dollars), the ticket to Delhi, his legend: that was all Fielding could do. The rest was up to him.
He lay down on the bed, feet propped up on the rucksack, and looked again at his new life: David Marlowe (same initials as his own) was taking a year out to travel around the world, starting with Europe, after graduating with a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Cambridge, just as he himself had done. MI6, Marchant knew, had arrangements with various Oxbridge colleges and redbrick universities for phone enquiries and mail. If anyone rang Trinity to ask whether a David Marlowe had studied there, the porters would find the name on a list; if anyone wrote, the post would be forwarded to Legoland via its PO box address.
He had only briefly visited Poland on his own year out, and he needed to decide on where Marlowe had gone (the legend didn’t go into detail): a week’s stay in Krakow enjoying the jazz bars, followed by a few days in Warsaw. He had planned to travel further (the Rough Guide to Poland was noticeably well thumbed), but chose to head for India, fed up with the cold weather – the talk at the hostel bar had been of little else.
He sat up and looked at the rucksack, increasingly aware of the smell rising from it. Prentice had given it to him an hour earlier at the embassy. It was bulging and well-worn, with a bright orange sleeping bag sticking out from under the top.
‘The thing’s been knocking around here for months, you might as well take it,’ Prentice had said casually.
‘Whose is it?’ Marchant asked, looking at the various badges that had been sewn on it: Paris, Prague, Munich.
‘Student, on his gap year, travelling around Europe. Died six months ago.’
‘Really?’
‘Drug overdose. We flew his body back but the rucksack never made it. Held back as evidence. The police here thought he was a mule, part of a ring. Their dogs sniffed it, found nothing. You’d better check.’
‘How old was he?’
‘Bit younger than you, same height, not as handsome, but then I only saw him on the slab.’
‘Any family?’
‘Middle-class parents, Hampshire. They’d apparently disowned him. Never asked for any personal possessions to be returned.’
Marchant started to unpack the rucksack with the caution of a customs officer. As he suspected, the clothes were rancid, revealing little about the owner except that his year of travel hadn’t taken in a visit to a launderette. He would ditch most of the fleeces and sweaters – he would only need thin clothes in India – but he would run the collarless shirts and cotton trousers through the hostel washing machine. The Rough Guide to Poland had to go, too. But the surfing bracelets would be useful once he was in India, although they weren’t half as stylish, he thought, as the ones he had once worn himself.
He looked again at his passport, hardly recognising himself in the photo: shaved head, a saffron, tie-dyed T-shirt, stud in the left ear, shell necklace slung loosely around his neck. The cobblers in G/REP, the Legoland department that specialised in forged documents, had excelled themselves. His features had been aged a little, compared to the original photo, which had been taken during his gap year in India. In real life, he knew his features had aged even more, but he was confident that he could still pass himself off as a student. Deception was as much about gait, attitude and rhythms of speech as facial appearance.
His own gap year had been a carefree time of his life. He had felt only relief when his mother had finally slipped away in his last year of school, her death allowing him to travel more freely than he might otherwise have done. For eighteen months she had suffered from cancer, but her health had started to deteriorate ten years earlier, when Sebastian had died. Severe bouts of depression blighted much of her subsequent life – and, he now realised, his own.
His father had almost sabotaged his entire year off on the night before he left. Sitting at the kitchen table of their London flat in Pimlico, he told him to let his hair down and live a bit. It could have been the kiss of death from any other father to a teenage son, but they had grown close during his mother’s illness, so his father poured him another Bruichladdich and laughed.
‘Just in case you should ever consider a career in the Service, there are only two things that make the vetters twitchy,’ his father had continued. ‘Heroin and whores.’
‘Perfect qualifications for a journalist.’
‘That’s still the thing, is it?’
‘Someone needs to expose all the Whitehall corruption,’ he grinned.
‘Your mother always wanted a doctor in the family, you know that.’ Marchant watched his father knock back his whisky, a slight tremor in his usually steady hand.
‘Because she thought Sebbie could have been saved?’
‘The doctors were very kind, said there was nothing that could have been done, but she always blamed herself for the accident.’
The years immediately after Sebastian’s death were vague now, but he remembered them as a strange time, a part of his life that floated in limbo, separate from the rest of his past. The overt kindness of so many people, more time spent with his father, his oddly withdrawn mother, who missed Sebastian terribly. His father had once hinted at some kind of mental illness, but it was the one subject he could never talk about with him. His own grieving had played out in reverse; he missed Sebastian more as each year passed.
Marchant thought again about his brother as he read through more of his own legend: the family details (English father, Irish mother), schooling, everything the same as his own life, except for the decision to travel on an Irish passport, which he knew was for operational reasons (it would draw less attention than a British one). It frustrated him that he could no longer be sure which memories were his own and which had been shaped by family albums. He remembered Sebastian playing in the orchard at Tarlton, dropping apples on their father’s sleeping head in the hammock; he could still see him sitting cross-legged with him in their room at the top of the cottage, trying to make as much noise as they could on their Indian dholak drums. There had been no photos of that.
His mother’s death was there, so too was his father’s, as well as a propensity to drink too much (a thoughtful gesture by the cobblers), but the career of David Marlowe’s father had been with the British Council. It was Marlowe’s first few years, though, that made Marchant curse them for not showing more imagination. Marlowe had also lost his brother in a car crash in Delhi, where his father had been posted. The name, Sebastian, was the same; but had Marlowe ever felt his sense of loss, the sharp jabs from the shadows that came at any time of the day or night? Marchant screwed the paper up into a tight ball. If there was one thing he could have erased from his Marlowe’s past, it would have been Sebastian’s death. But at least there would be no pretending.
He took the clothes downstairs in a plastic carrier bag and paid for some tokens and washing powder at reception. The young woman at the desk saw the bag and smiled at his domesticity. She had a flower tucked behind one ear, introduced herself as Monika, and joked that Irish travellers wore the cleanest clothes. Marchant knew conversation with anyone was a risk, but she had initiated the exchange, and it would arouse more suspicion if he kept quiet. Besides, Monika was good-looking, bohemian, early twenties – just Marlowe’s type.
‘Like the flower,’ he said, smiling back at her
. His accent was a soft Dublin one, like his mother’s.
‘Thanks.’
‘My room’s covered in them.’
‘Oh, you’re in spring. Do you like it? Dom is a friend of mine. The artist.’
‘Groovy,’ he said, hoping the irony translated.
Monika laughed lightly as he walked off down the corridor towards the launderette.
‘Groo-vy,’ he heard her repeat, saying the word slowly.
Under the heading of sexuality, David Marlowe had been described as a ‘promiscuous heterosexual’. He wondered if that’s what it said on his own vetting file. In the early days at the Fort he had tried hard to prevent his relationship with Leila from becoming serious, deliberately dating other women. Spy school, he had joked, was no place to make an honest woman of her: it was where people learnt to cheat and lie, not to love. Marchant, though, had kept coming back to Leila, who seemed neither surprised nor resentful. At least until recently. In the months leading up to his suspension, just when he was finally ready to accept (and needed) their relationship, she had been hesitant to make the step up, oddly changeable in her emotions: one moment pulling him in, the next pushing him away.
As he emptied his bag of clothes into one of the hostel’s empty washing machines, Marchant knew that it wouldn’t require much effort for David Marlowe to pursue another woman. It would be harder for him, though, even if the hippy-chick charms of Monika held a certain nostalgic appeal. He must tap into his own past, rebuffing any pangs of guilt with the irritation he had felt at Leila’s recent reluctance to commit.
It had been a few years since he had mixed with anyone like Monika, or stayed in a place like the Oki Doki, but he was encouraged by how easily old habits returned, once the mental switch had been flicked. He thought about rolling a joint again, something he hadn’t done since joining the Service, and the joys of stoned sex.
