by Jon Stock
His smile quickly faded, though, as he watched the load of washing turn and tumble. Wafting down the corridor from the hostel kitchen was the smell of Polish cooking: bigos, or maybe flaczki. His gag reflex twitched. Barely managing a nod at his new friend on reception, he headed outside to the street in search of fresh air. His stomach turned as he remembered the water, the panic.
He bent double over the gutter and vomited. Breathing in deeply, he stood up and walked down the empty street at a brisk pace, keeping to the shadows in the early-evening light. Then, a moment later, he heard a voice behind him. It was Monika’s.
‘Are you OK? You look terrible. Very un-groo-vy.’
The flower was now behind her other ear, but Marchant didn’t say anything: Marlowe wouldn’t have noticed.
‘I’m fine,’ he said, taking in her lissom figure for the first time. ‘Is there a barber around here? Nothing fancy, I just need a crew.’
‘Crew?’
‘All off,’ Marchant said, smiling. ‘Buzz cut…wiffle…GI One.’
Half an hour later he was sitting on a stool in a bedsit flat, around the corner from the hostel, with a whisky in his hand. Monika leant in against him as she shaved the last remnants of sandy hair from his head, her bare studded navel pressed against his back. In one hand she held the razor, in the other a large spliff. Vashti Bunyan was on the CD player. Monika had offered to cut Marchant’s hair herself, and he could think of no good reason to refuse. Her shift at the hostel was over, and he liked the anonymity her bedsit provided.
‘I’m done,’ Monika said, flicking away some loose strands. ‘Can I rub in some moisturiser? Your skin, it’s very dry.’ As she said this she leant forward, her smiling face appearing in the mirror at the side of his own, and placed the spliff in Marchant’s mouth.
‘Sure, whatever,’ Marchant said, assuming the dryness was down to something the Americans had put in the water. Before the weed dulled his senses he ran an eye around the room again, then went back over the last few hours, reassuring himself about her, their encounter. On balance, it was a good thing. The CIA would be looking for a single man, not a couple. Monika was in need of company, having recently split from her boyfriend, and she had already talked about spending the next few days together, looking at the antiques in Kolo Bazaar, drinking in the bars of Stare Miasto, although she knew he was booked on a flight the following morning.
‘I wish you weren’t going to India so soon, Mr Englishman,’ she said, moving around and sitting on his lap, facing him. She took the spliff out of his mouth and placed it back in her own. Marchant curled his arms around her lower back, and pulled her closer to him. For a moment all he could see was Leila, naked in the shower, watching him. He closed his eyes, breathed in deeply and thought hard about David Marlowe.
He stroked her cheek as he tried to calculate the risks and benefits of delaying his flight to stay with her. His brain was easing up. It slowed even more as she leant forward and kissed him, her spliff-free hand slipping inside his Levi’s.
‘Stay here for an extra day,’ she said quietly, holding him tightly. ‘I’d like that.’
‘What about my ticket?’ he said, slowly unpicking the mother-of-pearl buttons of her shirt. Leila was stepping out of the shower now, hair wrapped in a turban of towel.
‘What about it? I’ve got a friend, she runs a small travel agency not far from here. We send all our guests there. She can change it, she knows everyone up at the airport.’
But David Marlowe didn’t give a damn any more about his ticket, or Daniel Marchant, or Leila, as he eased Monika out of her shirt.
18
Sir David Chadwick had spent a lifetime brokering compromises in Whitehall meeting rooms, but even he was struggling to keep Marcus Fielding and Harriet Armstrong apart.
‘Before this gets referred to the PM, as it will, I need to know exactly what you’re alleging here, Harriet,’ he said, looking across his oak-panelled office at Armstrong, who was on the edge of her seat.
‘The Poles must have been tipped off by someone,’ Armstrong said, glancing at Fielding. He was sitting at a safe distance, equally upright though less on edge. On his lap was a clipboard, covered in a patchwork of blue and yellow Post-it notes. Armstrong had often wondered what Fielding wrote on them. No reminders to bring home dinner for his wife, because he had never had one, a fact that still intrigued her.
‘Marcus?’ Chadwick asked.
‘I think we’re underestimating our friends in Warsaw. The new government’s been looking for a way out of these renditions for some time now. I imagine someone was keeping the airbase under surveillance and decided that they no longer wanted a corner of their country run by America.’
‘Marcus, you rang me about the flight,’ Harriet said. Fielding’s poise riled her. Everything about him riled her: his equanimity, the Oxbridge intellect, those safari suits. And how could someone be ‘celibate’, as he had apparently defined his sexuality to the vetters, explaining that he was simply not interested in sex of any kind, with anyone? Her ex-husband had once accused her of something similar, but she hadn’t consciously chosen to deny him; it had just gone with the long hours.
‘True?’ asked Chadwick.
‘As you both know, we monitor all flights in and out of the UK, particularly ones that file dummy flight plans. To avoid confusion, I suggest that the next time the PM decides to authorise an undeclared CIA flight through British airspace, someone has the courtesy to tell us.’
‘Harriet?’ asked Chadwick, turning back towards her like a centre-court umpire.
‘It was agreed that the Americans could talk to Marchant,’ she said.
‘Talk to him, not try to drown him,’ Fielding replied. ‘And I think we said it should be in this country.’
Fielding’s last comment was addressed to Chadwick, who didn’t care for the look that accompanied it. ‘Oh, come on, Marcus,’ Chadwick said, a nervous smile creasing his pale jowls. ‘It must have felt like home from home, given the number of Poles over here.’
Harriet returned the smile, but Fielding stared out of the window onto Whitehall, watching an empty 24 bus make its way up towards Trafalgar Square. He didn’t have time for cheap jokes about immigrants. He didn’t have time for Chadwick, sitting behind his oversized desk like a child who had broken into the headmaster’s office.
‘So where is he now?’ Fielding asked him.
‘I was rather hoping you’d tell us.’
‘I want my man back alive. That was the other part of our deal.’
‘If you haven’t got Marchant, then who has?’ Chadwick turned back to Armstrong.
‘Spiro flew out to Warsaw this afternoon. They think he’s still in Poland.’
‘He lost him, he can bring him back,’ Fielding said, rising from his seat. ‘I’ve asked Warsaw station to keep a lookout.’
‘Prentice,’ Armstrong said coldly.
‘You know him?’ Fielding was now at the door, clipboard under one arm.
‘Only by reputation.’
‘Quite. One of the best in the business.’
‘And once Marchant’s found?’ Chadwick asked, standing too, sensing another altercation.
‘Then it’s our turn to ask him about Dhar,’ Armstrong replied.
Fielding opened the door to leave.
‘Just make sure we don’t lose him again,’ said Chadwick. ‘Twice would be careless. Thank you, Marcus.’
Fielding closed the door behind him, leaving Armstrong and Chadwick alone.
‘Whatever the differences between you two, I don’t want it affecting operations on my watch, Harriet.’ Chadwick had remained standing.
‘Spiro’s livid.’
‘I’m sure he is. But it should surprise no one that the Service looks after its own. It always has done. Is this Hugo Prentice protecting him?’
‘Quite possibly. We could throw the book at Prentice if we want. He’s had run-ins with Spiro before. He’s had run-ins with everyone. Any other agency would
have got rid of him years ago.’
‘I’ll talk to Spiro.’ Chadwick paused, shuffling papers needlessly on his desk. ‘We want this contained, Harriet. The Americans need Marchant back.’
* * *
Fielding found Ian Denton, folder in hand, waiting for him in the room outside his office, making quiet conversation with his secretaries. The Chief of MI6 was entitled to three of them: his personal assistant, a letters secretary and a diary secretary. Anne Norman had been PA to the previous four Chiefs, all of whom had valued her brusque phone manner, particularly when taking awkward calls from Whitehall. She had resigned over the Stephen Marchant affair, only to be talked into staying on over a long lunch at Bentley’s with Fielding. A formidable spinster in her late fifties, she was the archetypal bluestocking, except that she always wore bright red tights, usually with red shoes. Fielding had often meant to ask her why, but he was in no mood for small-talk after his meeting with Armstrong and Chadwick.
‘Come,’ he said, walking through to his office. Denton followed, closing the door behind them. ‘What have you got?’
‘Marchant’s with AW,’ Denton said, quieter than ever.
‘And the Americans?’
‘Spiro’s turning Warsaw upside down. Prentice says they won’t find him.’
Fielding hesitated a moment. ‘What about Salim Dhar? Any progress?’
Denton pulled out a sheaf of papers from the folder he was holding. He, like Fielding, lived an ordered life, and he had grouped the sheets into clear plastic files. He handed the top file over to Fielding with the confidence of someone who knew he had done well. It was a printout of an old bank statement.
‘Dhar’s father, his current account in Delhi,’ Denton said. ‘This deposit here was his monthly salary payment from the US Embassy.’
‘And this one?’ Fielding asked, pointing to another payment that had been circled with red biro.
‘As far as his Delhi branch manager is concerned, it was a regular payment from relatives in South India. Paid in rupees from the State Bank of Travancore, Kottayam. Works out at about £100 a month in today’s terms.’
‘Not bad for an administrative officer. You’d expect someone with a job in Delhi to be sending money back to his family in the south, not receiving it. So who was paying him?’
Denton paused for a moment, knowing that he would be blamed in some indirect way for what he was about to say. ‘We’ve followed the financial trail back further.’
‘And?’ Fielding glanced up at him irritably.
‘Cayman Islands, one of the Service’s old offshore accounts.’
‘Christ.’ Fielding tossed the file onto his desk.
‘Set up by Stephen Marchant in 1980.’ Denton pulled out another file, made up of sheets more faded than the first, and handed it to Fielding, hoping that it would become the new focus for his anger. ‘We found this in the FO’s employment files. Seems like the first payment was put through shortly after Dhar’s father was sacked from the British High Commission. There was a small disciplinary hearing, at which various references were read out, including this one from Marchant. He felt very strongly about it, thought the man had been shabbily treated.’
‘So strongly he set him up with an index-linked agent’s pension.’ Fielding pushed his chair back towards the big bay windows that looked across the Thames towards Tate Britain. Denton was still standing. ‘It doesn’t add up. A junior member of the commission’s admin staff – perfectly decent man, I’m sure, but not exactly a high-value intelligence asset. Is there any record of him providing information to the Service?’
‘Nothing so far. For what it’s worth, the monthly payment was roughly equal to the difference between his British salary and his new, lower income from the US Embassy.’
‘Very fair. Except that Marchant didn’t have the authority to set up something like this. Even back then.’
‘It never caught the eye of our auditors.’
‘He always did know how to handle the bean counters. Are the payments still being made?’
‘No. They stopped. 2001.’
‘Why then?’
Denton shook his head. ‘We don’t know yet. But there’s one other thing. We’ve found a second payment Marchant requested after he’d left India. To his driver, one Ramachandran Nair. Same account, gave him a pension of £50 a month.’
‘And we’re still paying him?’
‘Seems so, yes.’
‘Dear God, no wonder we’re always over budget. Do whatever you have to, Ian. I need to know why Marchant was paying Dhar’s father. What was it he did for him?’
19
Hassan was the only asset Leila had ever slept with. It wasn’t usually her style, but at least he was young and good-looking. Most agents were paid, but Hassan had always been an exception, ever since he’d provided her with enough information to thwart an attack on a passenger plane over Heathrow. After that he could name his price, which in his case was hard sex rather than hard cash.
According to Fielding, fragments of intelligence in the wind pointed to some sort of Gulf connection to the attempted attack on the marathon. Word had gone out for all assets, however tenuous, to be harvested for HUMINT. Hassan knew more about what was happening in the Gulf than any Western analyst in Whitehall, drawing on his Wahabi roots to keep informed of the region’s complex terror network. Ostensibly he was a travel journalist, writing for one of the many English-language newspapers in Qatar, but he didn’t need the salary. His family was worth more than MI6’s annual budget, which was why he was asking Leila if she could leave the media awards dinner early and host her first home match.
‘You’ve always played away,’ he said, topping up her glass of fizzy water. The dinner, in the ballroom of the London Hilton, was dry, which was why a herd of Western journalists was migrating steadily to the hotel’s bars. It was a dry affair in other ways, too. There was little cross-cultural mingling, despite the evening’s theme of global unity and despite the best efforts of the MC, a risqué, half-Iranian, half-British female comedian (‘Whenever I tell people my biological clock is ticking, everyone ducks’).
Leila had wanted to find her, say how much she had enjoyed her act, but Leila was acting too. She was attending the evening in the guise of a Gulf-based travel PR, one of her regular operational covers. It was the first time she had used it on British soil, and she felt more nervous than usual.
‘I’ve booked a room here,’ Leila said, wrestling with a sudden urge to join the hacks at the bar. She was used to having sober sex with Hassan, but tonight she felt the need for a drink.
‘Leila, that’s very thoughtful, but do you know what? The Hilton bores me. Hotels bore me. I spend all my life in hotels. Let’s go back to your place. Why not? It’s your first time on home soil.’
Hassan was proposing that she step over a line she had never crossed before. Apart from the security implications of taking an asset back to her home, there were personal issues too. Sex in a hotel room was one thing, but at home, the place where she retreated from Legoland, the sanctuary she returned to after postings abroad? That was different.
‘I’m sorry, Hassan. I’ve paid for the room. And it’s a long way back to where I live.’ But she knew, as soon as she spoke, that she had said the wrong thing.
‘You’ve paid for a room?’ he laughed. ‘So what? I’ll pay.’
She looked away at the myriad of tables, each with its candles and extravagant flower display, spread out across the ballroom floor like an illuminated orchard. She hated not being in control.
‘It’ll be worth it,’ he said, leaning forward to touch her arm. ‘I know who supplied the isotonics.’
Earlier that day, after her final debrief at Thames House, Leila had returned to her desk at Legoland for the first time since the marathon. The building was still buzzing with the attempted attack. In the canteen she noticed the glances, overheard people talking about her with an obviousness unbecoming of spies. The Gulf Controllerate, where she worke
d, was like a City traders’ pit. There were no flickering international share prices, but the hum of ringing phones and the vast data-analysis charts on the walls, linking hundreds of names across the world, conveyed a similar chaotic urgency. Her line manager said it was even busier than in the days immediately after 9/11.
It had been a relief when Marcus Fielding had called Leila in to his office and asked about Marchant, how she had found him the day before. He had also praised her for the way she had thrown herself back into work, and repeated the need for her to be patient. Marchant, he said, was to be questioned by the Americans, which wasn’t ideal, but he had every confidence he would be back in the fold soon. It was best, though, if he and she didn’t see each other for a few days.
Leila didn’t pursue what he meant by ‘questioned’, for fear of betraying Paul Myers, but there was also something about Fielding’s manner that discouraged further discussion of Marchant. Instead, he wanted her to focus on Hassan, and to find out whatever he knew about the marathon attack. His intelligence had been accurate in the past.
‘Squeeze the pips,’ Fielding had said, in a way that made her doubt his reportedly celibate status. They both knew that she had never filled in a request form for Hassan to be paid, and the matter had never been discussed. Leila thought about that now as she tied Hassan’s hands to the posters of her brass bed. It had shocked her how quickly she had got used to sleeping with a man she didn’t love, and struggled to fancy. She had told Marchant after the first time, but he didn’t want to know. It was her job: they would both have to sleep with other people occasionally, so they should just get on with it. The only reason for them to confide in each other, he said, would be if it meant anything more than sex.
Leila didn’t find it so simple, and was annoyed that Marchant could be so matter-of-fact. She remembered when, towards the end of their six months at the Fort, a female instructor had taken her and the three other women in that year’s intake for a drink one night, to pass on a few personal tips. She expected them all to deal with the health risks themselves. Her advice was solely about the emotional damage that professional sexual liaisons could result in. The key, she had said, was to think of themselves as actors playing out a scene in a film.
