Dead Spy Running

by Jon Stock

  The whitewashed roof was hot, but at least Dhar was out of direct sunlight. He was also out of view of the three helicopters, two American, one Indian, that were circling low above the temple complex. They had been in the air all day. According to the woman, Delhi police officers, accompanied by members of the Security Service, had also searched every house within a two-kilometre radius of the temple.

  All the houses on this particular estate had water tanks on their roofs, but the brother’s had been raised eighteen inches off the ground, resting on breeze blocks. It was also the only one with a false bottom, where the gun had been hidden. From the air, the tank looked identical to all the others. It was impossible to see Dhar, who was lying in the gap between the roof and the bottom of the tank, his gun resting on a tripod. The only risk was from the infrared cameras that Dhar assumed were strapped to the undersides of the helicopters. But the water above him had been in the sun all day, and he hoped that its heat profile would mask the warmth of his body.

  The President was well within range of the Dragunov, a weapon Dhar had used with accuracy at fifteen hundred yards, but he was still nervous as he panned the sights away from his target. For a moment he was distracted by some movement in the VIP enclosure, behind the avenue. A tall white man was trying to push his way through the crowd. Dhar moved on, panning across the remainder of the avenue, then settled on the first step, waiting for the President to enter the frame. He rested his finger on the trigger. It was 5.34 p.m.

  Fielding was still a hundred yards away when the President approached the foot of the first flight of steps leading up to the Lotus Temple. The rickshaw had dropped him and Marchant off on the western perimeter of the temple complex, and they had pushed their way through some of the thousands of people who had gathered in the gardens to see the new leader of the Western world.

  An armed Indian policeman blocked their way at a checkpoint. He was not letting anyone beyond it, even when Fielding showed his British security pass. Fielding felt a wave of relief as he leaned against the hot metal barrier, suddenly exhausted by the heat. It was up to Marchant now. He was the only one who could stop Leila.

  ‘You go on alone,’ Fielding said, shaking Marchant’s hand. ‘Good luck.’

  The formal gesture surprised Marchant, until he felt the roll of rupee notes pressed into his moist palm. He slipped them into his pocket and moved quickly to his right, following the crowd barriers for thirty yards until there was a gap, manned by another policeman, younger than the first one. Marchant looked around and spotted a vendor selling souvenirs: wooden snakes painted in American colours; toy rickshaws with the President’s name stencilled on their plastic windscreens. He was also selling disposable cameras. Marchant went up to him, and bought a camera for too much. It wasn’t the time to haggle.

  Beyond the barrier a group of well-dressed Indians, all saris and sherwanis, were mingling in the VIP enclosure with military brass, their uniforms blooming with medal ribbons. Marchant looked around quickly, thinking fast. The enclosure was on the south side of the main avenue, where it met the steps going up to the Temple.

  ‘I need a good photo,’ Marchant said to the policeman, showing him the camera. A bunch of 500-rupee notes was clearly visible in his hand. ‘Please.’

  The policeman glanced up and down the line of the barriers, then looked back at Marchant. His bruised face worried him, but not enough. He took the money with the deftness of a pickpocket, frisked Marchant thoroughly and let him through. There were barely twenty yards now between Marchant and the temple steps. He spotted Leila in amongst a detail of nervous Security Service agents. She was talking to the President, who was just visible in the middle of the group.

  The President seemed to be listening intently, his head cocked towards Leila on his right. For a brief moment, Marchant felt proud of her. A group of Bahá’í officials was waiting patiently for the party to reach them at the foot of the steps. As they drew near, the security detail, including Leila, momentarily withdrew, allowing TV crews and photographers to capture the President and the Bahá’ís seemingly on their own, against the dramatic backdrop of the Lotus Temple, framed by the tree-lined avenue. Marchant glanced at his watch: 5.35 p.m.

  He needed to get closer to Leila, but it was impossible. Security Service officers were everywhere now, their backs to the President, shouting at people to stop pressing against the metal barriers that separated them from the presidential entourage. The VIPs had grown boisterous, excited that the President had stopped in front of them. Marchant pushed through the crowd, upsetting people as he went.

  He thought about calling across to Leila, but she wouldn’t hear him above the noise. Whatever was about to happen, he knew her life was in danger, whether the threat to the President came from elsewhere or from her. Marchant scanned the crowd, searching for something, anything, that might buy him a few seconds.

  Leila had now moved back up alongside the President. What was she doing? What had she done? In the same moment, she turned northwards, staring out beyond the gardens and scrubland. Marchant followed her gaze, towards a housing estate in the middle distance, and froze.

  ‘Leila!’ he screamed.

  The atmosphere around the table in the White House Situation Room was tense, the low ceiling adding to the pressure. Dhar had still not been found, and Straker knew his job was on the line. The Director of the Secret Service, sitting to his right, was also feeling the heat. An occasional frozen frame on the screen didn’t help to ease the tension, the images suffering on their way from a military satellite orbiting at 7,000 mph high above the dust of Delhi.

  ‘Just keep him moving,’ Straker said to no one in particular, loosening his collar. The President had paused for a moment too long at the end of the avenue for the TV crews.

  ‘We need these images for the morning shows,’ said the Chief of Staff, who was sitting to Straker’s left. ‘Is he looking a bit shiny in the heat?’

  ‘You’d look shiny in ninety-five degrees,’ Straker said, as the President stopped at the foot of the first flight of steps. Come on, he thought, get your butt inside the safety of the temple.

  Straker was to repeat many times what he thought happened next, to colleagues, to Congress, to his conscience. As the President’s protective detail withdrew for the money shot, Leila scanned the crowds and spotted something that alarmed her. She couldn’t be sure, but her training suggested that it was the glint of a telescopic lens caught in the low sun, at a distance of one thousand yards to the north. Without any regard for her own safety, she stepped forward to shield the unprotected President, an American hero to the end.

  Dhar’s line of sight was suddenly perfect. He found the President’s choice of a cotton Nehru suit even more offensive than his predecessor’s cowboy boots, but he didn’t need any further incentive. Inshallah, his job was almost done. The President was alone, his figure filling the lens as Dhar traced the crosshairs over his chest and neck, and up to his forehead, which was beaded with sweat.

  But as he squeezed the trigger, distilling in that moment a thousand thoughts of anger, from his first day at the American School to the death of his father, a woman stepped forward and stared back at him through the lens. Dhar recognised the big eyes as the high-velocity bullet impacted between them, knocking her backwards and removing part of her skull.

  In that shard of time, where there was no place for shock or regret, Dhar knew that he had killed the person who had betrayed his father: her job at the American Embassy, the English-accented Urdu, her seeming affection for Daniel Marchant. They all surfaced at once to shout out her guilt, which should have made missing the President more bearable.

  A second shot was out of the question. The President had been thrown to the ground and smothered by a blanket of Security Service officers, as if he was on fire. There would be another opportunity in the future, Dhar told himself, but he knew it was unlikely. It no longer seemed to matter, either. He left the rifle where it was, hidden under the water tank, slid throu
gh a hatch in the roof, and made his way down to a rickshaw parked in the street below.

  * * *

  Marchant saw Leila pirouette to the ground, her spilt blood darkening the President’s white suit. He tried to push through the boiling crowd, but his world was slowing down, falling silent. The women all around him were mouthing muted screams, the men running everywhere and nowhere. A tide of people was carrying him away from Leila, out to the dark depths of the Arabian Sea, to level three. Sebbie was there, lying on the floor of the pool. Then he heard the sound of a police whistle and saw him on the road, twisted and bloodied, alone, eyes open with fear and confusion.

  He saw Leila, too, ignored at the foot of the temple steps as the President was bundled away towards Marine One, its blades starting to stir the hot evening air. How could they leave her on her own like that? He was by her side now, lifting her wet head in his hands, shielding her from the downdraft.

  ‘Leila, it’s me, Dan,’ he said through his tears. ‘It’s me.’

  But he knew it was too late. He bent over her, shoulders shaking, and kissed her still warm lips goodbye.

  54

  ‘As far as we’re concerned, she took the bullet that was meant for our President,’ William Straker said on the secure video link. Daniel Marchant turned away from the screen to the window. A Dutch barge was making its way up the river below Fielding’s office. ‘That’s pretty special in our book, a loyal Agency employee who made the ultimate sacrifice,’ Straker continued. ‘The President wants a full state funeral.’

  ‘And we’ll be there, of course,’ Fielding said. ‘Leila was an extraordinary woman.’

  Marchant caught Sir David Chadwick raising his eyebrows at Bruce Lockhart, the Prime Minister’s foreign policy adviser, who was sitting across from the Chief.

  ‘We appreciate it, Marcus, really,’ Straker went on. ‘It’s at times like this that Britain and America need to stand as one. No one here forgets the night after 9/11, when the Chief of MI6 somehow got a plane into Virginia to be with us. That’s how it should be. Madam, sirs, thank you.’

  The screen went blank, and the six of them sat quite still, listening to the sound of an aircraft flying over London towards Heathrow. Harriet Armstrong, crutches propped against her chair, glanced at Chadwick, who looked away. It was Marchant who finally spoke.

  ‘Have they seen all the evidence?’

  ‘Everything,’ Armstrong said.

  ‘And they still believe she was working for them?’

  ‘No. But they need to believe she was,’ Fielding said. ‘The alternative is unthinkable. And why not? She saved their President. You heard Straker. She “took the bullet”. In the West’s war against terror, she’s a hero. And at the moment, America needs heroes. It doesn’t need traitors.’

  ‘So why did they agree to release me?’ Marchant asked. Two Secret Service officers had started asking questions when they took Leila’s body away in an ambulance and Marchant had insisted on accompanying them. An hour later he was in the cell in the basement of the American Embassy again. He had finally arrived back in Britain earlier that morning, landing at Fairford, the airbase he had flown out of two weeks earlier with a hood over his head.

  ‘In return for Britain publicly believing in Leila too.’

  ‘And that’s enough for them to free me? They thought I was involved in a plot to kill their Ambassador to London, that I was a traitor.’

  Fielding shuffled his papers and looked around the room. The hesitation made Marchant feel uncomfortable, excluded. ‘There’s something more. What? Tell me.’

  ‘Leila sent me an email on the morning of the day she died,’ Fielding said, looking straight at Marchant. ‘In it, she provided the time and place of what would have been the next arranged dead drop with her Iranian handler. It was here in London, Hyde Park. We put the spot under surveillance, even though the world knew Leila had been killed. Someone from the Iranian Embassy duly turned up, in case she’d left something before she went to India. This man was unknown to us, not on the diplomatic list. Harriet pulled him in.’

  ‘He was senior officer in VEVAK, and he told us everything, in return for letting him leave the country,’ Armstrong said. ‘When Leila started to work for the Iranians, how they had given her no choice because of her mother, how the Americans recruited her. But it seems Leila struck a better deal than we thought. In some ways a very brave, selfless deal. In return for her spying for Iran, VEVAK would not only keep her mother safe, they would also suspend all police activity against the Bahá’í community in Iran.’

  The room fell silent. ‘The latest human rights data appears to bear this out,’ Denton said quietly. ‘The number of Bahá’ís persecuted in the last six months is the lowest since the ’79 Revolution.’

  ‘We sent a transcript to Langley,’ Fielding said.

  ‘And? What did they say?’ Marchant asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Fielding said. ‘We didn’t expect them to. Two days later, they agreed to a complete rehabilitation of your father. Lord Bancroft will be filing his report shortly. It will conclude that there is no evidence to doubt his loyalty to his country. There will be a full memorial service in Westminster Abbey, attended by the Prime Minister and the US Ambassador to London.’

  ‘All references to Salim Dhar and his family have been deleted from your father’s records, both here and at Langley,’ Armstrong added. ‘Privately, they still maintain that we’re honouring a traitor. Privately, we think they’re doing the same. But the world will never know.’

  ‘One day the truth will come out about Leila, though, we’ve insisted on that,’ Chadwick said. ‘Fifty years from now, historians will discover how she sabotaged our investigations into a terror campaign in Britain. Not only that, but it appears she was the main UK point of contact for the terrorists. It was a South Indian cell, your father was right about that.’ Chadwick looked Marchant in the eyes for the first time. ‘What Stephen didn’t know, what none of us knew, was that it was being run out of Tehran.’

  ‘Stephen visited Dhar, a rising star in the jihadi firmament, because he had hoped Dhar might know something about the cell,’ Fielding said.

  ‘He also wanted to meet his son for the first time,’ Marchant interrupted. Chadwick winced.

  ‘Stephen was convinced that this cell had help from inside the Service,’ Fielding continued, as if he hadn’t heard Marchant. ‘He was right about that, too. But the Iranians had kept Dhar out of the loop. He couldn’t tell Stephen who was behind the attacks in Britain, or who the mole was, because he didn’t know.’

  ‘Will the Iranians use him in the future?’ Lockhart asked. ‘He managed to eliminate Leila, one of their most priceless assets, someone who had infiltrated two Western intelligence agencies.’

  ‘Their interests might overlap again,’ Fielding said. ‘But it was an unusual alliance. Maybe that’s why no one saw it. We think Dhar’s future lies with AQ. The jihadi chatrooms are jubilant, praising him for getting so close.’

  ‘But is he ours?’ Lockhart asked. Marchant knew he was the only one who could answer the question. It had been on everyone’s lips from the moment the meeting had started.

  ‘Dhar is his own man,’ Marchant replied.

  ‘His war is with others, though, not with the British.’

  ‘So far his targets have all been American.’

  ‘Will he ever try to make contact?’ Lockhart asked.

  Marchant remained silent. He knew that a part of him hoped so.

  ‘We have to leave this to Daniel,’ Fielding said. ‘We think Dhar’s only motivation will be personal. Family business,’ he added, looking at Marchant.

  ‘But if he does?’ Lockhart persisted.

  ‘Then this whole operation is deniable. Dhar is currently the most wanted man in the Western world. If contact was ever established between him and Her Majesty’s Government, it’s clearly not something we would boast about.’

  ‘In the unlikely event of him becoming a British asset, the
PM must be ring-fenced, is that clear?’ Lockhart said, looking around the table. ‘He cannot be told, under any circumstances. Only the six people in this room will ever know.’

  55

  Marchant stood outside Legoland, on the Thames path, looking across the water to the Morpeth Arms. It was where he and Leila had sometimes gone after work in the early days, after they had graduated from the Fort. He had had time to think about her betrayal, about when the deception must have started, whether he had missed any obvious clues. It was easier to assume that her treachery had begun as something small, pieces of information here and there in return for her mother’s safety in Tehran, but that slowly it had gained an unstoppable momentum of its own, ending with the Americans recruiting her too, providing perfect protection against the hunt for a mole in MI6.

  Leila was certainly right to have feared VEVAK’s threats to her mother. The day before the President’s visit to the Lotus Temple, a mob in a poor suburb of Tehran had dragged an old Bahá’í woman outside and stoned her. She had died in the night. Had VEVAK begun to suspect that Leila was losing her nerve?

  Marchant turned away from the river and looked behind him, distracted by a noise. A yellow London Duck was coming down the slipway. The amphibious vehicle rumbled to a stop beside Marchant, who spotted Fielding sitting in the bow.

  ‘Hop on,’ he called down to Marchant.

  Two minutes later, Marchant was sitting at the front of the Duck as it made its way towards Westminster, too low in the water for his liking. But he had his own particular reasons to fear water, and tried to take comfort from the other passengers, sitting towards the stern, who seemed untroubled.