by Jon Stock
He liked the bike, but he didn’t want to steal it. Turning the headlight back on, he glanced in the mirror and saw that no one had decided to give chase. A madman had clearly stolen their bike, and he would be dead quicker than they could catch him. When he looked ahead again, he saw the oncoming lorry’s headlights, but there was no time to think. Instinctively, he swerved inside the vehicle and was almost thrown by the draft as it passed him, horn blaring in the darkness.
He moved back onto the correct side of the road. The petrol station where he had picked up the bike was shut, but he parked it there, flashing the headlight on and off once. A mile back up the road, one of the bikers broke away from the group and started to ride towards him. But Marchant was long gone by the time he had arrived, heading into the heart of Marrakech across rough ground, talking on his mobile to London.
11
Marcus Fielding, Chief of MI6, looked out of his fourth-floor window at the commuters walking home across Vauxhall Bridge beneath him. Two of them had stopped, jackets slung over their shoulders, to take in the evening sun as it set over a hot summer London. The Thames was out, the muddy shores busy with sand-pipers. On the far bank, below the Morpeth Arms, a woman weighed down with plastic bags was searching through the flotsam and jetsam.
Beside Legoland, one of the Yellow Duck amphibious vehicles that took tourists around London was parked up on the slipway, waiting while its captain briefed passengers on what to do if it sank. Sometimes, Fielding wished it would. Its proximity to Legoland had long made him uneasy, the guided tours attracting too much publicity, too many fingers pointing up in his direction. Still, Fielding couldn’t deny that he had enjoyed the time he had taken the Duck with Daniel Marchant. They were happier days then, full of hope. Marchant had received a text while they were on board together, and the Morocco plan had been born. But that was over now.
Fielding was supposed to be going to the opera tonight, but he needed to wait for Marchant to ring in again from Marrakech. The call had come through earlier on Marchant’s mobile, but the line had dropped, the encryption software unhappy with the integrity of the local network. He knew Marchant wouldn’t make contact unless it was urgent, but it all seemed irrelevant now. He wondered how best to break the news about Salim Dhar to Marchant.
There was a chance, of course, that James Spiro was mistaken. He had been wrong before, most famously about Marchant’s late father, Stephen, Fielding’s predecessor as Chief of MI6. According to Spiro, Stephen and Daniel Marchant were both infidels, worshiping at the altar of a very different god to the rest of the West. Spiro had tried to bring down the entire house of Marchant, and MI6 by implication, until the son had cleared the father’s name.
But the evidence coming out of North Waziristan suggested that this time Spiro was right. The CIA had finally nailed their man. Two intercepted phone calls, a red-hot handset last used in south India: it was hard to disagree with them. GCHQ was running its own tests on the voice, but the match was perfect, as Spiro had repeatedly told him a few minutes earlier on the video link.
There were few people Fielding despised more than Spiro. He should have been cleared out with the old guard when the new President was sworn in, hung out to dry with the attorneys who had sanctioned torture, but somehow he had survived, thanks to the President himself, of all people. The White House’s attitude to the Agency had changed overnight after the assassination attempt in Delhi. Briefly a champion of noble values, it was now an admirer of muscle, and in particular of Spiro, who had taken all the credit for protecting his leader. The clenched fist had replaced the hand of friendship. Now, God help them all, there was no stopping him. Spiro’s star was in the ascendant again. Not only were his enhanced methods back in fashion, but the CIA had been given permission to resume playing hardball with its allies.
Salim Dhar’s elimination was a particularly sweet victory for Spiro. The Agency had never seen Dhar in the same way as the British, struggling to countenance the possibility that he might one day represent an opportunity rather than a threat. For them, Dhar was the problem, not a potential solution, a man who had come close to heaping the ultimate shame on them. From where Fielding stood, it was all deeply frustrating: the President had promised an era of more nuanced attitudes to intelligence, but it appeared to be over before it had begun.
Fielding turned away from the reinforced window and walked across to the cabinet behind his desk. The collection of books reflected his Arabist tastes, charting his career through the Gulf and North Africa. He envied Marchant his time in Morocco, operating on his own, without the bureaucracy of Legoland. It was how he had worked best when he was Marchant’s age, drifting through the medinas, talking to the traders, listening, watching.
He took out a volume of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, presented to him years ago by Muammar al-Gadaffi after he had helped to persuade the Libyan leader to abandon his nuclear ambitions. It was Sir Richard Francis Burton’s ten-volume 1885 limited edition, for subscribers only, and he had never enquired too closely about its provenance. Fielding had been obliged to declare the gift to Whitehall, but it was his counter-intelligence colleagues across the Thames who were most interested, subjecting the volumes to weeks of unnecessary analysis.
The rivalry between the Services had bordered on war in those days, and Fielding had assumed that MI5 would do all it could to embarrass the Vicar, as he knew they called him. Gifts from foreign governments were a favourite cover for listening devices. No one had forgotten the electric samovar presented to the Queen at Balmoral by the Russian Knights aerobatics team, later suspected of being a mantelpiece transmitter, or the infinity bug hidden inside a wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States, given by Russian schoolchildren to the US ambassador to Moscow at the end of the Second World War.
But the sweepers at Thames House found nothing, and resisted the temptation to insert something of their own. The volumes were reluctantly passed back over the river to Legoland. There was talk of donating them to the British Library, but the Vicar was eventually allowed to keep his unholy gift.
As he began to read about Shahryar and Scheherazade, there was a knock on the door and Ann Norman, his formidable personal assistant, appeared. She was wearing her usual red tights and intimidating frown, both of which had protected four Chiefs from Whitehall’s meddling mandarins for more than twenty years.
‘It’s Daniel Marchant. Shall I put him through?’
‘Line three.’
Fielding went over to his desk and sat down, placing the open book in front of him, next to the comms console that linked him to colleagues around the world as well as to his political masters. The book’s presence made him feel more connected, less detached from Marchant’s world. He let him talk for a while, about a halaka, and his trip out into the High Atlas. Fielding stopped him as he began to talk of helicopters.
‘Daniel, I think you should know we’ve just had a call from Langley. NSA picked up a mobile intercept late this afternoon, from Salim Dhar in North Waziristan. One hundred per cent voice match.’
Marchant fell quiet, the hum of a Marrakech medina suddenly audible in the background.
‘Have they killed him?’
‘They think so. A UAV was in the area, eliminated the target within fifteen minutes of the intercept. I’m sorry.’
‘Without even checking? Without talking to us?’
‘The Americans aren’t really in the mood right now for cooperating on Dhar. You know that.’
‘But Dhar was here, I’m sure of it. In Morocco. Barely an hour ago, up near the Tizi’n’Test pass. The halaka spoke of a Roc bird.’
Fielding absently turned the pages of The Arabian Nights, hearing a younger version of himself in Marchant’s voice. Fielding had been less hot-headed, but he rated Marchant more highly than anyone of his generation. A part of him wondered again if Spiro had made a mistake, but it was hard to dispute the CIA’s evidence, at least those elements of it that they had pooled with Britain. Th
e Joint Intelligence Committee was convening first thing in the morning, by which time Britain’s own voice analysis from Cheltenham would be in. GCHQ was running tests through the night, but Fielding didn’t expect a different result.
‘And how do I present your evidence to the JIC tomorrow?’ Fielding said, knowing it was an unfair question. Unlike police work, intelligence-gathering was seldom just about evidence, as he had explained to MI6’s latest intake of IONEC graduates earlier that day. Agents had to be thorough but also counter-intuitive; ‘Cutting the red wire when the manual said blue,’ as one over-excited graduate had put it.
‘Someone took him away. Whoever owns the helicopter has Dhar.’
‘And who does own it?’
‘It was white, UN, but no markings.’
‘White?’ Fielding’s interest was pricked. He knew that the Mi-8 was used by the UN, knew too that the government in Sudan wasn’t averse to flying unmarked white military aircraft to attack villages in Darfur.
‘I was about to tell you that when you interrupted me.’
Fielding could hear Marchant’s anger mounting. He had always preferred field agents who were passionate about the CX they filed to London. It made for better product.
‘Suppose it was just an exercise,’ he said, testing him.
‘An exercise? They shot someone, the man I’d been following from Marrakech, the same man who’d been listening to the storyteller.’ Marchant fell silent again. ‘Remember when Dhar sent me the text, after Delhi?’ he continued, trying to restore his Chief’s belief.
Fielding stood up, his lower spine beginning to ache. It always played up when he was tired, and he suddenly felt world-weary, as if he had been asked to live his entire life over again, fight all his old Whitehall battles, relive the fears of raised threat levels, the waking moments in the middle of the night.
‘Daniel, we’ve been over this many times,’ he said, thinking back to their journey down the river. They had both thought the text was from Dhar. GCHQ was less sure.
‘The words were taken from a song. Leysh Nat’arak.’
‘And that text was one of the reasons I gave you time in Morocco. I would have let you go earlier if I could. You were no good to anyone in London. Langley thought otherwise. We all hoped that you’d find Dhar, that he’d make contact. But that’s not going to happen now. I’m sorry. It’s time to come home.’
‘You really believe the Americans have killed him, don’t you?’
Fielding hesitated, one hand on the small of his back. ‘I’m not sure. But whatever happened in Morocco, I want you away from it. For your own sake. If someone was killed, and you saw it, we have a problem, and that wasn’t part of the deal. I also sent you to Morocco to keep out of trouble.’
‘Yalla natsaalh ehna akhwaan. That was the lyric. Let’s make good for we are brothers.’ Marchant paused. ‘Dhar was out there, up in the mountains. I’m sure of it. And he wanted to come in. But someone took him, before he could.’
‘Someone? Who, exactly?’
Marchant tried to ignore the scepticism that had returned to Fielding’s voice. He had thought about this question on the way back to his apartment, wrestled with the possibilities, the implications, knowing how it would sound. But it was quite clear in his own mind, as clear as the Russian words he had heard on the mountainside: Nye strelai. Don’t shoot.
‘Moscow.’
12
Marchant swilled the Scotch around his mouth for a few seconds before swallowing it. He had hoped the alcohol would taste toxic, that his body would reject it in some violent way, but it was sweeter than he had ever remembered.
He was sitting under a palm tree in the courtyard of the Chesterfield Pub, a bar anglais at the Hotel Nassil on avenue Mohammed V. It was not a place he was particularly proud to be, but there was a limited choice of public venues serving alcohol in Marrakech. The Scotch was decent enough, though, and there were fewer tourists than he had feared. His only worry was if the group of British bikers had decided to turn back to Marrakech for the night and came here for a drink.
He had learned to trust his gut instinct since signing up with MI6, and at the moment it didn’t feel as if Salim Dhar was dead. The Americans had claimed to have killed a number of terrorists with UAVs in recent years and later proved to have been wrong. Only time would tell if they were right about Dhar. It would be too risky to send in anyone on the ground to collect DNA. Later perhaps. For now, the CIA would look for other evidence, listen to the chatter, assess jihadi morale.
Marchant knew, though, that Fielding was right: his Morocco days were over. He had already booked himself onto the early-morning flight back to London. In India, when he was a child, his father had once told him to live in each country as if for ever, but always to be ready to leave at dawn. At the time, his father was a middle-ranking MI6 officer who had served in Moscow before Delhi. He was used to the threat of his diplomatic cover being blown, of tit-for-tat expulsions.
Marchant wasn’t being expelled, but there had been an incident of some sort in the mountains and he had witnessed it. Whether anyone had seen him, he wasn’t sure, but he knew MI6 couldn’t afford for him to be caught up in another controversy, not after the events in India. And if he was right about Moscow’s involvement, an international row might be imminent.
After finishing his Scotch he ordered another. He had swapped his djellaba for jeans and a collarless shirt before coming to the pub, and guessed the waiter had marked him down as just another drunken Western tourist, tanking up before a night at the clubs. So be it. He needed to cut a different figure from the one who had ridden out to Tizi a few hours earlier.
It was after an hour and too much Scotch that Marchant saw the dark-haired woman walk up to the bar. He recognised her at once as Lakshmi Meena, the local Operations Officer the CIA had sent to keep an eye on him when he had first arrived in Marrakech. London had briefed him about her. She was a beneficiary of the CIA’s ongoing programme to recruit more people from what it called America’s ‘heritage communities’, particularly those who spoke ‘mission critical’ languages. MI6 had always recruited linguists, unlike the CIA, which had been found wanting after 9/11. Even in its National Clandestine Service, only 30 per cent of CIA staff were fluent in a second language. Meena spoke Hindi, some Urdu and, most importantly, the Dravidian languages of southern India, which had been upgraded to critical in the ongoing hunt for Salim Dhar, whose parents were originally from Kerala.
Marchant had also been told that she was a breath of fresh air, one of the recent intake who had joined the Agency on the back of the new President’s promises of change. He had yet to see any difference, at least in the CIA’s attitude to him.
Meena was young, late twenties, dressed in jeans and a maroon Indian top with mirrorwork that caught the light around her neckline. Officially, she was in Morocco teaching English as a foreign language, working at the American Language Center up in Rabat. Marchant had to admit that she looked the part, one up from his own student cover. He wished he’d thought of it for himself.
Meena walked over to Marchant’s table in the courtyard, checking her mobile phone before putting it away in her shoulder-bag. Marchant was momentarily wrongfooted by the direct approach. They had met face to face only once before, shortly after Marchant had arrived: a cold exchange in the foyer of a hotel.
‘Do what you have to do,’ Marchant had said, trying not to see Leila in Meena’s limpid eyes, her dark olive skin. ‘Just don’t expect any answers from me.’
‘You flatter yourself,’ she had replied. ‘We ask questions later, remember?’
It hadn’t been the beginning of a beautiful friendship. He knew afterwards that he had played it too cool, that she was only doing her job, but he wasn’t in the mood to mix with female field agents, particularly ones who reminded him of a woman who had betrayed him. Meena was taller, her manner more hardened, but there was unquestionably something of Leila in her: an attitude, sexual poise. And Marchant knew that an
y likeness was no coincidence, that it was a cruel joke by Spiro. Frustrated that he wasn’t allowed to lock Marchant up and torture him again, Spiro had sent someone to remind him of his past. But Marchant ignored the ploy, ignored Meena. For the following few weeks, they had played cat and mouse on the streets of Marrakech, before Meena had finally backed off to Rabat.
‘Mind if I join you?’ she asked, taking a seat.
‘Go ahead,’ Marchant said, concealing his surprise. A waiter was standing beside them. For a moment, he was back in a pub in Portsmouth, chatting up strangers as part of a training exercise. All new recruits at the Fort, MI6’s training base in Gosport, were dispatched to the city’s bars and pubs to chat up unsuspecting locals and solicit private information: bank-card details, National Insurance and passport numbers.
‘Bourbon and Coke, thanks. Daniel?’
Marchant knew Meena was taking in the scene, measuring the milligrams of alcohol in Marchant’s blood, whether his defences were down. The only consolation was that she wasn’t the sort to flirt. He didn’t think he could handle that right now. Leila had used her sexual charms shamelessly, in the office and in the field, but he sensed that Meena did things differently.
‘A Scotch, thanks,’ Marchant replied, nodding at the waiter.
‘I thought you’d given all that up,’ she said, fingering her Indian necklace. ‘Gone native.’
‘Celebrating. I didn’t think you drank either.’ He had read her files: vegetarian, non-drinker, decaffeinated coffee, herbal tea.
‘Celebrating, too.’
Marchant thought her necklace was from south India, similar to one his mother had once worn. He raised his glass, trying to run his own check on himself, calculate the damage. A drinking session after three months’ abstinence wasn’t a good idea, but he was sober enough to extract some leverage from the situation, fool Meena into thinking he was drunker than he was. At least, that was the plan. His dulled brain could think of two reasons why she had stepped out of the shadows tonight. To say goodbye, having heard that Dhar was dead; or to find out if he knew anything about the helicopter in the mountains. He had a problem if it was the latter.
