by Jon Stock
‘Is it?’
‘Primakov can only do so much. He can bring two brothers together with tales of their father’s treachery, but it’s up to you to persuade Dhar that you’re a traitor too.’
And if you don’t, Fielding thought, Dhar will kill you. But he said nothing as he walked out of the chapel into the harsh neon lighting of the airport.
55
The Hotel Supreme was not Madurai’s finest, but their room did apparently have a view of the temples, which was what Marchant and Meena had asked for when they checked in unannounced at the wood-panelled reception desk. Too many staff were standing around, some in dark suits behind the desk, others in baggy brown bellboy uniforms waiting by the lift, hands behind their backs. Guests seemed to be a mixture of businessmen and Indian tourists. Meena had made an advance booking at another place across town, but switching hotels reduced the chance of their room being bugged.
‘The view is there, but it is only partial,’ the manager explained, at the same time indicating to two staff to carry their suitcases to the lift. He picked a brass key off a row of hooks behind him and handed it to Marchant.
‘Meaning?’ Meena asked, raising her eyebrows at Marchant.
‘They are painting the temples at this time. You will see.’ The manager wobbled his head from side to side, smiling like a child with a secret.
‘But we’ve come a long way to be here. A view of them at sunrise would be nice,’ Meena said, sticking to her legend. As she had explained to passport control at the airport, she and Marchant were a couple. They were visiting India for a traditional wedding in a village near Karaikudi, about eighty miles east of Madurai, where one of Meena’s distant cousins was marrying an accountant from Chennai. First, they were doing some sightseeing in Madurai, where the main tourist attraction was the Sri Meenakshi temple, with its brightly painted towers, or gopurams, and ornate carvings.
As soon as they looked out of the window of their top-floor room, the view of the temple became clear. At least, the manager’s explanation did. As he had promised, it was possible to see the tallest gopuram from the room’s balcony, if you leaned over the side of the crumbling wall. But every inch of it was covered with scaffolding and organic sheeting made out of matted palm fronds. From a distance, it looked like a giant papier-mâché structure.
‘I think that’s what he meant by partial,’ Marchant said. Meena was walking around the double bed, checking the light switches and wall hangings for audio devices.
‘I was hoping for twin beds,’ she said.
‘We’re married, remember?’
‘I know. I’ll sleep over there, on the sofa.’
‘It’s OK. I will.’
There was silence for a few seconds as Marchant watched her go through her suitcase. She was wearing white trousers and a cream-coloured shirt with long sleeves. On the plane, she had been in tight jeans, but she had changed in the lavatory, explaining about temple etiquette. Marchant had reminded her that he used to live in India, promising he wouldn’t wear shorts and a T-shirt, however hot it was.
‘Thanks for not making all this any harder than it is already,’ she said quietly, her back to him as they stood on either side of the bed. ‘Blame my strict upbringing.’
Ever since they had boarded their flight to Chennai in London, Marchant had done only the bare minimum that was required for them to appear as a couple. In his experience, intelligence officers the world over usually took husband-and-wife cover as an opportunity to flirt with colleagues, a brief and unconditional escape that often led to more, but he could see how much Meena struggled with it. She seemed troubled, not her usual sparring, confident self. Her sexual poise had disappeared. She hadn’t spent long with Fielding on her own, but whatever the Vicar said had left her even quieter. Marchant suspected he had laid down a few ground rules, reminded her about Leila.
‘Come on. Let’s go and be ignorant Western tourists together,’ Marchant offered, trying to lighten the mood.
Meena seemed to rally at the thought of the task that lay ahead of them. She found the map she had been looking for in her suitcase and spread it out on the glass coffee table in front of the windows.
‘We think Dhar’s mother is working in the centre of the temple complex, near the main shrine to Shiva,’ she said, pointing at the map. ‘We’ve got two of our people inside, posing as temple staff, and two more outside.’
‘Indian origin?’
Meena gave him a sarcastic smile. ‘Yeah. It kind of helps them to blend in.’
‘I didn’t know Langley was so enlightened.’
‘We’re getting there. And there’s someone from our Chennai substation — OK, white guy, redneck — who’s hanging around Madurai as a tourist. Have you been inside a temple like this before?’
‘Not since my gap year.’
‘Believe me, it’s one big crazy city in there. Shops, animals, ponds, people, food. Worship is just a part of it.’
‘Did you used to come here when you were younger?’
‘As a little girl, yes. We moved to the States when I was seven. I grew up near Karaikudai, where we’re meant to be going for my cousin’s wedding.’
‘So this was your local big temple.’
‘I guess so. I don’t remember a lot about it. Just that it was very full-on inside. Let’s go,’ she said, hooking her arm through Marchant’s and heading for the door.
56
Salim Dhar looked at the photo of Daniel Marchant on his wall as another jet took off outside. Kotlas airbase was busy today, more activity than usual. He was meant to be flying with Sergei, but they had been grounded on account of the increased air traffic. More classroom theory, more work on the simulator.
He tried to think back to the time he had met Marchant in India. The Britisher’s appearance had been different then, a crude cover identity. His hair had been shorter, his clothes more dishevelled, like those worn by the Westerners he had seen and despised in Goa. He reached out for the photo, gently prised it from the wall, and studied it more closely. According to Primakov, it had been taken by a young SVR agent from the top of a number 36 bus in London. Marchant was in a suit, looking through the window of a motorcycle showroom, across the road from MI6’s headquarters in Vauxhall.
Dhar had never been to London, but he felt he knew the city well. Although he had studied at the American school in Delhi, his education had been heavily influenced by Britain. He didn’t know why at the time, but his mother used to bring home books about London, talk to him about the country in a way that he realised now expressed a heartfelt affection. She had only been employed briefly at the British High Commission in Delhi, before he was born, but she had loved the place and its values. Dhar remembered playing Monopoly with her under a lazy fan, wondering at the names on the board: Old Kent Road; The Angel, Islington; Marylebone Station.
He had thought about the game again when the London Underground was attacked on 7 July 2005: Liverpool Street, King’s Cross. For some reason, his mother had always liked to buy up the stations.
‘Mama, but the maximum rent is only £200,’ he used to tease her.
‘I know,’ his mother had said, smiling, with a knowing tilt of the head. ‘But there are four stations, and only two or three of everything else.’
Dhar was in Afghanistan at the time of the London attack, fighting American troops, but he hadn’t joined in the cheering when news reached his camp of the bombings.
‘Why do you not salute our brothers in Britain, Salim?’ the commander of the camp had asked.
Dhar had walked off. Such methods had never been his style. His approach had always been to target the West’s troops and political leaders rather than its people. It was why he preferred to operate alone whenever he could, outside al Q’aeda’s indiscriminate umbrella. But he knew it was something else, too. In his mind, it was his mother’s world that the 7/7 bombers had desecrated; a board-game fantasy, but still her world. It was only later that he had understood why: it was his fa
ther’s, too.
It would have been easy for Dhar to dismiss Marchant’s bond of half-brotherhood as worthless. In his childhood he had had countless ‘cousin brothers’, distant relatives who played up family connections whenever it was convenient. It was acutely compromising, too, for a jihadi to be related to a Western spy Chief. But now that Dhar understood his father’s loyalties, he knew that he had to see Marchant again. The Britisher had been a potential ally when they had met in India. He was a man on the run from the CIA, but who had returned to a job at the infidel’s castle on the shores of the Thames, ignoring his coded text to join him in Morocco. Now, according to Primakov, he was finally ready to betray his country, to follow in their father’s footsteps.
Dhar pinned the photo of Marchant back on the wall. He knew there was another in London who could help him, but he had insisted to the Russians that it should be Marchant, telling them that the mission was off if it was anyone else. It wasn’t ideology. It was curiosity. There were too many questions he wanted to ask him. How had he coped with being waterboarded by the Americans? Who was the beautiful woman in Delhi he had shot instead of the President, the woman whose meenakshi eyes had haunted him ever since? And, most of all, what was their father like, the man who had hoodwinked the West for so long?
57
There was a queue of people waiting to enter the Meenakshi temple by the east gate. A female police officer checked the women, frisking their saris with a lollipop-shaped metal detector, while a male officer did the same with the men. No one was wearing any shoes, not even the police. Marchant and Meena had left theirs around the corner at a stall with thousands of others, not expecting to see them again.
Marchant approached the policeman and stood with his arms out and legs apart. Security seemed to be tight today, he sensed — thorough rather than a gesture — and he wondered if the temple was on a heightened state of alert. It wouldn’t have anything to do with Salim Dhar’s mother, but it might make things more difficult when they lifted her. They had already had to abandon their plan of using their wires in the temple, as they would have been picked up by the police detectors.
He smiled at the policeman once he was done and walked on, waiting for Meena at the bottom of the stone steps. He couldn’t be certain, but he thought he detected a slight hostility towards her from the female officer, who glanced over at him as she frisked her. Meena had daubed her hair parting with vermilion, a sign of marriage, but she couldn’t do much about the colour of Marchant’s skin. Perhaps mixed-race marriages didn’t play well in Madurai.
‘Sometimes I remember why we left this country,’ Meena said as she joined him. They walked down a colourful colonnade of pillars, leaving the sunlight behind them. Marchant thought he heard the sound of hesitant slokas being recited in a distant classroom. In front of them he could make out the profile of an elephant, its head almost touching the ornate roof, from which carved lions looked down. A queue of worshippers was waiting to be blessed by the animal. In return for a banana, bought from the elephant’s mahout, it would raise its trunk and touch their heads.
Before they had entered the temple complex, the CIA officer from Chennai had given Meena an update, in between shooting a tourist video of devotees queuing up to smash coconuts before entering the temple.
‘It’s kind of quaint, isn’t it?’ he had said. ‘Signifies leaving one’s identity behind.’
Marchant wasn’t sure if the American was playing his legend or being himself. He showed them a video he had shot earlier of a Russian behaving erratically outside the east entrance. Marchant recognised the tall figure as Valentin.
They walked further inside the temple complex, the light fading until all Marchant could see were pillared halls and corridors disappearing off into the darkness in all directions. In every corner there seemed to be small shrines to Hindu deities, like tiny puppet theatres, the gods visible deep within dark recesses, their bright colours lit by flickering oil candles. Stone sculptures of animals with lions’ bodies and elephants’ heads reared out of the shadows. A man wearing only a lunghi around his waist was lying prostrate, hands in prayer above his head, in front of a statue of Ganesh. They stepped around him and walked on, passing briefly through a courtyard where three camels were tethered. All around them, Hindu prayers were being chanted over a loudspeaker system, the priests’ voices distorting at full volume.
‘I told you it’s another world,’ Meena said, stopping beside a pillar encrusted with what seemed like centuries of crumbling red turmeric powder and candle wax. ‘This is Lakshmi, my goddess,’ she added, looking at an idol of a benign woman with four arms. Its surface was also streaked with yellows and reds, and weathered by generations of worship. ‘The goddess of wealth and fortune, courage and wisdom.’
‘And beauty,’ Marchant added, looking at the lotus flower the goddess was sitting on. He thought back to the Lotus Temple in Delhi, where Leila had been killed. Her lips had still been warm as she had lain lifeless in his arms, her hair sticky with blood. He watched Meena daub some red on her forehead and bow in front of the statue. For a moment, she seemed genuinely at peace. Then she turned to a man standing behind a trestle table beside the idol. On it were tumbling garlands of white jasmine, coconuts and pyramids of turmeric. She gave him a few rupees and picked up a garland. At the same time, they exchanged a few words, too quietly for Marchant or anyone else to hear. Then she placed the fragrant flowers around Lakshmi’s neck, turned back to the table and dabbed her finger in the turmeric.
‘Come on, Indian boy,’ she said, smudging a tilak on Marchant’s forehead and walking on. ‘She’s here.’
A moment later, she pulled him back from the main thoroughfare, just as a white cow came running out of the shadows, draped in a gold-embroidered cloak and accompanied by two breathless temple priests. The tips of the cow’s horns had been painted red and green, and two drums had been strapped to its back, one on either side. The priests, chests bare and glistening with oil, were beating the drums, accompanied by the jangling silver bells that swung from the cow’s neck.
After the cow had gone, Marchant and Meena headed towards Shiva’s shrine, walking through a thriving market of brightly lit shops selling souvenirs and incense that hung heavily in the air. Further on, they passed the Golden Lotus Pond, a bathing pool on the stepped sides of which pilgrims and worshippers washed and chatted. Marchant was alert now, his senses heightened, on the lookout for other agencies. Because Meena was leading the operation to find Dhar’s mother, he had been momentarily entranced by the temple’s sights and sounds, let them carry him back to his childhood in Delhi.
Their plan was a simple one. If Meena’s colleagues were right, Dhar’s mother, Shushma, was selling devotional candles in the hall outside the Shrine of Lord Sundareswarar, Shiva himself. She had been there for the past two days, making the small clay pots at night and filling them with ghee, or clarified butter, and wicks during the day. The CIA had not wanted to alert the Indian authorities to her whereabouts, preferring to interview her in the West, so Meena could not call on local police support. And the temple surrounds made it impossible to seize her against her will, even if she was sedated. Instead, the operation would be low-key and discreet, not words Langley was familiar with; but this was Meena’s job, and she had insisted on it.
Marchant would strike up a conversation with Shushma in his rusty Hindi, explaining who he was and that she was in danger. Better to come with him back to Britain, where waterboarding was still off the menu, than be seized by the CIA. After he had walked her out of the temple complex, they would drive her to a disused airfield east of Madurai where Meena had arranged for a plane to take her to the UK.
It was a risk, but there weren’t many options. Legoland’s profilers had given Marchant a brief psychological assessment of Shushma, which he’d read on the plane. Their conclusion was that she was on her own, abandoned by her husband and wanted by the authorities, and that the thought of being protected by Daniel Marchant, son of the
man whom she had once loved and who had financially supported her, would prove sufficiently comforting for her to cooperate.
Marchant wasn’t so sure as he passed a small statue of Hanuman the monkey god — covered in ghee and worn smooth with endless touching — and then turned into the hall that led to Shiva’s shrine. Ahead of him was an imposing icon of Nandi, Shiva’s bull. As a non-Hindu, this was as far as he was allowed to go. Several foreign tourists had entered the hall at the same time as him, one of them peering into the shrine to try to get a glimpse of the holy shivalingam that lay within. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted another foreigner moving away in the darkness, disappearing beyond a statue that he recognised as Nataraja, Shiva as lord of the dance. His father had always kept a small bronze one beside his bed.
Marchant looked again at where the foreigner had been standing, and saw that Meena had clocked him too. She nodded in the direction of the shrine entrance and then moved towards Nataraja. The deal was that he would focus on Shushma while she dealt with any outside interest. He joined a queue of people waiting to collect their ghee candles and enter the shrine. It wasn’t easy in the darkness, but he caught a glimpse of the woman who was handing out the candles to the devotees. She had shaved her head and was wearing a threadbare kurta. Outside the temple complex she could have been mistaken for a beggar.
As he drew near to the front of the queue, Marchant glanced behind him, but he couldn’t see Meena. He was on his own, just how he preferred it. As far as he could tell, the people around him needn’t give him any cause for alarm. His only worry was the priest up ahead at the shrine entrance. The chatty couple in front had travelled from Bangalore, and the extended family immediately behind him were from Chennai. Both had expressed their friendly concern that he wouldn’t be permitted to enter the shrine for darshan.
