by Jon Stock
‘And if I hadn’t?’
‘There was another Russian on our tail, but we lost him. I know how to look after myself, Dan.’
‘And her, I see,’ he said, nodding at Shushma’s wrist. It was joined to Meena’s with handcuffs. ‘Comforting.’
‘They’re a precaution.’
‘I gave my word we’d take care of her, not treat her as an enemy combatant.’
They both heard the noise of the plane’s door opening behind them. Meena turned around to look, and then faced Marchant again.
‘Daniel, I told you, there’s been a change.’
He detected something dancing in her eyes, but he couldn’t be certain what it was any more: loyalty and deceit had begun to look the same in recent months. Then he glanced up at the open door behind her and saw James Spiro filling the frame, a gun in his hand.
‘We need to get out of this hellhole,’ he drawled.
‘I’m sorry,’ Meena whispered, still looking at Marchant.
‘You knew?’ Marchant said, glancing at Spiro again, trying to process the implications.
‘Ask Fielding,’ she replied, turning towards the plane. Shushma followed, pulled along by her wrist. Then she stopped and faced Marchant. For a moment, he thought she was going to say something, but instead she spat in his face and walked on.
‘Fielding?’ Marchant said, wiping the saliva off his cheek. He couldn’t blame her.
‘Send my love to the Vicar,’ Spiro called out. ‘And hey, thanks. We couldn’t have got our hands on this piece of brown shit without you.’
Marchant wanted to run at the plane, pull Spiro down onto the Indian dirt, but there was nothing he could do, not while the American was armed. He thought about Fielding, who had sanctioned the change of plan without telling him, and wanted to drag him into the dirt too. Dhar’s mother was meant to be flown back to the UK. Now she was heading to Bagram, or worse, with Spiro. A deal had been done. He knew he should never have believed in Meena, but this had been brokered far above her head. She was irrelevant. Why would his own Chief let Salim Dhar’s mother — the only lead the West had — fall into Spiro’s heavy hands? It didn’t make any sense.
He watched helplessly as the plane taxied down the decrepit runway, shimmering in the heat as peacocks ran in all directions. It turned and then accelerated, lifting up into the evening sky. As it passed him, he picked up a rock and hurled it at the fuselage. On the far side of the airfield, the female workers were watching too, one of them transfixed by the mad ghora, a load of logs still balanced on her head. Marchant started to walk back towards his car, kicking at the dust, thinking fast what he could do, who he should ring. Fielding wouldn’t take his call, but he wanted to challenge him, make sure his anger was logged by the duty officer in Legoland.
He started to dial London, and then stopped. Up ahead, a black car turned off the dusty road and drove towards him, bumping across the concrete. Marchant stood back as it drew up beside him, a darkened rear window lowering.
‘Your American friends were in a hurry to leave,’ a voice said. It was Nikolai Primakov.
64
Monika had always been relaxed about sex, ever since her first encounter, as a sixteen-year-old, with an English tutor who was five years her senior. It was something that came easily to her, which was a relief, as she was struggling at the time with other areas of her life. Her mother, a teacher, was desperate for her to achieve academic success and study at the University of Warsaw. Her father, a lecturer, had died when she was younger. She was bright, top of her class in languages, but she had no siblings, and life at home as a teenager with her mother could be claustrophobic, until she discovered sex and the freedom it gave her.
But she hadn’t enjoyed sleeping with Hugo Prentice, who was lying next to her now. It wasn’t his habit of smoking before they made love — she wasn’t averse to kicking things off with a joint. And she wasn’t upset that she was doing it for work rather than pleasure. She knew when she signed up to the AW that her job would occasionally require it, and in this case there had been a redeeming motive. What had cast a shadow over the sex was an encrypted text message that had come through from General Borowski. She had ignored her phone beside the bed, even though the unique alert tone indicated that it was her boss in Warsaw.
‘Work can wait,’ she had said, easing herself on top of him. It hadn’t been easy — Borowski only made contact when it was serious — but she didn’t want to arouse Prentice’s suspicions.
Now that he was asleep, she peeled away from his heavy limbs and dressed. Watching him all the time, she went to his bathroom, where evidence of Prentice’s single life was everywhere. The small room wasn’t unhygienic, but it wasn’t clean either. The old iron bath had greenish stains where the brass taps dripped, and the sink hadn’t been cleaned after his morning ablutions. A wooden-handled shaving brush lay between the taps, still covered in lather, and the lid hadn’t been put back on a pot of hair-styling wax.
But none of this bothered her. It was his London pad, and he had been living in Warsaw for the past two years. What worried her was Borowski. She looked at the text again and then replied with a blank message, the agreed protocol. Moving fast, she removed the back of her phone and took out the SIM card, replacing it with another she kept in her purse. It had never been used before. She looked in again on Prentice as the phone rebooted, peering through a gap in the bathroom door. He seemed to stir, scratching himself before going back to sleep. Seconds later, a new message had appeared on the screen.
Monika stared at the words, barely able to believe what she was reading. Then she bent double over the lavatory and threw up.
65
‘Tell me something,’ Primakov said. ‘What ever made you think you could trust them? After all they’ve done to you?’
‘I put my faith in the Vicar,’ Marchant said.
‘A mistake your father never made.’
They were driving back towards Madurai in Primakov’s car. A thick glass partition divided them from the front, where a Russian driver sat without expression. It was evident that he couldn’t hear their conversation. Marchant wasn’t surprised that Primakov had turned up at the airport. More worrying was his lack of concern that Dhar’s mother was now in US custody. Marchant had told him the whole story: Fielding’s assurances about Lakshmi Meena, how the CIA had agreed for Shushma to be taken to the UK. Primakov had been particularly interested in Fielding’s role, asking Marchant to repeat exactly what he had said. Marchant had been happy to tell him. He no longer knew where his own loyalties lay, let alone Primakov’s.
‘Did you know that she was working at the temple?’ Marchant asked.
‘Of course.’
‘Why didn’t you do more to stop the Americans from taking her?’
‘Like you, we had heard she was bound for Britain. I was also a little under strength. Valentin is in the Apollo hospital.’
Marchant didn’t believe him. Moscow could have drawn on more resources to stop Shushma’s departure. But for some reason they hadn’t.
‘Her son won’t be happy,’ Marchant said, trying to steer the conversation towards Dhar. The only thing he knew for certain was that he needed to see him, discuss their father man to man, brother to brother. Primakov had avoided referring directly to Dhar before, but it would be hard not to now.
‘It will confirm his worst fears about the West,’ Primakov said.
And then Marchant began to see things more clearly. Primakov hadn’t flown to Madurai to prevent Shushma’s exfiltration: he wanted to be sure that she was taken. It was the one act that could be guaranteed to get under Dhar’s skin. Whatever the Russians had planned for him, it suited them if Dhar’s blood was up.
‘A son will do anything for his mother,’ Marchant offered.
‘Rage is important. It can persuade others to take you seriously. People who had their doubts.’
For the first time, Primakov looked at Marchant with something approaching knowingness in his mois
t eyes. Was it a sign at last? A part of Marchant no longer believed Fielding’s reassurances about Primakov’s loyalty to London. The Russian wouldn’t give him anything because there was nothing to give. His brief was simply to keep the jihadi fires stoked in Dhar’s belly, and to persuade Marchant to help his half-brother. There was no hidden agenda, no resurrection of old family ties, no belated clemency for his father. But somewhere inside him, Marchant still hoped he was wrong.
‘Are you angry, too?’ Primakov asked.
‘Wouldn’t you be? I promised Shushma I’d look after her, only to see her renditioned in front of me by James fucking Spiro.’
Even as Marchant spat out the expletive, a sickening feeling had started to spread: a realisation that he had been manipulated, that actions he thought were his own had actually been controlled by others. Rage is important. It can persuade others to take you seriously. People who had their doubts. He was the one raging now, against Fielding, Meena, Spiro, the West. And it would be music to Moscow’s ears.
He closed his eyes. Christ, Fielding could be a cold bastard.
66
Even Marcus Fielding, working late, was surprised by the swiftness of Moscow Centre’s response. GCHQ’s substation at Bude in Cornwall had intercepted a call from Primakov to Vasilli Grushko, the London Rezident, within half an hour of Lakshmi Meena’s departure from a remote airfield outside Madurai. Fielding played the recording again. Primakov spoke first, then Grushko.
‘He has been humiliated, which is always a good moment to strike.’
‘And by his own side. Fielding is more heartless than I gave him credit for.’
‘I can only assume that he wanted to win favour with Langley. By giving them Salim Dhar’s mother, MI6 has gone some way to restoring a relationship they cannot live without for ever.’
‘Where is Marchant now?’
‘I dropped him off at a village. There was a wedding. He wanted some time on his own.’
‘And has he agreed to help us?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then there is no time to waste. He must meet Dhar.’
Fielding sat back, poured himself a glass of Lebanese wine and turned on a Bach cantata. It was a rare moment of triumph. Oleg, asleep in the corner, looked up briefly, sensing the change in mood. There was no longer any talk of dangles, no equivocation in Grushko’s voice. Fielding’s only headache was Marchant. It hadn’t been an easy decision to call on Spiro’s services, let alone Lakshmi Meena’s, but it was the only way to provoke Marchant. He wouldn’t want to talk to his Chief, not for a while, which was why he had sent Prentice to pick him up from the airport, take him out for a meal in town, suck some venom from his wounded pride.
Fielding had told Prentice only the bare essentials of the operation to lift Dhar’s mother. He wouldn’t have expected to be given any detail. Need-to-know was a way of life for both of them. Prentice was unaware of Marchant’s ongoing attempt to be recruited by Primakov, given that it was linked to the Russian’s highly classified past. All he knew was that there had been a change of plan in Madurai, and that Marchant would be upset.
‘We had to screw him,’ Fielding had explained. ‘You know how it is.’
Marchant would be astute enough to work out what had happened, why Fielding had been forced to intervene, pull the strings, but he would still be angry. He could let off steam with Prentice, have a moan about means and ends and Machiavellian bosses.
After he had calmed down, Fielding would have one last talk with him. Then he would be on his own, free to go off the rails, not turn up for work, drink too much. Marchant had form when it came to falling apart. In the months before he had left for Marrakech he had been a mess. And the Russians would lap it up, reassured that he was ready to be turned. Only then would it be time for him to meet Dhar. He owed it to Marchant to prepare him properly, let him genuinely feel what it was like to hate the West. Dhar would detect a false note at a thousand yards.
It was as he poured himself a second glass of wine that another encrypted audio file from GCHQ dropped into his inbox.
67
Marchant had asked Primakov to drop him off in the centre of Kanadukathan, about ten minutes from the airfield. It was a small village, and Marchant would have described it as poor if it hadn’t been for the vast deserted mansions that dominated the dusty lanes. Meena had talked about them in Madurai. They were the ancestral homes of the Chettiars, a once-wealthy community of money-lenders, merchants and jewellery dealers who had fallen on hard times since the end of the Raj. Used now for storing dowry gifts, the mansions only came alive for family weddings, when the Chettiar diaspora would descend from around the world and fill the pillared courtyards with music and laughter.
Marchant strolled around the village square. The ground was covered in a confetti of paper and cardboard, the remains of exploded firecrackers. He could hear a wedding party in the distance, and wondered if one of Meena’s cousins really was getting married. He had seen the celebrations from a distance on the way out to the airfield. It didn’t matter either way, but he wanted to know. The world of lies and legends had lost its appeal after the scene with Spiro, and he needed to be reassured by something tangible, real.
He thought again about what had happened with Dhar’s mother. It was clearer now, painfully clear. Fielding hadn’t trusted him to betray, didn’t think he had it in him to persuade the Russians of his treachery. So he had given Marchant a helping hand, asked Spiro to humiliate him in front of Primakov. The American wouldn’t have needed much persuading.
‘Are you angry enough to meet your brother?’ Primakov had asked as he stepped out of the car. Did the Russian suspect what game Fielding was playing? That Marchant’s rage had been conceived five thousand miles away in Legoland?
‘I’d like to see him, yes,’ Marchant had said.
‘And he’d like to see you. But first I want you to do something for me. For Russia. Then we will get you out of Britain.’
Marchant walked around the corner towards the mansion where the wedding was taking place. A crowd had spilled out onto the road beneath loops of bunting that had been strung between tangled telegraph poles. Two women were walking towards him, arm in arm, their bright carmine saris illuminating the dusk. The one on the left reminded him of Meena, the same lambent eyes, the subtle sashay of hips. A stray pie dog lingered in the shadows.
‘Can you help me?’ Marchant asked her, ignoring the field agent’s normal caveats. He was drawing attention to himself in a place where he was already a curiosity.
‘We’ll try,’ she said, masking a giggle with her hand.
‘I had a friend who was meant to be here today.’ He nodded at the house behind them. ‘Over from the States. Lakshmi Meena. You don’t happen to know her, do you?’
‘Sure. She’s my friend’s cousin. It’s such a shame. Lakshmi was meant to be here, but she got held up in Madurai.’
‘Thank you,’ Marchant said. He felt stronger already, as if the world had been veering off its axis and was now spinning true again. He realised, as he walked on, how much he wanted to believe in Meena, believe that she wasn’t another Leila. He was no longer sure he could face a life of trusting no one. Meena was beautiful, there was no point denying it, but it was his sympathy rather than his love that she kept asking of him. She had claimed that she had tried to stop Aziz in Morocco, then admitted that she could have done more. The appearance of Spiro at the airfield appeared to have pained her, but she had still boarded the flight.
He stopped, and turned back to the square, where he had seen a taxi waiting, and thought about Primakov’s request. He was certain it was a test. If he was caught, the consequences would be serious. Should he run it past Fielding? Or was he now expected to play the traitor’s game alone?
68
Monika had always thought she would be able to do it herself, that she owed it to her brother, but she couldn’t. She hoped he would understand. She had the money in cash, £20,000 withdrawn from an emergency
AW fund in London that was meant to be used for bribing disillusioned SVR agents.
As she stood outside a snooker hall in Haringey, north London, waiting for her contact to arrive, she wondered if she had any energy left to hide her tracks, to invent a cover story for the money. To begin with, she had resigned herself to being caught. She had imagined standing over him, waiting calmly for the police to arrive, but she couldn’t do that either. Her survival instincts, honed in the field, were too strong. So she had contracted out her revenge instead.
She was spoilt for choice in London, but had settled on a Turkish gang with a proven record and an obsession with forensics. They had never been caught, and they asked for more when she told them the West End venue.
‘It’s very public.’
‘Good. I want everyone to know.’
General Borowski would certainly know, but at least this way there was a chance of protecting herself afterwards, providing the political will was there. She was in his hands now.
69
Dhar listened in silence as Primakov told him about his mother’s rendition. He knew that anger was a weakness, but it took all of his strength to remain calm and listen. The only outward sign of distress was a twitch in his lower left eyelid.
‘This Spiro is the bane of many brothers’ lives,’ Dhar said. He was sitting upright, his hands flat on the table in front of him, on either side of a glass of water. They were talking in the hangar at Kotlas. Outside, it was raining again, rattling the metal roof.
‘He was the one who waterboarded Daniel Marchant.’
Dhar tried not to think where the Americans would take his mother, how she would cope.
Reaching for the glass of water, he watched Primakov walk over to the window and look outside. Sergei was right. There was something about the Russian — other than the mix of cologne and garlic — that made Dhar wary. But he had no option but to work with him. He had come straight from seeing Marchant in India.
