Dirty Little Secret

by Jon Stock

  He had run up against them once on a training exercise when he was an IONEC graduate. After being dropped in the centre of Portsmouth, he and the rest of his class had been told that they had one hour to get back to their rooms without using the base’s main entrance. Marchant had swum round from Gosport, only to be met on the beach by a guard who had given him a very physical welcome.

  Tensing at the memory, Marchant retreated into the shadows of the archway, out of sight of the two men and the gatehouse. Above him were the rooms where visiting top brass stayed. (Fielding had a room reserved solely for his use.) Marchant couldn’t hear what the guards were saying, but after several minutes one of them walked on, leaving the other outside the main door, which was at the northern end of the accommodation block. Behind him was an alleyway that led through to a flight of stone steps down to the beach. Which was where Marchant wanted to go.

  He felt for the kitchen knife under his jacket and then cut left, keeping one eye on the guard as he kept close to a wall that ran across to a hangar. It was in there that he had been trained in anti-kidnap techniques. British diplomats and royalty were occasionally sent down for training too, which had always been a laugh, as the IONEC students got to play the bad guys.

  After working his way around the hangar, Marchant came to the lab where he had learned how to forge passports and take covert film footage. From here it would be possible to approach the guard at the main door without being seen, providing he kept behind a parked van. He inched forward until the guard was barely five yards away.

  It was clear that he had been told to stay where he was, but every few minutes he went for a short walk, wandering away from Marchant down to an external staircase that led up to the first floor of the accommodation block. There was a chance that Marchant could run the five yards and slip down the steps to the beach during one of these walkabouts, but the risk was too great.

  He waited for the guard to set off again, but it was as if he had suddenly become more diligent. For ten minutes he remained rooted to his post outside the door. Marchant could hear his breathing, the sound of his shoes as he rocked gently back and forth, the slow rhythm of bored guards everywhere. He wondered if it was the same man who had met him on the beach. It had been an unnecessary show of force. Marchant had been exhausted, having failed to anticipate the strong tide, and he had got closer to his room than any other student. But as their instructor, a former sergeant in the SBS, had pointed out, they weren’t being trained to become nursery-school teachers.

  The guard was finally on the move, a slow meander down the side of the building towards the staircase. Marchant ran across the narrow gap between them, checking again for the knife in his jacket. In one movement, he pulled back the guard’s head by his hair and punched him hard in the throat. As the man doubled up, clutching at his neck, Marchant kneed him in the face and brought a hand down hard across the back of his head. Before his body collapsed to the ground, Marchant was already dragging him over to the doorway. He pulled him inside and propped him against the wall.

  ‘He doesn’t look well,’ a familiar voice said.

  Marchant glanced up to see Lakshmi standing at the top of the stairs. She looked terrible, sallow around the eyes. Had her wrist become infected?

  ‘He’ll live,’ Marchant said. Lakshmi had surprised him, and she knew it. ‘I’ve got to get out of here. Are you OK?’

  ‘You should have woken me. I could have helped,’ she said, nodding at the guard. Marchant didn’t doubt her, even with one wrist in plaster. He had only seen her engage in physical combat once, and it had been enough to convince him that the Farm, the CIA’s equivalent of the Fort, trained their people well.

  ‘I was going to. Fielding’s in trouble. He’s taking too much heat from the attack at Fairford. I need to see him, tell him about the traitor. It might be enough to save his job.’

  ‘Can’t you call him?’

  ‘Too risky.’

  ‘So what do you want me to do? Kiss you goodbye at the picket fence and go back to bed?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Marchant wanted to confide in her, explain why he really needed to get away from Fort Monckton. He could tell her about the phone call from Dhar, and take her with him. But he knew he had to go alone. She had already become too close to him for her career to survive. If she was found with Dhar, she would spend the rest of her life behind bars.

  ‘I want you to go the gatehouse, chat up the guard on duty, distract him from the security-camera screens.’

  ‘Flash my tits at him, you mean?’ She was angry, the sudden outburst out of character.

  ‘I’ve got to go.’ He glanced at the guard. ‘I’ll be back by morning. Just talk to him. All you have to do is talk. Please? And get that wrist looked at again.’

  Her wrist was not the problem, it was the rest of her body that was in pain. Lakshmi didn’t know why Marchant was in such a hurry to leave, but it clearly had nothing to do with Fielding. All she knew was that she wanted him to go, to leave her alone for what she needed to do. She tried to think about what she had seen earlier: Marchant with his back to her, holding the phone that had woken her from her troubled sleep with its insistent vibrating. And the words she had glimpsed on the screen: ‘Dad – Home’. Then she thought about her own father, the anxiety in his voice.

  ‘OK,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll go to the gatehouse.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And if anyone discovers that you’ve left?’

  ‘Tell them I’ve gone to see Fielding.’

  16

  Fielding worked fast after the PM had hung up. First he rang Marchant, but his phone went straight to voicemail. He didn’t leave a message. Then he called the duty officer at Legoland, giving a password that authorised an emergency lockdown. The main green gates of the pedestrian and vehicle entrances on Albert Embankment were always shut at night, but within moments a second set of barriers rolled into place behind them. At the same time, steel blinds closed on all the windows and the order went out that nobody was to leave – or enter – the building until further notice.

  The last time Legoland had shut down in anger was in 2000, when the IRA had damaged an eighth-floor window with a Russian-built RPG-22, launched from Spring Gardens across the railway track. Fielding tried not to dwell on the fact that this time the threat was from Britain’s closest ally.

  These latest developments were beginning to remind him of the 1960s, when relations between Britain and America had been at an all-time low. Fielding had been rereading the files, hoping to learn lessons from the past. Washington, still reeling from Kim Philby’s defection, had been appalled at the election in 1964 of Harold Wilson, whose Labour government was against the US’s Polaris nuclear-missile programme. President Johnson was equally suspicious of Britain’s intelligence establishment, believing that it was still riddled with Soviet spies. The President duly dispatched two spooks to London to review the effectiveness of MI5. Accompanied by the CIA’s London head of station, they were granted widespread access, including to MI6’s headquarters, without anyone on the British side knowing their real purpose.

  Their damning report concluded that the UK had insufficient counter-espionage resources, and that MI5 was leaderless under its Director General, Roger Hollis. If James Angleton, then head of counter-intelligence at the CIA, had got his way, MI5 would have been run by Americans and become an outpost of the CIA’s London station. Plus ça change …

  The most recent analysis to cross Fielding’s desk suggested that 40 per cent of the CIA’s efforts to prevent another atrocity in homeland America were now being directed at the UK. What was the ghastly phrase someone at the Agency had used to describe Britain? ‘An Islamic swamp,’ Fielding recalled, as he tried to ring Marchant again.

  17

  The captain of the thirty-two-foot yacht was relieved they had finally reached Portsmouth. He didn’t much care for Spinnaker Tower, but it was good to be drawing close to it at last, having seen its sai
l-like profile on the horizon for what seemed like an eternity. In a few minutes they would moor for the rest of the night in Gosport Marina. It had been a tiring crossing, taking longer than it should have done, and both he and his future son-in-law, brewing tea below, were exhausted. They should have arrived before sunset, but the wind had been against them, making them miss the tide coming around the Needles.

  But at least the trip had been a success. Jacana, an old Seadog ketch he had owned since the 1970s, was lower in the water than normal, thanks to the haul of wine that was stacked up in boxes below decks. His daughter’s wedding was in a few weeks, and she thought it would be fun to buy the wine in France. He had spent far too much in the cellars of Saint-Vaast, where the prices were inflated for British visitors, but they had enjoyed tasting the wines, and the trip had been ‘a chance to bond’, as his daughter had put it.

  It was as he adjusted his woolly bobble hat, the butt of many family jokes, that he heard the call. How far away the person was, he wasn’t sure, but he knew at once that someone was in the water, on the port side.

  ‘Hello?’ he called out, cupping his hands. ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Over here!’ the voice shouted. Then he saw a waving hand and a figure clutching to a yellow racing buoy, fifty yards away.

  ‘We see you!’ he called back, turning the wheel hard to port. ‘Coming across now!’ He leant in to the cabin. ‘Forget the bloody tea, and get yourself up here! There’s a man overboard!’

  Daniel Marchant watched the yacht as it adjusted course and headed towards him. He had spotted it from the shore fifteen minutes earlier, and timed the hundred-yard swim out to the buoy. He didn’t think he had been seen by the two security cameras mounted high up on steel poles either side of the beach. As he had slid off the rocks and into the sea, the cameras had stayed pointing to the left and right, scanning the public footpath that ran along the shoreline. He reassured himself that they were set to detect people trying to breach the Fort’s defences, not to escape from them. Lakshmi, too, must have kept her word. He was worried about her.

  Now, though, he had to concentrate on his escape. There had been no opportunity to create a cover story. Instead, he would have to improvise, judge the mood. The boat was bigger than he had thought, and he hoped there wouldn’t be too many people on board, too many questions.

  ‘What the hell happened to you?’ the captain asked, manoeuvring the yacht alongside the buoy. A younger man had already lowered a rope ladder over the gunwale and was holding out a boathook for Marchant to grasp.

  ‘Long story. Bet someone I could swim across to Portsmouth.’

  ‘Are you drunk?’

  ‘Not any more,’ he said, hauling himself up onto the rope ladder.

  ‘We can take you into Gosport Marina, but then you’re on your own.’

  ‘Suits me.’

  Five minutes later, Marchant was in the cockpit with a blanket wrapped around him, cradling a mug of steaming tea. He wasn’t as cold as he looked. There seemed to be only two people on board, a father and son perhaps. Their bags were packed, but the older man, who spoke with a faint Glaswegian accent, had explained that they were going to spend the night on board, as they were too tired to drive home. Marchant needed to establish only one thing: the whereabouts of their car keys.

  After finishing his tea, he climbed down into the cabin and placed the mug on the draining rack beside a tiny sink. He paused a moment, looking around at the cupboards, the foldaway table and a bank of electrical equipment on the other side of the cabin doorway. An old leather Morris Minor key fob was hanging next to the depth finder. His father used to sail a Westerly 22 out of Dittisham when Marchant was young. He too had kept the car key hanging up in the cabin, beside an ancient VHF radio. Marchant slipped the key off its hook, slid it into his jeans pocket and returned to the cockpit. Just his luck that they drove a car even older than their boat.

  ‘Thanks for the tea,’ he said. They were decent people, and he regretted having to steal their Morris Minor, but he needed to reach Dhar before dawn.

  18

  Ian Denton had taken the decision to represent MI6 on his own at the COBRA meeting. The committee was sitting through the night, but key players had dispersed for a few hours’ sleep, replaced by deputies. Now, though, heads and chiefs had all been recalled, with the exception of Marcus Fielding. Nobody objected to his absence.

  ‘Marcus has assured me that Dhar is not being held at Vauxhall Cross,’ the PM began, glancing at Denton. ‘I passed that information on to the President. Daniel Marchant is being held at Fort Monckton. I passed that on too, but I can’t say the President was reassured.’

  The mood was worse than Denton could ever remember at a COBRA meeting. ‘I’ve checked with security at the Fort,’ he said, hoping to inject some optimism. ‘They’ve got strict orders to keep Marchant on site. Extra security has been put on his door.’

  ‘Did you sense any shift in Washington?’ the Foreign Secretary asked.

  ‘None,’ the PM said. ‘We remain an irrelevance. And we must be prepared for the Americans to act unilaterally. The President’s words, not mine.’

  ‘Any progress on where Dhar was calling from?’ Harriet Armstrong, Director General of MI5, didn’t look up, but her question was intended for the Director of GCHQ.

  ‘An MI6 facility, that’s all we know,’ he said, shifting awkwardly in his seat. ‘Although we were obviously involved with setting up Six’s comms network, it’s a private-key encryption. Nobody else can access it. That’s how these things work. And I’d be lying if I said we were enjoying the full support of the NSA on this one.’

  ‘I may have something,’ Armstrong continued. ‘An incident in Gloucestershire was red-flagging on the grid as I arrived. A SAR helicopter made an emergency landing earlier tonight at Kemble in Gloucestershire. All three crew are missing. Local police are liaising with RAF Valley in Anglesey.’

  Denton looked up. He had taken a train to Kemble once, a few years ago. What had been the occasion? A private lunch, to mark Stephen Marchant’s appointment as Chief of MI6. Tables covered with white linen in the apple orchard, a jazz band, competitive croquet. He had never felt so out of place. The journey from Kemble station to the Chief’s house had taken less than five minutes.

  19

  Salim Dhar moved around the bedroom, looking for something that would link the place to his mother. The air was stale, the mood one of finality rather than grief. There were no sheets on the double bed, just a pile of folded blankets at one end and some pillows without their covers. The bookcases were empty, the cupboards bare.

  He limped over to the bedside table, where there was a small bronze statue of Nataraja: Shiva as lord of the dance. The figure was familiar to him, a distant memory from the days when he had been a Hindu, like his parents, who had called him Jaishanka Menon. He had converted to Islam partly to spite the man he thought was his father. The statue’s weight surprised him, and he wondered at its significance. It was the only trace of India in the room.

  He picked up a leaflet from the dressing table. It was the order of service for the funeral of Stephen Marchant, the man who had turned out to be his real father. There were Christian readings, but Hindu ones too, and a passage by Kahlil Gibran, an Arab described in a footnote as a Maronite Christian influenced by Islam and Sufism.

  Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.

  And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.

  And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

  As he put the service sheet down, something caught his eye. A photo had slipped to one side in a silver frame on the dusty windowsill. It showed a middle-aged Western woman, standing in front of Qtab Minar. She didn’t strike Dhar as a picture of happiness: a wry, confused face squinting into the Delhi sun. But it wasn’t this photo that interested him. There was another one behind it, a corner of which was visible.

  Dhar turned t
he frame over and removed the back. An image of his mother fell onto the table. She was wearing a turquoise sari and standing in front of the British High Commission, where she had once worked. Her smile was radiant, beaming out at him across the years and the continents. He smiled back at her and slid the photo into his pocket. She was here now, somewhere in Britain. Inshallah, one day they would be together again.

  20

  Lakshmi sat on the edge of the bed at the Fort, holding a sterilised syringe in one hand, her phone in the other. Marchant had only been gone ten minutes, but she couldn’t wait any longer. As requested, she had flirted with the guard in the gatehouse, distracting him without having to flash her breasts. By the time she had returned to the room, the guard at the bottom of the stairs had gone too, dragged into one of the empty rooms by Marchant. The alarm would be raised shortly, either when the guard regained consciousness or his absence was noticed, but by then she would be immune to the storm raging around her.

  She looked at the needle’s point, turning it in the light of the bedside lamp. Her damaged left wrist was sore in its cast, the most painful it had been since she had left hospital. But it wasn’t hurting enough for what she was about to do.

  Everything had been going so well before she was sent to Morocco to spy on Daniel Marchant. For two clean, healthy years she had worked for the Agency, signing up amid the optimism of a new presidency. Life as a field officer hadn’t always been what she had hoped. At times it had been hell. In her first year at Langley, Spiro had constantly reminded her that she was a woman in a man’s world. He had also tried to sleep with her, but she had dealt with that. The career change was working: her bad habits had been left behind at medical school.