Dirty Little Secret

by Jon Stock

  ‘Monika was acting alone,’ Borowski continued. ‘She was very close to her brother. It clouded her judgement.’

  ‘I just want to assure myself that it really was Prentice,’ Fielding said. ‘He was a good friend. That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Officially?’ Borowski asked, trying to be delicate. It didn’t suit him. He was a big walrus of a man, who reminded Fielding of Lech Wal̦sa, the former Polish president.

  ‘I don’t know how much you’ve heard, but officially I’m on sick leave. My deputy, Ian Denton, is currently acting Chief.’

  ‘And he’s just issued a warrant for your arrest,’ Borowski said, indicating a sheet of paper on his desk. ‘Which I’m ignoring, of course.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Denton was more of a bastard than he thought. Now he must prove that he was a traitor too. ‘I need to talk to Monika.’

  ‘She’s not well.’

  Fielding had allowed Monika to return to Poland, despite the ongoing police investigation into Prentice’s death. He was aware that she had hired a Turkish gang in north London to kill Prentice, but she had covered her tracks well. Nobody would ever be allowed to link Prentice’s death with a Polish intelligence officer, something for which Borowski was particularly grateful.

  ‘Can we go over the evidence one more time?’ Fielding asked. ‘What made Monika so sure it was Prentice?’

  ‘Me, unfortunately. I had no idea she would react in the regrettable way she did. Her instructions were to prepare a case. I would then have brought the evidence to you.’

  ‘So what convinced you?’

  Borowski lit a cigarette, tilted his head back and exhaled, the smoke rising to the low ceiling, where it spread out as if in search of something – the truth perhaps.

  ‘Nine months ago, we lost an asset in Moscow. He was an illegal, had been living there for ten years. One of our best. He was shot – the police blamed local gangs and an argument over money. Then we lost two more in quick succession. Both were illegals and part of the same ring. In Russia, we have always operated better without embassy cover. One was in Moscow, the other in Sochi.

  ‘The coincidence was too much. We must have had a mole in AW. When we lost the last two in the ring, we feared for our entire illegals programme. We worked all our Russian assets, pumping them for anything they had. One of them, a junior officer with the FSB, came back with a name. He said the FSB was being fed the identities of our illegals in Russia by an MI6 agent based at the British Embassy here in Warsaw.’

  ‘Hugo Prentice.’

  ‘Correct. I passed this on to Monika, to help her build the case. Bravely, she’d begun sleeping with Prentice, hoping to find out more. When they were in London together I sent her a message, telling her that a second FSB asset had come forward with Prentice’s name. I wanted her to know she was on the right track. Her cover was not an easy one for a young woman, pretending to love a man who might be responsible for her brother’s death.’

  ‘But how would Prentice have known the identities of your illegals?’

  ‘He had been stationed here for two years. MI6 and AW pool a lot of intel, as you know.’

  ‘But not the names of each other’s illegals.’

  ‘No. Not officially. Hugo was – how do you say – unorthodox, old school. Played by Moscow rules.’ Brigadier Borowski smiled, as if remembering better days. ‘I would not have put it past him to find these things out. Unfortunately, Monika took the second FSB confirmation the wrong way and, well, you know the rest.’

  Prentice had been shot dead in cold blood outside a restaurant near Piccadilly. Fielding thought back to the funeral, at Coombe in West Berkshire. A pitiless sun had shone down on black suits in idyllic countryside. It had been a difficult day.

  ‘If I told you I didn’t think Prentice was a Russian asset, would you be surprised?’ Fielding asked.

  ‘I would have been, until a few days ago.’

  Fielding sat up, ignoring the smoke, which had started to circulate down towards him.

  ‘What changed your mind?’

  ‘The FSB agent who first gave us Prentice’s name? It appears he’s a plant. A podstava. We had our doubts about him. Now we know for sure that the information he gives us is being controlled by Moscow Centre.’

  ‘So the Russians wanted to frame Prentice?’

  ‘It would seem so. Please don’t ask me why.’

  Fielding already knew why. To protect the identity of Ian Denton, the real Russian mole in MI6.

  54

  Marchant had been to Jean-Baptiste’s family château a few times, but he had forgotten how grand it was. Jean-Baptiste’s mother, Florianne, had bought it twenty years earlier as a summer retreat. She spent most of the year in Versailles, but liked to have a place for her children and grandchildren to gather in the holidays. It had been a wreck when she took it on, but over the years she had gradually restored the main house and the rambling outbuildings that formed a loose courtyard.

  Florianne had greeted Jean-Baptiste and Marchant when they had arrived a few minutes earlier. He couldn’t remember ever seeing a more attractive seventy-year-old. Although she had a cigarette hanging loosely from her mouth, she hadn’t aged the way most smokers do. Her skin was fresh, her face open, reflecting the youth that she liked to surround herself with. She wore white linen trousers and spoke English with a French accent so sexy that Marchant had to stop himself from laughing.

  He could hear her now, talking outside with Jean-Baptiste about Lakshmi, while he took in the building in which they were to stay. It had only been half converted, and the main room was still clearly a barn. Old wooden troughs from which cattle had once fed ran along one wall, and a huge oak beam supported the roof. Beyond that was a bedroom, where Lakshmi was sleeping, a small bathroom and a tatty sitting room with old leather sofas and a Mac desktop computer. Marchant guessed it was normally used as a playroom. There were four grandchildren in residence, playing down at the swimming pool, but Jean-Baptiste had explained that their parents (his sister and brother-in-law) were in Paris.

  ‘She’s still sleeping,’ Marchant said as he came out to join Jean-Baptiste and Florianne.

  ‘Clémence is on her way back from the shops now,’ Jean-Baptiste said. ‘She won’t be long.’

  ‘Do you want a swim while we wait?’ Florianne offered, a barking Pomeranian at her feet. After their initial exchange in English, she had reverted to French. ‘The boys are down there.’ Her eyes were kind, but hinted at sadness too.

  ‘I’ll stay with Lakshmi,’ Marchant said.

  ‘I can sit with her, it’s not a problem.’

  ‘It’s OK. Thank you.’

  There was a pause in the conversation as Florianne took a drag on her cigarette. Marchant glanced around at the surrounding countryside. Apart from the farm opposite, there were no other houses in the immediate area, just flat fields dotted with white Normandy cattle.

  ‘Here she is now,’ Jean-Baptiste said as a car appeared at the far end of the track. The Pomeranian began to bark.

  Ten minutes later, Marchant was sitting with Clémence beside the bed in the barn, talking to Lakshmi. She was in a bad way, drifting in and out of sleep.

  ‘Was she on any medication for her injury?’ Clémence asked, taking Lakshmi’s pulse on her good wrist. Clémence was as Marchant remembered: fragile and intense, beautiful with her short hair, tired around the eyes. She didn’t joke like Jean-Baptiste, and often Marchant felt guilty in her company for not taking life seriously enough. At times it seemed she was carrying all the world’s troubles – poverty, famine, disease – on her slim shoulders.

  ‘I think so. Painkillers.’

  ‘The heart rate is high and her pupils are presenting symptoms of withdrawal. I would not expect this with ordinary pain relief. Does she have any history of drug abuse?’

  ‘Lakshmi?’ he asked, as a wave of adrenaline surged through him. It was one of those moments when he realised how little he knew about her. He suddenly felt vulnerable, e
xposed. What else didn’t he know? Marchant had come across one or two agents in MI6 and the CIA with drug habits, but Lakshmi was too conscientious, too industrious.

  ‘What is the English expression, Dan?’ Clémence asked.

  ‘Cold turkey?’

  ‘This is her condition. She is having chills, muscle cramps, shivers. You need to run a hot bath for her, and then talk. Through the night if necessary. I don’t want to prescribe anything until I know more.’

  ‘She got cold, she had to swim out to the boat when we left England,’ Marchant said. ‘Maybe she has hypothermia?’

  But he knew it wasn’t that. Her sweating legs at the Fort, the sudden mood swings, her euphoria on the phone; all along, he had told himself it was something else – her injured wrist, the cold sea – but he knew now it wasn’t. He had kept secrets from her – the name of the traitor in MI6, the reason he hadn’t killed Dhar – and she had withheld one from him.

  55

  Spiro always liked the final approach to Bagram air base. The Hindu Kush made for a spectacular backdrop that quickened the pulse, although he knew its rugged grandeur hid an ugly truth. Afghanistan had little to commend it as a country. Just ask the Soviets, who had built the original air base here after they had invaded the country in 1979. But he had always felt more on-message here than in Iraq when it came to fighting the war on terror.

  Salim Dhar had been taken to Tor Jail, an interrogation facility on the air base that was set apart from the newly built main prison. If it hadn’t been for the Red Cross, Tor would have remained as anonymous as the CIA’s various black sites around the world, but its existence was now widely known. In Pashto, Tor translated as ‘black’, and ‘the black jail’ was run by the Joint Special Operations Command. (It was not to be confused with ‘the dark prison’, or ‘Salt Pit’, a former brick factory outside Kabul where detainees had once been held before being transferred to Guantánamo.)

  Spiro knew the JSOC people well, and everyone had agreed that Tor was the best place to send Dhar, at least for the time being. The number of inmates at Bagram, known by its liberal detractors as Guantánamo’s evil twin, had tripled since the new president’s arrival to around two thousand. Guantánamo hadn’t taken any new prisoners since 2008, and the President had issued an executive order to close it within a year of his coming to office. Just like he had ordered the closure of the CIA’s black sites and an end to the Agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques.

  Almost two years on, what had changed? Diddly squat. Guantánamo remained open, ditto some of the Agency’s more clandestine sites, and a revised Army Field Manual had become the new gold standard for interrogation. The manual was meant to draw a line under waterboarding, but Spiro could still do almost what he liked with Dhar, thanks to its ten-page ‘Appendix M’. Much of it was based on the same blueprint drawn up by SERE instructors at Guantánamo in 2002 – that lawless period after 9/11 when he and others in the CIA had been given a blank cheque from the bank of pain, as his old boss used to say.

  Spiro glanced out of the window across the Shomali plain as his Gulfstream V taxi-ed off the long, 11,000-foot runway. Running south through the valley was the Panjshir river, taking its snowmelt towards Kabul forty miles away. It was here that the Taleban had fought with Ahmad Massoud’s Northern Alliance. Before that, it had been a battleground between the Afghan mujahideen and the Soviets. Abandoned tanks still littered the hillsides, and there were skull-and-crossbones signs everywhere warning of landmines. How long would it be before Bagram was abandoned? Ten years? Twenty?

  He flicked through a well-thumbed copy of the manual. To keep the bleeding hearts in Washington happy, a military psychologist and a lawyer were meant to be present when he interrogated Dhar. He would see about that. Walling, face-slapping and stress positions were all still allowed under the new manual, provided they caused ‘shock’ rather than ‘pain’. It was an interesting distinction. The same was true of a technique called ‘separation’. Described in detail in Appendix M, it belied its innocuous-sounding name and could only be used on unlawful enemy combatants – those who weren’t protected by the Geneva Convention, in other words.

  Solitary confinement, sensory deprivation and overload, the induction of fear and hopelessness, sleep deprivation, temperature manipulation and an approach called ‘pride-and-ego down’ – these were all part of separation. If everyone was born with a gift, this last one was Spiro’s. Taken to its limits, pride-and-ego down involved the ritual humiliation of a prisoner, beginning with calling their mothers and sisters whores and ending up forcing them to perform dog tricks on a leash while wearing female lingerie. Why was he so good at it? Spiro didn’t want to go there, he just knew how to make others feel suicidal.

  Dhar was in separation now. He had been ever since he had arrived from the UK twenty-four hours earlier, confined in a small cell. Ideally he would be kept there until he died of old age, but Spiro was too curious. He had wanted to meet Dhar ever since he had nearly ruined his day in Delhi fifteen months earlier, when he had got too close to assassinating the US President. That’s not to say he would have minded if Dhar had been killed when he had been captured, but the Brits had been too careful with their triggers.

  Just as Spiro was walking down the steps from his plane, taking in the heat of the Afghan afternoon, his phone rang. An unknown number. For a moment he thought it might be his wife. She still hadn’t made contact, and he had been unable to get in touch with any of her friends. A part of him feared where she might have gone, but he didn’t want to dwell on it.

  ‘Who’s this?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s Lakshmi.’

  56

  Lakshmi had waited until Daniel and Clémence had left the room before she sat up. Her lower legs were clammy with sweat, and her stomach was cramping. She knew what was going on. She had been here before. It would get worse for a few more days before the pain would slowly recede.

  She thought she was about to throw up as she sat on the edge of the bed, listening. Outside she could hear Jean-Baptiste, Clémence and Daniel chatting together on the gravel. It was a risk making a call now, but she wouldn’t have a better opportunity. She needed to tell Spiro where she was. Sea water had killed her own phone, but Clémence’s was in front of her now, left behind on the wicker chair. She had forgotten it, and would be back as soon as she realised.

  It was a sturdy old Nokia handset, and Lakshmi hoped it could make overseas calls. As she had drifted in and out of sleep, she had heard enough to establish that Clémence often worked abroad as a doctor. Holding the phone in her shaking hand, she dialled Spiro’s mobile, an American number that she knew by heart, and looked up at the high window. She could still hear talking, but only Daniel and Jean-Baptiste’s voices. Where was Clémence? Had she remembered her phone?

  The number didn’t connect, so she tried again, worried that Clémence would return at any moment. She rose to her feet, steadying herself as she climbed onto the chair, and looked out of the window, taking care not to be seen. She felt dizzy, and thought she would fall. Jean-Baptiste and Daniel were standing ten feet away, their backs to her, talking in low voices. In the distance she could see Clémence walking across a lawn to a swimming pool. Unable to get a connection, she climbed off the chair, stood to one side of the window and tried to hear what Daniel was saying.

  ‘Fifty years on, the Americans still think MI6 is a Moscow outpost,’ she heard him protest. Then the wind changed direction, or he lowered his voice, because she missed the next few words, only hearing the end. ‘… Stephen Marchant, then they thought it was Marcus Fielding. And they’ve always had their doubts about me.’

  ‘Who hasn’t?’ Jean-Baptiste said, laughing.

  ‘The problem is, the Americans are right. There is a Russian asset in MI6, but it’s not me, it wasn’t my father and it’s not Marcus Fielding.’

  ‘Do you know who it is?’

  Daniel seemed to hesitate, or perhaps she just couldn’t hear him any more. A part of
her was jealous of Jean-Baptiste. Daniel had never quite been able to confide in her who the traitor was, as they had stood on the moonlit shore in front of Fort Monckton. ‘… Denton,’ Daniel was saying quietly. ‘He’s ousted Fielding, and the Americans are backing him. He gave them Dhar on a plate.’

  Lakshmi felt a wave of disappointment. Daniel had got the wrong man. It couldn’t possibly be Denton. He was Spiro’s appointment, a little creepy, but his trusty lieutenant. She tried to keep listening, but the voices came and went on the wind.

  ‘You were right, they took Dhar to Bagram,’ she heard Jean-Baptiste say. What he said next made her think she was relapsing. ‘He won’t be much use to you there.’ What did he mean by that? ‘Not unless you want to learn first-hand about America’s enhanced interrogation techniques. But I guess MI6 knows about them already.’

  ‘Very funny. As if the DGSE has never tortured anyone.’

  ‘I didn’t say that. Sometimes we do crazy things, but I’m not sure we’d ever try to turn the world’s most-wanted terrorist.’

  Lakshmi couldn’t be sure she had heard Jean-Baptiste correctly. She didn’t trust her own mental state, and the wind was distorting his words, but there was something about what he had said that made sense. Daniel hadn’t held back from killing Dhar in Russia because they were half-brothers. It was because he was trying to recruit him.

  She dialled the number again, her fingers fumbling. This time the line connected.

  ‘Where are you?’ Spiro asked.

  ‘In France.’

  ‘With Marchant?’

  She paused, trying to order her thoughts.

  ‘You sound compromised,’ Spiro continued.

  ‘I haven’t got long.’ The talking outside had stopped.

  ‘What’s he up to?’

  ‘He thinks Ian Denton is a Russian asset.’

  ‘Denton?’ She could hear the derision in his voice. ‘Has he been drinking? Talking to Fielding?’