Dirty Little Secret

by Jon Stock

‘I’ve got some news,’ he said. It was hard to tell if Myers was excited or terrified. ‘He’s out.’

  ‘Dhar?’

  ‘Escaped an hour ago. We’re in meltdown here. Americans suddenly wanting to share all our Farsi intel again.’

  ‘Was it the Iranians?’

  ‘We don’t know, but I’m fucked if it was, Dan. Well and truly screwed. I shouldn’t have sat on that intercept.’

  Marchant hadn’t heard Myers like this before. He had to calm him down, reassure him. At the back of his mind, though, he knew it had been asking too much of his friend to withhold the Revolutionary Guard intel for twenty-four hours.

  ‘Where are you calling from?’

  ‘My flat.’

  ‘I’m almost certain it’s the Iranians who sprung him.’

  ‘Jesus, Dan. What are you getting into? There’s an alert out for you, too. And for Fielding.’

  ‘You have to pool what you heard. Otherwise it will look as if you’re covering something up. Can you alter the timings? Make it look like a mistake?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was in real time, not data mining. It doesn’t look good for me, Dan. In fact, it looks shit.’

  ‘I realise that.’ Marchant paused. ‘I know it’s hard, but it’s important, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked. It will be worth it, trust me.’

  ‘Not if I’m bloody arrested, it won’t. There was an internal warning last week about Iranian sympathisers.’

  ‘You’re not going to get arrested, Paul. I promise.’

  But he wasn’t so sure.

  75

  Spiro’s ears were still ringing when he took the call from the Director of the CIA. Technically, Salim Dhar was Joint Special Operations Command’s prisoner at the time he had escaped, but Spiro was overseeing his interrogation, and Washington had decided that the Agency would take the drop.

  He didn’t hear much of what the DCIA said as he stepped into a corridor outside the medical bay. He couldn’t hear much of what anyone said. But he understood the general message. His career was over if Dhar wasn’t recaptured within twenty-four hours. So far there had been a successful news blackout of his escape. The attack on the Craig Joint Theater Hospital was being widely reported in the US media, but no mention had been made of Dhar. It wouldn’t be long, Spiro thought, before news seeped out and the CIA was the laughing stock of the world.

  He had refused to be medevacced out of Bagram. The worst traumas were already on their way to Germany, but he had chosen to be patched up at the internment medical bay. It was overstretched but doing what it could in the aftermath of the mortar attack. As Spiro walked back in to have his hands bandaged, he looked around for the doctor who had made the initial assessment of Dhar. There was no sign of him.

  He had rung in a panic, telling Spiro that a high-value detainee was about to die unless he received expert medical attention at the hospital. ‘I’ve never seen anaphylaxis like it,’ he had said. ‘I’ve injected him with adrenaline, but no response. The guy’s body will blow unless he gets proper treatment.’

  The temptation to let Dhar swell until he exploded had been considerable, but Washington was adamant that he should be kept alive to stand trial, once he had told the Agency everything he knew. So Spiro had authorised the fateful transfer. He had been knocked unconscious by the blast that had ripped the roof off the hospital, but as he explained to the young medic who was dressing his hands, he had seen a lot worse in Iraq.

  ‘That’s the first war, when things were done properly,’ he said. And probably before you were born, he wanted to add, but resisted. He felt old enough already. Apart from his hearing, which would return eventually, he had minor cuts to his face and hands, and a shrapnel wound across his right calf. He knew he had been lucky to survive, but he also knew you made your own luck in war.

  It was now more than an hour since Dhar had escaped. Spiro had feared the worst from the moment he had regained consciousness. The timing of the mortar attack on the hospital was too much of a coincidence. At first, it had looked as if Dhar had missed his chance to cut and run, and was still lying on a bed in the trauma bay. It was only as the dust settled that Spiro suspected he had been switched with another patient.

  Suspicion turned to sickening reality when it emerged that an ANA had been admitted with anaphylaxis at the same time. Spiro had called through to the air base commander and asked for as many helicopters to get airborne as possible. By all accounts, the ANA vehicle was heading for Kabul, but he wanted checks on all roads out of Bagram.

  He also wanted to know what his wife was doing. As he left the medical bay, his hands bandaged like ski gloves, he checked to see if she had rung. There were no missed calls, but the phone was ringing in his clumsy hands. He hadn’t heard it, couldn’t hear it now. Alarmed, he lifted the handset to his ear and detected a distant ringing tone. The damage to his ears was worse than he thought. He accepted the international call and explained that whoever it was would have to speak up. It was Lakshmi Meena.

  76

  ‘She took your mother’s car,’ Marchant said on the phone as he drove fast in the Mehari towards Barneville-Carteret. ‘And I’m in yours.’

  ‘Look after it,’ Jean-Baptiste replied. He was at Heathrow, shortly to board his flight to Paris. ‘There’s a GPS tracker on the Golf. I installed it last year, borrowed from the office. Give me a second – I can see where she is with an app on my phone.’

  Marchant waited while Jean-Baptiste found the car’s location. There was no guarantee that Lakshmi was still with it, but it was a start. He had tried to ring Jean-Baptiste as soon as he had untied his wife and mother, but had been unable to get through.

  ‘She’s driving my mother’s precious car on heavy medication?’ Jean-Baptiste asked. ‘That’s not good.’

  ‘Jean-Baptiste, I don’t think she’s sedated. Clémence wasn’t giving her the proper dose.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She’s a doctor. We should never have asked her. She believed Lakshmi was recovering well. She couldn’t bring herself to make her ill again.’

  There was a pause. Marchant imagined Jean-Baptiste was trying to process the implications.

  ‘Did anyone see her take the car?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I was at the computer. And Clémence –’ He broke off.

  ‘What? There’s something wrong.’

  ‘They’re both fine.’

  ‘Tell me what happened.’ Jean-Baptiste was angry now.

  ‘I’m sorry. She tied them up.’

  ‘What’s going on, Dan?’

  ‘I said they’re fine.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like it.’

  ‘Fine and angry. Clémence tried to ring you on the landline, but couldn’t get through. I tried too.’

  ‘I’m keeping my phone turned off as much as I can.’

  ‘Is it safe for you to talk now?’

  ‘We’re taxi-ing down the runway.’

  ‘I’m sorry about Clémence and Florianne, really I am. If it’s any consolation, Lakshmi took care not to hurt them.’

  ‘Find the bitch. Clémence spent three days of her life looking after her – she won’t be happy. That’s why I try to keep our worlds separate, Dan, to stop things like this happening.’

  ‘I know.’

  Jean-Baptiste paused before speaking again. ‘I’ve uploaded some photos to the email you gave me. They show Denton and his friend in the supermarket. I don’t know who he is, but I’m sure he’s Russian.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Jean-Baptiste hadn’t actually sent the photos. It was too risky. To avoid detection, he had put them in the draft folder of an anonymous Hotmail account. ‘It’s my fault about Lakshmi. I should never have brought her here.’

  ‘Just find her for me. She went north at first, but now she seems to be heading towards Caen on the N13.’

  ‘Can you tell if she’s stopped anywhere since leaving the château?’

  ‘No stops. If you head straight for Carentan, you should catch up with he
r on the N13. But be careful, eh? With the Mehari. It’s only plastic. And try not to damage my mother’s Golf.’

  77

  ‘I wanted you to be the first to see them,’ Brigadier Borowski said, walking around the small kitchen. They were in an AW safe house in Marki, a suburb in the north-east of Warsaw. Fielding was at the table, sifting through a sheaf of black-and-white photos, a half-empty bottle of whisky next to him. He was unshaven and still wearing the American clothes of his cover. Sleep had eluded him since he had been in Poland. His back was playing up, too. It always did at times of stress.

  ‘How did you get these?’ he asked.

  ‘We go back a long way, Marcus, and at the moment I feel very indebted to you, but please don’t ask me for the name of our best asset in Moscow.’

  Fielding looked up at the Brigadier’s broad smile. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I felt I hadn’t helped you enough with your questions about Hugo Prentice. To lose a close friend is never easy, but to know his death was a mistake is even harder. After we met, I called a meeting and we decided to utilise our asset at the heart of Moscow Centre. It’s not something we do very often. Every Western intelligence service should have one, but we’re among the few who actually do. As a rule we use him at times of national crisis only, to reduce the risks. But our mistake about Prentice makes this, in my opinion, an emergency.’

  ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘I have put the images on a memory stick for you. Please use them carefully. It’s important Denton has no means of contacting his handler once you confront him with the photos. Otherwise our asset could be blown.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Fielding ran through the likely order of events, how best to present the evidence in his hands. It might not be him who did the confronting. He was still shocked by the images before him. The sight of Denton naked was one thing, but it was the overpowering atmosphere of incarceration – the cell-like surroundings, the shackles – that most unsettled Fielding.

  Ian Denton had been a colleague for twenty years, his deputy for the last year. Fielding knew he had separated from his wife, but he had never suspected him of anything like this. But then, what did anyone know of anyone else when the curtains closed? The Russians knew. They must have made it their priority to find out. Once they had photographed Denton in such compromising circumstances, the blackmail would have been easy. There may have been no wife to embarrass, but Denton would have agreed to anything to prevent the photos surfacing. They would have destroyed his career. Now Fielding had to make sure they did.

  ‘I never thought the British were like this,’ the Brigadier said, looking over Fielding’s shoulder at one particularly shocking photo. Denton was holding a razor blade close to his bloodied and swollen penis. Fielding detected the faintest trace of smugness in his voice. He couldn’t blame him. ‘I thought this was what you did to the other side.’

  ‘That was the Americans,’ Fielding said. ‘In places like Szymany, a black site in your country, I seem to remember.’

  Szymany was where the Americans had taken Daniel Marchant. After flying him out on a rendition flight from Fairford, they had waterboarded him at Stare Kiejkuty, a former outpost of the SS’s intelligence wing during the Second World War. It was Prentice who had rescued him.

  ‘We all have our price.’

  As Fielding made to leave, Brigadier Borowski’s phone rang. He stood in the doorway, handset to his ear, and then said something in Polish that Fielding couldn’t catch. He wasn’t fluent, but he knew enough to get by.

  ‘Some surprising news from Afghanistan,’ Borowski said, clipping the phone shut as he turned to Fielding. ‘Salim Dhar has just escaped from Bagram.’

  78

  Marchant could see the Golf up ahead. They had just passed Bayeux. He had rung Jean-Baptiste for an update on her position, and tried to reassure him again that his wife and mother were out of danger, but he wasn’t happy. Marchant didn’t blame him. He liked to think he had taken some of the sting out of Clémence’s anger, but she would still give Jean-Baptiste hell when he returned. He imagined Florianne could be a handful too.

  He overtook the car in front of him, cursing the Mehari for its lack of suspension. There were now only two cars between him and Lakshmi. He had to move quickly, knowing she would recognise the Mehari as soon as she saw it in her rear-view mirror. He waited for another straight stretch of road and then accelerated past the first and then the second car, dropping in tight behind the Golf. Lakshmi was clearly visible in the driver’s seat. Why hadn’t she stopped at the first opportunity and rung Spiro? Then he saw the reason. She was talking on a mobile phone. Either she had taken Florianne’s from her room, or it had been left in the car.

  Marchant tried to think through what Lakshmi might have discovered at the château. If she wasn’t sedated, she could have overheard everything. He had talked indiscreetly with Jean-Baptiste, as old friends, even field officers, sometimes did, but it had been on the assumption that Lakshmi was unconscious. Whatever it was she had heard, Spiro now knew. He drove alongside the Golf and waited for Lakshmi to look up, keeping an eye on the road ahead.

  She glanced across, and was startled to see Marchant. He had expected better of her, thought she would have seen him coming. Capitalising on her surprise, he turned the steering wheel sharply to the right, knocking the Golf sideways with a sickening crunch of plastic. The Mehari wasn’t heavy enough to bump her off the road, so he veered away before knocking into the Golf again. Meena had got the message. She took the next slip road off the N13, but she didn’t slow down and pull over.

  After joining a smaller road, she accelerated away, leaving Marchant no choice but to try again. He spotted a gap in the oncoming traffic and pulled out, bringing the Mehari level with her. The road had begun a sharp curve to the left. Marchant was now in the wrong lane on a blind corner. He turned into the Golf for a third time, just as he saw a lorry coming around the corner towards him, lights on, horn blaring.

  79

  Despite the incessant noise in his ears, more like a guttural roar now than ringing, Spiro had caught most of Lakshmi’s call from a car in France. Daniel Marchant had turned Salim Dhar. His initial reaction was to dismiss the idea out of hand. But as he left the detention centre at Bagram and headed towards the accommodation block, her faint words began to make more sense.

  Marchant’s presence in the cockpit of a Russian jet had always troubled Spiro. According to Fielding, Dhar had scaled back his attacks on Fairford and GCHQ thanks to Marchant’s powers of persuasion. Spiro hadn’t believed him at the time, but maybe Marchant really had struck an eleventh-hour damage-limitation deal. They had also been together at the house in the Cotswolds shortly before Dhar was captured. Had they been finalising terms?

  Spiro watched as a Chinook helicopter took off nearby. It was unnerving not to hear the distinctive thudding of its twin blades that he knew so well. The roar in his ears provided a more general soundtrack, the amplified din of war as blood coursed through his auditory arteries. The most compelling reason for believing Lakshmi hung over him like the black smoke still drifting across the air base. He tried to ignore it at first, not wanting to contemplate the implications, but by the time he reached his room, he knew it was true. If Marchant was running Dhar, he was no good to him in Bagram – just as Meena had heard the Frenchman say. Which meant that Marchant was in some way involved with the jailbreak.

  ‘Ian, it’s Jim Spiro,’ he said, talking too loudly into his mobile phone.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Denton asked. ‘I heard you got caught in the blast.’

  ‘Can we talk about Dhar?’

  ‘Our station head in Kabul just rang with the news.’

  ‘Lakshmi Meena’s called in from France. She overheard Marchant talking to some shady French guy, possibly DGSE. She thinks Marchant’s recruited Dhar as a British asset.’

  ‘Not with my authority.’

  ‘I kinda figured that. If it’s true, he was acting on his ow
n, or more likely on Fielding’s orders. Either way, you need to look into the possibility that someone other than Fielding and Marchant might have helped Dhar escape. Fielding’s in Russia, Marchant’s in France. They couldn’t have done this on their own.’

  ‘Someone in MI6?’

  ‘Or Five. Or GCHQ. The goddamn SAS, for all I know. We’re looking for anyone who was sympathetic to Marchant and Fielding.’

  ‘That’s quite an allegation.’

  ‘Is it? How about a former Chief of MI6 once passed US intel to Moscow. I’d call that quite an allegation.’

  ‘Britain’s no friend of Dhar.’

  ‘Neither was Russia, but they helped him. If you don’t start asking around, we will.’

  80

  Marchant braked hard and dropped in behind Lakshmi again as the lorry thundered past. He didn’t want to think how close he had been to being shunted back down the road by a ten-tonne juggernaut. He didn’t want to think of the damage that had already been done to the Mehari either, or to Florianne’s Golf. This time Lakshmi slowed down and pulled into a lay-by. Marchant followed her, reaching for the gun in the bag on the passenger seat. Once both cars were stationary, he slipped the gun down the back of his jeans and walked over to the Golf.

  Lakshmi sat impassively, waiting for him. It was as if they were strangers in an American movie, he the traffic cop, she waiting for her ticket. It was hard to think that only a few days earlier, they had shared a bed at the Fort. Life had seemed full of promise then.

  ‘You could have got us both killed,’ she said, staring ahead, hands still on the steering wheel.

  ‘You left in a hurry. I figured you might not want to stop.’

  ‘I didn’t see you in my mirror.’

  ‘Careless – for someone so good in the field.’

  ‘Don’t try to flatter me.’

  ‘Are you getting out?’

  ‘Is that a question?’