Dirty Little Secret

by Jon Stock

Marchant didn’t answer. Reluctantly, Lakshmi stepped out of the Golf. She must have calculated that he was armed. It was windy, and she ran a hand through her hair as she looked across the open French countryside. In another life, Marchant would have shared the view with her, but he wasn’t in the mood for sightseeing.

  ‘Did Dhar give you the gun?’ she asked.

  So she had heard him talking to Jean-Baptiste about Dhar.

  ‘I need to know what you’ve told Spiro.’

  ‘Will you let me tell you why first?’

  ‘I’m guessing blackmail.’

  ‘You make it sound so matter-of-fact. It wasn’t something I agreed to lightly. Spiro threatened to destroy my father, his business, everything he’s worked for, unless I complied.’

  ‘When did he do that? At the Fort?’

  ‘After you decided not to tell me that Denton was a traitor.’

  So she knew about Denton too.

  ‘I thought we really had something,’ she continued. ‘I was ready to leave the Agency to give us a chance. But Spiro gave me no option. I owe everything to my parents.’

  ‘Including your smack habit? Or were you faking that, too?’

  ‘That was the real deal, Dan,’ she said, turning to face him. ‘It will be for the rest of my life.’

  Marchant paused, holding eye contact. For someone who had just come off hard drugs, she didn’t look so bad. Beautiful, in fact. The original heroin chic. ‘I really need to know what you’ve told Spiro,’ he repeated.

  ‘Spiro laughed when I told him you thought Denton was a Russian asset.’

  Marchant looked down at the ground. It was a delicate situation. He had to establish what she had told Spiro without telling her anything she didn’t already know.

  ‘What else did you tell him?’

  ‘Is there anything else?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Dan, I don’t know what game you’re playing, but Salim Dhar just got out of Bagram.’

  ‘That was careless too. Did Spiro tell you that?’

  ‘Two minutes ago.’

  ‘How was he?’

  ‘Deaf. He very nearly lost his life in a mortar attack.’

  ‘Now that would have been a shame.’

  Marchant had been trying to imagine what had happened in Bagram ever since Myers had told him the news. A mortar attack sounded like the Taleban, who had increasingly close links with Tehran.

  ‘For some reason, Dhar was being treated at the air base hospital. They should have let him die, don’t you think? Or did you have other plans for him?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Marchant lied. He had to hear her say it.

  ‘He might be your half-brother, Dan, but Dhar’s spent his entire adult life trying to destroy my country. He very nearly killed our President.’

  Marchant hadn’t heard her talk about America in such proprietary terms before.

  ‘And now his followers are trying to destroy my country,’ he replied. ‘Have you listened to the news recently? Britain is on its knees.’

  ‘So why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why are you running him, Dan?’

  She had finally said it, what he feared the most. ‘Is that what you think, what you told Spiro?’

  She didn’t answer. An articulated lorry drove past, followed by a line of cars. When they had gone, she turned again to Marchant, speaking quietly this time.

  ‘Just what sort of a deal have you cut with him?’

  Now it was Marchant’s turn to remain silent. He glanced down the road. A solitary vehicle was approaching.

  ‘I remember you once telling me there were other ways to win the war on terror,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t all about Guantánamo, enhanced interrogation techniques, drone attacks, Jim Spiro. He can’t kill them all, you used to say.’

  ‘I still believe that. But there are lines that can’t be crossed.’

  ‘And you think I’ve crossed one?’

  ‘I don’t know, Dan. It doesn’t seem to surprise you that Dhar’s at liberty again. Or even concern you. That really scares me. The thought that you might have helped in some way with his escape.’

  Had she told Spiro that, too? The solitary car was getting closer now. For the first time, Marchant began to worry. It was a black people-carrier.

  ‘What exactly did you tell him?’ he asked, a hint of urgency in his voice. Time appeared to be running out.

  ‘I overheard Jean-Baptiste say that Dhar wouldn’t be much use to you in Bagram. I didn’t want to believe it. I tried to convince myself that I’d misheard, but when Spiro said Dhar had just escaped, it made sense. I hope to God you know what you’re doing.’

  What happened next took place behind bulletproof Perspex, at least that was how Marchant saw it – as if he was watching events through a safety screen. The people-carrier was driving fast, but it slowed as it passed them, almost to walking pace. Marchant saw the gun at the rear passenger window before he had time to draw his own.

  ‘Get down!’ he shouted to Lakshmi, but his words came after the gun had fired. He knew it was aimed at him, but he felt nothing, protected by the Perspex. They both fell to the ground, Lakshmi more awkwardly, on a patch of muddy grass beside the Mehari. Even if they had managed to duck in time, the car’s fibreglass shell would have offered little protection against the bullets, one of which had hit Lakshmi in the stomach.

  She made no sound as she lay on the grass, bewildered, a hand on her bleeding abdomen. Marchant shouted – a mix of anger and guilt – and stood up, firing off three rounds at the people-carrier, which was now driving away at speed. The rear window exploded into myriad shards, but the car sped on.

  81

  Denton put the phone down and walked over to the window of his office, trying not to break into a sweat. What was Marchant doing with someone from DGSE? It was too much of a coincidence. Two days earlier, he had been alerted to a tail. Someone from the French intelligence agency had been following him around. MI5 had dismissed it as routine, a welcoming party for a new Chief of MI6, but now it began to look like something more.

  He told himself he was worrying unnecessarily and went back to his desk, thinking over what Spiro had said about Dhar’s escape. He had enough on his plate without the CIA making wild accusations about British complicity. The events in Bagram had already kicked off an ugly row in Whitehall.

  He thought again about Marchant, what he might be doing in France. If anyone could turn Salim Dhar, it was his half-brother. A rapport of some sort clearly existed between them. And then there was Fielding, who had never quite been straight with him about Dhar and Marchant, always holding something back. But nullifying a terrorist was one thing, turning him into an asset quite another.

  What advantage did he – or Fielding – think it could possibly bring MI6? Dhar had focused his jihad on America, but his followers weren’t averse to tearing Britain apart, as recent events had proved. And what about his escape? How could Marchant, on the run in France, possibly have helped?

  Early reports suggested that the Taleban had played a central role in the jailbreak, possibly with assistance from Iran. Denton knew the handful of MI6 officers who worked the back channels with the Taleban, and none of them had ever been close to Marchant. The Increment was another possibility, but it was highly unlikely that a rogue element had been drawn into helping with a jailbreak in Afghanistan.

  Then it came to him. At the COBRA meeting he had just left, the PM had rounded on the Director of GCHQ, asking why his analysts had not picked up any Taleban or Iranian chatter before the attack. Marchant had friends in Cheltenham, people like Paul Myers, the analyst who had revealed the truth about the drone attack on the six US Marines in North Waziristan. He worked the Farsi beat, and had been one of Leila’s many admirers. If anyone had heard the Iranians say something, it would have been him.

  Denton picked up the phone and rang Spiro back.

  ‘Can I borrow your interrogation facility at Fai
rford?’

  82

  Lakshmi was drifting in and out of consciousness in the passenger seat as Marchant drove fast towards Caen. He had left Jean-Baptiste’s damaged Mehari in the lay-by and taken Florianne’s Golf. There was no doubt in his mind that he had been the intended target of the shooting, or that Valentin’s finger had been on the trigger. The Russians must have followed him from the boat, and would have been on the lookout for a Mehari.

  ‘Try to stay awake, Lakshmi, keep talking to me,’ he said. He hoped the hospital in Caen would be easy to find.

  ‘Please don’t let them give me painkillers.’ Lakshmi was holding a dirty towel to her bleeding stomach. Marchant had found it in the boot, and feared it was for the dog. ‘I can’t go there again.’

  ‘I won’t.’ A relapse, or a rechute, as Clémence had called it, was the least of Marchant’s worries. Lakshmi was losing blood, and needed urgent treatment. He banged his hands on the steering wheel in frustration as the car in front of him stopped at traffic lights. There was a chance to jump them, but they were now in a city and he didn’t want to draw attention.

  He would get Lakshmi admitted to hospital as an emergency, give Jean-Baptiste an update, and then fly out to Morocco. Lakshmi was no longer a threat, but the Russians were onto him. It would have been too risky to call for an ambulance and wait by the roadside. Instead, he had phoned Jean-Baptiste and told him about the shooting. After showing more concern for the Mehari than for Lakshmi, Jean-Baptiste had given him directions to the University Hospital on avenue de la Côte de Nacre in Caen.

  ‘Seriously, I’ll look after her, don’t worry,’ the Frenchman had said. ‘I’ve spoken to Clémence, and she has forgiven her. Sadly, she hasn’t forgiven me.’

  ‘Has Dhar really agreed to work for you, or is it wishful thinking?’ Lakshmi asked, her voice slow but clear. Marchant glanced across at her. She was slumped into the corner of her seat like a drunk. Her usually open face was distorted in pain. For a fleeting moment, he wondered if she was faking her injury, just as she had faked her sedation.

  ‘He’s agreed.’

  As soon as the words left his lips, he realised she was going to die. He could confide in her at last, tell her the truth. It took death for them to be honest with each other.

  ‘What will you get out of it?’ she asked, more breathless this time. Marchant picked up a bottle of water from his door, checked the traffic lights and held it to her lips. She drank a little; the rest poured down her face onto her shirt. The lights changed, and he accelerated away.

  ‘We share the same father. He was British. Dhar never felt comfortable waging his jihad against the land of his father. He’s promised to shield Britain from future terrorist attacks. We could do with that right now.’

  ‘What will you give him in return?’

  Marchant looked across at her again. Her voice was barely a whisper now. They weren’t going to reach the hospital in time.

  ‘I’ve already given it. His freedom.’

  He had never spelt out his deal with Dhar before. He hadn’t told Jean-Baptiste the details, and there had been no opportunity to talk it through with Fielding. The way he had just explained it, the pact sounded Faustian, like the one his father had made with Primakov.

  ‘It’s blackmail,’ she whispered. Marchant thought he saw a smile trying to break through her pain.

  ‘It’s not,’ he said.

  ‘We’ve both been blackmailed.’

  ‘I thought you were betraying me for nobler reasons.’

  ‘I was.’

  Marchant drove on in silence. When he looked back at Lakshmi, her eyes were closed, her hand less tight on her stomach.

  ‘Keep the towel pressed firmly,’ he said too harshly, reaching across and pushing it against her bloody hand. She opened her eyes and looked at him.

  ‘Britain will be safe, but –’ she faltered, whispering. ‘Will Dhar still be at war with America?’

  Marchant drove on, not wanting to look at her, following the signs for URGENCES through an endless lattice of small roads and low hedges that ringed the university hospital. It had begun to rain hard, and the wipers were struggling to clear the water from the windscreen.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Dhar will still be at war with America.’ He knew Lakshmi was gone. After a while he turned to check. The hand holding the wet towel had fallen across her lap, her head had rolled forward. Tears pricked his eyes.

  ‘But Britain will be safe,’ he continued, staring ahead, his hands too tight on the steering wheel. ‘Isn’t that what matters? What this is all about? Why I signed up to Six? Why you joined the Agency? We talk about making the world a safer place, but in the end we just want to protect our own back yards.’

  But as he pulled up outside the hospital, he knew he was lying. He sat there for a moment, still looking ahead, hoping to hear her breathing above the sound of the rain and the wipers. He didn’t want to turn off the engine, fearing the silence.

  ‘I was close to my father too,’ he said quietly. ‘I would have done anything for him. I hoped you’d come round to what I’m trying to do with Dhar. But I never told you, did I? Never trusted you.’

  He cut the engine and looked across at Lakshmi. She had lost too much blood. Leaning over, he touched her eyes, closing them like delicate clamshells, and moved to kiss her goodbye on the lips. He hesitated. It was from moments like this that he had guarded himself. He kissed her on the forehead. They had both tried to trust each other, but it wasn’t to be.

  An image of her at the temple in Madurai came to him, barefoot except for ankle chains, her forehead dabbed with crimson tilak. He preferred to think of her like that. She had looked strong then, at home in Mother India, proud to be American. At times he had let her in, but not completely, not the way he had done with Leila. And now he knew why.

  He promised to tell her father that she had loved him.

  83

  ‘Are you free to talk?’

  Paul Myers took the call at his bedsit in Montpelier, Cheltenham, where he had been confined since the attack on GCHQ that had nearly killed him. He wasn’t ready to return to the office; not yet.

  ‘Who is this?’ he asked, sitting up at his desk. A bank of computer screens flickered in front of him. The voice had been crudely distorted. The effect wasn’t as subtle as his own modulator, the one he had given Marchant. Instinctively, he wanted to know more, not about the caller but the technology. He guessed it was Eastern European.

  ‘Can you talk?’ the voice asked again. Myers thought about routing the unknown caller through his laptop, trying to reverse the modulation, but it would take too long. He had also worked out who it was: Marcus Fielding. There was something about the upper cadences, a faintly nasal quality that hadn’t been knocked out by the software.

  The former Chief of MI6 was on the run, just like Daniel Marchant, who had caused him enough grief already. Try as he might, it was proving hard for Myers to cover his tracks over the Revolutionary Guard intercept. The last thing he needed was Marcus Fielding making his life even more complicated.

  ‘It’s a secure line,’ Myers said.

  ‘I need to make contact with Marchant.’

  Fielding wasn’t bothering with any niceties, like introducing himself or apologising for potentially losing Myers his job.

  ‘I’ve got a number.’

  ‘That would be helpful.’

  A call from Fielding had always made his palms sweat, and this one was no exception, even though he was no longer Chief. Myers went over to his bedside table, where he kept a notebook for middle-of-the-night ideas. At the back he had written down Marchant’s number, using a simple shift-key code. But just as he was reading it out to Fielding, his doorbell rang. The postman had already called, and he wasn’t expecting visitors. He never was.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said after reading out the number, but Fielding had already hung up.

  Myers looked down onto the street. Two men were standing in front of the door tha
t led to his flat and the three others in the building. He thought he recognised one of them from work, but he couldn’t be sure. Moving quickly, he logged into GCHQ from his desktop computer and checked for a final time that his CX report on the Farsi intercept was not showing in the Gulf Controllerate files. He had deleted it from his own account, but a trace could still be found in the auxiliary data silos if someone was looking for it. The information was gathered from keystroke logging, a security measure that everyone at GCHQ was subject to, particularly those, like Myers, who had authorised computer terminals at home. Every keystroke, every action on a keyboard was tracked and later automatically analysed for unusual patterns of behaviour, such as deleting files.

  After signing out, he pressed the intercom button by the front door and asked who it was.

  ‘GCHQ security,’ a voice replied. ‘Routine homeworker check.’

  Routine my fat arse, Myers thought, as he considered his options. He wasn’t like Marchant, who would escape out of the window or grab a pizza box off the floor and bluff his way past the men, pretending he had delivered a Margarita instead of an American Hot. That wasn’t his style. He was too much of a coward. Instead, he looked around the room in the vain hope that there might be somewhere to hide, a place where he could curl up in the darkness, eat a large chocolate bar and pretend none of this was happening. They wouldn’t be interested in the copies of Fly RC, a magazine for remote-control plane enthusiasts, scattered on the bed, or the Persian Pussy porn mags stacked under it. They would be looking for evidence to link him with the jailbreak. Why did he agree to sit on the information for twenty-four hours, as Marchant had asked?

  Preparing himself for the worst, he buzzed the men in. Suddenly remembering the notepad by the bed, he walked over and ripped out the back page, which had Marchant’s coded number on it. He scrunched it up and popped into his mouth as the two men reached the top of the stairs.

  84

  Marchant held Lakshmi in his arms, standing in the swing doorway marked URGENCES. It was the second time in a week that he had carried her limp body. The first had been on the boat at Portbail, where he had handed her over to Jean-Baptiste. This time she was heavier, a dead weight.