Dirty Little Secret

by Jon Stock

  A group of chic French students in bikinis called him over to their sun lounger, where they were crowded around smooth-chested teenage boys in swim shorts. Music played on a mobile phone while they smoked. Empty beer bottles were stacked on the table. Marchant thought the almond seller was about to be given a hard time, but he was greeted like an old friend.

  ‘Camel ride?’ a voice said beside him. The man had approached with the stealth of a professional.

  ‘How much?’ Marchant asked.

  He knew at once that this was Dhar’s man. There was something about him: a fierceness in the eyes.

  ‘Four hundred and fifty dhirams, half an hour. No haggle.’

  ‘I haven’t come all this way not to haggle,’ Marchant said, detecting the beginnings of a smile on the man’s weatherbeaten face.

  ‘Nobody haggles with Abdul,’ he said. ‘Would you like to walk with me?’

  Two minutes later, they were far enough away from the beach cafés to talk. Abdul was showing off his camels, giving Marchant an assessment of each one: ‘… dull eyes … shiny hair … nervous … firm ears … broad cheeks … strong straight legs.’ For a moment, Marchant thought he had been mistaken for a camel buyer.

  Then Abdul’s tone changed as he fastened a strap on a saddle. ‘I have an address for you,’ he said. ‘In London.’ He barked a command and the camel collapsed to its knees, as if it was deflating.

  Marchant tried to concentrate on the camel, to look as if he was sizing it up for a ride, but Abdul’s words threw him. He had been expecting coded instructions of some sort, a way to meet up with Dhar or at least make contact with him. Dhar would never return to Britain, even if he had been on the vodka again. So why had he been given an address in London?

  ‘If you care for your country, you must pass it on,’ Abdul continued, the camel now fully seated on the sand. ‘Time is running out.’

  97

  ‘I’m not naïve, Jim,’ Linda said. ‘But somehow it was easier when you were in the Marines, fighting a war.’

  ‘We’re at war now, just on a different battlefield, with different weapons and a different enemy.’

  Spiro and his wife were walking beside the Thames, past the Globe Theatre. When they had met outside the South Bank Centre, she had let him kiss her on the cheek, but pulled away when he tried to hug her. She was looking tired after her flight from Beirut, and had done her hair in a different way, but otherwise Spiro thought she seemed OK.

  ‘Jason’s taught me to see the world differently,’ she said.

  Spiro had told himself not to react when Jason’s name cropped up, as he knew it would. But try as he might, he bristled at the thought of her spending time with the doughnut puncher he’d met in Busboys and Poets.

  ‘Oh come on, Linda, don’t bring him into this.’

  ‘Excuse me? You and I don’t have a future if we can’t talk about Jason.’

  ‘Is that so? Is he the reason you went away?’

  They stopped to look at each other. Spiro had always thought it odd when couples argued in public seemingly unself-consciously, but right now he didn’t give a damn what the people passing by thought.

  ‘Jason’s gay, OK?’ Linda said, her voice quieter. ‘I thought that was fairly obvious.’

  Spiro had suspected as much, but the idea of Jason teaching his wife ‘to see the world differently’ still made him mad. He knew his jealousy made no sense, but that was how it was. He was tired, and was already feeling humiliated by Denton’s demise.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, as they walked on. ‘It’s been a bad day.’

  ‘And you can’t talk about it.’

  ‘How long have we been married? Thirty years? Not a bad run. What I don’t get is, why now?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Where did you go, Linda?’ He needed to ask, in case Dhar had been lying. ‘Why didn’t you answer my calls?’

  ‘You wouldn’t have believed me if I told you. I can’t believe it myself. I’ve been a military wife all my adult life, staying at home, looking after Joseph, waiting for you to walk through the door, not knowing where you’ve been, when you’ll be away again.’

  ‘And I appreciate it, you know I do. I should have done more, encouraged you to do your own thing. Photography, whatever.’

  ‘The timing was never right. You know that.’ He guessed she wouldn’t want to talk about Joseph. The decision to send their disabled son away into full-time care still sat uncomfortably with both of them.

  ‘I wanted to do something for myself. Not as your wife, but as me. Photography for Peace has given me some self-respect. When Jason asked if I wanted to go with the group to Ramallah, I saw an opportunity.’

  So Dhar hadn’t been lying. It would have been so much easier if he had. His supporters must have been with them on the West Bank. Had the Israelis watched them mix with her and Jason and their group? His CIA career would be over if Mossad started circulating photos of his wife with Salim Dhar’s jihadi friends. He told himself to calm down. They could discuss the damage to his career later. Today was about her. Everything had always been about him – that was the problem.

  ‘An opportunity for what?’ he asked, trying to be conciliatory.

  ‘To see conflict for myself, first-hand. To try to understand why we fight each other. Why you were sent off to war in Iraq. What drives you and the Agency now.’

  They walked on in silence for a while. Then she spoke. ‘You don’t seem too surprised. I thought you’d be mad at me for going to a place like Ramallah.’

  ‘I’m an intelligence officer.’ He was tempted to reveal that he already knew where she had been, but decided against it. ‘We’re trained to conceal our emotions.’

  He swallowed hard, and felt his eyes moistening as they walked on. All he wanted was for them to be back in Virginia, ordering double pan-fried noodles and spicy chicken from P.F. Chang’s at Tysons Corner as they watched old episodes of The Sopranos. Their marriage hadn’t been perfect, but it had worked, and he would do all he could to make it better now.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said, linking an arm in his. It was the first sign of affection she had shown. ‘That I fell blindly in love with the Palestinian cause, and hated the young Israeli soldiers who trained their sights on us when we threw stones at them.’

  ‘Well, didn’t you?’

  ‘It wasn’t as simple as that. I came away thinking peace will never be achieved if both sides continue as they are. It’s not a new idea, it’s never going to win me the Nobel Peace Prize, but nothing will improve unless one side or the other has the courage to change its own behaviour.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s going to happen any day soon, honey.’

  ‘Perhaps not. And I’m in no position to change things. All I can do is exhibit a few photographs at Busboys and Poets. But you are. You can make a difference.’

  ‘Me? How?’

  ‘In your war on terror. By stopping the torture. Treating your enemies as prisoners of war rather than as enemy combatants with no rights.’

  Spiro detected Jason’s words in what she said. He could hear the watercooler chat in the office already: ‘Heard about Jim’s wife? Some butt pirate’s turned her into a beatnik.’

  ‘One, these are not nice people we’re dealing with here,’ he said, resentful that he was having to justify his job to his own wife. ‘Two –’ he dropped his voice, glancing around them – ‘we don’t do torture. And three, I don’t even want to begin listing all the atrocities we’ve prevented as a result of information gathered from enhanced interrogations.’

  ‘I know all that, Jim. Don’t treat me like a fool. I’m not asking you to put in for a transfer to payroll, I just want you to try to change your behaviour at a personal level, that’s all. These things can only start with the individual. There must be times, even at the Agency, when it’s down to you, your call alone, whether to treat someone as a fellow human being or as a goddamn farm animal.’

  An image of Salim Dh
ar hanging from the ceiling in Bagram flashed through his mind. Could he have done things another way? Would it have made a lick of difference? He doubted it.

  ‘And if I do? If I try?’

  ‘Perhaps you and I can make a go of things. Give ourselves another chance.’

  98

  Harriet Armstrong sat in the Range Rover, looking out across the Thames, waiting. She was in East Greenwich, in the shadow of an old coal-fired power station. It reminded her of earlier days, when she had been a young officer with MI5. Her life then had seemed like one long wait, a never-ending series of stake-outs, cold coffee and male colleagues with marriage problems.

  Twenty minutes earlier, a team of armed police officers from CO19 had broken down the front door of an old dockworker’s cottage in a parallel street. Four men had been arrested. Bomb-making equipment on an industrial scale had been found in the house and a metal scrapyard that backed onto the garden, along with plans for more devastating attacks, one of which had been imminent.

  She had moved fast after taking the call from Daniel Marchant. He had not gone into detail, and she hadn’t asked him to. All she knew was that MI5 finally had a lead.

  ‘You need to get people down there now,’ Marchant had said.

  ‘Thank you.’ She never liked anyone telling her how to do her job, but she had hoped her gratitude sounded genuine. ‘I’m picking Fielding up from the airport later,’ she had added, knowing he would be pleased.

  A text came through on her phone. The crime scene had been secured. She tapped on the glass that separated her from the driver and the Range Rover sped off. A small crowd had gathered at the far end of the street, mostly residents who had been evacuated from their homes while the terraced cottage and the scrapyard had been searched for explosives. A police officer on the front door stood aside as Armstrong walked into the house.

  Forensics teams in blue overalls and facemasks were busy at work. She knew her presence was unhelpful, but she needed to see for herself where so much of the pain of the past few weeks had been conceived. She also wanted to know how Marchant knew, what linked him to the terrorist cell. At the COBRA meeting he had said the attacks would stop now that Salim Dhar was free. Did he mean that Dhar himself would stop them? If so, how did Marchant know? Was he in touch with Dhar?

  She couldn’t believe that he had helped Dhar to escape, as Spiro had alleged – but who really knew? They were half-brothers, after all. Marchant had always been Marcus Fielding’s private project, someone he was not prepared to share with anyone else. It had driven Denton to distraction. She hoped Fielding might be more open with her on his return.

  The cottage was a simple two-up, two-down, with a kitchen and bathroom recently added at the back of the ground floor. It was tidier than she had expected, except for the second bedroom. Two mattresses lay on the floor, on either side of an architect’s design board which was on a slant facing the sash window. The blind was down, and the solitary bulb hanging from the ceiling wasn’t working – CO19 had cut the electricity before the raid – but there was enough light to see what was on the board. Rough, hand-drawn sketches of Sellafield nuclear power station and the National Grid substation in Sheffield, along with professional surveillance photos of both sites. But it wasn’t these that caught her eye. It was a photo of a young Salim Dhar, posing with an AK47 at a training camp, stuck on the wall like a picture of a saint.

  She stared at him for a moment, and was about to leave the room when another piece of paper caught her eye. Someone had written down an address in Victoria. Next to it was tomorrow’s date.

  99

  Marchant was drinking coffee at one of the cafés at the back of the beach, near where the camels mustered. Trance music played over the speakers as tourists lounged around in the wind and sun, but he couldn’t relax. The sea mist had cleared to reveal Île de Mogador on the horizon. There had once been a prison on the island. Now all he could see was the tower of a mosque, its white brickwork picked out in the sunlight.

  Abdul was down on the beach, away to his left, chatting to other camel herders. Business was slow today. Nobody wanted to ride out to the fort ruins of Bordj el Berod, which had supposedly inspired Jimi Hendrix to write a song. Perhaps the tourists were wising up, Marchant thought. Hendrix had not visited Morocco until two years after ‘Castles Made of Sand’ was released.

  He took another sip of coffee. Two trawlers were returning to port. Seagulls swarmed behind their sterns like clouds of smoke. An inflatable rescue boat headed slowly across the bay. A lot had happened since Dhar had been picked up by the Russian trawler in the Bristol Channel. Marchant wondered where he was now, whether Abdul knew the sender of the message he had given, let alone what it meant. He doubted it.

  Dhar would have communicated using his own human version of anonymous routing. Each link of the chain would only have been aware of the messenger either side of him. Somewhere along the line, at the start perhaps, Dhar might have used technology, left a message in a draft email folder, just as Fielding had done. But Dhar was a firm believer in using the spoken word rather than modern comms, which were no longer safe from the prying eyes and ears of GCHQ and the NSA.

  A few minutes earlier, Marchant had rung Armstrong on another new pay-as-you-go phone, standing at the water’s edge where no one could overhear him. After the call, he had dismantled the unit and slipped its parts into his pocket before binning them. Armstrong had sounded happy. If, as Marchant thought, the address in London was that of a terrorist cell, it meant that Dhar was playing ball. He would catch the news tonight, see if there was any talk of police raids in Britain.

  Marchant watched as a kite-surfer walked down towards the water, carrying his gear like a parachute. Ahead of him people were starting to rip across the waves, soaring into the air as the wind rose. Would he still be able to do it, Marchant wondered, as a waiter wrestled with a parasol in front of him. He had deliberately chosen a sun lounger at the back of the café. There was no one behind him and he had clear sightlines, allowing him to clock everyone who entered or left. He could keep an eye on Abdul too, see who he talked to.

  Abdul had asked him to return in half an hour, once he had passed on the message. He hadn’t elaborated, just said that there was something else he needed to discuss. The plan had sounded messy, putting Marchant on edge. He waved for a waiter, settled up and made his way over to Abdul, satisfied that he was alone.

  ‘It is better you ride,’ Abdul said, gesturing at his camel, which was kneeling down.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Marchant asked. ‘To meet Jimi Hendrix?’

  ‘Don’t mock us. We all have to earn a living. It is safer to talk if people think you are a dumb tourist who has paid too much to ride a lazy camel.’

  ‘People? Who’s watching?’ Marchant asked, mounting the animal. Abdul was making him increasingly nervous.

  ‘There are new faces on the beach today, people I haven’t seen before.’

  ‘What sort of people?’ Marchant must have been losing his touch. He had seen nothing suspicious from the café.

  ‘Maybe Russians.’

  Ten minutes later, Marchant was riding down the beach, scouring the horizon for threats. He had thought about cutting his losses and heading back to the medina, but he needed to know what else Abdul had to say.

  ‘You had another message for me,’ he said, glancing around. Someone had started up a quad bike in the dunes, at the end of the row of cafés.

  ‘You must travel to Bandar-Abbas,’ Abdul replied.

  Marchant closed his eyes as they rode on in silence. It made sense. Dhar was hiding with the people who had sprung him from Bagram. Travelling to Bandar-Abbas on the Iranian coast would be risky, but he needed to see Dhar again, thank him for the address in London and reassure him of his own role in the jailbreak. If Dhar was to be an effective MI6 asset, it was important that he was run properly. Marchant didn’t just want the details of one cell in London, he wanted a constant flow of intel from the heart of the global
jihad. That was the deal.

  ‘How do I get there?’ he asked. But before Abdul could reply, Marchant heard the sound of a horse galloping up behind them.

  He spun round. A man riding bareback on an Arabian piebald mare drew up alongside them, pulling on the reins. His face was half covered by a red scarf, which he lowered to talk to Abdul. His accent was different from that of the Berbers of Marrakech, but Marchant caught enough to know there was something wrong.

  ‘It is not safe for you to be here,’ Abdul said, turning to Marchant. ‘You must take my friend’s horse.’

  ‘Who is it? Where are they?’ Marchant asked, scanning the beach. The scene looked innocent enough in the July sunshine. The wind was up, and a fine spray hung over the sea where the waves were breaking. Half a dozen bright kites zig-zagged through the sky, dragging their surfers across the choppy water.

  Then he saw them, two quad bikes rising into the air as they came over the crest of a distant sand dune.

  ‘Russians,’ Abdul said. ‘Please, there is no time.’

  The rider had already dismounted and was holding the mare beside the camel. Marchant slipped down from the saddle and jumped across onto its bare back, feeling the horse’s warmth. His father had been a keen rider, taking him and his twin brother through dried-up riverbeds in Rajasthan when they were young. Later he had taught Marchant how to play polo, which they had watched in Delhi. The horse bucked, unhappy with its new rider, but the man still had hold of the bridle and brought it under control with a curse. Marchant had never ridden bareback before.

  ‘Go,’ Abdul said. ‘We will try to delay them.’

  Without hesitating, Marchant dug in his heels and galloped down the beach, away from the cafés and towards the ruins of Bordj el Berod. He was barely in control of the horse, which was strong and wild, but a survival instinct had taken over. He glanced behind him. The quad bikes were approaching Abdul. The other man was on foot, waving frantically for the quad bikes to stop. They didn’t have a hope. The Russians weren’t giving up. Marchant was pretty sure they blamed him for Dhar’s failure to complete the mission at Fairford.