by Jon Stock
‘They probably have already.’
32
The woman made no effort to cover herself as she stepped from the shower, walked across the bathroom and removed a towel from the radiator. She tilted her head, drying her blonde, shoulder-length hair as she looked over at the bed and smiled. Marchant wondered if she had been waiting for him to open his eyes. Her actions had a rehearsed choreography about them, more subtle than a porn star’s but no less calculated.
He knew before she began to speak that it was the same woman who had been sitting on the terrace earlier, whenever that might have been. Bells were ringing so loudly in his head that he thought, for a moment, that they were the reason he had woken. He hoped that something visceral in his sleeping state had raised the alarm. An uninvited Russian woman in his hotel room was about as bad as it could get for an MI6 field agent, the sort of scenario they taught on day one at the Fort.
If the implications weren’t so serious, his situation was almost funny. Textbook honeytrap, perfected in the 1960s, fell out of fashion after the Cold War, seemingly back with a vengeance. A British diplomat had recently been fired after he was filmed by the FSB with a couple of Russian tarts in a hotel room.
His head was clearer now, but he couldn’t be sure how long he had been lying in bed. Several days, at least. Where was Lakshmi Meena? Why had no one from London been to visit him? Hadn’t she said that MI6 knew where he was? And what was a naked woman doing in his bathroom?
He propped himself up in bed and took in his surroundings, tried to order random memories. He was in Sardinia, brought here by Meena after the Americans had handed him over to Abdul Aziz. He touched his mouth again, which was less swollen. He looks just like his father.
‘You’ve been sleeping for three days,’ the woman said. Her English was good, but there was no disguising the Russian mother tongue that thickened her cadences. She was standing in the doorway now, between the bathroom and the bedroom. Her shoulders were broad, like a swimmer’s, her breasts high and firm. Marchant estimated she was in her early thirties. Despite himself, he began to stir. Her pubic hair was tidy, trimmed rather than shaved, its soft brownness framed by tanned thighs.
‘I tell you this because I know how much the British men like to be in control,’ she smiled, glancing at the sheet covering Marchant. ‘On top of things.’
For a moment, Marchant felt pity for her, the wooden lines spoken with all the conviction of a hard-up lap dancer. But something about the way she moved across the hotel room and picked up a hair dryer made Marchant’s hands begin to sweat. And it wasn’t because of any desire she might have roused. Despite the air of a performance, her manner had a lover’s familiarity, an easiness born of intimacy. Instinctively, he felt about on the sheet next to him, trying to be discreet. It was damp.
‘Please, put something on,’ he said. More memories, scent, taste. ‘A dressing gown, clothes, anything.’
‘Clothes? It’s 40 degrees outside and you want me to put something on? Relax. You’re on holiday.’ She was sitting now, one leg tucked under her, head tilted, hair dryer in hand.
‘Where’s Lakshmi Meena?’
‘You ask too many questions. Please, try some of this.’
She picked up a plate piled high with watermelon and walked over to him, placing it beside the bed. Then she slid a piece into her mouth, holding it carefully between thumb and finger. A small trickle of juice escaped from her lips as she crushed the fruit. She gathered it in with her tongue, which lingered a moment longer than was necessary.
‘Do you know why Russian men like watermelon so much?’ she asked. Marchant had sat up now, careful to cover himself with a sheet.
‘I need you to leave,’ he said, strength returning to his voice, his body. More memories: Morocco, the mountains, Nye strelai. The woman might have some information on Dhar, but he wasn’t in control. He needed time to think, rid his head of the drugs he must have been given with his morphine, work out how to play the hand in front of him, but she held all the cards. ‘Ten minutes. Some time to wash, freshen up. Recharge.’ He managed to garnish the last word with a twist of innuendo.
‘Of course. I’ll go to the beach. Join me in the restaurant when you’re ready. I’m Nadia, by the way.’
He watched her walk over to a wardrobe and put on a black bikini. The bottom was decent enough at the front, but hardly covered her buttocks. Again, she knew she was being observed, which annoyed Marchant, who turned away when she catwalked towards the sliding glass doors. As she started to close them behind her, she leaned back into the room.
‘Watermelon juice is a natural Viagra, at least that’s what our men believe. Yes, it’s sweet too, and we love sweet things in Russia, but this is not the main reason. Enjoy.’
She slid the door shut, the click of the catch cutting into Marchant’s thoughts. Once he was sure she had gone, he lifted the receiver on the hotel phone, but the line was dead, as he expected. He stood up, unsteady on his feet, and went over to the wardrobe, where he had seen some of his clothes. His wallet was there, complete with some Moroccan dirhams and the ‘litter’ he had put in it for his photographer’s cover (Dirk McLennan’s business card, some studio receipts), but his phone was missing. He looked around the room. Had they slept together? He kept seeing them on the bed, caught in the reflection of the mosaic mirror. How could he have allowed himself to get into such a vulnerable situation?
After taking a shower, washing off any traces of what might have been, he put on a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, sunglasses and some flip-flops that someone – Meena? Nadia? – must have bought from the resort shop for him. They all fitted well enough. He glanced in the mirror, put a hand to his bruised jaw, and stepped outside into the midday sun, watched discreetly by a gym-toned man lying on a sunbed outside the adjacent villa.
33
‘I want you to hold back,’ Fielding said, standing up to rub his lower back. No one had fixed the grandfather clock that stood against the far wall of his office. It had been built by Sir Mansfield Cumming, the first Chief, and had worked well enough until the Service’s move from Southwark, since when it had kept stopping. Fielding meant to do something about it, but there was never enough time.
‘It’s too late anyway. She’s all over him.’ Prentice was back in the resort now, standing in some shade beside a rack of red bikes for hire. Behind him he could hear children playing football on an Astroturf pitch: German, English, Italian and Russian voices. He had taken a look earlier. The football facilities were provided by Chelsea, the club he’d followed since childhood, and there were huge posters of all the top players on the fencing around the ground.
‘Has he met the man yet, or just the woman?’
‘He’s sharing a pizza with them both now. Down by the sea.’
‘And no one’s seen you?’
‘Not yet.’ Prentice glanced at a nearby CCTV camera, hidden in the bushes. He doubted the guests knew that every inch of the resort was being filmed, day and night, low and high season. The cameras were very discreet, he had to give them that. He had already checked out the control centre, behind the main reception building, where a bank of screens captured most things that went on at the resort. As far as he could tell, it was also from there that the master satellite TV signal was distributed to all the villas.
‘Get him on your own after lunch and try to limit the damage.’
Prentice hung up, surprised by the Vicar’s calmness.
‘We want you to meet someone in London,’ Nadia said. ‘An old friend.’
‘A friend of your family,’ her partner, Valentin, added. He had joined them from the sunbed a couple of minutes after their arrival at the beachside restaurant. Marchant assumed that he had followed him from his room, in case he tried to leave the resort. But Marchant didn’t have the strength to escape. Not yet. Valentin was tall, muscular, wearing a T-shirt as tight as his skin. Marchant was struck by his small, Prussian-blue eyes.
‘I don’t have any family,’ Marchant replied.
‘Our friend knew your father. He always speaks very highly of him, and would like to meet you. Talk about old times.’
‘Which friend?’ Marchant asked, his mind racing. The only Russian he could recall was someone his father had known in Delhi, but Marchant had been a child at the time, and the memories were distant. He knew there must have been many others, his father’s illustrious career in MI6 being built on successes behind the Iron Curtain. Some he was aware of: the ones who had been blown and were dead now, executed by Moscow Centre after Aldrich Ames had exposed them. He would never know about the others who were still alive, still betraying their motherland, their files known only to a select few in Legoland.
‘All we ask is that you meet him once,’ Valentin said, ignoring Marchant’s question. ‘One meeting, nothing more. In London.’
Marchant wanted a name, someone to run past Fielding, who had known his father better than anyone, but they weren’t playing. More important, he told himself, was the approach itself. The Russians’ interest in him gave him hope that he could be right about Dhar, the mountains, the helicopter. And that thought banished any lingering effects of the medication, his brain suddenly as fresh as a forest after rain.
‘He will attend an exhibition opening,’ Valentin said, passing Marchant an embossed invitation card. ‘In Cork Street. The artist is from the Caucasus, South Ossetia. He is very accomplished, but not as well known outside Russia as he should be. Picture number 14, a nude sketch, has been reserved with a half-dot on the price label. It’s a very beautiful work. You may recognise the model.’ He looked across at Nadia and smiled. ‘Your contact will confirm the purchase on the night, towards the end of the evening. If it already has a full red dot beside it when you arrive, the meeting has been cancelled.’
Standard SVR tradecraft, Marchant thought. The plan was a little elaborate, but it implied intent. They meant business. A crowded place had been chosen, a venue where contact could be accidental, ambiguous, denied.
Marchant glanced around at the restaurant, trying to spot any watchers. It was one of his best skills as a field agent, the thing that had most impressed his instructors at the Fort. But this time he was struggling. More than half the diners were Russian. A senescent man with an eighteen-year-old escort in a short skirt; another, younger Russian businessman more interested in his BlackBerry than his gorgeous wife. She was wearing diamante jeans, listlessly following their young son as he tottered around the tables with a beach ball almost as big as him. Maybe Nadia and Valentin were operating on their own.
‘And if he’s not my kind of artist?’ Marchant asked, knowing the answer. As far as they were concerned, he had already been compromised enough to guarantee his cooperation.
‘Our friend will be very disappointed,’ Valentin said.
‘We all will,’ Nadia added, smiling at him with a coyness that made Marchant’s palms moisten again.
‘You and your father, you both seem to share a dislike of America.’
‘I wouldn’t put words into my mouth,’ Marchant said, touching his jaw. ‘It’s not a nice place to be at the moment.’ Despite the bravura, Valentin’s comment unsettled him. The Americans had long accused his father of disloyalty, eventually driving him from office.
‘But they didn’t treat you very well.’
‘That wasn’t the Americans.’
‘Of course not. And they couldn’t have cancelled your appointment with Dr Aziz.’
Marchant looked at him.
‘Our friend is eager to see you again,’ Valentin said. ‘Your father once gave him a photo of all his children. He still treasures it.’
‘All?’
‘You, Sebastian…’ Valentin paused, looking hard at Marchant, as if he hadn’t finished.
‘And?’
‘And your father.’
Marchant didn’t buy it. ‘All his children’ was an odd phrase for two sons, even allowing for some loss in translation. The Russians knew about Salim Dhar.
34
Fielding had told him he was coming. It was courtesy, but it was also a matter of security. Giles Cordingley lived at the top of Raginnis Hill, overlooking the Cornish fishing village of Mousehole, ten miles from Land’s End, and visitors to his granite farmhouse were rare. He was too old for surprises. A security camera was positioned discreetly to the left of the high oak gates, and it took a while for them to swing open and let Fielding’s Range Rover pass through into the gravel courtyard. His driver parked in front of an old stable block and took a look around, taking in other security cameras, the high walls that enclosed a forgotten orchard. Then he made a call on his mobile and returned to the car, leaving Fielding to approach the house on his own.
Cordingley had been Chief of MI6 in the 1990s, serving for three years before becoming master of an Oxford College and then retiring to Cornwall. He was the last of the Cold War Chiefs, the end of an era. Well into his sixties by the time he reached the top, he had enjoyed a long career that had begun with a role in Oleg Penkovsky’s recruitment. He had managed the defection of Vladimir Kuzichkin when he was head of station in Tehran, overseen the handling of Oleg Gordievsky, and lost agents at the hands of Aldrich Ames. Most importantly, he was one of the few people who knew about Nikolai Primakov, having personally authorised his recruitment.
There was no answer when Fielding rang the doorbell and he eventually found Cordingley behind the house, tending to a row of beehives in what must have been the old vegetable garden. Fielding thought his face looked fleshier than he remembered, like pale putty, big heavy-rimmed glasses making it seem rounder, more vulnerable. Despite the dramatic clifftop setting, there was no sense of a man enjoying his retirement in the great outdoors, no ruddy, windblown cheeks or healthy complexion. He looked like a man unused to daylight. For a moment, Fielding wondered if he was ill, if that was why he had moved to Cornwall.
‘Good of you to see me, Giles,’ Fielding began, knowing that it would be futile to wait for him to stop tending his bees. Cordingley was wearing a protective veil but no gloves or suit. His hands looked feminine, unthreatening. Fielding assumed he had operated the main gates with the device that was hanging around his neck. His hospitality didn’t seem to extend beyond allowing entry, and he hadn’t bothered to come round and greet his visitor. It was a reminder that Cordingley’s relationship with the Service was complicated, that he had left under a cloud of homophobia, been denied a KCMG, the usual gong for a Chief.
‘Duty rather than goodness,’ Cordingley said, putting a lid back on one of the hives. Fielding kept his distance, knowing that angry bees were all part of the welcome. The garden, he thought, looked tatty and tired. Only the hives were well tended. A gentle wind was blowing in off the sea far below. On the far side of the bay, St Michael’s Mount rose out of the water like a fairytale castle. A brace of beam trawlers were returning home to nearby Newlyn under a high mackerel sky, their nets hung out on either side for a final trawl of the bay. If it wasn’t for the froideur of his host, Fielding thought that the idyllic scene was almost heart-warming, reason enough for him to have dedicated his life to the Service.
Cordingley walked past him towards the back door of the house, a slow amble that still drew a cloud of bees in his slipstream. Fielding swatted one away as nonchalantly as he could. He felt a sharp pain on the back of his hand.
‘They only sting when they sense fear,’ Cordingley said, entering the house. He was almost eighty, but he hadn’t missed Fielding’s flinch.
35
&
nbsp; Marchant knew that there was something wrong with his room twenty yards before he reached it. The sliding doors were open, and he could hear a couple inside, the unmistakeable soundtrack of sexual pleasure. At least, he could hear a woman; the man sounded more subdued, set upon. The Russian couple had told him to rest, agreed to meet for a drink before dinner, talking as if he had the liberty to do as he pleased. But he knew it was a pretence, that he had no freedom. They were already back at the villa next door, watching, waiting. Marchant wasn’t a guest at the resort, he was a prisoner.
As he approached the sliding glass doors, he could see the blue flicker of a TV screen reflecting off his apartment’s white walls. Had he got the wrong number? The layout of the sprawling resort, each house set back from the smooth-tiled paths that meandered through them, was confusing, but the number by his apartment matched the key in his hand.
He stepped into the small garden, careful not to touch the half-open iron gate, and edged towards the glass doors. He knew what was going on now, but he still kept his approach silent, in case he was wrong, in case there really were people in his room. But he knew there weren’t. Not in the flesh.
He looked at the large TV screen for a second, distracted by the rhythmic movement of Nadia’s taut buttocks, the winking recesses. Then he realised that it was his body beneath them, and felt sick. He stepped into the room and grabbed the remote, which was on the table beside a replenished bowl of watermelon. It was only as he turned away that he saw Hugo Prentice standing by the bathroom door, arms folded, watching the screen with a smirk on his fifty-something face.
‘It’s showing in my room, too,’ Prentice said, careful to remain out of sight from the window. ‘On a loop. Every room in the resort, nationwide release. It’s the most exciting thing I’ve seen on an in-house hotel channel in years.’
