Dead Spy Running (13 page)

Six miles south-west of the shopping mall, Daniel Marchant sat sipping a black coffee too. Monika was next to him, drinking mint tea in a tall glass and wearing a faded purple
salwar khameez
. A large rucksack covered in stickers was propped up beside her. The Terminal One departure hall at Frederic Chopin airport was crowded, and they had been lucky to get a table in the bustling café, but Monika seemed to know everyone, and after a brief chat with one of the baristas a reserved sign on the corner table had been removed.

If Marchant had had to select a spot that afforded views of the entire departure hall, and also offered the observer cover and protection, their table would have been his first choice. Their backs were to the wall, denying anyone the chance to approach them unsighted, the seating area was raised above the main concourse, and the entrance and exit onto the road outside was almost beside them. Anyone who entered the departure hall would have to pass beneath them, where they could be easily observed.

All of which made him genuinely drawn to Monika, because it confirmed what he had suspected: she was an intelligence officer, most probably with AW. The text she had discreetly sent while fetching the sugar had also smacked of the covert, but he had already begun to realise at her flat: her bringing his rucksack over from the hostel, his extreme sleepiness, the way she had confined him indoors, changed his flight. And then, finally, her announcement that she had managed to buy a ticket on the same flight and was coming to India with him.

He knew she wasn't, but he couldn't confront her, in case it jeopardised her operational cover: the Americans might have had them under surveillance for days. A part of him also wanted to believe that it was true. He was flattered that she trusted him to play the game, and he admired her thoroughness: he hadn't had such good sex since his own year off.

So he was still David Marlowe and she remained Monika, and together they talked about their shared love for the human drama of arrivals and departures, and whether India's airports would be any different.

‘The queue for the check-in is short. We should go now,' she said, resting her hand on his.

‘OK,' Marchant said, glancing across at the row of desks. He made a cursory sweep of the hall, but by now he was confident that his departure from Poland for India, via the Gulf, was in the safe hands of AW.

‘Is there something wrong?' she asked.

‘Nothing.' He paused. ‘It's just the end of my European adventure, that's all. I've grown quite fond of Poland.'

‘Really?' she said. ‘Even after your experience with the Americans?'

For a moment, their separate masks slipped. As he looked at her, he wondered what her real name was, whether she had a boyfriend, if she made love differently when she wasn't in character.

‘It's amazing how quickly you get over these things,' he said, thinking back to Stare Kiejkuty. ‘Water off a duck's back.'

*   *   *

Spiro watched Prentice read his newspaper on the big screen, wondering from which direction Marchant would join him. He knew a part of him envied Prentice's reputation as a maverick; he could never have the confidence to disobey orders, to do his own thing in the way Prentice had done on numerous occasions over the years. The CIA didn't allow for freewheeling field agents, not any more. Gone were those glory days in Afghanistan, when he and others were dropped into Kabul with suitcases stuffed full of hundred-dollar bills and instructions to win the war on terror. Everyone now had to be accountable in a way that would have been unthinkable ten years ago. Did Prentice wilfully disregard his briefs from London, Spiro wondered, or had London learnt not to brief him too specifically, knowing that it would be futile?

Either way, Spiro knew Prentice had the better hand, which made what happened next all the more galling. Prentice folded his newspaper, glanced at his watch and finished his coffee.

‘This could be it,' Spiro said to no one in particular, but Carter concentrated even harder on the panel of visual feeds in front of him.

Everyone in the room watched as Prentice pulled a phone out of his jacket pocket and dialled a number.

‘Did we get a shot of that?' Spiro asked.

The main screen changed to a close-up of Prentice, focusing on the phone in his hand. The images then played back in slow motion. Carter called out the digits as Prentice's fingers moved from one number to the next. But his voice started to trail off as the sound of Spiro's own ringtone filled the room.

Prentice sent the pre-written text while his hand was still in his jacket pocket, but neither Spiro nor Carter, or any of his team, suspected him of doing anything other than making a phone call. The only person who knew was Monika, whose phone buzzed in the back pocket of her jeans as they approached the check-in desk for their flight to Dubai.

Spiro didn't take the call immediately, letting the phone ring five times while his brain linked the image on the screen with the sound of his own phone.

‘Prentice. What a pleasure,' he said at last, refusing to catch the eye of anyone in the room, although all of them were hanging on his every word. Prentice had humiliated him once before, in Prague a few years earlier, and he knew he was about to do the same again.

Prentice looked around the mall, as if trying to spot Spiro.

‘I can offer you a deal,' Prentice said, not revealing that he knew he was being filmed. He had noted all the CCTV cameras as he came into the mall, and was tempted to face the one nearest to him, like a newsreader, but he didn't want to give an impression of being in control. Not yet.

‘And there was I thinking we were on the same side,' Spiro said.

‘It's a good deal.' Prentice paused, looking around the café again.

‘Are all units in place?' Spiro asked briskly, muting his phone. Carter nodded. ‘Try me,' Spiro continued to Prentice.

‘You can talk to Marchant, but I need to be present,' Prentice said.

‘He's a proven threat to America,' Spiro said.

‘Who isn't these days?'

‘The deal was that we could talk to him.'

‘I know. And you can. Just without the watersports. Your new President banned torture, remember?'

‘Where is he?'

‘I'm at a café, ground floor, Zlote Tarasy.' Prentice knew he didn't have to tell Spiro, but he still wanted his old rival to feel empowered. ‘When Marchant sees we're on our own – don't piss about, he's good – he'll come and join us for a latte.'

 

Marchant and Monika handed their passports over the airline counter. The luck of the Irish, he thought, as the check-in woman took his green passport and studied it. He presumed Monika's passport had been cleared already. How far was she going to take this pretence? All the way to the plane?

He wasn't sure if she was on her own or had back-up. He still hadn't noticed anyone who might be AW, but they both clocked the man pushing a luggage trolley past them while their passports were being checked. Neither of them reacted when he looked in their direction for a moment longer than a stranger would, or when he reached for his phone, talked briefly as he glanced at Marchant again, and then quickened his walk to the main exit.

 

Carter looked hard at the image on his screen of Marchant and Monika as they waited for their passports to be handed back. There was something about them that troubled him: the lightness of skin around the man's hairline that suggested he had shaved his head recently; the pairing of Irish and Polish passports.

‘Sir, I think you should take a look at this,' he said, turning to Spiro.

‘Are all airport units on their way to the mall?' Spiro asked, ignoring him.

‘They're mobile, sir, but I think you should…'

‘Every floor, every exit. I want Marchant in a van before he's even smelled Prentice's coffee,' Spiro said.

As Spiro took his coat and strode out of the room, Carter hung back and looked again at the live feed from the airport. Marchant and Monika were moving out of the image towards passport control. Then his phone rang.

 

Operational cover was something that an agent never dropped, not until the job was done, but Marchant hoped that Monika might make an exception now. Their flight had been called, and they were queuing to board. He wasn't in India yet, but the dangers of the departure hall were behind them, and there was little that the Americans could do now. And he knew, from the way that they had hung back, waiting to be last in the queue, that she wouldn't be flying with him to India after all. These were to be their last few minutes together.

‘I think we can drop…'

‘Ssshh…' she said, putting a finger on his lips and nodding at the three check-in staff. There were still twenty people between them and the gate.

‘Thank you,' he said, gently taking her hand from his face and holding it. ‘I won't forget this, the time we had together.'

‘Here, take this,' she said, pulling out a chrome pendant from her pocket. It was small and silver, attached to a piece of thread. She took it in both hands and slipped it over Marchant's head. ‘It's an Om symbol, the sound of the universe. You can't go backpacking around India without one.'

As Marchant looked down at it she leant forward, kissed him on the lips, then hugged him. He wanted to taste her mouth again, but before he could, she was whispering in his ear, holding his head tightly in her hands.

‘There's a man in Delhi called Malhotra. Ask for him, Colonel Kailash Malhotra, at the Gymkhana Club. Plays bridge there every Wednesday night. You may remember him; he knew your father. And he knows where to find Salim Dhar.'

Before he could reply, she peeled herself away, nodded at the check-in supervisor, and disappeared. Two minutes later, in the departure hall, she texted Prentice to tell him that he could finish his coffee and disappear too.

She didn't recognise Carter as she left the exit, but he noticed her, and reached for his mobile. Two thousand miles away, a phone began to ring in the crucible of a Delhi summer.

Daniel Marchant pushed open the blue door, not sure what to expect. There had been no
chowkidar
on the front gate, and he knew the house was deserted, but for some reason he hoped that Chandar, the family cook, would be in his little outhouse, on his
charpoy
, sleeping off the Bagpiper whisky of the night before. It was an absurd thought, he knew. He had last seen Chandar twenty years ago, all four foot nine of him, standing proudly in his baggy High Commission chef whites as he oversaw his Nepali cousins serving chicken curry to his father and mother for their sad, farewell dinner.

The small room was hot and empty. He had forgotten how stifling Delhi could be in May, or perhaps he hadn't noticed the heat when he was last here, as an eight-year-old child. A bare wire dangled from the ceiling, where once a lightbulb had hung. Apart from that, there was no evidence that anyone, let alone Chandar, had ever called the place home.

The other three staff rooms were similarly empty. Together they formed a single block, set apart from the main house. He struggled to recall who had lived in them all: the
mali
, he thought, or perhaps the
ayah
's smiling brother, who sat behind a humming sewing machine all day in the searing heat. Chandar's room was the only one he and Sebastian used to enter as children. In the afternoons, when the twins were meant to be sleeping, they would slip past the dozing
ayah
and help Chandar roll the
chapattis
he made for his own late lunch. He could still hear the hiss of the blue flame, feel the comfort of the
chapattis
, folded like warm blankets. Chandar's wife sometimes came down from Nepal to stay in the tiny room too. The brothers' visits were never the same when she was around: she scolded Chandar for feeding the sahib's sons with cheap flour, and pinched their cheeks too hard.

Marchant walked over to the main house and peered in through a window which, like all the others on the ground floor, was protected with ornate metal bars. He remembered the cold marble hall floor, big and smooth enough for him, Sebastian and Chandar to play cricket on, although it was shiny when he lived here, not black and soiled as it was now. How long the house had stood empty he wasn't sure. The padlock and chain on the front door suggested it must have been for years.

Behind him was the swimming pool. Its bottom was caked with several seasons of big leaves, rotting in a few inches of brackish water. The tiles, once blue and pristine, were chipped or missing, leaving a patchwork of decay. Marchant tried to force the thought away, but an image of Sebastian came into his mind, staring up at him from the bottom of the pool.

As he turned back towards the gate, he became aware of someone watching him, a figure beneath the neem tree on the far side of the lawn, where the generator used to belch out its black smoke. He walked across the brown, untended grass, reaching the trees just in time to see a young boy climb over the wall and drop down into the neighbouring garden.

‘Hey, wait,' Marchant called, struggling to recall the correct Hindi. ‘
Suno, Kya Chandar abhi bhi yahan rahta hai?
' Does Chandar live here any more?

The name ‘Chandar' seemed to have an effect, even if his Hindi didn't. The boy's black hair reappeared above the brick wall a few moments later.

‘Chandar Bahadur?' he asked tentatively, still partly concealed behind the wall.

‘
Tikke
,' Marchant said, smiling. The boy's whole face had now appeared, and Marchant knew from the glint in his eyes that he was looking at Chandar's son.

Ten minutes later, Marchant was sitting in the cramped staff quarters of the neighbour's house, eating
chapattis
and
dhal
with Chandar, his wife, who remained standing, covering her head with a scarf, and their only child, Bhim. Chandar's hair was still jet-black, but there was a tiredness around his eyes that betrayed the passing of twenty years. His English was still terrible (he said the same about Marchant's Hindi), but the
chapattis
were as good as ever, and they were soon reminiscing about the baby cobra Chandar had once caught in the compost heap, the rides around the lawn on the handlebars of his ancient Hero bicycle, and the Christmas when he drank too much Bagpiper and forgot to cook the turkey.

Marchant asked about his old family house next door, once one of the grandest in Chattapur, a village seven miles south of New Delhi. His mother had insisted on living off the high commission compound because of the traffic pollution in the centre of the city, even though it had meant a hazardous daily commute for his father in an Ambassador. He knew, too, that his mother would never have made that fateful drive from Chanakyapuri if they had been living in the compound like everyone else.

According to Bhim, who translated his father's words into near-perfect English, the house had stood empty for a year after the Marchants left, then the landlord's only son, an IT graduate, had returned from California and moved in with another man. The landlord, a retired army colonel, discovered his prodigal son was gay, chucked him and his boyfriend out, and had let the house stand empty ever since as a symbol of his family's shame. A smile crept onto the boy's face when he relayed the last detail. Chandar had moved around Chattapur, cooking his famous chicken curry for various expats, and was now working for a young Dutch family who, by chance, had moved into the house next door.

‘But my father says he will always remember working for Marchant Sahib,' Bhim said. There was a pause in the conversation as Marchant looked around the tiny room, listening to the clatter of the water cooler by the window, the Bollywood film music coming from the oversized radio-tape recorder in the corner. ‘Is sir still alive?' Bhim asked, with a sensitivity that suggested he already knew the answer.

‘No, he's not,' Marchant said. ‘He died two months ago.'

There was no need for Bhim to translate. Chandar bowed his head for a few moments, staring at the dusty concrete floor, and then started talking animatedly to his wife, who went over to the
charpoy
and pulled out a metal trunk from underneath it. Marchant watched as she opened the trunk lid and rummaged around inside. A moment later, she handed Chandar a handwritten letter, which he looked at for a token moment, as if reading it, and then passed to his son.

‘My father received a letter from Ramachandran Nair, your father's driver. He used to live here. Now he is back in Kerala, his home place.'

Marchant remembered the driver's name – they used to call him Raman – but he couldn't picture his face. Bhim started reading the letter, his father barking incongruously fierce instructions at him in a way that Marchant suddenly recalled. His memories of Chandar were faint, but he could still remember that sense of contrast: one moment the subservient cook in the company of his father and guests, the next bossing everyone around in the kitchen, where Chandar was king.

‘Ramachandran says your father visited him last year, in the monsoon,' Bhim said, his eyes scanning down the letter. Marchant felt an imperceptible drying of his mouth. Suddenly there was a new connection between this place he was in and the past of twenty years ago, like the ignition sparking in his father's old Lagonda.

‘Does he say why my father was there?' Marchant asked.

There was another pause as Bhim carried on reading.

‘He says he was worried about Marchant Sahib. He looked very tired. He didn't eat his wife's curry. “I asked him why he had come to Kerala”' – Bhim was translating directly from the letter now – ‘“and he told me he had come on family business.”'

Marchant smiled to himself. His father would never have disclosed what he was doing, of course, even to his faithful old driver. He had heard the words ‘family business' more than once in his childhood, an expression that his father's generation had used whenever they were referring to state secrets.