Dead Spy Running (2 page)

‘Hot one,' Marchant said. The man glanced at him nervously and looked ahead again, wiping his thick eyebrows with the back of his hand. ‘Did you see that last drinks station?' Marchant continued. ‘Crazy. Shouldn't have to queue for water, not on a day like this.' Marchant smiled at the man, nodding towards his belt. Inside, his stomach turned. He was right. ‘Couldn't have one of yours, could I?'

‘Who are you?' the man said aggressively. His accent was thick, from India: another cell from the subcontinent. Marchant knew immediately there would be consequences, for him, for his father, but they would have to wait.

‘No problem. Any idea who that is?' Marchant gestured at the US Ambassador. ‘Brought his own fan club with him.'

‘Please, stay away,' the man said.

The two of them ran on in silence. Marchant's mind was racing. Post 7/7, it was bulky clothing that had attracted attention. Here was a man wearing explosives on the outside, and it was so bloody bold no one had noticed. The pouches must be wired together inside the belt, he thought. But if the man was a running bomb, why hadn't he blown himself up by now? Why was he warning him to stay away? And if his target was the Ambassador, he could easily have bunched in close to him and his babysitters and taken them all out before now.

He remembered the last suicide bomber he had seen, in Mogadishu. They had been talking in the marketplace, making nervous progress. Then a phone rang. Twice. Marchant had run for his life. The man's head was found on the corrugated-iron roof of a nearby café. The bomber hadn't wanted to die, Marchant was sure of that. Afterwards, in the British Embassy bar, as his hand shook the Johnnie Walker out of his glass, he kept telling himself, over and over, that the bomber had not wanted to die. It had made it easier to understand. The handler knew it too, which is why he had detonated the bomb himself.

This time, he had to keep his man talking, establish the method of detonation, hope the mobile networks would be too busy for a phone call from a third party. Like the bomber in Mogadishu, this man was also not a volunteer. He had been forced to wear the belt. It was happening more and more these days: genuine suicide bombers were becoming hard to find. Trust your gut feeling, his father had said.

‘That watch you've got there,' Marchant said. ‘GPS?'

‘Sat-Runner,' the man replied. Better, Marchant thought, much better; a gear and gadgets man.

‘Useful piece of kit.'

The man nodded. Then the GPS beeped. Both of them looked at it. ‘Please, you must go,' the man said to Marchant. They weren't the words of a suicide bomber hoping to take as many people with him as he could.

‘Why's it beeping?' Marchant asked, recalculating the risk to himself, to others. His lungs tightened, making words difficult. ‘Does it do that when you slow down, when your pace drops?' he asked, trying to remember how Leila had explained it, cursing himself for not showing more interest at the time.

The man nodded. He had been coerced into this, Marchant repeated to himself, which meant that he could be talked out of it.

‘Then what?' Marchant glanced down at the belt again.

‘Can you help me?' They looked at each other for a moment, gauging the fear in each other's eyes.

‘I can try. What's your name?'

‘Pradeep.'

‘Keep it going, Pradeep. You're doing fine. Just fine. Don't go anywhere. I'm coming straight back.'

Pradeep glanced over his shoulder, stumbling again, as Marchant dropped back down the field to search for Leila, but he couldn't see her in the crowd. How much faster than her had he been running? He slowed up some more, looking at everyone who overtook him. He shouldn't have left her, he knew that now. There were too many people, too much noise.

Above him the helicopters circled low again, drowning out the jazz band playing on the roof of a pub. Children by the roadside cheered, holding out bags of sweets. Stout women from St John's Ambulance were offering outstretched hands of Vaseline. And then he spotted her, over on the far side of the road, hidden behind a small group of club runners. He cut across the flow of people to join her, almost tripping on the heels of another runner. His legs were tiring, more than they should have been at this stage of the race. He was desperate for more water, too.

‘Leila, we've got a problem,' he said, short of breath. ‘A big problem.'

‘Where have you been? I couldn't see you anywhere.'

In between swigs from her drinking bottle, he told her about the GPS, and how he thought it was linked in some way to the pouches around Pradeep's waist, which he was now convinced contained explosives – enough to kill dozens of people if he was in a tightly bunched group. He knew how he sounded: a has-been desperate to prove himself in the field.

‘My guess is, if he drops below a certain pace, the isotonics will blow,' he added.

‘Daniel…'

Leila's face told him she was struggling to comprehend the situation, trying to decide whether his reading of it was deluded or credible. She was momentarily tearful.

‘You've got to leave this to others,' she pleaded. ‘You must. You're no longer…I need to make a call,' she said, removing her mobile phone from a pocket at the back of her running shorts.

‘You won't get a signal,' Marchant said, glancing at the phone. With its stubby, inch-long aerial, the unit looked very familiar.

She held the phone in front of her, tripping and grabbing at Marchant's arm for support.

‘Who are you ringing? MI5? The networks will be congested,' he said. ‘Too many people.'

She looked at him again, her face suddenly professional, drained of all emotion, and then she dialled.

‘It's a TETRA handset,' she said coldly. The secure encrypted digital network used by the emergency and security services was one of the perks Marchant missed. ‘They're not answering. Daniel, please. This is not your responsibility, not mine. If what you say is true, it's one for MI5, Anti-Terrorism Command. We must leave it to them.'

Marchant looked at the road ahead, and reckoned he knew where the runner was, give or take a few hundred people. ‘I've got him talking. He doesn't want to go through with it.'

Leila hesitated, weighing up the options. Had she conceded he might have a role to play? She looked at him again, swallowing hard.

‘OK. If you take my phone, I'll drop out, find a phonebox and tell Five about the situation. Once the networks have been knocked out, I'll give you a call on TETRA.'

Marchant was thinking fast now, like he used to in the field. The head of station in Nairobi had once predicted that a glittering career stretched ahead of him; he might even follow his father to the top if he quit the whisky and womanising. Next time they met, Marchant was suspended and burying his father.

‘Alert MI5. I'll stay with him,' he said, trying not to think about the funeral in the Cotswold frost, how they had treated his father. ‘My guess is we can't pull him off the course, even if he keeps running. Deviating from waypoints could trigger the belt too.'

‘Daniel, you shouldn't be doing this.'

‘I know.' He also knew there weren't many alternatives. If they both stopped, it would be almost impossible to find the bomber again. ‘I could tell the Americans. The Ambassador's got company, and I think they're wired.' Leila glanced at him for a moment. They were both reluctant to involve the Secret Service, who didn't always play by the same rules as everyone else. ‘The Ambassador
is
the target here?' he asked.

‘He must be.'

Marchant had missed the adrenalin, but it was draining his energy, too. Lactic acid was building in his legs, weighing them down like lead.

‘Here,' Leila said, holding out the phone. Their eyes met.

‘No blues and twos, nothing to alert him, OK?' he said, taking the handset. He was increasingly short of breath. ‘Someone else might have their finger on the button. It's happened to me once before.'

‘I know,' she said. ‘Keep your distance from him.'

‘Who gave you this?' he asked, looking at the handset again. It was a Motorola MTH800. ‘Just like my old one.'

‘Services. Mine was knackered. If you don't hear from me in fifteen minutes, try calling the office.' She paused. ‘Speed-dial 1. They'll find me.'

Marchant glanced back at Leila as she pulled up on the side of the road, feigning a hamstring injury. She looked up at him, and for a moment he wondered if she might never make the call, leaving him to run on in his imaginary world of bombers and belts.

He knew she had tried to walk away from what they had together – God, how they had both tried – but each time one of them had relented. It wasn't like him at all. For the first time in his life, a woman had got under his skin. Now they might be at the heart of a major security incident, and his involvement wouldn't do her career any favours. Suspicion still hung over the Marchant family like a poisoned fog.

She gave a small wave and disappeared in the sea of runners.

It took ten minutes for Marchant to find Pradeep again. His head was bowed, his feet scuffing the road, running like a drunken tramp. The American Ambassador was in the group immediately ahead of him, still with company. He was moving strongly, chest out, no signs of tiredness. Worryingly, the field seemed to be tightly bunched around Pradeep, not as spread out as it was further back. And then Marchant saw the reason why: up ahead, just beyond the Ambassador, was an official pacemaker, running with a sign above him: eight minutes a mile. Stick with him and the marathon was yours for three hours thirty minutes. Marchant looked at Pradeep again, and feared that he didn't have long, maybe ten minutes at most.

‘Pradeep? It's me. You're doing great.'

‘It's too late.'

‘Why?'

‘I'm so tired, too weak.'

‘Do you want to stop, take a rest?' Marchant said, bluffing. One final check, just to reassure himself about the GPS.

Pradeep's glance at his belt gave him his answer. He was right.

‘How about we keep running, but turn off the course, up here, say, right at the pub?'

Pradeep shook his head.

‘Is the marathon route programmed into your GPS, your Sat-Runner?' Marchant asked. That was something else his father had told him, shortly after he'd joined the Service: never ask a question you don't know the answer to.

Pradeep didn't respond. He was really struggling now, continually losing his footing. Marchant looked at his frame, lean and sinewy, and thought that in other circumstances he would be a natural marathon runner. No doubt that was why he had been chosen. But the mental pressure on Pradeep was sapping every ounce of his energy. Marchant could feel them slowing moments before the GPS beeped.

‘Come on, Pradeep, we're going to get through this,' Marchant said, trying to pick up the pace again. They had to keep running until Leila rang. She would have an answer.

‘Two beeps and we're gone,' Pradeep replied, suddenly grinning, almost laughing. Marchant realised Pradeep was losing control. ‘You don't understand, my friend,' he continued. ‘The American. I can't leave him.'

‘The Ambassador?'

Marchant looked up at Turner Munroe, who was five yards in front of him. The Ambassador checked his watch, and for the first time Marchant noticed that its bulky design was identical to Pradeep's.

‘Eight minutes a mile. He always runs the same,' said Pradeep, suddenly sounding like a trainer admiring one of his charges.

‘Three hours thirty,' Marchant said. ‘He's running a 3.30.'

‘One hour forty.'

‘What?'

‘He reaches Tower Bridge after one hour forty minutes.'

‘And?'

Pradeep smiled again, tears welling now. They had been running for one hour thirty minutes. Marchant desperately wanted Leila to ring, more than when they had first tried to split up, more than after their first date at the Fort, MI6's training centre in Gosport. He looked at the phone in his hand and saw that the commercial networks had been knocked out. Should he try ringing her? The office would be surprised to hear his voice, but she would have told them and they would patch him through to wherever she was. He lifted his head, looked around, and for a moment he thought he saw his father running ahead of him, trundling along at a surprising speed for his age.

He blinked, wiping the sweat away from his eyes, and looked again at the handset. He had to stay on top of this: Pradeep was wearing a belt of explosives linked in some way to the GPS receiver on his wrist. He seemed to be an unwilling participant, rather than a suicide bomber. If he slowed down, the explosives would detonate: ditto if he took any deviation from the marathon course, the waypoints for which had been entered into his GPS. And for some reason it seemed that Pradeep had to stay close to the Ambassador, possibly because of a similar GPS receiver on
his
wrist.

Suddenly Leila's TETRA phone was vibrating in his hand. A couple of runners ahead of him glanced around at the sound of the loud ringtone.

‘Leila?' he said, hearing the panic rise in his own voice. He had to remain calm.

‘Did you try ringing me?' she asked.

‘No.'

‘Don't, OK?' she insisted. ‘Please. Just don't. There's some sort of problem with TETRA. Are you still with him?'

‘Yes.' Marchant glanced across at Pradeep, managed a smile, then pulled back a few yards, out of earshot.

‘Listen very carefully,' Leila was saying. ‘I'm on the grid at Thames House. MI5 picked up someone in Greenwich and have been sweating him all morning. You've got to get the GPS off the Ambassador's wrist.'

‘Why?'

‘It's just like you said. The Asian guy's GPS receiver is linked to his belt using Bluetooth. Only we think the belt can be triggered by Munroe's GPS too.'

‘If Munroe drops off the pace as well, you mean,' Marchant said.

‘Yes.' Marchant thought of Pradeep's words, how he said he couldn't leave the Ambassador. ‘And maybe if the link between the two GPSs is broken, if they're separated,' Leila added. ‘Technical's working on the permutations now.'

Marchant could hear other people in the background. He imagined the scene at Thames House, MI5's headquarters, as news of the situation spread and increasingly senior people arrived, duty officer giving way to Harriet Armstrong, MI5's Director General, who had helped to hound his father out of office. Leila would be consulted less and less, particularly once his own involvement had become clear. It was a nightmare for MI5: having to rely on someone from MI6, and a discredited case officer, too. It would confirm their worst suspicions about their rivals south of the river. And then the US Secret Service would try to take over, reigniting old turf wars.

‘What about the Americans?' Marchant asked. ‘Are they running the show now?'

‘Not yet. They wanted to lift Munroe and for us to escort the bomber down a side road, away from the crowds, but the risk of collaterals is too high. We don't know how quickly the belt might be triggered by removing Munroe.'

‘So I get to wear the Ambassador's GPS, then what?'

Leila paused. ‘You both keep running while Cheltenham tries to intercept the satellite signals.'

‘Tries?'

‘They're keen to pull you out, Daniel, put someone else in.'

‘I bet they are.'

‘But it's going to take time, and we haven't got any.'

‘Pradeep's knackered.'

‘I know. We've got a feed from the BBC helicopter above you now.'

Marchant had forgotten about it, hovering high above him. So Armstrong could see them, he thought. He could never forgive what she and others in MI5 had done to his father. Stephen Marchant was a man who had lived and breathed for the Service, only to be accused, at the pinnacle of his career, of the very thing he had always despised in others. Some people died of a broken heart; his father had died of shame, within weeks of being forced to retire as Chief. There was nothing more important to his father than loyalty. Even the best assets he had recruited, the ones who made his reputation in Delhi, Moscow, Washington, Paris, had filled him with a deep loathing for mankind and its willingness to betray.

‘Don't Munroe's babysitters have a radio link?' Marchant asked. Things might become easier for him and Leila after this; the family's reputation might be restored; he might get his old job back.

‘They're linked to each other,' Leila replied, ‘not to the outside world.'

‘That figures. Is there a code for this yet? Something to reassure the Ambassador I'm not from Albania when I relieve him of his watch.'

‘Tell them it's a Defcon Five. Try “Operation Kratos” if that doesn't work. Once you've got the GPS, persuade Munroe to leave the course as soon as possible. He must be out of there before Tower Bridge.'

‘What is it with the bridge?' Marchant asked, remembering Pradeep's words.

‘It's where the biggest crowds are, apart from the finish. We're trying to clear the area now. Bomb disposal are on the way. We've got blues assembling in all the back streets, from you to Tower Bridge.'

The line suddenly dropped. There was not much more to say. Marchant moved up to join Pradeep again.

He had some jelly beans on board for the final few miles, but he decided to pull the bag out from his pocket now and offer them to Pradeep, who visibly rallied at the sight of them.

‘Beats the gels,' Marchant said, taking a couple himself after Pradeep had grabbed a desperate handful. ‘I'm going to talk to the Ambassador, then I'm coming back,' Marchant said. ‘It's going to be OK. I promise.
Sab theek ho jayega, Pradeep.
Everything's going to be fine.'

Marchant hoped his rusty Hindi had reassured Pradeep as he moved up towards the Ambassador. He knew a bit about Turner Munroe, who had arrived in London six months ago. He was a hawk, best known for his outspoken views on Iran, where he favoured regime change by military intervention. And he had fought in the first Gulf War, serving with distinction. Marchant now knew that he was also a fitness fanatic, who liked to run with an iPod.

Experience had taught Marchant to stick to protocol when dealing with the Americans (it reduced the chances of being shot), so he approached the Ambassador's outriders first. When he explained that they were in the midst of a critical, Defcon Five incident, they asked him for some ID, as Marchant knew they would. They finally agreed to let him approach the Ambassador when he name-checked one of his old CIA contacts who was still based in London, but only after they had briefed their boss.

‘How you doing?' Munroe asked, taking an earpiece out of his right ear. Marchant swore he was listening to Bruce Springsteen. ‘Tell me you're kidding about the Defcon Five.'

‘No, sir, I'm afraid it's true,' Marchant said, knowing Munroe would appreciate the ‘sir'.

‘You realise I've never run a 3.30 before? Boston: 3.35.10, Chicago: 3.32.20. Right now I'm heading for 3.29.30, and you're telling me to quit?'

‘You might never be able to run again if you hang around here,' Marchant said.

‘Is that so?' Munroe said sarcastically. Marchant glanced at one of the sweating Security Service officers, who was nodding towards the side of the road.

‘Sir, we need to break off,' the officer said, moving alongside the Ambassador. At the same time, his colleague closed in on the far side.

‘But first I need your Sat-Runner,' Marchant said.

‘Am I being mugged here?' Munroe said. ‘That's what it feels like. Mugged on the London Marathon. Can you believe it?'

‘I really need the GPS,' Marchant said, as the Ambassador's babysitters began to ease him across the road. ‘And please don't slow down.'

Munroe looked at him as he undid the strap and handed the receiver over. ‘3.29.30. A PB was on the cards here, never mind the heat. Somebody's going to pay for this.'

He watched as Munroe was almost lifted to the kerb, where he stopped, reluctantly. Then Marchant strapped the GPS to his own wrist. Pradeep was now ahead of them, glancing anxiously over his shoulder.

‘We're in this together now,' Marchant said, coming up on Pradeep's shoulder and showing him his wrist.