Dirty Little Secret (18 page)

‘She’s still sleeping,’ Marchant said as he came out to join Jean-Baptiste and Florianne.

‘Clémence is on her way back from the shops now,’ Jean-Baptiste said. ‘She won’t be long.’

‘Do you want a swim while we wait?’ Florianne offered, a barking Pomeranian at her feet. After their initial exchange in English, she had reverted to French. ‘The boys are down there.’ Her eyes were kind, but hinted at sadness too.

‘I’ll stay with Lakshmi,’ Marchant said.

‘I can sit with her, it’s not a problem.’

‘It’s OK. Thank you.’

There was a pause in the conversation as Florianne took a drag on her cigarette. Marchant glanced around at the surrounding countryside. Apart from the farm opposite, there were no other houses in the immediate area, just flat fields dotted with white Normandy cattle.

‘Here she is now,’ Jean-Baptiste said as a car appeared at the far end of the track. The Pomeranian began to bark.

Ten minutes later, Marchant was sitting with Clémence beside the bed in the barn, talking to Lakshmi. She was in a bad way, drifting in and out of sleep.

‘Was she on any medication for her injury?’ Clémence asked, taking Lakshmi’s pulse on her good wrist. Clémence was as Marchant remembered: fragile and intense, beautiful with her short hair, tired around the eyes. She didn’t joke like Jean-Baptiste, and often Marchant felt guilty in her company for not taking life seriously enough. At times it seemed she was carrying all the world’s troubles – poverty, famine, disease – on her slim shoulders.

‘I think so. Painkillers.’

‘The heart rate is high and her pupils are presenting symptoms of withdrawal. I would not expect this with ordinary pain relief. Does she have any history of drug abuse?’

‘Lakshmi?’ he asked, as a wave of adrenaline surged through him. It was one of those moments when he realised how little he knew about her. He suddenly felt vulnerable, exposed. What else didn’t he know? Marchant had come across one or two agents in MI6 and the CIA with drug habits, but Lakshmi was too conscientious, too industrious.

‘What is the English expression, Dan?’ Clémence asked.

‘Cold turkey?’

‘This is her condition. She is having chills, muscle cramps, shivers. You need to run a hot bath for her, and then talk. Through the night if necessary. I don’t want to prescribe anything until I know more.’

‘She got cold, she had to swim out to the boat when we left England,’ Marchant said. ‘Maybe she has hypothermia?’

But he knew it wasn’t that. Her sweating legs at the Fort, the sudden mood swings, her euphoria on the phone; all along, he had told himself it was something else – her injured wrist, the cold sea – but he knew now it wasn’t. He had kept secrets from her – the name of the traitor in MI6, the reason he hadn’t killed Dhar – and she had withheld one from him.

Spiro always liked the final approach to Bagram air base. The Hindu Kush made for a spectacular backdrop that quickened the pulse, although he knew its rugged grandeur hid an ugly truth. Afghanistan had little to commend it as a country. Just ask the Soviets, who had built the original air base here after they had invaded the country in 1979. But he had always felt more on-message here than in Iraq when it came to fighting the war on terror.

Salim Dhar had been taken to Tor Jail, an interrogation facility on the air base that was set apart from the newly built main prison. If it hadn’t been for the Red Cross, Tor would have remained as anonymous as the CIA’s various black sites around the world, but its existence was now widely known. In Pashto, Tor translated as ‘black’, and ‘the black jail’ was run by the Joint Special Operations Command. (It was not to be confused with ‘the dark prison’, or ‘Salt Pit’, a former brick factory outside Kabul where detainees had once been held before being transferred to Guantánamo.)

Spiro knew the JSOC people well, and everyone had agreed that Tor was the best place to send Dhar, at least for the time being. The number of inmates at Bagram, known by its liberal detractors as Guantánamo’s evil twin, had tripled since the new president’s arrival to around two thousand. Guantánamo hadn’t taken any new prisoners since 2008, and the President had issued an executive order to close it within a year of his coming to office. Just like he had ordered the closure of the CIA’s black sites and an end to the Agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques.

Almost two years on, what had changed? Diddly squat. Guantánamo remained open, ditto some of the Agency’s more clandestine sites, and a revised Army Field Manual had become the new gold standard for interrogation. The manual was meant to draw a line under waterboarding, but Spiro could still do almost what he liked with Dhar, thanks to its ten-page ‘Appendix M’. Much of it was based on the same blueprint drawn up by SERE instructors at Guantánamo in 2002 – that lawless period after 9/11 when he and others in the CIA had been given a blank cheque from the bank of pain, as his old boss used to say.

Spiro glanced out of the window across the Shomali plain as his Gulfstream V taxi-ed off the long, 11,000-foot runway. Running south through the valley was the Panjshir river, taking its snowmelt towards Kabul forty miles away. It was here that the Taleban had fought with Ahmad Massoud’s Northern Alliance. Before that, it had been a battleground between the Afghan
mujahideen
and the Soviets. Abandoned tanks still littered the hillsides, and there were skull-and-crossbones signs everywhere warning of landmines. How long would it be before Bagram was abandoned? Ten years? Twenty?

He flicked through a well-thumbed copy of the manual. To keep the bleeding hearts in Washington happy, a military psychologist and a lawyer were meant to be present when he interrogated Dhar. He would see about that. Walling, face-slapping and stress positions were all still allowed under the new manual, provided they caused ‘shock’ rather than ‘pain’. It was an interesting distinction. The same was true of a technique called ‘separation’. Described in detail in Appendix M, it belied its innocuous-sounding name and could only be used on unlawful enemy combatants – those who weren’t protected by the Geneva Convention, in other words.

Solitary confinement, sensory deprivation and overload, the induction of fear and hopelessness, sleep deprivation, temperature manipulation and an approach called ‘pride-and-ego down’ – these were all part of separation. If everyone was born with a gift, this last one was Spiro’s. Taken to its limits, pride-and-ego down involved the ritual humiliation of a prisoner, beginning with calling their mothers and sisters whores and ending up forcing them to perform dog tricks on a leash while wearing female lingerie. Why was he so good at it? Spiro didn’t want to go there, he just knew how to make others feel suicidal.

Dhar was in separation now. He had been ever since he had arrived from the UK twenty-four hours earlier, confined in a small cell. Ideally he would be kept there until he died of old age, but Spiro was too curious. He had wanted to meet Dhar ever since he had nearly ruined his day in Delhi fifteen months earlier, when he had got too close to assassinating the US President. That’s not to say he would have minded if Dhar had been killed when he had been captured, but the Brits had been too careful with their triggers.

Just as Spiro was walking down the steps from his plane, taking in the heat of the Afghan afternoon, his phone rang. An unknown number. For a moment he thought it might be his wife. She still hadn’t made contact, and he had been unable to get in touch with any of her friends. A part of him feared where she might have gone, but he didn’t want to dwell on it.

‘Who’s this?’ he asked.

‘It’s Lakshmi.’

Lakshmi had waited until Daniel and Clémence had left the room before she sat up. Her lower legs were clammy with sweat, and her stomach was cramping. She knew what was going on. She had been here before. It would get worse for a few more days before the pain would slowly recede.

She thought she was about to throw up as she sat on the edge of the bed, listening. Outside she could hear Jean-Baptiste, Clémence and Daniel chatting together on the gravel. It was a risk making a call now, but she wouldn’t have a better opportunity. She needed to tell Spiro where she was. Sea water had killed her own phone, but Clémence’s was in front of her now, left behind on the wicker chair. She had forgotten it, and would be back as soon as she realised.

It was a sturdy old Nokia handset, and Lakshmi hoped it could make overseas calls. As she had drifted in and out of sleep, she had heard enough to establish that Clémence often worked abroad as a doctor. Holding the phone in her shaking hand, she dialled Spiro’s mobile, an American number that she knew by heart, and looked up at the high window. She could still hear talking, but only Daniel and Jean-Baptiste’s voices. Where was Clémence? Had she remembered her phone?

The number didn’t connect, so she tried again, worried that Clémence would return at any moment. She rose to her feet, steadying herself as she climbed onto the chair, and looked out of the window, taking care not to be seen. She felt dizzy, and thought she would fall. Jean-Baptiste and Daniel were standing ten feet away, their backs to her, talking in low voices. In the distance she could see Clémence walking across a lawn to a swimming pool. Unable to get a connection, she climbed off the chair, stood to one side of the window and tried to hear what Daniel was saying.

‘Fifty years on, the Americans still think MI6 is a Moscow outpost,’ she heard him protest. Then the wind changed direction, or he lowered his voice, because she missed the next few words, only hearing the end. ‘… Stephen Marchant, then they thought it was Marcus Fielding. And they’ve always had their doubts about me.’

‘Who hasn’t?’ Jean-Baptiste said, laughing.

‘The problem is, the Americans are right. There is a Russian asset in MI6, but it’s not me, it wasn’t my father and it’s not Marcus Fielding.’

‘Do you know who it is?’

Daniel seemed to hesitate, or perhaps she just couldn’t hear him any more. A part of her was jealous of Jean-Baptiste. Daniel had never quite been able to confide in her who the traitor was, as they had stood on the moonlit shore in front of Fort Monckton. ‘… Denton,’ Daniel was saying quietly. ‘He’s ousted Fielding, and the Americans are backing him. He gave them Dhar on a plate.’

Lakshmi felt a wave of disappointment. Daniel had got the wrong man. It couldn’t possibly be Denton. He was Spiro’s appointment, a little creepy, but his trusty lieutenant. She tried to keep listening, but the voices came and went on the wind.

‘You were right, they took Dhar to Bagram,’ she heard Jean-Baptiste say. What he said next made her think she was relapsing. ‘He won’t be much use to you there.’ What did he mean by that? ‘Not unless you want to learn first-hand about America’s enhanced interrogation techniques. But I guess MI6 knows about them already.’

‘Very funny. As if the DGSE has never tortured anyone.’

‘I didn’t say that. Sometimes we do crazy things, but I’m not sure we’d ever try to turn the world’s most-wanted terrorist.’

Lakshmi couldn’t be sure she had heard Jean-Baptiste correctly. She didn’t trust her own mental state, and the wind was distorting his words, but there was something about what he had said that made sense. Daniel hadn’t held back from killing Dhar in Russia because they were half-brothers. It was because he was trying to recruit him.

She dialled the number again, her fingers fumbling. This time the line connected.

‘Where are you?’ Spiro asked.

‘In France.’

‘With Marchant?’

She paused, trying to order her thoughts.

‘You sound compromised,’ Spiro continued.

‘I haven’t got long.’ The talking outside had stopped.

‘What’s he up to?’

‘He thinks Ian Denton is a Russian asset.’

‘Denton?’ She could hear the derision in his voice. ‘Has he been drinking? Talking to Fielding?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Can you give me your exact location?’

‘Northern France. We came by boat.’ She tried to listen again for Daniel and Jean-Baptiste’s voices, but heard nothing. ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘We can trace this call if you stay on the line.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Stay with him, find out what he’s planning to do.’

‘There’s something else. I’m not sure, but –’

‘What?’

She thought again about what she had heard. Maybe she had just imagined it. There was no time to explain. Daniel and Jean-Baptiste had been silent for too long.

‘I have to go.’

She hung up, and deleted the call history. It wasn’t enough to fully cover her tracks, but it would be sufficient if nobody was looking. After putting the phone back on the chair, she climbed into bed. She should have told Spiro that Daniel had tried to turn Dhar, but perhaps she didn’t believe it herself. A part of her wanted it to be true. However shocking the implications, it made her own betrayal of Daniel easier to bear, more justified. She was no longer doing it solely in response to blackmail.

If Daniel was helping Dhar with his
jihad
, she had no qualms about betraying him. Dhar had dedicated his life to destroying the country she called home. America had adopted her as one of its own, and she had promised to give something back. Wasn’t that why she had signed up to be a doctor? Why she had joined the Agency? Both men needed to be stopped.

She closed her eyes and fell into a troubled sleep, unaware of the figure standing in the doorway.

‘Are we ready?’ Spiro asked, striding into a small, well-lit room in Tor Jail. The brick walls were painted white and the floor was grey concrete. It was easy to clean, and disguised any bodily fluids that might have been missed. The room had no ceiling, just a metal grille. The jail was housed inside a vast hangar built by the Soviets as a workshop, and its span roof arced high above all the cells. It reminded Spiro of an old railway station, except that it echoed to the sound of pain rather than steam, and smelt strongly of excrement.

‘Yes, sir,’ an overweight Military Police guard replied, handing Spiro a clipboard. He noticed that the words ‘Fuck Islam’ had been tattooed across the knuckles of the guard’s hands. There was no military psychologist or lawyer present. Spiro had brought the interview forward without telling them. ‘The Hadgie’s had forty-eight hours of isolation, sleep-depped too.’