Dirty Little Secret (2 page)

Taking the phone out of the bag, Dhar dialled 999 and held the receiver up to the Russian’s mouth. With his other hand, he pressed the barrel of the gun hard against the man’s temple. Afterwards, he would drag his body back to the boat and hide it in the shadows.

‘Talk,’ he ordered, cocking the gun. Dhar’s head was clear, purged of twins. ‘You’ve had a fall, hurt your left leg.’ He pointed the gun at the man’s thigh and fired. ‘And now you need help.’

Daniel Marchant sat on the rock, throwing stones into Southampton Water. It was past midnight, and he still didn’t have a strategy. Lakshmi Meena was asleep in the room behind him. To his left and right, a high green steel fence, topped with barbed wire, marked the perimeter of Fort Monckton, MI6’s training centre at the tip of the Gosport peninsula.

Marchant was on a small private beach in front of the Fort’s accommodation block. Two old cannon and a row of dark inlets in the sea-facing wall were a reminder of the Fort’s role in the Napoleonic Wars, while an MoD sign saying
NO LANDING ON THE FORESHORE
hinted at its current purpose. The accommodation was usually occupied by MI6’s most recent recruits, fresh-faced graduates on the Intelligence Officers’ New Entry Course, but the latest batch had left for a two-week stint in Helmand station, and the rooms were empty.

He glanced up at the row of white sash windows, checking that there wasn’t a light on in his room. It was a warm night, and he had tried to sleep with the window open, but sleep had never come. How could it, after what he’d just been through? A few hours earlier he had nearly died in a plane with Salim Dhar, and he knew he wouldn’t be thanked for it. Never mind that he had thwarted one of the most audacious terrorist attacks ever mounted against mainland Britain.

And now this. He had already woken Lakshmi once to talk to her about the letter in his hands, but he hadn’t been able to share its contents. Perhaps it was training. A genuine trust had built up between them over the past few weeks, a rapport that was edging towards something stronger, but she was still a CIA officer, although he suspected not for much longer. She was too honest, too nuanced for Langley. And she had become too closely associated with him.

But he knew it was more than training. As long as the contents of the letter remained known only to him, he could discount them, imagine they weren’t real. He read them again, holding the paper up in the moonlight.

An hour earlier, while Lakshmi was sleeping, he had tried to call his Chief, Marcus Fielding, but the line was busy. He never liked leaving messages. He would call again when he had gathered his thoughts. Not for the first time, Marchant was struck by the solitude of his trade. He threw another stone towards the sea, harder this time. It missed the water and ricocheted between rocks like a maverick pinball.

Ian Denton had been good to him over the years, shared his distrust of America. And he was different from the smooth set at MI6, an outsider: a quiet northerner from Hull. But his awkward stabs at camaraderie at the terrace bar, the whispered words of encouragement in the corridor – they had all been a pack of lies.

‘Are you OK down there?’ It was Lakshmi, who had appeared at the bottom of the stone steps down to the beach, wearing an oversized dressing gown. Her left wrist was in plaster. Marchant knew as soon as he saw her that this time he would reveal what was in the letter. He understood that look in her eyes, the weariness of isolation. The CIA was about to throw the book at her for failing to bring him in. She had crossed the divide, reached out to a fellow traveller. Fielding had promised Marchant that his own job was safe, but the Americans were after Lakshmi’s head, too. And they would get what they wanted, sooner or later. They always did.

He held Lakshmi’s gaze and then looked at the stone in his hands, rubbing it between finger and thumb. If only he could break free, leave the distrust behind.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said.

‘You were going to share something earlier,’ Lakshmi said, walking over to him. Her feet were bare except for ankle chains, which tinkled like tiny bells as she crossed the stony beach. The sound brought back childhood memories of India, Marchant’s
ayah
approaching across the marble floor with sweet
jalebi
from Chandni Chowk.

‘Maybe if you told me, you might get some rest,’ she continued, standing beside him now, tightening the cord on her dressing gown as she shivered in a gust of wind. She rested her hand on Marchant’s neck and began to work the tight muscles.

Marchant breathed in deeply. There was no point being enigmatic. If he was going to tell her, he would be blunt about it. ‘The Russians have got an asset high up in MI6,’ he began, raising a hand up to hers. ‘Very high.’ He needed to feel her warmth. Or was it to stop her slipping him thirty pieces of silver? It was the first time he had told tales out of school.

‘I thought he’d been killed.’ Lakshmi’s tone sounded casual, which annoyed Marchant, even though he knew it was unintentional. She was referring to Hugo Prentice, his close friend, fellow field officer and mentor in MI6. Prentice had been accused by the Poles of working for Moscow, and was gunned down in front of Marchant on the streets of London. The Americans had been only too ready to believe that he was a traitor. For Fielding and Marchant, it had been harder to dismiss him so quickly.

‘It wasn’t Hugo. None of us wanted to believe it was him, but we did. We forced ourselves, recalibrated our pasts. Now it turns out it wasn’t him after all.’

‘And that makes you mad.’

‘It makes me feel cheap, sordid. Hugo was a family friend. Close to my father. He looked out for me.’

‘Perhaps now you can remember him as he was, without the guilt.’

Marchant let his hand drop, and picked up another stone. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me who the traitor is?’

‘I can’t do that, Dan,’ she said, ignoring his flippant tone. ‘You’ve got a career to return to. You’re a hero, remember? The man who talked Salim Dhar out of killing thousands.’

Marchant laughed. Sometimes Americans saw things in such black and white: heroes and villains, good and evil. His world wasn’t like that. ‘Try telling that to Langley. To James Spiro. I was in the plane that shot down a US jet.’

‘Spiro won’t listen to me.’

‘Are you definitely leaving the Agency?’

‘I’ve got no choice.’

‘Then there’s no harm telling you who the traitor is.’

This time Lakshmi returned his smile and sat down on the rocks next to him, close, her injured wrist slung playfully over his knees. ‘Let me guess, now. Marcus Fielding?’

They laughed together, the tension gone for a moment, a sudden brightness in her tired eyes that gave him hope: for them, the lives they had chosen. The thought of Fielding, Chief of MI6, being anything other than loyal was risible, they both knew that. Known as the Vicar, Fielding was the one constant in Marchant’s life. Lakshmi liked him, too. She had met him a couple of times, once at the Chelsea Physic Garden, and had warmed to his professorial ways. He had even visited her in hospital, brought her honey mangoes from Pakistan and Ecuadorian roses.

‘It’s true,’ Marchant said. ‘He’s defected to the Royal Horticultural Society – to head up their fight against moles.’

Lakshmi smiled again and fell silent, running her front teeth over her lower lip. They both knew better than to fall under Fielding’s avuncular spell. A few weeks earlier in Madurai he had turned Lakshmi and Marchant against each other for his own cold purposes, and he would gladly do so again if circumstances required it.

‘Spiro once told me that he thought you were a traitor,’ she said, her good hand sliding up Marchant’s leg, working the thigh muscles.

‘Sounds like Spiro – the guy thinks he’s James Jesus Angleton. Spiro also suspected my father for years, particularly when he was tipped for the top. I don’t think the CIA ever really got over Kim Philby.’

‘Don’t tell me who it is, Dan.’ Lakshmi was serious now, almost whispering, her sweet breath warm on his neck, her hand squeezing the top of his thigh. ‘You’ve got to go on, continue the fight. No one can stop Salim Dhar except you.’

But Marchant was no longer listening. His phone was vibrating, and there was only one person who rang him at this time of night: Fielding. He stood up to take the call, instinctively turning away from Lakshmi as if to shake off their intimacy, worried he had been caught.

‘It’s Paul here,’ the voice said. ‘Paul Myers.’

‘Paul? How are you doing?’ Marchant asked, relieved, walking down the beach. He turned and waved a hand of reassurance at Lakshmi, but he could already feel the shutters coming down, protocol kicking in. Myers had been injured when Dhar had bombed GCHQ’s headquarters in Cheltenham after downing the US jet. The bomb was meant to have been dirty, but Marchant had talked Dhar out of it.

‘Bit of a headache. Ears still ringing. But I’m back at my desk. Well, working from home. Spent the afternoon at A&E. The doc told me to stay away from GCHQ for a while.’

‘It could have been worse, trust me.’ Marchant felt bad that he hadn’t been to visit Myers, but Fielding had insisted on him staying at the Fort in the aftermath of the attack.

‘So I gather. I suppose I should be thanking you.’

‘Any time. What’s up?’

‘I couldn’t help listening in on the crash zone. I should have been resting, but you know how it is.’

Marchant knew exactly how it was. Myers lived and breathed for chatter, drawing it down from the ether with the dedication of a drug addict. Intercepts, voice-recognition, black-bag cryptanalysis, wiretaps, asymmetric key algorithms: he was a privacy kleptomaniac. The more measures people took to ensure their communications were private, the more Myers wanted to listen in. If Myers hadn’t been working for GCHQ, he would still have found a way to eavesdrop.

‘I picked up something just now that I thought you should know about,’ he continued.

‘About the crash?’ Marchant asked, glancing back at Lakshmi, who was heading up the steps to their room. Once again she had got under his skin, come too close when he should have been focusing elsewhere.

‘Maybe.’

According to Fielding, a trawler had been found with its autopilot on, drifting west in the Bristol Channel with three dead Russians on board. There had been no sign of Dhar, which troubled Marchant. He also remembered counting four crew when he had been in the sea with Dhar.

‘A Search and Rescue Sea King from RAF Chivenor was called out a few minutes ago. A man rang in from the coast, near Quantoxhead. Said he’d fallen down a cliff on the way home from the pub at Kilve. I was listening in on the call. He sounded in a lot of pain. And drunk.’

‘It’s the weekend, isn’t it?’ Marchant knew Myers was one of the best analysts at GCHQ, but this time he wondered if he had been on the beer too. Marchant didn’t blame him. He had been lucky to survive the bomb blast.

‘He also sounded Russian.’

Marcus Fielding was surprised to see the lean figure of Ian Denton already in position at the long coffin-shaped table, talking quietly with the Foreign Secretary. Less surprising was the sight of Harriet Armstrong, his opposite number at MI5, chatting with the Prime Minister at the far end of the airless conference room. She had always been good at the politics. As he watched them, silhouetted against a flickering mosaic of flat TV screens, the thought crossed Fielding’s mind that this might be his last COBRA meeting.

A part of him flinched at the idea. He wasn’t ready to step back from the fray. There was still so much to do, battles to be won, not just in the war on terror but in Whitehall. He knew he should be more like Armstrong and Denton, sweet-talking the politicians, but he had always preferred dealing with field agents rather than Foreign Secretaries. He was a Chief who liked to stay south of the river.

If this was to be his final COBRA, he wouldn’t miss the dimly lit Cabinet Office room with its low ceiling and brown curtains along one wall. It was past 1 a.m., but time was meaningless here. Night didn’t follow day. Instead, the room was trapped in a penumbral stasis. The air conditioning was too warm, the coffee cold. As for the meetings, they had become increasingly ineffective, a forum for political posturing rather than swift operational responses. That was why he liked to meet privately beforehand with the heads of MI5, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre and the Defence Intelligence Staff, away from ambitious ministers with their own agendas. Only this time, they had quietly demurred.

Fielding took his seat, nodding at the Director of GCHQ. It wasn’t reciprocated. Dhar’s bomb might not have been dirty, but it had still knocked some sugar off ‘the doughnut’, as GCHQ’s Cheltenham premises were known. Fielding felt a knot begin to tighten in his lower lumbar. Tonight wasn’t the moment for lying supine on the floor, as he was prone to do when his back played up. He was prepared for the meeting to be tense. For many of those gathered around the table, MI6 was in the dock. He also knew that he could never reveal the one piece of intelligence that might save his career.

‘Welcome, everyone,’ the Prime Minister began, looking down the room. His jacket was off, his tone businesslike. No small talk. ‘Marcus, I think it’s best if we start with you?’ In other words, Fielding thought, you got us into this Christawful mess, you can get us out of it.

‘The UK threat level remains at critical,’ Fielding began, glancing at Armstrong, who cast her eyes down at the printed agenda. ‘And in our opinion it should remain so. As we know, yesterday’s attacks on the Royal International Air Tattoo at Fairford, where an F-22 Raptor was destroyed, and on GCHQ at Cheltenham, were carried out by Salim Dhar in a Russian SU-25 fighter jet. Although we think it was partly an act of proxy terrorism on behalf of the Russians, Dhar was essentially operating on his own.’