Read Dirty Little Secret Online
Authors: Jon Stock
Tags: #Action, #Adventure, #Mystery, #Suspense, #USA, #Thriller, #Spy, #Politics, #Terrorism, #(Retail)
‘Yes?’ Marchant said.
‘You’re using it, aren’t you?’
‘What?’
‘The voice-modulating hands-free. Your voice sounds different, a bit more than it should. Like –’
‘Listen, what have you found?’ Marchant told himself not to be so impatient with Myers, who was doing him a favour.
‘Picked up some Revolutionary Guard chatter about Bagram and Dhar. They’re definitely planning something, just like you thought.’
‘What are they saying?’ Marchant asked, his pulse picking up. He knew all about Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Formed after the Revolution in 1979, the Corps was separate from the regular army, which had been tainted by loyalty to the deposed Shah. Among other things, it specialised in asymmetric warfare and thumbing its nose at the West. If anyone could free Dhar, it would be them.
‘I need time to analyse it properly. A lot of it’s indirect, coded phrases. But you were right about them wanting Dhar out of there.’
‘Has anyone else heard this? The NSA?’
‘You are joking? The NSA rely on us for this sort of thing. Wouldn’t know a decent Farsi analyst if they saw one. Everyone thinks Mossad has the best Farsi desk, but we’re –’
‘What do you normally do with intel like this?’ Marchant said, cutting him off, thinking fast.
‘Pool it with the relevant Controllerates, run it past my line manager. Then she liaises with the Americans.’
‘Don’t share it with anyone, do you understand? No one.’
‘I can’t do that, Dan. You know that.’
Marchant was aware that there was only so much he could ask of Myers.
‘Can you at least sit on it? Twenty-four hours?’
Spiro felt the blood drain from his face as if someone had pulled a plug. He turned away, wondering whether to hit Dhar again, but his strength had left him. He didn’t like people talking about his wife, least of all Salim Dhar. Dammit, what did he know? What did anyone know?
To his colleagues at Langley, his thirty-year marriage to Linda must have seemed unusually strong. Perhaps it was because they had married when he was still in the Marines. As a military wife, Linda was used to putting on a brave face in public, never complaining.
Espionage was different. Most of the officers he knew at Langley were either divorced or separated. The long periods of travel, often at short notice, and an inability to offload at home after a hard day at the office put an intolerable strain on relationships.
But in fact Spiro’s marriage was far from strong. Right now, he didn’t even know if Linda was alive, let alone where she was.
The problems had started way back, when their disabled son had been born. Joseph had required a lot of looking after, which had taken its toll on their relationship. After years of dedicating herself to him while Spiro was away on tours, Linda had come to terms with her guilt and finally let others take over the burden of care. She was a changed woman, taking up photography, getting into shape at the gym. Spiro wished they had made the decision earlier. But then she fell in with a new crowd of people, younger than herself.
‘This is my husband, Jim,’ Linda had said one Saturday morning, after she had dragged him out for a coffee in Washington, DC, to meet a group of her photography friends. Busboys and Poets was at 14th and V, and it wasn’t his kind of place, but she had insisted on it. Students and chinstrokers ate Oaxaca omelettes with pico de gallo as they read on their Nooks and Kindles. The walls were adorned with images of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. At the far end, the high-ceilinged restaurant merged into a non-profit bookstore. Not his kind of place at all.
‘So what exactly do you do for the government?’ the only other man in the group had asked after Spiro had initiated some awkward smalltalk about the previous night’s Redskins game.
Spiro threw a glance at Linda. This hadn’t been part of the deal. She knew he never talked about his job in public. And she knew not to talk about it to others.
‘Come on, Jason, give the guy a break,’ she said. ‘It’s the weekend.’
‘It’s just that in my world that usually means the Feds.’
Everyone seemed to stop talking at once, not just at their table but in the whole café. Spiro glanced across at Linda, who didn’t quite seem sorry enough, and then turned back to Jason as he took a sip of his decaf coffee. He was holding the cup’s handle delicately between thumb and index finger, his ringed pinkie sticking out. For a second he wondered if Linda was having an affair with him. He had long, fair hair and soft, almost cherubic features – more like a poet than a photographer.
‘It’s OK, no big deal,’ Spiro said quietly. ‘I work for the Agency.’
Jason sat back and folded his arms, looking at the others with smug satisfaction.
‘What do you do? Run their black sites?’
‘Not quite. I try to keep our country safe.’
‘Right. By invading other countries. Remind me again about the intelligence that linked 9/11 with Saddam?’
‘Jason, Jim’s come along to see what we do,’ Linda said, a hand on Spiro’s arm. He withdrew it.
‘Well, I’m not interested in showing him,’ Jason said, finishing his coffee and standing up. ‘And I don’t think the rest of you should be either.’
The group watched in awkward silence as Jason walked out of the café.
‘I’m sorry, Jim. He can get a bit passionate,’ Linda said.
It was an unfortunate choice of words, but Spiro agreed to stay on. The remaining three women were easy on the eye, full of apologies and keen to tell him how pleased they were to have met his wife. He would look up Jason’s file later. It turned out the women had recently set up Photography for Peace, a Washington-based project to capture ‘whatever makes the world a more harmonious place’. They showed him some photos on an iPad, including a dove in flight and a peace sign formed by six hands, taken by Linda. She wasn’t yet a member, at least that’s what she told him on the drive home afterwards. She had wanted to clear it with him first.
A brief check revealed that Jason was a peace campaigner who had cut his teeth protesting against the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Since then he had been a staunch critic of Israel, opposed the war in Afghanistan and campaigned for a ‘new and progressive non-militaristic US foreign policy’. He was currently on an FBI watchlist, although not under surveillance.
Spiro and Linda had a row when he told her about Jason’s file. She was angry that he had checked up on him, and walked out of the house when he told her not to see him or her other friends again.
‘He’s just a frickin’ photographer,’ she had shouted. ‘You’re jealous, that’s what this is really all about. Jealous that someone might just be interested in me for a change.’
‘What do you know about my wife?’ Spiro asked, glancing at the cell door as he turned to face Dhar again. His voice was quieter now. At this point in the interrogation the psychological advantage should have been all his, but Dhar had turned the tables. The mother stunt appeared to have left him unmoved, and he knew about his wife. Spiro had no idea how, but he would find out.
‘We all carry secrets,’ Dhar said. ‘I was Stephen Marchant’s.’
‘Mine are strictly professional,’ Spiro lied. He needed to flush out more, establish what Dhar knew.
‘I know where she is.’
‘Of course you do.’ Spiro tried to play down his interest, but he realised how desperate he was to find out.
‘It could have been worse. She could have been a
jihadi
like me.’ A smile broke across Dhar’s bloodied lips. ‘But she chose to be a peace campaigner. At least nobody knows. None of your colleagues.’
Spiro didn’t hesitate to hit him again. He punched him hard in the face, and followed up with a knee to the groin, thinking of Jason in the café. Then he hit him in the solar plexus.
‘You’re lying!’ Spiro shouted, losing control of his immediate environment, breaking the first rule of interrogation.
Breathing heavily, Dhar spoke again.
‘My Palestinian brothers are grateful for her support. It takes a brave American to stand up to Israeli soldiers in villages like Bil’in. Ramallah is not for the faint-hearted.’
Spiro knew he was telling the truth. She had gone to the West Bank with her peacenik friends. Professionally, it would be humiliating if it ever became known at Langley. Damaging, too. He had yet to tell the vetters about his wife’s new social circle.
‘You might never see daylight again,’ Spiro said, walking towards the door.
‘One thing I don’t understand,’ Dhar whispered, raising his head in defiance. ‘Does this man Jason know she’s married?’
Marchant stood up and stretched. The night was warm, and moths were crashing against the light outside the stable block. Jean-Baptiste was talking on the computer, the idle chat of a tedious stakeout. It was 9 p.m. in London, and he was in a hired car across the street from Ian Denton’s flat on Battersea Bridge Road.
The previous night he had followed Denton’s Range Rover home from Legoland, but the driver had taken several counter-surveillance measures, which worried Jean-Baptiste. Either they were routine or he had been spotted. He liked to think it was the former.
‘He’s working late,’ Jean-Baptiste said. ‘Last night it was 8.30.’
‘He’s the Chief.’
‘I thought the point of being boss was that you got other people to do all the work.’
‘That’s true, but the buck stops with you when things go wrong, and Britain’s currently under attack, in case you hadn’t noticed. I’m amazed he’s not sleeping under his desk.’
‘He gets in early. This morning it was 5 a.m. How’s Clémence tonight? Still mad at me?’
‘You could have told her why you’re really in London.’
‘I will when I need to.’
Marchant looked across at the château, where a light was on in an upstairs window. Clémence had taken Lakshmi under her wing, looking after her day and night. The phone call to Spiro three days earlier still worried him. Marchant’s natural instinct was to move on, keep running, but he couldn’t leave Clémence on her own. Lakshmi was his prisoner.
He knew, too, that it was safer to liaise with Jean-Baptiste in London if he remained at the château. The VOIP software on Jean-Baptiste’s computer made it easy to talk to him over the internet, and harder for anyone else to listen in. As an extra precaution, Marchant had spoofed the IP address using a proxy server and downloaded free software for Tor, an anonymous routing network.
Tor was widely used by political activists in countries – Iran or China, for example – where they needed to disguise their location. MI6 had its own ‘onion routing’ network for field officers (available as a secure app or a download) that used a similarly layered approach to security.
‘Here comes Denton,’ Jean Baptiste said.
Marchant tried to imagine the scene: Denton sitting in the back of the Chief’s official Range Rover, talking on the phone, enjoying his new power, Fielding’s seat still warm.
‘Special Branch driver gets out, opens rear door for Denton,’ Jean-Baptiste continued. ‘He glances up and down street – old school – says good night to the driver, goes inside. Front door closes. I’m not sure what I’m going to find out here, Dan.’
Marchant wondered too, but if Denton was going to do anything interesting, it would be after his Special Branch officer had left for the night. Earlier he had called Paul Myers on his pay-as-you-go number and asked him to hack into Denton’s bank account, find out where he shopped, look for any unusual payments. Myers had been reluctant at first – he was already feeling uneasy about delaying the Revolutionary Guard intercept – but Marchant knew it would appeal to his curiosity.
‘His personal data will be well protected,’ Myers had said, savouring the challenge already. ‘Very well protected. The
News of the World
’s been after it for months. And Armstrong’s. And the Prime Minister’s.’
‘Did they get anywhere?’
‘Only with the PM’s bank account. That’s because they didn’t understand –’
‘It’s OK, I’ll take your word for it.’ Marchant didn’t have time to listen to one of Myers’s technical explanations. They tended to be long and incomprehensible. ‘Can you do it?’
‘I can try.’
Two hours later, a triumphant Myers was on the phone again. In the past year, Denton had shopped almost exclusively online for his clothes, except for the House of Fraser in Hull, formerly Hammonds, where he had picked up two suits in person.
‘There’s just one thing that strikes me as odd,’ Myers said. ‘He buys his food at Waitrose.’
‘What’s strange about that? Just because he’s from Hull, you think he should be shopping at Booths?’
‘Listen, pal, I’m from the Midlands, and I shop at Waitrose. We’re all middle-class now. It’s not that. He could have the stuff delivered. Waitrose Home or Avocado if he’s in London.’
‘Ocado. Bit posh for Denton.’
‘He buys his food at the Clapham Junction branch, St John’s Road, every Tuesday and Friday evening. Pays with his partnership card. If I was Chief of MI6, I think I’d have it delivered, don’t you?’
Myers had a point. And it was a Friday evening now. Perhaps Denton’s solitary shopping trips were a thing of the past, the habit of a deputy, but it was worth a try, which was why he wanted Jean-Baptiste to stay on the case tonight.
‘Be patient,’ Marchant told him. ‘Denton gets hungry on a Friday.’
‘So you said. I’m also hungry, but I think I’ll wait until I’m back in France to eat again. He’s out. Closes front door. Checks up and down the street. Heading my way. Far side. Walking quickly.’
‘He wants his dinner. He’ll go down Latchmere Road, then turn right to Waitrose.’ Marchant had called up Google Street View on the computer screen. ‘Follow him. I think this might be it.’
Spiro poured himself a large bourbon and sat down on the edge of the bed in his living quarters in Bagram. They were on the far side of the base, away from the runway, but he could still hear the sound of aircraft. The base was always busy, giant C-5 and C-17 cargo planes landing day and night, F-15 and F-16 jets screaming down the runway. After vowing never to eat there again, he had just had another lousy meal at DFAC, the base’s dining facility. He used to find it funny, but he hadn’t felt comfortable tonight seeing the Muslim LECS (locally employed civilians) serving up bacon and pork dishes. It would only breed hatred for America, fill the world with more Salim Dhars.