Dirty Little Secret (27 page)

He would get Lakshmi admitted to hospital as an emergency, give Jean-Baptiste an update, and then fly out to Morocco. Lakshmi was no longer a threat, but the Russians were onto him. It would have been too risky to call for an ambulance and wait by the roadside. Instead, he had phoned Jean-Baptiste and told him about the shooting. After showing more concern for the Mehari than for Lakshmi, Jean-Baptiste had given him directions to the University Hospital on avenue de la Côte de Nacre in Caen.

‘Seriously, I’ll look after her, don’t worry,’ the Frenchman had said. ‘I’ve spoken to Clémence, and she has forgiven her. Sadly, she hasn’t forgiven me.’

‘Has Dhar really agreed to work for you, or is it wishful thinking?’ Lakshmi asked, her voice slow but clear. Marchant glanced across at her. She was slumped into the corner of her seat like a drunk. Her usually open face was distorted in pain. For a fleeting moment, he wondered if she was faking her injury, just as she had faked her sedation.

‘He’s agreed.’

As soon as the words left his lips, he realised she was going to die. He could confide in her at last, tell her the truth. It took death for them to be honest with each other.

‘What will you get out of it?’ she asked, more breathless this time. Marchant picked up a bottle of water from his door, checked the traffic lights and held it to her lips. She drank a little; the rest poured down her face onto her shirt. The lights changed, and he accelerated away.

‘We share the same father. He was British. Dhar never felt comfortable waging his jihad against the land of his father. He’s promised to shield Britain from future terrorist attacks. We could do with that right now.’

‘What will you give him in return?’

Marchant looked across at her again. Her voice was barely a whisper now. They weren’t going to reach the hospital in time.

‘I’ve already given it. His freedom.’

He had never spelt out his deal with Dhar before. He hadn’t told Jean-Baptiste the details, and there had been no opportunity to talk it through with Fielding. The way he had just explained it, the pact sounded Faustian, like the one his father had made with Primakov.

‘It’s blackmail,’ she whispered. Marchant thought he saw a smile trying to break through her pain.

‘It’s not,’ he said.

‘We’ve both been blackmailed.’

‘I thought you were betraying me for nobler reasons.’

‘I was.’

Marchant drove on in silence. When he looked back at Lakshmi, her eyes were closed, her hand less tight on her stomach.

‘Keep the towel pressed firmly,’ he said too harshly, reaching across and pushing it against her bloody hand. She opened her eyes and looked at him.

‘Britain will be safe, but –’ she faltered, whispering. ‘Will Dhar still be at war with America?’

Marchant drove on, not wanting to look at her, following the signs for
URGENCES
through an endless lattice of small roads and low hedges that ringed the university hospital. It had begun to rain hard, and the wipers were struggling to clear the water from the windscreen.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Dhar will still be at war with America.’ He knew Lakshmi was gone. After a while he turned to check. The hand holding the wet towel had fallen across her lap, her head had rolled forward. Tears pricked his eyes.

‘But Britain will be safe,’ he continued, staring ahead, his hands too tight on the steering wheel. ‘Isn’t that what matters? What this is all about? Why I signed up to Six? Why you joined the Agency? We talk about making the world a safer place, but in the end we just want to protect our own back yards.’

But as he pulled up outside the hospital, he knew he was lying. He sat there for a moment, still looking ahead, hoping to hear her breathing above the sound of the rain and the wipers. He didn’t want to turn off the engine, fearing the silence.

‘I was close to my father too,’ he said quietly. ‘I would have done anything for him. I hoped you’d come round to what I’m trying to do with Dhar. But I never told you, did I? Never trusted you.’

He cut the engine and looked across at Lakshmi. She had lost too much blood. Leaning over, he touched her eyes, closing them like delicate clamshells, and moved to kiss her goodbye on the lips. He hesitated. It was from moments like this that he had guarded himself. He kissed her on the forehead. They had both tried to trust each other, but it wasn’t to be.

An image of her at the temple in Madurai came to him, barefoot except for ankle chains, her forehead dabbed with crimson
tilak
. He preferred to think of her like that. She had looked strong then, at home in Mother India, proud to be American. At times he had let her in, but not completely, not the way he had done with Leila. And now he knew why.

He promised to tell her father that she had loved him.

‘Are you free to talk?’

Paul Myers took the call at his bedsit in Montpelier, Cheltenham, where he had been confined since the attack on GCHQ that had nearly killed him. He wasn’t ready to return to the office; not yet.

‘Who is this?’ he asked, sitting up at his desk. A bank of computer screens flickered in front of him. The voice had been crudely distorted. The effect wasn’t as subtle as his own modulator, the one he had given Marchant. Instinctively, he wanted to know more, not about the caller but the technology. He guessed it was Eastern European.

‘Can you talk?’ the voice asked again. Myers thought about routing the unknown caller through his laptop, trying to reverse the modulation, but it would take too long. He had also worked out who it was: Marcus Fielding. There was something about the upper cadences, a faintly nasal quality that hadn’t been knocked out by the software.

The former Chief of MI6 was on the run, just like Daniel Marchant, who had caused him enough grief already. Try as he might, it was proving hard for Myers to cover his tracks over the Revolutionary Guard intercept. The last thing he needed was Marcus Fielding making his life even more complicated.

‘It’s a secure line,’ Myers said.

‘I need to make contact with Marchant.’

Fielding wasn’t bothering with any niceties, like introducing himself or apologising for potentially losing Myers his job.

‘I’ve got a number.’

‘That would be helpful.’

A call from Fielding had always made his palms sweat, and this one was no exception, even though he was no longer Chief. Myers went over to his bedside table, where he kept a notebook for middle-of-the-night ideas. At the back he had written down Marchant’s number, using a simple shift-key code. But just as he was reading it out to Fielding, his doorbell rang. The postman had already called, and he wasn’t expecting visitors. He never was.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he said after reading out the number, but Fielding had already hung up.

Myers looked down onto the street. Two men were standing in front of the door that led to his flat and the three others in the building. He thought he recognised one of them from work, but he couldn’t be sure. Moving quickly, he logged into GCHQ from his desktop computer and checked for a final time that his CX report on the Farsi intercept was not showing in the Gulf Controllerate files. He had deleted it from his own account, but a trace could still be found in the auxiliary data silos if someone was looking for it. The information was gathered from keystroke logging, a security measure that everyone at GCHQ was subject to, particularly those, like Myers, who had authorised computer terminals at home. Every keystroke, every action on a keyboard was tracked and later automatically analysed for unusual patterns of behaviour, such as deleting files.

After signing out, he pressed the intercom button by the front door and asked who it was.

‘GCHQ security,’ a voice replied. ‘Routine homeworker check.’

Routine my fat arse, Myers thought, as he considered his options. He wasn’t like Marchant, who would escape out of the window or grab a pizza box off the floor and bluff his way past the men, pretending he had delivered a Margarita instead of an American Hot. That wasn’t his style. He was too much of a coward. Instead, he looked around the room in the vain hope that there might be somewhere to hide, a place where he could curl up in the darkness, eat a large chocolate bar and pretend none of this was happening. They wouldn’t be interested in the copies of
Fly RC
, a magazine for remote-control plane enthusiasts, scattered on the bed, or the
Persian Pussy
porn mags stacked under it. They would be looking for evidence to link him with the jailbreak. Why did he agree to sit on the information for twenty-four hours, as Marchant had asked?

Preparing himself for the worst, he buzzed the men in. Suddenly remembering the notepad by the bed, he walked over and ripped out the back page, which had Marchant’s coded number on it. He scrunched it up and popped into his mouth as the two men reached the top of the stairs.

Marchant held Lakshmi in his arms, standing in the swing doorway marked
URGENCES
. It was the second time in a week that he had carried her limp body. The first had been on the boat at Portbail, where he had handed her over to Jean-Baptiste. This time she was heavier, a dead weight.

The staff rolled a stretcher in and laid her down on it. They worked with quiet professionalism, and were more optimistic than he was as they took her away to the Emergency Room. He knew it was too late, but they would do all they could to try to revive her. He explained to the duty nurse that his friend had been shot in the stomach, and she told him he would have to stay in the waiting area until the police arrived.

That was all he could do for Lakshmi. The moment the nurse turned her back, he was out the doors and walking back through the rain to the Golf. It didn’t feel right to leave her behind, but he had already said his goodbyes. He sat at the wheel for a moment, breathing deeply, watching the condensation form on the inside of the windscreen.

He felt less strongly about her death, now the seat beside him was empty. The only trace of her was a bloodstain on the upholstery. She had chosen her country above what might have existed between them. He had chosen his. And yet, they had both acted with a knowingness of each other’s position, a mutual respect, an acknowledgement that this was the only way it could be.

The intelligence services had long been a magnet for patriots, but he had never seen himself as one, not overtly, like his father. The same was true for her. Circumstances had drawn it out of them. Perhaps it had something to do with being abroad, seeing your country from afar, in a wider context. The reports of Britain in flames had gone to his core, reminding him why he had joined MI6, why he was now spending so much time trying to turn Dhar. And her patriotism had been stirred by the thought of Dhar being free to attack America once again.

His phone buzzed twice before he was aware of it ringing. The only person who had this number was Paul Myers, but it wasn’t him, unless he was calling from a different phone. He thought of not answering, but decided to take the call on the hands-free given to him by Myers.

‘We don’t have long,’ a distorted voice said. Marchant wondered if his modulator was playing up, and adjusted the headphones.

‘Who is this?’

‘The Vicar.’

Myers didn’t know where he was, but it was within an hour’s radius of his flat by car. He had focused on the geography of his journey, the time spent blindfolded, as he tried to work out what was happening to him. The two men who had come to his flat had explained that they wanted to take him for a routine security check, but he feared the worst when they showed him into the back of a car with darkened windows. For a brief, unrealistic moment he had thought about running, but he was overweight and unfit. And he was still hurting from the bomb blast of a week earlier.

No one had been rough with him. Not yet. There had been no intimidation or threats of violence, but he was still more scared than he could ever remember being. At school the bullies had always masked their initial approach with a veneer of kindness, luring the fat boy into dark corners with smiles and false sympathy. It was the not knowing that unnerved him. No one had said a word since he had got into the car. His questions went unanswered, his pleadings ignored. Then they gagged him.

All he knew was that he was now sitting on a plastic chair in what felt like an aircraft hangar. He couldn’t be sure, because he was still blindfolded, but the acoustics suggested a high roof. He had also heard the sound of an aircraft taking off close by. At one point he had caught an American accent. Perhaps he had been drugged and was in Afghanistan, Bagram. They did that on TV, took people to the scenes of crimes to jog their memories. Was he about to be shown the blast hole in the perimeter wall through which Dhar had escaped? Forced to confront the consequences of his actions?

He told himself to stay calm. They weren’t going to hurt him. His hands and arms were tied, but he was sure he hadn’t left the country. He was still in Britain, where they didn’t do torture. He just wished someone would remove the blindfold. If they started to play rough, he had already decided that he would tell them everything: the Revolutionary Guard intercept, Marchant’s interest in Dhar’s escape, the voice modulator he had given him. There was nothing in it for him any more. He had helped Marchant enough over the past few years, and their friendship had proved more trouble than it was worth.

‘It’s Paul, isn’t it?’

Myers jumped. He had assumed he was alone. The voice sounded close to him. It was also familiar. He was good on regional accents, global as well as local, even better at people’s attempts to conceal them.

He tried to reply, but a noise came out instead, as if the gag was still in his mouth, although it had been removed a few minutes earlier. Instinctively, he moved his jaws and licked his lips.

‘I hope you’re not uncomfortable,’ the voice went on. He knew who it was now. Ian Denton, the new Chief of MI6, born and bred in Hull – on the eastern side of the city, if he had to be more specific about the accent. ‘The blindfold is nothing sinister, just a security precaution. Someone will untie you in a moment.’