Dirty Little Secret (8 page)

It was 4 a.m. when he eventually reached Cirencester, two hours after he had left Gosport. He took the road to Tetbury, turning left to Kemble after a few miles. He didn’t want to drive up to Tarlton in the Traveller. There was a chance that the sailors had noticed it had been stolen and had already raised the alarm. He needed to leave it somewhere it wouldn’t draw attention.

At Kemble, he turned right into the railway station and a big car park that he remembered. He used to cycle here from Tarlton in the university holidays when he went up to London, leaving his bike against the railings in a well-tended garden beside the platform. There had been no need to lock it, as it was a sit-up-and-beg Hero his father had brought back from India. Modern bikes were stolen regularly from Kemble, but nobody had wanted this one.

He found a quiet corner, away from the station, and parked the Traveller between two other cars. One was an Aston Martin, the other a BMW. The Traveller might stand out more than he thought. Then he went over to the garden beside the platform, just in case there were any unlocked bikes there. But it was empty, the flowerbeds still well tended. Shivering in the dawn light, he set off back down the road and began the two-mile walk up to Tarlton.

James Spiro looked out onto a deserted Grosvenor Square and glanced impatiently at his watch. The Marines were running behind time. In his day, if you weren’t five minutes early, you were late. For a moment, he felt the same churn in his stomach that he used to get in Iraq before a contact. Back in the first Gulf War, the Brits had been allies, decent fighters in Operation Desert Storm. How times had changed.

He didn’t believe Salim Dhar was really holed up in Legoland, but he couldn’t afford to take any chances. After all, who would have guessed that an MI6 officer would be sitting with Dhar in a Russian jet when it took down an F-22 Raptor? He had spent all evening in the crisis centre at the American Embassy, listening to Turner Munroe, the US Ambassador to London, fight a losing battle with Washington. As far as the President and the Pentagon were concerned, there was a good case for withdrawing Munroe in light of the air-show fiasco. The special relationship, if it ever existed, was over, and as Spiro pointed out, it could be argued that Britain had been complicit in an act of war against the US.

But Munroe had displayed a dogged loyalty to Daniel Marchant.

‘Let’s not get too trigger-happy here,’ the Ambassador had said in a lengthy video conference with the White House. ‘We could have been discussing the death of the US Defense Secretary. Marchant has form when it comes to persuading
jihadis
not to blow people up. I should know.’

Fifteen months earlier, Marchant had helped to talk a suicide bomber out of killing Munroe and countless other competitors in the London Marathon. At least, that was Marchant’s story. Spiro had begged to differ. In tonight’s discussions with Washington, Munroe had consistently fought Marchant’s corner, calling for restraint until all the facts were known. But the President’s anger had prevailed. The CIA’s London station was given
carte blanche
to do all they could to find Salim Dhar, last known location somewhere in UK waters.

Spiro, as head of the Agency’s National Clandestine Service, Europe, was put in charge of the mission. His first call was to surround MI6’s headquarters with a deployment of US Marines who were based permanently at the embassy. He had also given orders for Daniel Marchant to be picked up from Fort Monckton. Fielding couldn’t protect him any longer. Denton had given assurances that Marchant was being held securely, but Spiro knew better than to underestimate Marchant.

‘Go in the back door,’ he had told the captain of USS
Bulkeley
, a destroyer moored in Portsmouth on a meet-and-greet hosted by the Royal Navy. The captain explained that he would need authority from the Pentagon before giving the order to deploy a unit of Seals against an ally he had just been on exercise with. Spiro had anticipated friction. The US Navy wasn’t in the habit of taking orders from the CIA, or storming British military bases. He gave the captain the name of someone to speak to, and told him to get on with it. ‘And leave the woman out of it,’ he added. ‘She’s one of ours.’

He had expected to hear back from Lakshmi Meena by now, but she hadn’t rung, which made him wary. He had hoped to hear from his wife, too, but that was another story. It had been three days since they had spoken, and he had no idea where she was.

He pushed her to the back of his mind and thought again about Marchant. As a former Marine, he wished he could be with the Seals when they beached at Fort Monckton. It would be the final humiliation of Marchant and MI6. Instead, Spiro had to settle for the lead jeep as it rolled out of Grosvenor Square five minutes later and headed down Regent Street towards Vauxhall. There were six US Army trucks behind him, carrying a hundred Marines in total. The sight of American forces on the streets of London would send a clear message to the Brits, causing acute political embarrassment. Better still, Spiro hoped, it would scare the crap out of Fielding.

‘Ain’t London a beautiful city when it’s empty?’ he said to his driver as they rumbled around a deserted Piccadilly Circus at 3 a.m. Above him, the advert for Coca-Cola flashed in the night.

‘I think I know where Dhar might be,’ Denton said, turning to the Prime Minister.

‘Go on.’

The room fell silent as everyone looked down the table at Denton. He paused, calculating the implications one more time. On balance, it was better to share his hunch with COBRA rather than with the Americans, but there wasn’t much in it. He studied the tired, expectant faces and thought that the British establishment had never appeared so weak. If he was going to become a Chief with any power, he would need US support. To win that, he had to give them Dhar on a plate. But he didn’t trust them to capture him. The British were still better at some things.

Just as he was about to speak, an aide to the Chief of Defence Staff came into the room and whispered something to his boss.

‘A contingent of US Marines is currently making its way down Regent Street,’ the Chief of Defence Staff announced, trumping Denton’s announcement. ‘It’s an unauthorised movement. Any US troop activity on UK soil must be cleared first with –’

‘Of course it’s bloody unauthorised,’ the PM said. Denton had often noted how, in times of crisis, the military defaulted to mindless protocol.

Everyone in the room turned to look at the staccato images now streaming live from traffic cameras on Piccadilly Circus. For a moment, Dhar’s location was no longer important. Denton had known it was coming, but the sight of the US military on the streets of London was still chilling. Fielding must have anticipated it too. A few seconds earlier, Denton had received a staff alert informing him that Legoland was in lockdown.

‘They’re heading for Vauxhall Cross,’ the PM continued. ‘Unilateral action, just as the President warned.’ He turned to the Chairman of the Defence Advisory Committee, who had been summoned from his club to join COBRA. ‘It’s too late for the papers, but I don’t want to see these pictures tomorrow morning on
The Andrew Marr
Show
.’

‘That might be difficult,’ the Chairman replied. ‘The best we can do is put out an MoD release explaining that it’s an exercise.’

‘If only it was,’ the PM said. ‘I hope to God Dhar’s not there.’

‘He’s not,’ Denton said. ‘And even if he was, the Americans wouldn’t find him. Fielding’s locked down the building.’

‘That could be interpreted as the actions of a Chief with something to hide.’

‘Just pride.’ Denton paused, looking around the room at his pale, flabby colleagues. Most of them had been up for twenty-four hours. ‘Dhar’s not in London. He’s gone to his father’s house. Stephen Marchant had a big place in the country, in a hamlet called Tarlton, just outside Cirencester.’

A murmur swept around the room, followed by shuffled papers and disbelieving asides.

‘I know it’s been a long night, but are you seriously telling me that Salim Dhar is hiding in the Cotswolds?’ the PM asked. ‘Wouldn’t he want to be as far away from here as possible?’

‘It would explain the MI6 number. As Chief, Stephen Marchant’s home was installed with a secure landline. My guess is that it was never downgraded after he died.’ Denton turned to the Chief of Defence staff. ‘How long would it take for the Increment to reach Tarlton?’

Dhar stood by the grave in the half-light, reading the words that had been carved into the stone. ‘Stephen Marchant 1949–2009.
Semper occultus.
’ He didn’t know what the words meant. If Marchant showed up, he would ask him. Time, though, was running out – for both of them. He had left the pilot in the house, tied up and gagged. He still wasn’t sure why he had chosen to keep the man alive. Perhaps it was for his own self-preservation. One kidnapped
kafir
wouldn’t be enough to barter with when they came for him, as he knew they would, but it might stop him being killed.

He glanced around and knelt awkwardly, trying to ignore the pain in his leg. His father was buried at the back of a small and ancient church, separated from the main house by a gravel drive. It was the first time he had been to a Christian burial site, and he began to recite the last verses of the Surat al-Baqarah, the second chapter of the Holy Qur’an.

‘
… Our Lord! Lay not on us what we have no strength to bear. Pardon us, forgive us and have mercy on us. You are our Protector; give us victory over the disbelievers …
’

Tears pricked his eyes as he prayed in the early-morning stillness. A gossamer mist hung over the surrounding fields, and his knees were wet with dew. He was here to honour his real father, whom he had only met once, at a black site in South India, but images of another man kept rearing out of the shadows.

Life had been hard when he was growing up on the fringes of Chanakyapuri in New Delhi, where his parents had worked at various foreign embassies. The man who claimed to be his father used to beat him regularly with a wooden baseball bat: back of the legs, arms, soles of his feet when he slept late. His mother had suffered terribly too, hiding when her husband returned from yet another party at the American Embassy, drunk on bourbon and Coke. Dhar couldn’t blame her for turning to another man.

He leant forward and kissed the top of the gravestone, the sound as his lips touched it exaggerated in the quietness. Silence at dawn felt alien to him. Where was the
muezzin
, calling the faithful to prayer? Where were the mosques in this sterile land they called the Cotswolds? That was the hardest thing for Dhar to accept: that his father had been an unbeliever. It was painful enough that he had worked for an infidel intelligence agency, but he had come to terms with that. Now, though, he had to deal with the
kuffar,
whom he could feel closing in all around him.

Fielding walked briskly along the south side of Grosvenor Road. Oleg was at heel, surprised but happy to be on a night-time walk. They had slipped out of the Dolphin Square flat unnoticed by the Special Branch guard down on the street, which gave Fielding a kick. He might not be Chief for much longer, but he hadn’t lost any of his old field skills.

He wanted to see for himself if Spiro had really parked his tanks on MI6’s lawn. The threat, relayed by the PM, had sounded real enough, and as he turned south onto Vauxhall Bridge, dawn beginning to break over London, he knew his career with the Service would soon be over. They weren’t tanks, but two large US military lorries were positioned across the road, stopping what little traffic there was at that time of the morning. He could see more US military vehicles down by the bus station, closing off all approaches to the usually busy junction. It was a scene not unlike the ones that had recently caused Fielding to wake in the middle of the night, dripping in sweat: tangible proof of Britain’s submission to America.

Up in front of him a solitary car was turning around, followed by a motorbike, both being instructed by a helmeted US Marine waving a gun. A gust of wind blew up from the river. Fielding tugged at his coat collar and considered turning around too, but he wanted to see if Spiro was there, tell him to his face that he was making a fool of the United States, and not just MI6. He was certain now that Dhar had made his way to Tarlton, the Marchant family home, from where he had rung Daniel on an old secure line. It was a desperate decision for a man on the run, but perhaps he had nowhere else to go.

There was nothing Fielding could do about it. What power he still had was slipping through his fingers like desert sand. It was up to Marchant now. He would find a way out of the Fort, and make his way to Tarlton. That was what he was best at: kicking out against his own system. Like Fielding, Marchant would want to know what the hell Dhar was playing at. He just hoped that others wouldn’t get to Tarlton first.

He kept walking, tugging at Oleg, who seemed less eager to confront the scene up ahead.

‘No access, sir,’ the Marine said as Fielding approached the roadblock.

‘Is Jim Spiro around?’ Fielding asked. ‘Tell him it’s Marcus Fielding, Chief of MI6.’

The Marine looked him up and down, then got on his radio mike. Two minutes later, Spiro was sauntering over as if he had just conquered London. Fielding was surprised he wasn’t smoking a stogie.

‘Nobody seems to be at home,’ Spiro began, looking over his shoulder at Legoland. The lights were all out and the windows shuttered. ‘We knocked on the front door, like the polite people we are, but there was no answer. Don’t suppose you’ve got a key?’

‘If I had more time, I’d gladly show you around.’

‘Where is he, Marcus?’

‘He’s not in Legoland, for Christ’s sake.’

‘I kinda figured that. Not even the Brits would be that dumb.’

‘So why are you here?’

‘Wanted a drive through London without the traffic. And our trucks are cheaper than those open-topped buses. Or them crazy Yellow Duck tours. We’re bringing Marchant in too, by the way. He took the call. He’ll know where Dhar is.’