Dead Spy Running (14 page)

‘It was a precaution, Marcus, nothing more,' Sir David Chadwick said, watching Fielding carefully as he poured them both a gin. ‘She was never working for them as such. Ultimately she answered to you, to us.'

Fielding remained silent, looking out through French windows at a posse of female statues in the garden. There were three of them, their crude curves lit up by spotlights sunk around an ornamental pond. Chislehurst seemed to be full of naked garden statues, Fielding thought, at least on the private road where Chadwick lived. Statues and speed bumps and video-linked doorbells. Even Fielding's driver, parked outside in his official Range Rover, had been taken aback by the ostentation.

‘The Americans insisted on it,' Chadwick continued, filling the silence. Fielding made him nervous when he was in this sort of mood, his reticence impossible to read. ‘Unfortunately, we weren't in a very strong position to argue. You know as well as I do how things were. We were in turmoil. No leads on the bombing campaign, the Chief of MI6 under suspicion.'

Fielding still said nothing as he turned to take his drink. He had asked to meet outside London, and Chadwick had thought that inviting him to dinner at home would be the perfect solution, particularly as his wife was out at choir practice for the evening. The informal setting would allow them to talk properly about the future of the Service, how it might start to rebuild itself after the damage inflicted by the Stephen Marchant affair, and what the hell he had done with Daniel Marchant. Did he also want to show off the Edwardian-style orangery that had been added since he took over as Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee? Perhaps. But now he was regretting it, because Fielding somehow knew about Leila.

‘I need reassurances that there's no one else,' Fielding eventually said.

‘She was the only one,' Chadwick replied, joining him at the window. ‘No one was happy about it, Marcus.'

‘Except Spiro. And Armstrong.'

‘We needed to know if it ran in the family.'

‘Which is why I suspended Daniel Marchant.'

‘And that was the right and proper thing to do. But it wasn't enough, I'm afraid. Daniel began to go a little off-message when Stephen died, started to show all the signs of a renegade.'

‘He knew the rules, that we'd go after him if he became another Tomlinson.'

‘The Americans wanted more assurances – not a bad call in the light of the marathon attack.'

Fielding laughed dryly. ‘Which Daniel Marchant thwarted.'

‘Leila's account of the incident is a little more ambiguous.'

‘Not in the debrief I read. No doubt she told others what they wanted to hear.'

‘You've approved her three-month attachment?'

‘Of course. With a proviso that she never returns.'

‘How did you know, by the way?'

‘How do any of us know anything in this business? We join the dots, squint a little, turn things on their side and try, with a lot of luck, to see the bigger picture.' He paused. ‘She didn't debrief properly, after meeting one of her best Gulf contacts. I knew the CX had gone elsewhere. She knew I knew. Then she asked for a transfer.'

Chadwick said nothing, matching Fielding's silences with one of his own.

‘There's something else you should know,' he said. ‘MI5's had a breakthrough on the running belt. As we suspected, there was a remote-detonation option from a mobile phone. But it was configured to work only on the TETRA network.'

Chadwick sensed that, for the first time that evening, he had unsettled Fielding. TETRA was only used by the emergency services and the intelligence agencies. Terrorists would love to have access to TETRA – it would allow them to detonate a bomb even if the main mobile networks had been knocked out – but its use was tightly restricted (although not tightly enough for Fielding's liking).

‘And?'

Chadwick went over to the mahogany sideboard, where a brown A4 envelope lay next to the silver drinks tray. He pulled out a photo, glanced at it and walked back over to Fielding by the window.

‘Take a look at this,' he said, handing it over. The photo was a grainy image of the London Marathon, a screen-grab from the BBC's helicopter camera. In the middle of the picture was Daniel Marchant, surrounded by other runners, and holding a mobile phone in his right hand. The unit had been circled in yellow marker.

‘You can just make out the short aerial,' Chadwick said. ‘MI5's certain it's a TETRA handset. Motorola.'

‘Of course it bloody is,' Fielding said. ‘How do you think we were able to talk to him out on the course? I understood he borrowed Leila's.'

‘Apparently not. He brought his old one along, according to her. The one he should have handed in when he was suspended. We've checked the phone records at Thames House, and she's right. She rang him on his old encrypted number.'

Fielding wasn't convinced. He knew Marchant's suspension hadn't been as thorough as it might have been, partly because of his own reluctance to withdraw one of his best agents from the field; but failure to return an office phone, particularly an encrypted one, would not have been missed by even the most routine of Legoland's security checks. He needed to make his own enquiries.

‘Has it ever occurred to you that someone might be setting Daniel Marchant up here?' Fielding asked, looking at the photo for a few seconds before passing it back. ‘Knowing what a weak case there was against his father?'

‘Setting him up? Why?'

‘Oh, come on, David. You know as well as I do that there are plenty of people who would rather the Service didn't dine at top table any more.'

‘I'm not sure even the Americans would risk the life of one of their own ambassadors to frame an MI6 officer.'

‘I don't know.'

‘Is that why you're protecting Daniel? You still believe he's innocent?'

‘We're not protecting him, not now.'

‘Prentice gave Spiro the runaround in Warsaw. You know Langley's recalled him?'

‘The man's a fool.'

‘Where is Daniel, Marcus?'

‘I've no idea. Clearing his father's name, I assume.' Fielding finished his drink. ‘And if you really want to see the Service's reputation restored, I suggest we let him.'

After twenty-four hours in India, Daniel Marchant concluded that he wasn't under surveillance, but he still took no risks as he was driven in a cream-coloured Ambassador taxi, ordered by Chandar, from Chattapur up into the centre of New Delhi. At Qutb Minar, in Merauli, he asked the driver to pull into the dusty car park, near the landmark monument, where they waited for ten minutes under the shade of some trees, engine and air conditioning still running.

The driver stood beside the car in his white uniform. It was obvious that he was having a smoke, but he still tried to conceal the cigarette, cupping it in his hand as he shifted from foot to foot. A tour guide handed him a leaflet and glanced hopefully in at the window at Marchant, but moved on when the driver swore at him. Marchant wound down the window, felt a wave of hot air, and took the leaflet from the driver. A few sweltering Western tourists were drifting around the complex, being informed about the tower's 399 steps, how it had been begun in 1193 by Qutbud-din Aibak, the first Muslim ruler of Delhi. No one mentioned the stampede in 1998, when the lights went out in the tower and twenty-five children were crushed. Marchant remembered reading about it at the time. Visitors weren't allowed up the tower any more.

Marchant watched as the party of tourists climbed back into their minibus. The place was now empty. Nobody seemed to have followed him. Monika and her colleagues had given him a head start, but it would only be a couple of days at most. He also assumed that Prentice had done his best to hamper the Americans on the ground. But he knew it wouldn't be long before the connection was made between David Marlowe and Daniel Marchant. The CIA had a big station in Delhi. He wondered what the CX from Langley would be saying once they had worked out he was in India: suspended MI6 officer on the run, suspected of trying to eliminate US Ambassador.

Why did they still think he was behind the attempted marathon attack? How could anyone interpret his actions that day as anything other than loyal? Only he and Leila knew what had happened out there on the streets of London, how he had come to be propping up Pradeep as they stumbled towards a deserted Tower Bridge. He wanted to talk to her now, go through the events again to find any ambiguities; and yet, for the first time since they had met, a new emotion had crept imperceptibly over the horizon.

Perhaps it was the change of continents, the physical separation that had been imposed on them. But he knew it wasn't that. They had been apart before. Again he asked himself, how could the Americans view his actions as suspicious, even through the warped prism of his father's guilt? Leila was the only other person who knew what had happened. Her explanation should have clarified his role, spared him the waterboard; but it hadn't, and he couldn't help resenting her for that.

Before his resentment grew into something more troubling, he realised that he was looking at it all from the wrong end. It didn't matter whether the Americans thought he was guilty or not. They
needed
him to be guilty, to damn the father through the son. And in order to do that they had either distorted the evidence, wilfully ignoring the debriefs, or the whole thing had been an elaborate set-up. That would explain why he and no one else had spotted the belt. He knew, though, that the Americans would be unlikely to sanction such a risky plan. Either way, Leila was the one person who could have proved his innocence. Why hadn't she cleared him?

He sat back in the taxi and closed his eyes. He hadn't had time to think since he had touched down in India, a land that was so full of conflicting memories for him. His arrival at Indira Gandhi airport late the night before had been much more stressful than he had expected. Passport control hadn't questioned his Irish passport or the tourist visa in the name of David Marlowe, but the security measures at the airport had surprised him. There had been police officers everywhere, randomly checking luggage. Outside, army trucks lined the main approach road to the city, soldiers sitting in the heat.

The scene reminded him of Heathrow in 2003, when Scimitar and Spartan reconnaissance vehicles had rolled in to guard the terminals. He had been an undergraduate in Cambridge at the time, and had read the chilling newspaper reports: it had been one of those exhilarating, self-affirming moments when he knew what he wanted to do with his life. If only he had acted on it then, been honest with himself and his father, rather than wasting years pretending he wanted to be a journalist, trying to do something – anything – other than follow in his father's footsteps.

For a moment at the airport, Marchant thought the Indians had been tipped off about his arrival, but then he discovered the reason for the heightened security. According to a newspaper stand, the US President was due to arrive in Delhi in four days' time. Marchant felt a surge of unease at the news, at the thought of Salim Dhar being in the same country at the same time. The visit was part of a four-country tour of the subcontinent. Arms deals would be signed between Washington and Delhi in a bid to shore up India's defences against China.

The capital had set about cleaning its streets and whitewashing its walls in febrile anticipation of the visit. The road from the airport to the Maurya Hotel, where the President's entourage would be staying, was being transformed into a corridor of cleanliness. The city of Agra was also sprucing itself up. Thousands of litres of cheap perfume had been reportedly emptied into the Jamuna river, beside the Taj Mahal, in an effort to reduce the smell of the city's effluent. Tigers, too, had been corralled into a corner of Ranthambore wildlife sanctuary to ensure a presidential sighting. Marchant knew he did not have long to find Dhar.

After collecting his tatty rucksack from the luggage carousel, Marchant had taken a deep breath and walked out of the arrivals hall into a wall of heat, knowing that, as a backpacker, he wouldn't have the budget for a taxi. (The thousand US dollars given to him by Hugo Prentice was carefully split between his money belt and a purse strapped to his shin beneath his cotton trousers.)

A horde of shouting people, mostly in white
kurta
pyjamas, had jostled for his custom, tugging at his backpack, calling out snatches of German, French and Italian as well as English. He had eventually settled on a Sikh auto-rickshaw driver, for no other reason than that he was bigger and more dignified-looking than his rivals. After an early, unpromising stop for fuel, the driver smiled in the wonky rear-view mirror and drove down the main highway into New Delhi, turning to make inaudible remarks about American presidents.

On either side of the road, road sweepers pushed their straw brushes idly in the heat while painters daubed thick yellow emulsion on the railings that ran down the central reservation, removing shirts and saris that had been hung there to dry. Occasionally, parts of the road itself had been cordoned off for potholes to be filled and new tarmac laid, tribal women trailing damp rags on the big wheels of the steamrollers to keep them moist.

The rickshaw took Marchant all the way to Pahaganj, north of Connaught Place, where his
Rough Guide
promised cheap accommodation and the company of other backpackers. The Hare Krishna guesthouse wasn't exactly the Oki Doki, but with its permit room (‘for quenching thirst') and rooftop restaurant overlooking the bazaar, it was perfect for David Marlowe. His flight from Poland, with a four-hour change at Dubai, had been tiring, and he slept deeply, despite the heat of the night and the rhythmic rattle of the ceiling fan.

Now, as he watched an orange sun set behind Qutb Minar, he knew his search for Salim Dhar must begin. He was wearing the least tatty clothes he could find in the rucksack, and he hoped that the taxi, an extravagance for David Marlowe, would not attract attention when he arrived at the Gymkhana Club.

As he was driven into town, the flow of traffic was busy on the other side of the road as commuters streamed out of the scrubbed-up city towards the suburbs. The sight of an elephant, ambling along in the slow lane, brought back memories of childhood birthdays at the high commission, always shared with Sebastian. He turned back to look at the animal, admiring the unrushed fall of its padded feet. An elephant used to be obligatory at expat parties, a telephone number for bookings written in chalk between its eyes. Children would be lifted up onto the unsteady palanquins to ride around the commission compound, thrilled and scared by the muscular sashay of their mount's huge haunches.

Marchant remembered the time he fell out of love with the birthday elephant, or at least with the
mahouts
who brought them up from the slums by the river. He and Sebastian were sitting at the front of a gaggle of children, directly behind the
mahout
, when he saw the metal spike that had been driven deep into the animal's thick and bloodied neck. The
mahout
twisted the spike whenever he barked an order, desperate to assert his waning authority over the animal.

The Gymkhana Club felt as if it had been waning for the past hundred years. A
chowkidar
at the gate searched under the car with a mirror before waving them on. Marchant told the driver to wait for him in the car park to the side of the whitewashed Lutyens building, explaining that he might be back in five minutes, or maybe an hour. ‘
Koi baat nay
,' he replied, rocking his head gently from side to side before driving off.

Marchant paused beneath the large porch, catching the perfume of bougainvillea tumbling over the nearby perimeter wall. Above him, crows were roosting, their cries faintly eerie. He hadn't been here before, but his father often used to talk about the place. Under British rule it had been known as the Imperial Gymkhana Club, but the Imperial had been dropped after 1947, and now its tennis courts, Lady Willingdon swimming pool, library and bridge drives were for the exclusive use of Delhi's social elite, many of whom had waited thirty years to become a member.

Non-Indian guests were welcome, but Marchant remembered his father telling him of an unsettling custom at the bar that if a ‘Britisher' bought a round of drinks, he couldn't expect the favour to be returned. Marchant's father had liked his Kalyani Black Label beer, but had found that the only way to quench his thirst was to keep standing rounds for everyone. Buying a drink solely for himself would have caused offence, and given that British diplomats often ventured to the Gymkhana Club to gauge the military's current level of hostility towards neighbouring Pakistan, a subject about which they were especially prickly, it was important to keep the members onside.

‘I've come to talk to Kailash Malhotra,' Marchant said to the khaki-uniformed man at the colonnaded reception.

‘
Colonel
Malhotra?' the man checked him.

Marchant nodded, taking in the colonial setting – high ceilings, the whiff of floor polish, a sign saying that ‘bush' shirts were prohibited – as the man looked through a list on a clipboard. Marchant could detect cigar smoke coming from somewhere, and it took him a few moments to realise that a distant clinking sound was the noise of billiard balls colliding. Marchant would be back at his Wiltshire boarding school if he smelt boiled cabbage for dinner.

‘He's playing bridge in the card room,' the man said finally.

‘I thought they didn't get underway until eight.' Marchant had made a call earlier.

The man looked at Marchant's crumpled shirt for a moment, unable to conceal his disdain, then glanced at a large clock on the wall to his right. ‘Right now they are having sundowners in the bar. Is he expecting you?'

‘Yes. Could you tell him David Marlowe's here?'

Ten minutes later, Marchant was sitting opposite Colonel Malhotra in a corner of the bar, sipping a ‘
burra
peg' of Chivas Regal.

‘When you were a naughty little boy – my God, you were so naughty – you used to call me “uncle”,' the colonel said, laughing, one hand patting Marchant's knee. ‘You can still call me uncle. Uncle K. It's the name your dear father always used.'

Marchant had only very distant memories of Uncle K: watching
Mother India
and other old Hindi movies on a Sunday afternoon at his house, where he and Sebastian would eat pistachio
kulfi
and be told off by their mother for complaining that it didn't taste like real ice cream. Uncle K used to sing along to all the songs, tears often streaming down his face. Afterwards, he would retire with Marchant's father to another part of the house and talk in low voices while his mother fielded the children.

When Monika had mentioned the name Malhotra at the airport, he couldn't be certain it was the Uncle K of his early childhood. It was only when the colonel had walked towards him in reception, open-armed, that Marchant knew for sure it was the same man. Now, as they talked, more memories came back: the discreet acceptance of a gift of Scotch brought over from Britain; the blunderbuss on the wall, once used for shooting tigers; the
touché
shaking of hands after cracking a gag; Uncle K's avuncular kindness when Sebastian was killed.

‘Your father was very keen that you didn't grow up resenting India because of the traffic accident,' he said. ‘It could have happened anywhere.'

‘He did a good job. It's great to be back.'

Marchant didn't tell him that he hadn't visited Delhi since they had left as a grieving family twenty years ago. He had backpacked through India in his year off, paving the way for David Marlowe, but he had made a point of travelling through the south, and then up into the Himalayas, consciously bypassing Delhi.

‘I fear your mother never got back her health, though,' Uncle K said.

‘No,' Marchant replied, but he was no longer listening. His attention had been distracted by a man who had walked up to the bar, briefcase in hand.

‘I still feel bad about your father's funeral. It just wasn't possible.'