Dead Spy Running (22 page)

William Straker sat back in the DCIA's office in Langley, Virginia, and looked at the photos of his two boys on his desk. He had been an only child, and envied the camaraderie that his sons already enjoyed. He hadn't checked, but he guessed Harriet Armstrong in London was a single child, too. She shared his natural distrust of others.

‘It's a final green, Harriet, we're going in now,' he said on speakerphone. ‘Fort Meade picked up the call earlier. The strike point's been relayed to the USS
Independence
.'

‘The Prime Minister has requested that Daniel Marchant is taken alive,' Armstrong replied.

‘I was afraid you'd say that. The DNI wants all threats in the region eliminated. And Dhar's currently top of the lone-wolf list.'

‘Marchant might be useful,' Armstrong said.

‘You're not going soft on me, Harriet, are you?' Armstrong said nothing. ‘India won't allow Predator use in their airspace, so we're sending in Seals, supported by some token Black Cats to keep Delhi onside. I'm sure your Prime Minister appreciates we can't take risks with a presidential visit. There are too many already on this trip. Monk Johnson's a wreck.'

‘We understand the threat, of course we do, but Marchant is a British citizen, and the PM is adamant he is not killed. We currently have an SAS unit on standby in Delhi, ready to help.'

‘You know, I think we can manage this on our own, but thanks for the offer. Here's what I'll do. Once we've pulled Marchant out of the jungle, he's your prisoner. You might get a bit more out of him than we did in Poland. How does that sound?'

Not great, Armstrong thought. Body bags didn't make great interviewees. ‘I'll inform Cobra of the offer. It's convening now.'

‘Your cooperation is appreciated, Harriet. You and I think the same. You saw the TX details of the call?'

‘Earlier, yes.'

‘Jesus, we were right about Stephen Marchant. Like father, like son. But what about Marcus? Daniel's put through to his home, then the Chief chooses not to report the conversation to anyone. And now he's gone AWOL. I thought this guy was on our side.'

‘It also bothers the PM.'

‘Glad to hear it,' Straker said, failing to detect much sincerity in Armstrong's reply. ‘Does the PM know about Chadwick, too?'

‘David?'

‘Sir David, knight of the realm.'

‘What about him?' Armstrong tightened her grip on the phone. She had always liked Chadwick, even fancied him in her earlier Whitehall days. She wouldn't hear a bad word said against him.

‘Seems like he's been signing up to some illegal websites over here. The FBI passed over the credit card trail this morning, thought we should know.'

Armstrong, her resentment rising, wanted the conversation to end. She didn't believe a word. The Americans were still on the warpath after removing Stephen Marchant, but this was new territory. They would go after the PM next.

‘How illegal?'

‘I hope he hasn't got children.'

 

Marchant slipped the mobile phone back under the magazine and lay on his
charpoy
again, watching the guard walk back up the hill towards him. He looked in briefly on Marchant then sat down, picking at his teeth. It had been good to hear the Legoland receptionist's voice. The best ones worked on the emergency number. Her warm, reassuring tones had contrasted sharply with Anne Norman's brusque manner.

Fielding had said very little. They both knew that the less time they spoke, the less chance there was of the call being traced. But it had been hard to convey everything quickly and cryptically. The most important thing had been to provide Fielding with the real reason for his father's trip. He had also wanted him to know that Dhar might be turned. Dhar would never work for America, but the notion of him spying for Britain was suddenly not so implausible.

The implications of his father's revelation had not yet fully sunk in, he knew that: the opposite lives his sons had led, each one's existence on a separate continent, unknown to the other, despite being born within months of each other. Marchant knew that by ringing Fielding, immersing himself in his old professional world, he was avoiding the personal consequences. His father, who had spent a lifetime uncovering other people's secrets, had been carrying around the biggest one of all. Did he think worse of him for it? He feared the Americans might.

A commotion outside broke in on his thoughts. A man was coming up the hill with a large sheet of cardboard, cut out in the shape of a human figure. He was talking excitedly, a small group of men following him, looking at the effigy. Marchant couldn't understand what he was saying, but he heard Salim's name mentioned, and recognised the figure. It was of the previous US President, wearing a cowboy hat and boots.

One of the men barked an order at another, who pulled out a cigarette lighter and held it to the image, dropping it to the ground when the flames caught. But before the curling fire had reached the President's head, Marchant saw quite clearly that there was a small hole between the eyes, made by a single bullet.

 

Spiro leant in towards Leila and touched her hand. ‘You don't have to do this, you know,' he said, maintaining the contact longer than she would have liked. ‘The threat level is high. There are others who can take your place.'

‘Like Baldwin? He doesn't seem very pleased to see me here.'

‘The guy's a loser,' he said, looking around the restaurant. ‘All hat and no cattle.'

Spiro had been drinking all evening – their last chance for the next forty-eight hours, he said – and was starting to worry her.

‘It's important I'm there. My mother will be proud that her daughter's showing the US President around the biggest Bahá'í temple in the world. It's important for me, too. I need to draw a line under all that's been said, reassure the doubters.'

‘Who cares what Baldwin or the Brits think?' Spiro said, topping up her glass with wine. She shouldn't have agreed to dinner, but she was indebted to Spiro, and needed his ongoing support. She glanced around the restaurant. It was on the roof of their hotel, the lights of New Delhi spread out beneath them as two musicians from Rajasthan worked the candlelit room. With a different man the scene might have been romantic, she thought, trying not to picture herself and Marchant together.

‘They're pulling the Vicar in, too,' Spiro said. He was pumped up, unrelaxed, his leg bouncing beneath the table. ‘Never liked the guy.'

Leila knew all about the allegations Fielding had made, that she was working for Iran, but she hadn't heard of his apparent suspension.

‘Why?'

‘Daniel, your former squeeze. Seems he made a call to London. Spoke to Fielding on a phone used once by Salim Dhar. Thank God Fort Meade had their pants up and their headphones on for a change.'

Leila was relieved to hear that Marchant was still alive. She had feared the worst after the Gymkhana explosion. What remained of the book at the club's reception had confirmed that a ‘David Marlowe' had been signed in as a visitor, but his body was never found. She hoped one day to talk to him, explain it all, but time was running out.

‘Where was he calling from?' she asked, struggling to conceal her interest.

‘Somewhere south of here. We were right to man-mark him in London, Leila. You did a fine job. It turns out the whole lot of them were at it: Marchant, his father, Fielding.'

‘Was Daniel with Dhar when he called?' Her voice was more anxious.

‘We sure as hell hope so. But you don't need to trouble yourself about him. What do you say to a drink back in my room?' He forced his leg between hers under the table.

‘I must do a bit more reading up on the Bahá'ís,' she said, pushing back her chair. ‘I'd hate the President to think I'd just screwed my way to the top.'

‘I'm not sure you heard me,' Spiro said, holding her forearm. She looked around the restaurant for support, but no one had noticed. Spiro's breath was sour, his lips oily from the earlier
biryani
. ‘I've been asked a lot of questions in recent days, told a lot of folk to trust you. Men like Baldwin. I think that deserves a little payback, don't you?'

Marchant heard the mobile phone begin to ring moments before the Sikorsky Seahawk came in low over the treetops. He rushed to pick it up just as the guard outside fell to the ground, a single sniper shot to his chest.

‘Get out of there now,' a familiar female voice urged. As he tried to place it, a loud explosion ripped the roof off the hut, knocking him to the ground. He started to crawl, but his eyes were filling with warm blood from a cut to his forehead. Wiping his face, he rolled across the dusty ground to the back of the hut, where he slid out through a hole that had been torn in the palm-woven panelling. The air was thick with the sound of gunfire, urgent shouts – American, Indian, Middle Eastern – and the cry of crows.

Marchant kept thinking of the crows, what they were doing in the middle of a firefight, as a group of Black Cats moved down the hillside towards him. They must have walked, taken the long route, he thought. If it hadn't been for them, he would have escaped. Two of them lifted him up and dragged him semi-conscious towards the winch rope of the Seahawk, now hovering above the clearing.

‘No Dhar,' Marchant heard one of the Black Cats say into his helmet mike, as he rose above the coconut canopy into a cerulean sky.

*   *   *

Leila looked up to the very top of the temple ceiling, where a lotus-flower pattern blossomed at its apex. Early-morning sunlight was streaming in through the windows, bathing the interior in an ethereal glow. Pews had been arranged in neat rows across the large open space, and Leila sat down at the end of one of them. The temple was almost deserted, except for a few cleaners polishing the floors and a group of Indian police officers who stood at the main door. The temple complex had been swept four times in the last twenty-four hours by the Secret Service, and would be checked twice more before the President's visit in the evening.

Leila glanced around, then pulled out a piece of paper and began to read from it quietly, tears filling her eyes. ‘
O thou forgiver of sins, open thou the way for this awakened soul to enter thy kingdom, and enable this bird, trained by thy hand, to soar in the eternal rose garden. She is afire with longing to draw nigh unto thee: enable her to attain thy presence.
'

She had heard the news about her mother two hours earlier. Something had made her want to ring Tehran from the moment she had woken. Already her mind was playing tricks, rearranging the sequence of events so that she somehow knew her mother was dead before the woman on the phone had confirmed it. The woman, a neighbour, had been sitting with her mother all night, comforting her as she slipped away. She shouldn't have told Leila, but clearly she needed to speak to someone.

‘
She is afire with longing to draw nigh unto thee,
' Leila continued, the words blurring in front of her. ‘
Enable her to attain thy presence. She is distraught and distressed in separation from thee. Cause her to be admitted into thy Heavenly mansion.
'

The past twelve hours had been the worst of her life. She had stayed up late reading about Fariborz Sahba, the Iranian architect behind the temple. Her mother had spoken often of him and his wonderful house of worship, which she had visited soon after its completion in the 1980s. Sahba had chosen the metaphor of a blossoming lotus flower in the hope that a new era of peace and religious tolerance would emerge out of the ‘murky waters' of mankind's history of ignorance and violence.

Spiro was ignorant of many things, but last night was the first time he had been violent towards her. She had tried to resist, to talk him out of it, but he had threatened to tell Monk Johnson that she was behaving erratically. Nothing could jeopardise the presidential pageant, or the leading part she had been asked to play in it, so she had followed him out of the restaurant and back to his hotel room.

Afterwards, in her own room, she had taken a shower, sobbing as she scrubbed herself with sandalwood soap. Then the tears had cleared and she had set to work, researching the Bahá'í faith online with the zeal of a dying patient desperate for a cure: the simple process of religious conversion that required a ‘declaration card' to be filled out; how the rural masses had been targeted by Bahá'í missionaries in post-Gandhi India, many of them signing up to its appealing message of a united mankind with a single thumbprint. And the British weapons inspector David Kelly, who had converted to Bahá'ísm four years before his mysterious death.

By the time dawn broke, her research had better prepared her for the news of her mother's death, which only seemed to confirm in her tired mind the belief that she had known about it already. She felt closer to her mother, understood her life better, and knew how to pray for her in death. Her understanding of the Bahá'í faith was still nothing compared to her mother's, but it had grown in recent months, preparing her for this day.

Now she was here, in the Lotus Temple, waiting for her Security Service colleagues to arrive, and she must try to put her grieving on hold. As an intelligence officer she was used to protecting her emotions, partitioning off her inner life in order to play a part, but she knew that the next few hours would test her skills to the limit.

‘With tearful eyes she fixed her gaze on the Kingdom of Mysteries. Many a night she spent in deep communion with thee, and many a day she lived in intimate remembrance of thee.'

She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue and looked around the temple, drawing strength from its beauty. Monk Johnson would want to walk through the President's journey one more time, down the avenue, up the five flights of steps and into the protection of Sahba's petals. Leila felt protected too, with her own declaration card in one hand, a page of prayers in the other, about to convert to the religion of her mother and hoping to be forgiven for the choices she had made and the actions she was about to take.