Games Traitors Play

Marchant listened again to the Berbers’ agitated calls as a goat stumbled out of the gloaming next to him and moved off down the hillside. Something had disturbed the peace of the mountains. The man he had been following had stopped now. His hands were cupped around his mouth and he was calling out into the dying light. The wind was in the wrong direction for Marchant to hear, but the man’s body language said enough. He had sunk to his knees with exhaustion. Had he come with a warning? Was it that he was too late? Then he heard him cry out again. The swirling wind carried the sound down the hillside to Marchant. There was panic in his voice, and they weren’t Berber words this time.

‘Nye strelai!’ he shouted. ‘Nye strelai!’

Moments later, a short burst of automatic gunfire rang out, echoing through the mountains, and the man slumped over. Marchant pressed himself closer to the earth, breathing hard, searching around for better cover, calculating where the shots had come from. He slid across to a bush, keeping his eyes on the horizon. And then he saw it, hovering up over the crest of the hill. The Roc bird rose into the sky.

He knew at once that it was Russian-built, an Mi-8, its distinctive profile silhouetted in the dusk light. It was white, but there were no UN markings. The shots had come from the machine-gun mounted beneath the cockpit. Marchant was dead if the pilot had seen him, but the helicopter turned, nose down, and rose into the star-studded sky, heading towards the Algerian border.

9

The doubt that had been sown in the young sensor operator’s mind grew stronger with each passing second. She had tried to tell herself that she was just seeing things, that she was suffering from exhaustion, too many late nights reading God’s word, but there was no escaping the yellow shape that the heat of the bodies had formed. Although the hut only had a canvas roof of some kind, it was impossible to tell precisely how many people there were inside, as the bodies were bunched so closely together – too close for Taleban.

‘Sir, there’s something abnormal about the target imagery,’ she said, turning to her pilot.

‘Would you care to elaborate?’ Spiro said, before the pilot had time to reply.

The analyst paused, struggling to conceal her dislike of Spiro. ‘They’re too close together.’

‘Perhaps they’re praying. What’s the local time anyhow? I’ll put money on it being the Mecca hour. If we have no other objections, I say we shoot.’

Spiro directed his last comment at the base commander, who was on the phone to the Pentagon. Spiro knew the commander needed the break just as much as he did.

‘We’re green-lit,’ the commander said, replacing the phone. Spiro could tell he was concealing his excitement. He just had to make sure the USAF didn’t get to take any credit.

‘Then let’s engage, people,’ Spiro said, putting a hand on the pilot’s shoulder. The pilot flinched, and Spiro withdrew it. He knew at once that it had been an inappropriate gesture. These pilots were under pressure, too. There was talk on the base of combat stress, despite their distance from the battlefield. Unlike a fighter pilot, who pulled away from the target after dropping his payload, the Reaper pilots stayed on site, watching the bloody aftermath in high magnification.

‘Sir, given the subject is static, I’d appreciate a second opinion,’ the pilot said, catching his colleague’s eye. ‘If she’s not happy, neither am I.’

‘Are you not happy?’ Spiro asked the analyst. No one in the room missed his sarcasm. ‘The Pentagon’s happy, I’m happy, your commander here is goddamn cock-a-hoop. Salim Dhar, the world’s most wanted terrorist, just spoke on a cell from the target zone, and you’re not happy. As far as we know, nobody has gone in or out of that lousy shack apart from a pack of crazy Afghani dogs. This is paytime, honey. And we’ll all get a share, don’t you worry your tight little ass. I’ll see to it personally.’

As Spiro’s words hung in the air, a phone began to ring. The commander picked it up and listened for a few moments, nodding at the pilot. ‘Could you stream it through now? I’d appreciate that. Channel nine.’

The pilot leaned forward and flicked a switch. Moments later, Salim Dhar’s voice filled the stuffy room. It was only a few words, a short burst from someone who seemed to know the risk he was running by speaking on a cell phone, but no one was in any doubt. They had all heard his voice too many times in the last year, seen his face on too many posters.

‘Fort Meade picked it up a few seconds ago,’ the commander said. ‘Same coordinates, same cell, 100 per cent voiceprint match, confidence threshold now at 95 per cent. Gentlemen, ladies, I hope 432 Air Expeditionary Wing will be remembered for many things, but as of this moment, we’ll be known for ever as the people who took down Salim Dhar. Engage the target.’

Lieutenant Oaks spent the last minutes of his life in frustration as much as fear. He had managed to corral everyone into the middle of the hut, including Murray, and persuaded them of the merits of his plan. The cross was as good as he could make it in the circumstances: four men lying in a line, hands still tied behind their backs, heads below the next man’s shackled ankles, and then two lying perpendicular to them, one either side of Oaks, who was second in the upright. Even if it didn’t show up as a cross, Oaks figured it would look pretty damn weird on a thermal-imaging screen.

But then, as they lay there, each praying to his own God, Salim Dhar was suddenly amongst them for a second time. It was only a few words, spoken on his cell phone, but it was enough to make Oaks realise what was happening. When he heard him, he screamed, hoping that his voice would be picked up by someone at Fort Meade, but he was too late. Dhar had stopped talking by the time he was railing at the sky.

He started to sob now, lying in the mud on his imaginary cross, the smell of urine filling the air. There was nothing left to do. For a moment he stopped, trying to hear the sound of the drone above the murmurings of his colleagues. A Reaper’s turboprop engine at altitude purred like a buzzing insect – that’s what they said, wasn’t it? – but he heard nothing. Just the noise of the dogs, which whined and ran in all directions when the first Hellfire exploded deep in the Afghan mud beside him.

10

Marchant had to call London, tell them what he’d seen, but his mobile phone had no signal. Satisfied that the helicopter had been operating on its own, he broke cover and ran back down the path to the motorbike, stumbling and falling as he went. The mountains were quiet now, the Berber goatherds stunned into silence by whatever had just happened. He started up the engine and headed back down the track to the main road and on towards Marrakech.

He couldn’t decide if it was safer to dump the bike and get back to his apartment before he called Fielding, or to ring as soon as he was in range. His mobile phone was encrypted, but the events he had just witnessed made him nervous of talking in the open. The sight of the man being shot had heightened his senses, stirred a primitive survival instinct.

He also felt an irrational sense of loss. He had never met the man, but they had been joined in some way, had listened to the same story in the square, ridden the same route out of town, first on Mobylettes then on more powerful machines. It could have been him in the line of fire. All he wanted to do now was get as far away as possible from the mountains, and the haunting Berber goatherds’ calls that had warned of danger.

It was as he throttled back the engine that he began to rethink his plans. A line of single headlights had appeared a thousand yards ahead, coming up the straight road towards him, fanned across both lanes. He knew at once that it was the group of British bikers, one of whose machines he had stolen. Should he stop, try to explain? They had clearly seen him at the petrol station, and would immediately identify the bike as theirs. It was out of the question. He could never play his employer’s card. It was a last resort, reserved for tight spots with foreign governments. He would have been allowed to tell his immediate family who he worked for, too, except that he didn’t have any. Not any more. Not unless he counted Dhar.

His priority was to get a message to Fielding, tell him he had been right, that someone had taken Dhar away by helicopter. He was convinced that the halaka had relayed a message to Dhar, tried to warn him of a Roc bird rising into the sky. It would explain the recent increased level of chatter about Dhar in the souks. But had time run out? Had the warning come too late?

There was only one option. It had been a few years since he had ridden a motorbike at speed, but he had felt comfortable on the journey out of Marrakech. In his first months at Legoland in Vauxhall, working as a junior reports officer, a few of the new recruits used to take bikes out for test rides at lunchtime. There was a motorcycle dealer opposite the main entrance to Legoland, and the staff there were always obliging – one eye on a government contract, perhaps – without ever acknowledging which building Marchant and his colleagues left and entered each day. Marchant would sometimes play it up, hinting that he lived life in the international fast lane, when the truth of his head-office existence was much more mundane. That was one of the reasons he wanted to stay in Morocco.

He watched the needle move across the dial and adjusted his position in the saddle, wishing he was wearing a helmet. If he approached the bikers fast enough, he reckoned they wouldn’t hold the line. Five hundred yards from them, he turned off his headlight and took the machine up to 90 mph, riding in darkness, his face cooling in the night wind. Not for the first time in his life, he felt liberated rather than scared as death drew near, sensing as he had done before in such moments that he was closer to those he had lost: his father, his brother.

Still the bikers were fanned across the road, no gaps between them. An image of the London Marathon came and went: the police roadblock, trying to find a way through. Then, as the needle nudged passed a hundred, a gap started to appear at one end of the line, in the opposite lane. He headed for it, feeling the surface change beneath him as he crossed the middle of the road. For a moment he thought he had lost control, but the BMW handled well and he accelerated again, touching 110 mph. Fifty yards from the line, all the bikes began to peel away, and then he was through them, the sound of their anger fading in his ears.

He liked the bike, but he didn’t want to steal it. Turning the headlight back on, he glanced in the mirror and saw that no one had decided to give chase. A madman had clearly stolen their bike, and he would be dead quicker than they could catch him. When he looked ahead again, he saw the oncoming lorry’s headlights, but there was no time to think. Instinctively, he swerved inside the vehicle and was almost thrown by the draught as it passed him, horn blaring in the darkness.

He moved back onto the correct side of the road. The petrol station where he had picked up the bike was shut, but he parked it there, flashing the headlight on and off once. A mile back up the road, one of the bikers broke away from the group and started to ride towards him. But Marchant was long gone by the time he had arrived, heading into the heart of Marrakech across rough ground, talking on his mobile to London.

11

Marcus Fielding, Chief of MI6, looked out of his fourth-floor window at the commuters walking home across Vauxhall Bridge beneath him. Two of them had stopped, jackets slung over their shoulders, to take in the evening sun as it set over a hot summer London. The Thames was out, the muddy shores busy with sandpipers. On the far bank, below the Morpeth Arms, a woman weighed down with plastic bags was searching through the flotsam and jetsam.

Beside Legoland, one of the Yellow Duck amphibious vehicles that took tourists around London was parked up on the slipway, waiting while its captain briefed passengers on what to do if it sank. Sometimes, Fielding wished it would. Its proximity to Legoland had long made him uneasy, the guided tours attracting too much publicity, too many fingers pointing up in his direction. Still, Fielding couldn’t deny that he had enjoyed the time he had taken the Duck with Daniel Marchant. They were happier days then, full of hope. Marchant had received a text while they were on board together, and the Morocco plan had been born. But that was over now.

Fielding was supposed to be going to the opera tonight, but he needed to wait for Marchant to ring in again from Marrakech. The call had come through earlier on Marchant’s mobile, but the line had dropped, the encryption software unhappy with the integrity of the local network. He knew Marchant wouldn’t make contact unless it was urgent, but it all seemed irrelevant now. He wondered how best to break the news about Salim Dhar to Marchant.

There was a chance, of course, that James Spiro was mistaken. He had been wrong before, most famously about Marchant’s late father, Stephen, Fielding’s predecessor as Chief of MI6. According to Spiro, Stephen and Daniel Marchant were both infidels, worshiping at the altar of a very different god to the rest of the West. Spiro had tried to bring down the entire house of Marchant, and MI6 by implication, until the son had cleared the father’s name.

But the evidence coming out of North Waziristan suggested that this time Spiro was right. The CIA had finally nailed their man. Two intercepted phone calls, a red-hot handset last used in south India: it was hard to disagree with them. GCHQ was running its own tests on the voice, but the match was perfect, as Spiro had repeatedly told him a few minutes earlier on the video link.

There were few people Fielding despised more than Spiro. He should have been cleared out with the old guard when the new President was sworn in, hung out to dry with the attorneys who had sanctioned torture, but somehow he had survived, thanks to the President himself, of all people. The White House’s attitude to the Agency had changed overnight after the assassination attempt in Delhi. Briefly a champion of noble values, it was now an admirer of muscle, and in particular of Spiro, who had taken all the credit for protecting his leader. The clenched fist had replaced the hand of friendship. Now, God help them all, there was no stopping him. Spiro’s star was in the ascendant again. Not only were his enhanced methods back in fashion, but the CIA had been given permission to resume playing hardball with its allies.

Salim Dhar’s elimination was a particularly sweet victory for Spiro. The Agency had never seen Dhar in the same way as the British, struggling to countenance the possibility that he might one day represent an opportunity rather than a threat. For them, Dhar was the problem, not a potential solution, a man who had come close to heaping the ultimate shame on them. From where Fielding stood, it was all deeply frustrating: the President had promised an era of more nuanced attitudes to intelligence, but it appeared to be over before it had begun.

Fielding turned away from the reinforced window and walked across to the cabinet behind his desk. The collection of books reflected his Arabist tastes, charting his career through the Gulf and North Africa. He envied Marchant his time in Morocco, operating on his own, without the bureaucracy of Legoland. It was how he had worked best when he was Marchant’s age, drifting through the medinas, talking to the traders, listening, watching.

He took out a volume of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, presented to him years ago by Muammar al-Gadaffi after he had helped to persuade the Libyan leader to abandon his nuclear ambitions. It was Sir Richard Francis Burton’s ten-volume 1885 limited edition, for subscribers only, and he had never enquired too closely about its provenance. Fielding had been obliged to declare the gift to Whitehall, but it was his counter-intelligence colleagues across the Thames who were most interested, subjecting the volumes to weeks of unnecessary analysis.

The rivalry between the Services had bordered on war in those days, and Fielding had assumed that MI5 would do all it could to embarrass the Vicar, as he knew they called him. Gifts from foreign governments were a favourite cover for listening devices. No one had forgotten the electric samovar presented to the Queen at Balmoral by the Russian Knights aerobatics team, later suspected of being a mantelpiece transmitter, or the infinity bug hidden inside a wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States, given by Russian schoolchildren to the US ambassador to Moscow at the end of the Second World War.

But the sweepers at Thames House found nothing, and resisted the temptation to insert something of their own. The volumes were reluctantly passed back over the river to Legoland. There was talk of donating them to the British Library, but the Vicar was eventually allowed to keep his unholy gift.

As he began to read about Shahryar and Scheherazade, there was a knock on the door and Ann Norman, his formidable personal assistant, appeared. She was wearing her usual red tights and intimidating frown, both of which had protected four Chiefs from Whitehall’s meddling mandarins for more than twenty years.

‘It’s Daniel Marchant. Shall I put him through?’

‘Line three.’

Fielding went over to his desk and sat down, placing the open book in front of him, next to the comms console that linked him to colleagues around the world as well as to his political masters. The book’s presence made him feel more connected, less detached from Marchant’s world. He let him talk for a while, about a halaka, and his trip out into the High Atlas. Fielding stopped him as he began to talk of helicopters.

‘Daniel, I think you should know we’ve just had a call from Langley. NSA picked up a mobile intercept late this afternoon, from Salim Dhar in North Waziristan. One hundred per cent voice match.’

Marchant fell quiet, the hum of a Marrakech medina suddenly audible in the background.

‘Have they killed him?’

‘They think so. A UAV was in the area, eliminated the target within fifteen minutes of the intercept. I’m sorry.’

‘Without even checking? Without talking to us?’

‘The Americans aren’t really in the mood right now for cooperating on Dhar. You know that.’

‘But Dhar was here, I’m sure of it. In Morocco. Barely an hour ago, up near the Tizi’n’Test pass. The halaka spoke of a Roc bird.’

Fielding absently turned the pages of The Arabian Nights, hearing a younger version of himself in Marchant’s voice. Fielding had been less hot-headed, but he rated Marchant more highly than anyone of his generation. A part of him wondered again if Spiro had made a mistake, but it was hard to dispute the CIA’s evidence, at least those elements of it that they had pooled with Britain. The Joint Intelligence Committee was convening first thing in the morning, by which time Britain’s own voice analysis from Cheltenham would be in. GCHQ was running tests through the night, but Fielding didn’t expect a different result.

‘And how do I present your evidence to the JIC tomorrow?’ Fielding said, knowing it was an unfair question. Unlike police work, intelligence-gathering was seldom just about evidence, as he had explained to MI6’s latest intake of IONEC graduates earlier that day. Agents had to be thorough but also counter-intuitive; ‘Cutting the red wire when the manual said blue,’ as one over-excited graduate had put it.

‘Someone took him away. Whoever owns the helicopter has Dhar.’

‘And who does own it?’

‘It was white, UN, but no markings.’

‘White?’ Fielding’s interest was pricked. He knew that the Mi-8 was used by the UN, knew too that the government in Sudan wasn’t averse to flying unmarked white military aircraft to attack villages in Darfur.

‘I was about to tell you that when you interrupted me.’

Fielding could hear Marchant’s anger mounting. He had always preferred field agents who were passionate about the CX they filed to London. It made for better product.

‘Suppose it was just an exercise,’ he said, testing him.

‘An exercise? They shot someone, the man I’d been following from Marrakech, the same man who’d been listening to the storyteller.’ Marchant fell silent again. ‘Remember when Dhar sent me the text, after Delhi?’ he continued, trying to restore his Chief’s belief.

Fielding stood up, his lower spine beginning to ache. It always played up when he was tired, and he suddenly felt world-weary, as if he had been asked to live his entire life over again, fight all his old Whitehall battles, relive the fears of raised threat levels, the waking moments in the middle of the night.

‘Daniel, we’ve been over this many times,’ he said, thinking back to their journey down the river. They had both thought the text was from Dhar. GCHQ was less sure.

‘The words were taken from a song. Leysh Nat’arak.’

‘And that text was one of the reasons I gave you time in Morocco. I would have let you go earlier if I could. You were no good to anyone in London. Langley thought otherwise. We all hoped that you’d find Dhar, that he’d make contact. But that’s not going to happen now. I’m sorry. It’s time to come home.’

‘You really believe the Americans have killed him, don’t you?’

Fielding hesitated, one hand on the small of his back. ‘I’m not sure. But whatever happened in Morocco, I want you away from it. For your own sake. If someone was killed, and you saw it, we have a problem, and that wasn’t part of the deal. I also sent you to Morocco to keep out of trouble.’

‘Yalla natsaalh ehna akhwaan. That was the lyric. Let’s make good for we are brothers.’ Marchant paused. ‘Dhar was out there, up in the mountains. I’m sure of it. And he wanted to come in. But someone took him, before he could.’

‘Someone? Who, exactly?’

Marchant tried to ignore the scepticism that had returned to Fielding’s voice. He had thought about this question on the way back to his apartment, wrestled with the possibilities, the implications, knowing how it would sound. But it was quite clear in his own mind, as clear as the Russian words he had heard on the mountainside: Nye strelai. Don’t shoot.

‘Moscow.’

12

Marchant swilled the Scotch around his mouth for a few seconds before swallowing it. He had hoped the alcohol would taste toxic, that his body would reject it in some violent way, but it was sweeter than he had ever remembered.

He was sitting under a palm tree in the courtyard of the Chesterfield Pub, a bar anglais at the Hotel Nassil on avenue Mohammed V. It was not a place he was particularly proud to be, but there was a limited choice of public venues serving alcohol in Marrakech. The Scotch was decent enough, though, and there were fewer tourists than he had feared. His only worry was if the group of British bikers had decided to turn back to Marrakech for the night and came here for a drink.

He had learned to trust his gut instinct since signing up with MI6, and at the moment it didn’t feel as if Salim Dhar was dead. The Americans had claimed to have killed a number of terrorists with UAVs in recent years and later proved to have been wrong. Only time would tell if they were right about Dhar. It would be too risky to send in anyone on the ground to collect DNA. Later perhaps. For now, the CIA would look for other evidence, listen to the chatter, assess jihadi morale.

Marchant knew, though, that Fielding was right: his Morocco days were over. He had already booked himself onto the early-morning flight back to London. In India, when he was a child, his father had once told him to live in each country as if for ever, but always to be ready to leave at dawn. At the time, his father was a middle-ranking MI6 officer who had served in Moscow before Delhi. He was used to the threat of his diplomatic cover being blown, of tit-for-tat expulsions.