The Daniel Marchant Spy Trilogy: Dead Spy Running, Games Traitors Play, Dirty Little Secret

‘We’ve been through this before, Marcus. It wasn’t a set-up.’

‘I know. Because Leila wasn’t working for the Americans.’ He walked around to his seat, picked up the pile of transcripts and files and dropped them onto the table between Chadwick and Armstrong. ‘She was working for the Iranians.’

39

Marchant listened to the rustle of the necklaces slung loosely around the cows’ necks, made from seashells threaded with coarse coir twine. A small herd had gathered in front of the Namaste Café, meandering slowly towards a promontory of rocks that stretched out from the sand into the Arabian Sea. The café was in the middle of the beach, near the centre of the Om symbol. Marchant had seen the beach’s auspicious shape from the top of the cliffs at the far end, where the rickshaw driver had dropped him.

Now he was watching the sun set, with a Kingfisher beer in one hand, a chillum in the other, thinking he could settle here for a year. His plastic chair was listing badly, its legs sinking slowly into the soft sand, forcing him to cock his head to level the distant horizon. Two human figures stood motionless on the far rocks, looking out to sea, their yogic poses silhouetted against the vermilion-streaked sky. Further down the beach, a group of fishermen squatted around a wooden canoe, mending their nets. Monika would have enjoyed the scene, in real life as well as her cover one. Leila, he thought, would have told all the Westerners to go back home and find proper jobs.

He was beginning to accept now that Leila must have helped the Americans, unwittingly said something that made them think he was trying to kill Munroe at the marathon rather than save him. They had distrusted his father, and they suspected the son too. But had Leila really not known what she was doing? He hoped Salim Dhar would have the answer.

Other stoned travellers were sharing the view, chilled out in seats scattered around the café, chatting quietly. Marchant had two of them down as being from Sweden, two from Israel and one from South Africa. The Israeli couple, he guessed, had recently completed their national service (three years for men, twenty-one months for women). Behind the café was a small row of cubicles, each with a two-inch thick mattress on its sandy floor. Marchant had rented one of them for fifty rupees, and later paid an extra thirty for a mosquito net, when the biting started.

‘It used to be more shanti here,’ said Shankar, the bar owner, bringing Marchant another beer. He hadn’t asked him yet about Salim. The Israeli couple were arousing his suspicion: the occasional look in his direction, the bulge of a mobile phone in the pocket of the man’s shorts. ‘Now there are too many Indian tourists. They come to watch the hippies at weekends. Soon it will be like Goa.’

‘The beer’s good,’ Marchant said, reading from the label, which hadn’t changed since his backpacking days. ‘“Most thrilling chilled.” Is it difficult getting a licence?’

‘I give the policeman 4,000 rupees, they let me sell beer. Which place you from?’

‘Ireland.’

‘I tried it once. The Guinness beer.’

‘And?’

Shankar shook his head from side to side in appreciation, but Marchant could see that he was distracted. He was looking down to the far end of the beach, at least three hundred yards away, where there was another, bigger café. Some sort of commotion had caught his eye. Marchant turned around to see.

‘Baksheesh problem,’ Shankar said. Marchant stared hard into the dying sun, shielding his eyes. He couldn’t see anything unusual.

‘He didn’t pay up?’

‘Maybe. They usually come at start of season.’

‘Who? The police?’

Then Marchant saw them, a group of at least ten officers, led by a peak-capped man with a lathi in his hand.

‘No problem, no problem. They are my friends.’

But Marchant could hear the tension in Shankar’s voice. Without rushing, he stood up and walked around to his room at the rear of the café. There was nothing in it, because he had no luggage. Moving quickly, he removed the plastic bag from the purse belt strapped to his leg, checking that his money and passport were inside. He then went out and walked over to the shade of some coconut trees, where hammocks had been strung between their trunks, and started to dig quickly in the sand. A few moments later he had buried his passport and money. He made a mental note of the nearest tree, and then looked over at the group of policemen. They had stopped at another small café, halfway between him and the end of the beach.

‘I’m off for a swim,’ he said to Shankar, who was busy stacking crates of empty beer bottles at the back of the shack. It was a futile gesture if he was hoping to conceal them. None of the other travellers seemed to have taken much notice of Marchant’s movements.

‘No problem,’ Shankar said. ‘The sea is strong.’

Marchant didn’t want to leave his shirt and trousers lying around. Instead he ran down to the sea fully clothed, trying not to think of Stare Kiejkuty. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and dived into the waves, telling himself that he wasn’t about to drown.

‘I’m afraid your allegations about Leila haven’t played too well in Langley,’ Carter said, glancing at the newspaper in his hand before putting it down on the park bench beside him.

‘No one likes to hear that they’ve been betrayed by one of their own,’ Fielding said.

‘You know, I was sitting in on a Langley lecture the other day. The guy was telling all the rookies that money’s no longer what traitors do it for. Divided loyalties, that’s what they’re about these days. Mother country calling louder than their adopted one.’

‘So why don’t you believe it about Leila?’

‘She wasn’t born in Iran.’

‘She might as well have been. Close to her Iranian mother, fluent in Farsi. That’s why we recruited her. She represented the future of the Service.’

They watched the stream of morning commuters cut through St James’s Park up to Whitehall, a few runners weaving in and out of them. A cleaning van was making its way slowly along the path, its hazard lights flashing. To the left of their bench, a man was unchaining a stack of deck chairs. Spring had arrived, and the trees all around were blurred with blossom. In the distance, the London Eye rose above the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It was where Fielding had first had his doubts about Leila, high above London in a capsule with Jago. Sometimes he longed for the innocent outlook of his godson, the untroubled optimism.

‘They’re disputing the Ali Mousavi mobile evidence, reckon the maltreatment of the mother was part of the bigger Bahá’í picture, nothing more. They don’t buy that Leila was blown, Marcus. I’m sorry.’

No need to apologise, Fielding thought. She’s working for you now, protecting your President. ‘So I gather. Armstrong and Chadwick were the same. They think it’s sour grapes on the Service’s part. My revenge for Leila working for the Americans.’

‘Are you safe? The job?’

‘For the moment. Chadwick was brought in to steady the ship. He doesn’t need two Chiefs taking early retirement. And you?’ Fielding had heard rumours.

‘I’ve been called off the Marchant case. Straker’s brought back Spiro. He’s flying into Delhi this morning.’

‘Daniel Marchant wasn’t trying to kill your Ambassador, you know that,’ Fielding said.

‘I wanted to believe it, Marcus, I really did. But we’ve been blindsided by Armstrong’s TETRA evidence. The guy was within a speed-dial of blowing Munroe’s head off.’

‘Leila gave him the phone, trust me.’

‘But it was Marchant’s handset.’

‘His old one. It was taken away from him when he was suspended. I’ve been through the records. Someone managed to check it out again, without signing for it.’

‘It could have been Marchant, then.’

‘He was suspended. Leila gave it to him during the race, and he handed it back to her afterwards. She must have planted it in his flat.’

They sat in silence, watching a squirrel approach them, looking for food. ‘For a while, I thought our time had come,’ Carter eventually said. ‘Our chance to remind the world about the real meaning of intelligence. With Marchant’s help, we could have found Dhar, played him back, started to whip AQ the old-fashioned way. Straker gave us our chance–twenty-four hours, he said. Now he’s shuttered it. He wants Dhar dead, Marchant too. No nuances, no shade. The soldiers are running the show now.’

‘Are those Spiro’s orders?’

‘I’m afraid so. And he only deals in dead-or-alive.’

‘Does anyone know where Dhar is?’

‘Somewhere on the Karnataka coast. The Indians are cooperating fully. They want the President’s visit to go ahead as much as we do. A frigate from the Fifth Fleet is standing by.’

Marchant spotted the distinct outline on the horizon as he trod water, careful to keep his head above the surface of the sea. The ship was about two miles offshore, and looked like one of America’s Littoral combat ships, the sleek, angular profile designed to reduce its radar signature. A large flight-deck was just visible, silhouetted against the orange horizon. Beneath the water, the new class of frigate had a trimaran hull for speed: forty-five knots.

Marchant’s first thought was that it must be part of a wider security umbrella for the President’s imminent visit, but he was only flying into and out of Delhi. Gokarna was hundreds of miles away, south of Goa. He looked again at the ship and tried to determine if it was on the move. After a couple of minutes, he decided that it was stationary. Its presence troubled him, and he turned back to face the beach, 400 yards away. He felt better looking at the land, more in control of the water around him.

The police had combed the beach’s entire length, stopping at every café, and were now making their way back to the far end, where there was a way out onto the small road that led back to Gokarna. Marchant calculated that if he started his return now, they would have passed the Namaste Café and be almost off the beach by the time he reached the shore.

It was after two minutes of swimming that he noticed he was making no progress. While he had been treading water, watching the police, he had kept an eye on a small outcrop of cliffs, monitoring his position in case of currents. There had been little lateral movement, but he now realised that he had been drifting slowly out to sea. He should have gone easier on the chillum.

He kicked harder, and increased the frequency of his strokes. But when he stopped to look up, he knew that he had slipped further out to sea. He glanced behind him at the frigate, still out there on the horizon. For the first time, he felt a rising sense of panic. His arms felt heavier, the sea colder, deeper. He would be fine if he kept his head above water.

The sea was calm, but he faltered in his next stroke and swallowed a mouthful of water. As he choked, he remembered the cloth in the back of his throat, being worked in a circular motion, forcing itself deeper. He retched, seawater sluicing up his nose. The shore seemed to be slipping further away with each stroke, dropping beneath the gentle swell. The clingfilm would be next, a hose relayed into his mouth, deep down into his stomach.

But he never reached level three. Instead, he took a deep breath and dipped below the waves to a place where he could stretch his arms, kick for the shore. Here in the silence he could take control and confront the fear. Sebastian was by his side now, no longer lying still at the bottom of the pool, but swimming up to the surface, smiling. He pushed on through the darkness, growing stronger with each stroke, until his lungs began to burst.

40

Paul Myers hadn’t been hit so hard since he was bullied at school. He could have put up with the pain of a broken nose if it wasn’t for his glasses, which had been knocked to the floor with the impact. They had been taken off him when he was blindfolded, and put back on over his hood, to the amusement of his attackers.

The sound of them being crunched under a heel hurt even more than the second punch, which split his top lip like a burst grape. Instinctively he curled up into the foetal position, but it was no good. There were at least three of them, and he was soon being kicked in the back. Their feet were accurate, targeting his kidneys. He had always been useless at fighting.

Myers had gone from one bar to another after Fielding had dropped him off in Trafalgar Square, hoping to drown his memories of Leila. He also had nowhere to stay (the friend’s flat in North London had been a lie). It was as he was wandering across St James’s Park at about 9 a.m. that the van had slowly pulled up, hazard lights flashing. The usual park maintenance markings were visible on its sides, but the men who jumped out of the back doors weren’t interested in sweeping leaves.

The journey lasted fifteen minutes. He had no idea where he was being taken, except that the sound of the van’s engine echoed shortly before it stopped, suggesting that they had driven into a garage. Somehow he thought Leila was behind it, but he blamed her for everything in his life since he had discovered her betrayal.

As soon as the van’s back doors were opened, the beating started. They dragged him out onto cold concrete, and the fall from the van should have hurt him, but he was so drunk that he didn’t feel their kicks. He didn’t even recognise the voice of Harriet Armstrong as she ordered his attackers to stop.

The three fishermen spotted the Westerner two hundred yards off the port bow of their wooden, fifteen-foot boat. The owner had told his son to alter course and pick him up. It wouldn’t be the first tourist they had rescued, nor the last. They were usually drunk, high on skunk or acid. He had a cousin in Goa who said it was even worse over there. But Westerners had their uses. They liked having beach barbecues, and would buy tuna directly from his boat for prices three times as high as he could get at the market in Gokarna.

This one was far gone, he thought, as he and his son hauled the heavy body over the gunwhale. He had been swimming with all his clothes still on. Once the Westerner was curled up in the bottom of the boat, he nudged his stomach with his foot. The man groaned and vomited some seawater.

‘He’s probably one of Shankar’s,’ the boat owner said.

Marchant woke before it was fully light, and for a moment he thought he was in his childhood bedroom in Tarlton. The mattress was so thin it had taken him back, in the minutes before he was fully awake, to the time when he and Sebastian used to sleep on the floor in their indoor tent. But as his eyes adjusted to the orange light of dawn, he realised that the cotton above him was not a flysheet but a mosquito net.

He knew that he was lucky to be alive. The sea had drawn every ounce of energy from his body, and then worked on his mind. He had no recollection of being rescued, but he could remember being carried into his tiny room, the voice of Shankar, the café owner, enough to reassure him that he wasn’t on board the American frigate.

He went outside, his legs shaky, and looked up and down the beach. It was empty except for the cows, which were standing in a group between the café and the sea, and a solitary squatting figure in the far distance. The sea was calm, lapping at the shore. And then he saw the angular outline of the frigate, still two miles off, slightly further down the coast. He knew he must find Salim Dhar today.

After retrieving his purse belt from the sand, Marchant came across Shankar at the front of the café, trimming a coconut husk with a knife before chopping its top off and inserting a straw. He placed it on a table next to a row of others, each with a straw sticking out. Overnight a turquoise fishing boat had been pulled up onto the beach, next to the chairs that were still littered across the sand. Its name, Bharat, had been painted in white lettering on the side, beneath the high-pointed bow. Something about the boat looked familiar.

‘Who do I thank for rescuing me?’ Marchant asked, sitting down next to Shankar. ‘The owner of this?’ He nodded at the boat.

‘He says you shouldn’t go swimming with clothes on.’

‘I need to find someone. Brother Salim.’

Shankar stopped cutting at a new husk for a moment, and then continued.

‘Can you help me find him?’ Marchant asked, watching the knife. He knew he was speaking to the right person.

‘So it was you the police were looking for?’

‘Can you help?’

‘The boat goes after breakfast.’

‘Shanti Beach?’

Shankar stood up and walked away, dropping one of the coconuts into his hands. ‘Breakfast. You ask too many questions.’

41

Fielding lifted the flute to his lips and began to play Telemann’s sonata in F minor. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been at his flat during the middle of a weekday. It reminded him of being confined to the sanatorium at school while everyone else was in their classrooms. Dolphin Square had been surprisingly busy when his driver had dropped him off at the side entrance. So life went on after the workers had left their homes for the office.

His driver had asked whether he should wait, and Fielding had hesitated. It wasn’t a question of how long he would be, but of whether he would ever climb into the Chief of MI6’s official Range Rover again. In the end he had told him to go back to the office. Now, as Fielding lost himself in Telemann’s first movement, he hoped to find a reason to return to Legoland.

The most powerful person on the planet was about to be under the protection of someone working for an enemy state. He wished he cared more. The future of the free world might soon be hanging in the balance. But it was up to Straker and Spiro and Armstrong and Chadwick now. They had conspired to turn Leila against him; they must live with the consequences.

He had provided the Americans with all the evidence in his possession, but it hadn’t been enough. It was too circumstantial, the CIA said. More to the point, Leila was their prodigal signing, the agent who had saved an American ambassador’s life. The CIA wasn’t about to have her revealed as an Iranian spy by anyone, least of all by a compromised British spy chief whose ultimate loyalties the Agency also suspected.

Now they had taken Myers, an innocent man who had tried to do the right thing. MI5 were talking about a serious security breach, enough for a public prosecution. Leila would be called as a witness, to confirm that Myers had leaked confidential information on the night before the marathon. Fielding would be summoned too, asked to explain why Myers had taken transcripts off the Cheltenham site.

It took him a few moments to realise his phone was ringing. Very few people knew his home number. He walked over and picked up the receiver. It was Anne Norman.

‘Marcus?’ She had never called him that before.

‘Anne?’ He had never used her first name.

‘There’s someone who’s very keen to speak to you. From India.’

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s Daniel. Daniel Marchant.’

The boat left after breakfast, just as Shankar had promised. Marchant met its owner outside the café and walked with him down to the water’s edge, where his son was stowing a tangle of blue fishing nets in the bow. The owner was jovial, with a proud potbelly, and was soon joking with Marchant about his misfortune the previous evening.

‘You were floating in the water like a great big jellyfish!’ he said, slapping him on the back.

Their laughter stopped, though, when Marchant nodded towards two local fishermen smoking bidis, who had stepped out from the shade of the coconut trees at the back of the beach and were walking across the sand towards them. He knew at once from their detached manner that they had come to take him to Dhar. They looked on silently as the owner and his son struggled to launch the boat, helped by Marchant. Once it was afloat, the two men waded out into the shallow water and climbed aboard, ignoring the son’s offers of assistance. The owner threw Marchant a nervous glance, started up the engine and steered the boat out towards the headland.

To his relief, Marchant couldn’t see the frigate on the horizon any more. He looked inland at the rocky coastline and the hills beyond, one of which was topped with a communications mast covered in satellite dishes and aerials. In the past, he would have been depressed by its presence in such a rugged, timeless setting, but he knew they were everywhere in modern India, and today the sight of its distinctive red and white stripes reassured him.

After twenty minutes, Marchant spotted a small beach where some huts, made of laterite bricks cut from the local Konkan soil, had been built into the hillside. He thought he could make out one or two Westerners on the beach, but the owner kept going down the coast. If it wasn’t for the two silent men sitting behind him on the boat, Marchant would have enjoyed the spray and the sunshine of the open sea, but their stony presence was a constant reminder of what lay ahead.

An hour later, the owner finally nudged the tiller away from him and steered the boat towards the shore. The son jumped out first, and dragged the boat ashore. Marchant stepped down into the shallow blue water and walked up onto the beach, followed by the two fishermen. It was in a small cove, barely fifty yards across, and sheltered on both sides by steep cliffs. At the top of the beach was a tatty shack made from wood and woven palm leaves, and a few hammocks hung in the dappled shade of some coconut trees. A sign said ‘Shanti Beach Café’, painted in the colours of the Indian flag. There were no Westerners around, no sign that anyone was staying here. As Marchant took in the view, the two men pushed him forward, signalling for him to walk on.

He followed them to the shack, and they led him in through an open doorway. Inside was a small table, and a man standing with his back to them, talking on a mobile phone. He turned briefly to look at Marchant, a cigarette in his hand, and continued to chat quietly in what sounded like Kannada, the local language. He was better dressed than the fishermen, new jeans, printed shirt, sunglasses perched on the top of his head. For a moment his boyish good looks reminded Marchant of Shah Rukh Khan. Marchant glanced at the faded postcards that had been stuck to the central wooden post holding up the roof: London, Sydney, Cape Town.

It was a reasonable effort at cover, Marchant thought.

‘Welcome to the Shanti Beach Café,’ the man said, putting away his phone. He looked Marchant up and down. ‘Just our sort of guest.’

‘I’ve come to see brother Salim,’ Marchant said, tensing his stomach muscles. A part of him expected to be punched, bound and hooded at any moment.

‘He’s been waiting for you. It’s a long walk from here. I don’t know who you are, where you’ve come from, but these two will kill you if you try anything. Salim’s orders.’

Four hours later, Marchant reached the crest of the hill and looked back down over the tops of the dense vegetation towards Shanti Beach. It had been a hot, hard climb, and he was out of breath, dripping with sweat. The two fishermen pushed him on. ‘Chalo,’ the taller one urged. Neither had said anything else to him for the whole journey, ignoring his attempts to speak Hindi.

Marchant walked on from the crest, enjoying the first stretch of downhill since they had set off from the beach. He wondered whether he would ever leave this beautiful place alive. A pair of Brahmani kites soared high above him, enjoying the thermals. Why had Dhar agreed to see him? And would he have any answers about his father? The Namaste Café must have been used by Uncle K as a contact point when he was trying to run Dhar. Word would have reached him that a white man had asked for ‘brother Salim’.

The sound of a gunshot made Marchant drop to the ground and look around desperately for cover. For the first time since they had left the Namasté Café, the taller fisherman, who had kept walking as if he had heard nothing, smiled at Marchant, lying in the red dust. It was an awful smile, teeth stained with blood-coloured betelnut juice. Another shot rang out. Marchant listened carefully to it this time, calculating that it was from a high-powered rifle, fired from as close as twenty yards away. He had excelled in his fire-arms training at the Fort. Looking along the path ahead, he saw a figure approaching, a .315 sporting rifle slung over one shoulder. He knew at once that it was Salim Dhar.