Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

“None taken. There’s no money to spare, and complacency’s a damn sight cheaper than panic.”

Morley was rummaging around in a desk drawer. “Right,” he said, extracting a bulging folder, “I’ll give you the news as we got it ourselves. Seventh August—we had the first report of a gun battle in Kerki…” He turned and reached an arm toward the large map behind him. “Which is here,” he added, tapping with a finger. “There were Europeans involved, but we didn’t find out who until”—he moved on to the next message—“the eleventh. The battle took place on the twenty-eighth of July. The local Russian authorities—led, incidentally, by some high-ranking Cheka boss from Moscow—tried to stop a riverboat heading upstream past the town. Several men were killed, including the Cheka boss. There were two Europeans on the boat, who turned out to be members of the Good Indian team. By the time we heard about all this, they were halfway across Afghanistan, on their way to Kabul.”

“And McColl?”

“We had that message you know about, the one from Samarkand on”—he checked through the file—“on the twenty-fourth of July, and nothing since. According to our source in Kerki, the Cheka boss was already holding an Englishman, who might have been McColl. If so, he was probably taken to Tashkent, questioned, and shot. Which will save us the trouble.”

“Was there really no way of bringing him back on board?” Cunningham asked.

“When?”

“I don’t know. There must have been almost a month between his arrival in Moscow and his reaching… wherever you said the battle was.”

“Kerki.” Morley shrugged. “Maybe. But once Suvorov had taken the ‘need to know’ directive as literally as he did… well, the colonel decided we couldn’t take the risk.” He looked at Cunningham. “You knew McColl, right? I’ve talked to others who knew him in Calcutta during the war, and they all said much the same thing, that they never really thought of him as one of us.”

“No, he wasn’t.” Cunningham couldn’t say he’d ever liked the man’s holier-than-thou approach when it came to dealing with Indians, but he had been annoyingly proficient.

Morley turned to another page in his file. “Brady made contact in Kabul on August nineteenth and collected all the papers he and the others needed. He was told about Gandhi’s plans to visit Delhi in the third week of September.” Morley looked up. “Our loin-clothed friend is planning to stir up trouble during the Prince of Wales’s visit,” he explained. “And Brady was pleased to hear that—he thinks the local police will be stretched to the limit while the prince is here. Oh, and we did ask him about McColl. Brady said he hadn’t run into him in Russia.”

Morley consulted the next cable. “August thirty-first. They didn’t want to spend more than three weeks in Delhi, so they stayed a fortnight at Flashman’s Hotel in Peshawar and only arrived here a couple of days ago. We’ve put them up at Sayid Hassan’s…”

“Who’s he?”

“Ah, since your time. He’s from some tin-pot royal family or other—somewhere in Rajasthan, I think. Fortunately for us, he has some rather disgusting habits, and last year he got a little carried away with one of his little boys. We helped him out of the mess, which rather put him in our debt. He’s gone off to the hills for a holiday while this business is completed.” Morley grinned. “We’ve provided the Good Indian team with servants, a genuine one and three of our men. The real one’s there to show the others how it’s done. The team has been asked not to stray—we told them it’s for secrecy’s sake, but really it’s because it makes the surveillance that much easier. If and when they try to twist things around, we’ll be on them like a ton of bricks.”

“If? I don’t think there’s any doubt that Brady will try.”

“When, then.”

“Desperate remedies,” Cunningham murmured to himself.

“You don’t sound too sure about all this.”

“I’m sure enough. Whichever way it goes, they’ll be dead. And with any luck, Gandhi will be, too.”

“We certainly won’t be sorry to see the back of him. He can’t be ignored, he can’t be arrested without making things worse, and he can’t be killed by any obvious friend of ours without turning him into a martyr…”

“I know the rationale,” Cunningham said dryly.

The shadows were lengthening onChandni Chowk, but the offices on one side of the street were still bathed in dazzling sunlight. On the other, leaning in a derelict doorway, McColl idly wondered what the street had looked like before the bomb attack on the viceroy had prompted the authorities to cut down all the trees.

Few in the throng gave him more than a passing glance. Those who did saw a tall, dark-skinned figure with a thick mustache and beard wearing a large floppy turban, an embroidered waistcoat over a white kurta, and matching cotton trousers. In the shadows he convinced as a Pathan, and even in full daylight, most would take him for one of the half-caste unmentionables fathered by British soldiers and administrators over the previous century.

The door across the street opened, and two men emerged, one in Indian dress, the other in a smart European suit. Harkishen Sinha was the latter.

Almost a decade had passed since their paths had last crossed, here in Delhi during McColl’s last visit as an automobile salesman. That meeting had not gone well. Sinha had suspected, quite rightly, that his old friend was also involved in intelligence gathering for the British government, and McColl had found the Indian’s views on British rule both glib and judgmental. Their prewar years at Oxford, and the friendship they’d forged as outsiders at the shrine of English breeding, had felt like a distant memory. In the intervening years, both men had written a few stilted letters, as if reluctant to accept that their friendship was actually over.

A situation like this one, McColl thought, could hardly have been foreseen by either of them.

Their conversation over, the two Indians went their separate ways, the stranger heading west, Sinha crossing the street on a diagonal and walking south. McColl started after him, keeping a fifty-yard gap between them, and remembering a summer day almost twenty years before. They’d been sitting outside a pub by the river, and Sinha had suddenly exclaimed, in his perfect English, how muted everything was. “The sounds, the colors, the smells—everything. I feel like I’m wrapped in cotton wool.”

His old friend turned down a twisting street that McColl remembered came out in front of the Jama Masjid mosque. But after a couple of hundred yards, the Indian turned left into what appeared to be a dead-end alley, and McColl reached the corner in time to see Sinha vanish through a gateway.

A few seconds later McColl let himself through the gate and into a pleasant courtyard, where a servant moved to intercept him. Sinha, glancing back, saw only the costume. “What do you want?” he asked curtly in Urdu.

The servant was trying to push him back, but McColl stood his ground. “Hello, Harry,” he said.

Sinha’s mouth gaped open. “Jack?” he asked, as if he could scarcely believe his ears.

“In person.”

“What…?” Sinha noticed his servant watching with interest. “Nikat, shut the gate,” he told the man abruptly. “Jack, come this way,” he urged, hustling McColl through an archway, across another courtyard, and into what looked like his study. Legal briefs were neatly stacked along one wall.

“How are you, Harry?” McColl asked.

“I’m well, thank you. But…”

“And the children?”

“They are well…”

“I—”