Jon Stock - Games Traitors Play

After the initial shock, the grief of a surviving twin had been replaced by the comfort of a stranger. Marchant was no longer alone in the world. He was less troubled by the discovery of a jihadi half-brother than by the thought of what might have been. There had been a bond when they met in India, an unspoken pact that came with kinship. They were both the same age, shared the same father.

Their lives, though, had run in wildly different directions, one graduating from Cambridge, the other from a training camp in Afghanistan. Marchant knew that Dhar would never spy for the US, but he might work for Britain. It was why Marchant had been so keen to travel to Morocco: to establish where his half-brother’s loyalties lay, and then try to turn him. Dhar was not, after all, a regular jihadi . How could he be, with a British father who had risen to become Chief of MI6? Tonight, though, he had accepted that his plan had failed. Dhar had not come forward, as he had hoped, and agreed to work for the land of his father.

The butane lamp above Marchant flickered and died. Dawn was spreading fast across the city from the east, where the mountains were now bathed in warm, newborn sunlight. Marchant stood up, his aching brain holding on to two things: Dhar was still alive, and he could still be turned. But there was something else. Whether Dhar had chosen to leave Morocco without making contact, or someone had taken him, Marchant couldn’t deny that he felt rejected. When it had come to it, Dhar’s family calling hadn’t been strong enough.

Perhaps that was why, as he left the square, he didn’t at first see Lakshmi Meena standing in the doorway of the mosque, watching him with the same intensity as the hawk that had begun to circle high above the waking city. But then he spotted her, turned off into the medina and ran through its narrow alleys as fast as he could.

James Spiro took the call 35,000 feet above the Atlantic, sitting near the front of the Gulfstream V. He had a soft spot for the plane, which he had used regularly in the rendition years. The line wasn’t good, but he knew immediately that it was Lakshmi Meena. He made a mental note not to call her babe.

‘Lakshmi. What have you got for me?’

Meena explained about the unmarked white helicopter that had been seen in the mountains, then took a deep breath — another one — and told him about his old friend Dr Abdul Aziz, the Dentist, and what he had said about the GICM and their hideout in the Atlas mountains.

‘Where are we running with this?’ Spiro asked, cutting her short. ‘I’m on the red-eye here.’

Meena sensed that their conversation would be over almost before it had started. Spiro was too full of Dhar’s death to listen to a junior officer phoning in with a hunch. ‘Aziz thinks Daniel Marchant was in the mountains,’ she continued, feeling that she had nothing to lose. ‘Stole a bike, took a ride up there at the same time the helicopter was seen.’

‘Tell me you were with him.’

‘I’d backed off, as instructed. The guy’s done nothing but go jogging and read the Koran for three months.’

Spiro thought for a moment. Reluctantly, Langley had agreed with London to leave Marchant alone after Delhi, but he wasn’t allowed to travel abroad. After a year, Spiro had acceded to Fielding’s demands and let Marchant fly to Morocco. There was no doubt in Spiro’s mind that the kid should have been locked up, just as his father should have been. The subsequent revelation that he was related to Salim Dhar only confirmed his worst fears. Now might be the time to take him out of the equation, particularly if everyone was distracted by news of Dhar’s death. Besides, what the hell was his so-called vacation in Morocco all about? The Vicar had called it a sabbatical. As far as Spiro was concerned, if someone needed some R amp;R, they headed for Honolulu, not North Africa.

‘Check him in for some root-canal work,’ Spiro said. ‘Aziz could do with the practice.’

‘That would be a breach of existing protocol, sir,’ Meena said.

‘I think you misheard me, Lakshmi.’

‘No, sir, I didn’t.’

There was a pause, a calculation. Spiro knew she was right, but he wasn’t going to let anyone ruin his visit to London, least of all Daniel Marchant. He cut her off.

It had been a good day in Washington, one of the best of his career. He had personally briefed the President about the drone strike on Salim Dhar. Although it was still too early to go public, the signs were good: no collateral for once, just a clean hit on the world’s most wanted. It didn’t get much sweeter. Now he was on his way to Fairford, and would shortly be making Marcus Fielding’s life a misery, something he always enjoyed.

The CIA was already all over MI5, running its own large network of agents and informers in Britain. As Spiro had discussed with the President, a Pakistani entering the US from ‘Londonistan’ on a visa-waiver programme now represented the biggest threat to America. As a result, 25 per cent of the Agency’s resources dedicated to preventing another 9/11 were being directed at Britain. MI5 wasn’t up to the job, and the CIA had recruited half of Yorkshire in the past few years. Immigration security at all major British airports was being coordinated by the Agency, too. Now he was about to rub the Vicar’s nose in it.

His phone rang again. This time he hesitated before answering it. His boss, the DCIA, only called him in the middle of the night if there was a problem.

It was two o’clock in the morning, and Marcus Fielding was still in his Legoland office, playing his flute: Telemann’s Suite in A-Minor. It was something of a tradition in MI6. Colin McColl, one of his predecessors, had filled the night air at the old head office in Southwark with his playing. Fielding rarely drank, but tonight was an exception. A bottle of Château Musar from the Bekaa Valley stood on his desk, half empty. He knew Spiro had come to gloat in London and he was determined to deny him the pleasure.

He stood up, arched his stiff back and went over to Oleg, the Service’s newest recruit, a two-year-old border terrier. Fielding had adopted him from Battersea Dogs’ Home the previous month and named him after two great Russian servants of MI6. There had been a few raised eyebrows the first time he brought Oleg into Legoland, but he only accompanied the Chief to work when he had to stay late, like tonight. His driver had brought him across the Thames from his flat in Dolphin Square, Pimlico, walking him along the towpath before handing him over to security at a side gate.

Oleg had undoubtedly made life more tolerable, absorbed some of the stress. His presence broke up the neatness of Fielding’s existence, which he was aware had become an obsession since his return from India. He had almost lost his job helping Daniel Marchant in Delhi. For a few dark days, the Americans had taken over the asylum. Legoland had been raided and he had been on the run, just like Marchant. He was too old for that game, too tired, which was why he had tried to restore some order to his life, a protection against the chaos of the raging world outside.

Tonight, though, that chaos threatened to return, and it had nothing to do with Oleg or the Lebanese wine. His mind had been racing ever since he had spoken with Marchant in Morocco. Normally, he would have dismissed his talk of Moscow as wild speculation from a field agent under pressure. But earlier in the day, a routine memo from MI5 had landed in his in-tray that made Marchant’s words — Nye strelai — hang in the air long after the encrypted line from Marrakech had dropped.

Harriet Armstrong, Fielding’s opposite number at Thames House, had come over the river to talk about it in person. She was no longer on crutches, but she still had a slight limp, the only legacy of her car crash in Delhi. One of her officers in D4, the counter-intelligence branch that monitored the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens, had intercepted a routine diplomatic communication. A man called Nikolai Ivanovich Primakov was about to be posted to London under cultural attaché cover. The young duty officer had run the normal checks, calling up Primakov’s file from the library and cross-referring it with known SVR and GRU agents operating under diplomatic cover.