Jon Stock - Games Traitors Play

He looked at the large TV screen for a second, distracted by the rhythmic movement of Nadia’s taut buttocks, the winking recesses. Then he realised that it was his body beneath them, and felt sick. He stepped into the room and grabbed the remote, which was on the table beside a replenished bowl of watermelon. It was only as he turned away that he saw Hugo Prentice standing by the bathroom door, arms folded, watching the screen with a smirk on his fifty-something face.

‘It’s showing in my room, too,’ Prentice said, careful to remain out of sight from the window. ‘On a loop. Every room in the resort, nationwide release. It’s the most exciting thing I’ve seen on an in-house hotel channel in years.’

‘You took your time,’ Marchant said, turning off the TV and dropping the remote onto the bed, which had been freshly made. ‘Fielding send you by boat?’

‘Take off your shirt and close the curtains. You’re tired, remember? Sent to your room for a sleep.’

Marchant looked at Prentice for a moment, then pulled off his shirt, threw it on the bed and walked to the glass doors. Nadia was sitting outside her villa now, sunbathing topless, waiting to see how he would react to the video. She gave him a coy wave. He didn’t wave back, but drew the thick curtains.

Prentice remained by the bathroom door as Marchant went over to the pedestal sink and splashed water on his face. He didn’t want to dwell on the video, the fact that Prentice had just witnessed him having sex. Strangely, he found that more troubling than the implications for his career, the consequences of being compromised by a textbook honeytrap. Perhaps it was because Prentice had been a good friend of his father, who had perfected the knack during Marchant’s teenage years of striding into the sitting room whenever he was watching a sex scene on television.

‘It’s OK, I looked away for the money shot,’ Prentice said, trying to lighten the mood. ‘Fielding sends big love and kisses.’

Marchant wasn’t sure if he was pleased that London had sent Prentice. On balance, he thought he was. To look at, Prentice was smoothness personified, from the swept-back hair to the cut of his safari suit: old-school spy. Just the sort Marchant needed to help him out of the old-school fix he found himself in. Prentice had recently returned from a three-year tour of Poland, where he had helped Marchant escape from a black site, but he was too old for regular deskwork in Legoland, too much of a troublemaker for a management role. Human Resources had branded him a ‘negative sneezer’, spreading dissent rather than ’flu. Fielding had ignored the warning memos, as he usually did with anything sent from HR, and deployed him as a firefighter, ready to be dispatched to global trouble spots at the drop of a panama.

‘They want me to meet someone,’ Marchant said. ‘A friend of my father’s.’

‘That narrows it down,’ Prentice replied. ‘Your old man was a popular Chief. Any other clues?’

‘The meeting’s in London.’ He decided not to tell Prentice about the private view. In his current situation, it helped him to feel in control if he knew at least something that others around him didn’t. ‘I presume it’s with one of theirs, given the need to persuade me,’ Marchant continued, glancing at the television.

‘Moscow still rules. Christ, it’s a while since I’ve seen Eva Shirtov in action. Makes me feel almost nostalgic.’

‘I need to sort it.’ Marchant wasn’t in the mood for flippancy. He was embarrassed.

‘It’s already taken care of.’ Prentice walked over to the TV and ejected a disc from the player in the cabinet below it. ‘Master copy,’ he said, throwing it onto the bed next to the remote.

‘I thought you said it was being broadcast around the resort.’

‘That was their plan. I retrieved the disc while you were having lunch.’

Marchant felt a wave of relief, but he was also irritated. He hated being indebted to anyone.

‘Aren’t they going to notice?’ He knew it was a pointless question, that Prentice would have tied off any loose ends. He had more experience of the Russians than anyone in the Service. Marchant remembered listening to him at the Fort, which he visited every year to address the new IONEC recruits. They had sat in rapt silence as he spoke of brush passes in Berlin, dangles, and how, as a young officer, he had played Sibelius’s Finlandia on the car stereo to let a defecting KGB officer called Oleg Gordievsky, who was hidden in the boot, know that they had safely crossed into Finland. ‘And you know what actually got us past the border guard? A nappy full of crap. My colleague’s wife started to change her baby on the car boot when the guard asked to see inside. One whiff and he changed his mind.’

Sure enough, Prentice didn’t reply to Marchant’s question, letting its foolishness grow in the silence. Instead, he went to the window and peered through the curtain at the Russians’ villa. Marchant joined him.

‘When the Russians cross the line, you have to respond with interest,’ Prentice said, watching as a suited man approached the villa with a posse of local Italian police behind him. ‘Remind them where the line is. Otherwise it moves. They’ll respect you more, too. They don’t like weak enemies.’

‘Who’s that with the police?’

‘Giuseppe Demuro, manager of the resort, old friend of the family. He received an anonymous tip-off half an hour ago that the occupants of villa 29 were trying to broadcast pornographic videos across the resort.’

‘But we’ve got the disc.’

‘I swapped it for a different one.’

Prentice turned and picked up the remote from the bed, then clicked onto the resort’s in-house channel. The footage was grainy, but it was possible to see an older man with a younger woman, lying on a bed. It was also possible to see that the man was the Prime Minister of Russia and the young woman wasn’t his wife.

‘The oligarch currently staying in the penthouse by the sea is a close friend of the Kremlin. He won’t be amused. Come, we must go.’

‘Nikolai Primakov was an unusual case,’ Cordingley said, stopping at a disused coastguard hut to take in the view of the bay. ‘Once in a lifetime.’ They were walking west along the cliffs towards Lamorna. Cordingley was too old to go far now, but he had insisted that they should talk in the open, away from his house. His former hostility had passed, but there was no warmth, no offer of tea. ‘The initial approach was made by Stephen,’ he continued. ‘Never forget that. He’d met Primakov a few times at cultural events in Delhi, liked him on a personal level, singled him out for company. He also sensed a deep unhappiness behind all the smiles.’ Cordingley paused. ‘Primakov wasn’t the dangle, we dangled Stephen Marchant.’

‘And you’re still sure of that?’ Fielding asked.

‘More so than ever. And I think back over it often. Once Stephen had recruited him, Primakov’s true value became apparent to us. Dynamite. K Branch, First Chief Directorate. You couldn’t get better than that. And he knew much more than his rank should have allowed, particularly about KGB operations in Britain. The problem was, he kept talking about defecting, which would have been no good to us at all. To keep him useful, he needed to be promoted, not exfiltrated, so Stephen and I devised a plan for him, something to impress his superiors in Moscow Centre.’

‘You let Stephen be recruited by Primakov.’

Another pause as they watched the seagulls circling below. ‘It was actually Stephen’s idea. Brilliant, even now. Moscow thought they’d turned a rising MI6 agent, giving Primakov an excuse to meet regularly with Stephen. There was just one problem: the intel we had to give Primakov to keep Stephen credible as a Soviet asset.’