Jon Stock - Games Traitors Play

In order to keep the information flowing from Primakov, Stephen Marchant had let himself be recruited by the Russian. It was the highest stake an agent could play for. Marchant read on, and realised that his father had crossed the sacred line. To keep his enemy handlers happy, he had passed over classified Western documents to Moscow. As far as Marchant could tell, the CX seemed to have been about America, mainly Cuba. He could see nothing that might have directly damaged Britain. He hoped to God he was right.

‘Is this why the CIA went after him?’ he asked.

‘Not unless I’m working for Langley.’ Fielding smiled. ‘No, the Americans never knew. No one knows. But it is why the Russians are going after the son. They’ve seen a pattern, a family gene. Some call it “the treachery inheritance”. In their eyes, your father betrayed America. As for you, they look at the last year and conclude that the CIA is probably not your favourite intelligence agency either.’

Marchant felt a range of emotions, but in amongst them the thought of his father handing over US intel was strangely reassuring. It made his own visceral distrust of the CIA seem more understandable.

‘Cordingley? Has he seen it?’ He was the only previous Chief who was still alive.

‘Yes, but his issues were never with America.’

‘Someone in Moscow might have told the Americans that an MI6 agent was betraying them.’

‘There’s always that chance. But not in this case. Moscow thought they had the crown jewels, and the operation would have been known only to a very few people. Your father went on to be Chief, after all.’

‘But Primakov was working for us.’

‘And we hope he will again.’ Fielding paused. ‘No one in Moscow Centre knows that he was once loyal to London. He’s approaching you as a seasoned Russian intelligence officer with instructions to recruit an unhappy British agent with family form. And you must close your eyes and jump, let yourself be recruited by him.’

‘Just like that?’ Marchant liked to think of himself offering some resistance.

‘See how he plays it. One or two senior people in the SVR still have reservations about Primakov’s past, his relationship with your father. He knows that. They suspected your father might have been a worthless podstava , and will be quick to dismiss you as a dangle, too. Fight the rod a bit. As I said, betrayal requires faith. Don’t expect the smallest sign that Primakov is one of ours. He’ll give you nothing. When you meet him at the gallery in Cork Street, he’ll be wired. Moscow Centre will be listening. And all you can do, deep down, beneath the cover, is hold on to what you believe to be true: that Nikolai Ivanovich Primakov once worked for your father, and is now hoping to work for you.’

‘And what do we hand Moscow in return?’

Fielding paused. ‘We give them Daniel Marchant, of course.’

Marchant looked at him and then turned away to the window, pressing his nails deep into his palms.

‘No one other than me knows that we’re encouraging Primakov to recruit you. As far as everyone else is concerned, you’re trying to recruit him. It’s important you understand that. Prentice, Armstrong, even Denton — they’ll all think you’re hoping to turn Primakov. No one must suspect the reverse is true.’

‘And the Russians?’ Not for the first time, Marchant was struck by the loneliness of being Chief, the solitude of the spymaster’s lot, unable to trust anyone, even his own deputy.

‘Moscow Centre must believe that you’ve been landed, not presented to them on a plate.’

Marchant nodded. It was unsettling to think that the Russians had believed for so long that his father was theirs.

‘I’m sorry, you were right about the Russian-speaking Berbers,’ Fielding continued. ‘We’re now certain that the SVR is protecting Dhar.’

Marchant had never doubted who had taken Salim Dhar from the High Atlas, but it was still reassuring to hear someone else spell it out.

‘The approach in Sardinia confirmed it,’ Fielding added. ‘We know the SVR are not averse to using Islamic militants when it suits them. Roubles and rifles continue to flow freely into Iran and Syria. Moscow controls mosques in Russia that preach jihad against America.’

‘And do the Russians know we’re related?’

‘It would seem so. We’re back to the treachery inheritance again: the anti-American family gene. If you had to identify the one single thing that defines Dhar, it would be his hatred of the US. Moscow Centre is demonstrating an ambition we haven’t seen from them for a very long time. If they’re successful, they’ll have two brothers on their payroll. One, the world’s most wanted terrorist; the other, the Western intelligence officer charged with finding him. And they share a father who once worked for Moscow, too. A lethal combination, wouldn’t you say? The house of Marchant could do a lot of damage.’

‘Which is why they’ve recalled Primakov.’

‘He’s the only person in the world who could recruit both of you. He knew your father. Moscow Centre is still wary of Primakov, but they had no choice but to trust him, bring him back in from the cold.’

‘And what do you expect Primakov to give us?’

‘Advance warning, I hope, of whatever act of proxy terrorism the Russians and Dhar are planning. And given they’re counting on your help, we must assume that this time Dhar’s target will be mainland Britain.’

It was the incessant rain that Salim Dhar couldn’t bear. He could put up with the canteen food, and the training, morning, noon and night. Even the lack of sunshine was something he felt he could get used to. But the interminable drizzle was like nothing he had ever experienced before. The rain of his childhood had been joyful, thick drops that drenched the dusty streets of Delhi within minutes. He had danced with friends in the downpours, celebrating the monsoon’s long-awaited arrival, washing himself as the warm water cleansed the land all around. This rain penetrated the soul with its leaden persistence.

The surrounding countryside, deep in the Arkhangelsk oblast of northern Russia, offered little comfort from the misery of the weather: dense dark forests of pine and spruce as far as the eye could see. There was something about pine trees that he found particularly depressing, as if they had been sapped of the very will to live.

Dhar wondered if he would have been happier in the cold. It had been freezing at night in the mountains of Afghanistan, where he had gone after the attack in Delhi. But he had been there many times before, attending and then teaching at training camps, and his familiarity with the terrain seemed to reduce the chill. And winter was also over. It had been much warmer in Morocco’s High Atlas. Mount Toubkal was still tipped with white when he had first arrived more than a year ago, but he had kept below the snowline, moving on every night, holding on to the latent warmth of the previous day, encouraged by the promise of morning.

There was no respite where he was now, no prospect of a break in the slate-grey skies. His veins felt like roof gutters, flowing with rainwater. The guards said it wasn’t usually so wet. Early July could be beautiful. Some mornings, when he first woke up in his hangar, he wondered if he had travelled back fifty years and been sent to work at the nearby logging Gulag in the forests rather than to Kotlas air base. But as he rolled out his prayer mat on the concrete floor and heard the twin jet engines of a MiG-31 firing up in the damp dawn outside, he knew where he was and what lay ahead.

Kotlas, better known as Savatiya, was a small military airfield, headquarters of the 458th Interceptor Aviation Regiment. Security was already tight, but it had been discreetly increased around the perimeter fence to protect the airfield’s anonymous guest. Dhar was being kept in a draughty hangar at the northern end of the 2.5-kilometre-long runway, close to a parking sector deep within a wooded enclosure. There was only one other building in the area, a smaller maintenance hut where he carried out most of his training. On the far side of the runway was an alert ramp where two MiG-31s were positioned on permanent standby. The base was also home to MiG-25s and, as one of his guards had told him, was the ‘target of opportunity’ that was destroyed by an American B52 bomber in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove .