Jon Stock - Games Traitors Play

‘The sous-chef at Goodman’s is one of ours,’ she continued by way of explanation. ‘It’s one of the most popular Russian restaurants in town. You showed up on our grid before you’d even ordered your herring with mustard. How can you eat that stuff?’

‘You’re not from Calcutta then?’

‘Reston, Virginia, actually. Why?’

‘Bengalis like their mustard.’

‘I meant the fish.’

‘They like that too. Primakov was fine. Fatter than I remember him. He was an old friend of my father.’

‘Friend?’

‘Sparring partner.’ He paused. ‘So who showed up first on your grid? Me or Primakov?’

Meena hesitated. ‘OK, I’ll admit, we don’t have a great deal on Primakov. Cultural attaché, brought out of retirement, medium-ranking KGB officer before the fall.’

‘But you have a bulging dossier on me. Says it all, doesn’t it? So where in India are we heading?’

‘The south, Tamil Nadu. Where my parents are from.’

‘Great. Meet the in-laws time. A bit premature, isn’t it? We haven’t even slept together.’

Meena drove on in silence, glancing in the rear-view mirror.

‘I’m sorry,’ Marchant said, more quietly now. It had been a crass thing to say. Sometimes it was easy to forget Meena’s Indian heritage. She talked like a ballsy, confident American, trading coarse comments with colleagues, but there was an inner dignity about her that he recognised as uniquely subcontinental.

‘Actually, we’re going to find your father’s lover.’

He looked across at her for more.

‘Our Chennai sub-station is closing in on Salim Dhar’s mother. Fielding thought you should be there when we bring her in.’

Salim Dhar turned the navigation lights on as the canopy closed, and took a deep breath. Then, after running through the cockpit checks he had practised so often on his ancient PC, he leaned forward and flicked the switch to start the right engine. The RPM dial in front of him spooled up to 65 per cent, and the exhaust-gas temperature rose to 300 degrees. He did the same with the left engine, lowered one stage of flap and used his thumb to reset the trim to neutral.

For a moment, he was back in Afghanistan, sitting in the cockpit of the crashed SU-25. He remembered a solitary poppy pushing up through a broken dial. It was the first time in his adult life that he had been happy. The camaraderie at the training camp had made him realise how little friendship he had found until then. The darkest days of his childhood had been at the American school in Delhi, where his father had insisted on sending him. There were a few Indian pupils, sons of New Delhi’s business elite, but he was not like them, nor was he like the diplomats’ children, who made no effort to talk unless it was to taunt him — Allah yel’an abo el amrikaan’ala elli’awez yet’alem henaak (God damn the fathers of those Americans and whoever wants to study there!).

He turned the landing lights on, requested taxi clearance from the control tower, and again flicked the trim switch, setting it for take-off. Then he tested the wheelbrakes as he ran the throttle up to 70 then 80 per cent.

‘Brakes holding, airbrake closed,’ he said to himself as he felt for the switch on the side of the throttle. As jets went, the SU-25 wasn’t a demanding plane to fly. Unlike its more recent successors, it didn’t have a modern avionic suite, but it was a reliable ground-pounder, which was why it had been in Russia’s air force for so long. According to Sergei, his instructor, the SU-25 could operate at very low speeds without ‘flaming out’. Nor did it stall easily. ‘It can take a real beating and still bring you home,’ Sergei had said. But Dhar knew there would be no return flight.

After taxi-ing to the runway threshold and running through his pre-take-off checks, he waited for his clearance from control. At last it came. He took his position on the runway’s centreline, gazing at the white ribbon that stretched away as far as he could see. Engaging the wheelbrakes, he ran the power up to 90 per cent and checked that all the gauges were still in the green. Then he released the brakes and applied full military power, watching the air speed build quickly to 260 kmh.

Something was wrong.

‘Sometimes you need to add a little right rudder as you firewall the throttles,’ Sergei had said, but Dhar remembered too late. His fingers fumbled to deploy the twin drogue chutes, but it was hopeless. There was too little tarmac left. ‘Eject, eject!’ said a voice in his head. But as he overcompensated for the yaw, the plane lurching right, left, right again, the right wingtip hit the ground, breaking off in a shower of sparks and fire. He thought of his mother, closed his eyes and prayed.

Fielding took the call in the back of his chauffeur-driven Range Rover on the way to Heathrow. Cars didn’t particularly interest him, but he couldn’t deny that he had been impressed with the latest security upgrades to his official vehicle. Most of them were to do with jamming opportunist electronic eavesdroppers, but the car had also benefited from lessons learned in Afghanistan, where IEDs had caused such havoc. Its floor was now protected by hard steel armour blast plates, and the sides had been reinforced with composite ballistic protection panels.

‘Thank you for ringing back,’ he said, trying to picture his opposite number in America, his Langley office, the bland Virginia countryside. Fielding’s relationship with the DCIA had been at rock bottom during the past year, but he knew that things had to improve sooner or later. Much as it would like to, Britain couldn’t survive indefinitely without America’s intel.

‘What can I do for you, Marcus? No problems with Lakshmi Meena, I hope?’

‘No, she’s fine.’

‘Treat her as yours, Marcus. A shared asset. She’s good.’

Better than the last one, you mean, Fielding thought, but he said nothing. ‘Thank you. She’s briefed me fully about Dhar’s mother.’

‘That’s what she’s there for. Keeping our allies in the loop.’

Like hell, Fielding thought. He looked out of the window at the grey scenery either side of the Westway: tatty tower blocks, car showrooms, digital clocks, vast hoardings. It was such a drab part of London, a depressing first impression of Britain for anyone driving in from the airport.

‘How’s Jim Spiro these days?’ Fielding asked.

‘I never knew you cared. He’ll be touched, truly.’

‘Is he still suspended?’

‘To all intents and purposes. He’s the subject of an ongoing internal inquiry, based largely on evidence provided by MI6.’

‘I need to talk to him.’

Daniel Marchant moved quickly around his one-bedroom basement flat in Pimlico, removing a suitcase from underneath the bed that was already packed with three sets of clothes and a wash bag containing a razor, toothbrush and two passports. The cobblers had given him a new spare one after Morocco. He had asked for two, but they had talked about budgets and come back to him a few days later saying that the passport in Dirk McLennan’s name, the snap cover he had used to get out of Morocco, had not been compromised.

Out of habit, he checked the issue date, making sure it was still valid, and then he saw an old Islamabad visa stamp on one of the pages. A trip to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan had been fine for Morocco, but it might cause problems in India. He cursed the cobblers and put the passport on his desk. He paused for a moment, looking at the photo of Leila that he had tried so often to throw out. She was smiling back at him, the bright lights of a carousel blurred behind her. He had taken the photo at the funfair in Gosport, across the water from the Fort, a few hours before they had slept together for the first time. The instructors had given them a rare day off after two weeks of intense training.