Jon Stock - Games Traitors Play

Meena left Shushma in the car and walked out into the open expanse. Beneath the vegetation the ground was concrete, but it had broken up over the years, and she wondered if a plane would still be able to land there. As she walked out across the wide expanse, she could see where the main runway had been. It was in better condition than the rest of the airfield’s surface. She had been told that a local flying club had been campaigning for years for it to be reopened, and it looked as if volunteers had cleared away some of the vegetation.

She glanced at her watch and stared up into the dusk sky. There was no sign of a plane. If it didn’t come before nightfall, the operation would be abandoned. A night-time landing was out of the question without any airport lights. She didn’t know whether Delhi was onside or not about the flight, but that wasn’t her problem. She looked again at her watch. A part of her hoped that Marchant would turn up after they had gone, but she owed him an explanation. She turned on her phone and dialled.

‘Where are you?’ she asked.

‘Ten minutes away,’ Marchant said. ‘I’ve been trying to call.’

‘There’s a change of plan.’

‘What sort of change?’

‘I’ll explain when you get here.’

She hung up and walked over towards the car, fighting back a tear.

Marchant saw the plane coming in low over the scrubland. He was still two minutes away, and urged his driver to hurry up. Events were spiralling out of his control. Meena’s tone worried him. Nobody was being straight with anyone. He cursed himself again for going after Valentin, but he had felt better for it.

Marchant asked the driver to drop him off at the edge of the airfield. He ran across the broken surface, watching the plane turn slowly on the old runway, scattering peacocks. It was a Gulfstream V, the CIA’s preferred choice for renditions after 9/11, the plane Spiro had used to fly him out of Britain the previous year. It had taken him to an old Russian airfield outside Syzmany in northern Poland, where they had waterboarded him. He shut out the thought as he approached Meena. Shushma was standing beside her, their arms too close.

‘Glad you made it,’ Meena said, glancing at the plane, which had now drawn up a few feet behind them. The noise of the jet engines made it necessary to speak loudly to be heard. Shushma was not happy, staring at the ground, trying to cut out the world again, or just in shock.

‘Are you?’ Marchant asked.

‘It was your call to go after the Russian,’ Meena said. ‘The operation was compromised. I had no choice.’

‘And if I hadn’t?’

‘There was another Russian on our tail, but we lost him. I know how to look after myself, Dan.’

‘And her, I see,’ he said, nodding at Shushma’s wrist. It was joined to Meena’s with handcuffs. ‘Comforting.’

‘They’re a precaution.’

‘I gave my word we’d take care of her, not treat her as an enemy combatant.’

They both heard the noise of the plane’s door opening behind them. Meena turned around to look, and then faced Marchant again.

‘Daniel, I told you, there’s been a change.’

He detected something dancing in her eyes, but he couldn’t be certain what it was any more: loyalty and deceit had begun to look the same in recent months. Then he glanced up at the open door behind her and saw James Spiro filling the frame, a gun in his hand.

‘We need to get out of this hellhole,’ he drawled.

‘I’m sorry,’ Meena whispered, still looking at Marchant.

‘You knew?’ Marchant said, glancing at Spiro again, trying to process the implications.

‘Ask Fielding,’ she replied, turning towards the plane. Shushma followed, pulled along by her wrist. Then she stopped and faced Marchant. For a moment, he thought she was going to say something, but instead she spat in his face and walked on.

‘Fielding?’ Marchant said, wiping the saliva off his cheek. He couldn’t blame her.

‘Send my love to the Vicar,’ Spiro called out. ‘And hey, thanks. We couldn’t have got our hands on this piece of brown shit without you.’

Marchant wanted to run at the plane, pull Spiro down onto the Indian dirt, but there was nothing he could do, not while the American was armed. He thought about Fielding, who had sanctioned the change of plan without telling him, and wanted to drag him into the dirt too. Dhar’s mother was meant to be flown back to the UK. Now she was heading to Bagram, or worse, with Spiro. A deal had been done. He knew he should never have believed in Meena, but this had been brokered far above her head. She was irrelevant. Why would his own Chief let Salim Dhar’s mother — the only lead the West had — fall into Spiro’s heavy hands? It didn’t make any sense.

He watched helplessly as the plane taxied down the decrepit runway, shimmering in the heat as peacocks ran in all directions. It turned and then accelerated, lifting up into the evening sky. As it passed him, he picked up a rock and hurled it at the fuselage. On the far side of the airfield, the female workers were watching too, one of them transfixed by the mad ghora , a load of logs still balanced on her head. Marchant started to walk back towards his car, kicking at the dust, thinking fast what he could do, who he should ring. Fielding wouldn’t take his call, but he wanted to challenge him, make sure his anger was logged by the duty officer in Legoland.

He started to dial London, and then stopped. Up ahead, a black car turned off the dusty road and drove towards him, bumping across the concrete. Marchant stood back as it drew up beside him, a darkened rear window lowering.

‘Your American friends were in a hurry to leave,’ a voice said. It was Nikolai Primakov.

Monika had always been relaxed about sex, ever since her first encounter, as a sixteen-year-old, with an English tutor who was five years her senior. It was something that came easily to her, which was a relief, as she was struggling at the time with other areas of her life. Her mother, a teacher, was desperate for her to achieve academic success and study at the University of Warsaw. Her father, a lecturer, had died when she was younger. She was bright, top of her class in languages, but she had no siblings, and life at home as a teenager with her mother could be claustrophobic, until she discovered sex and the freedom it gave her.

But she hadn’t enjoyed sleeping with Hugo Prentice, who was lying next to her now. It wasn’t his habit of smoking before they made love — she wasn’t averse to kicking things off with a joint. And she wasn’t upset that she was doing it for work rather than pleasure. She knew when she signed up to the AW that her job would occasionally require it, and in this case there had been a redeeming motive. What had cast a shadow over the sex was an encrypted text message that had come through from General Borowski. She had ignored her phone beside the bed, even though the unique alert tone indicated that it was her boss in Warsaw.

‘Work can wait,’ she had said, easing herself on top of him. It hadn’t been easy — Borowski only made contact when it was serious — but she didn’t want to arouse Prentice’s suspicions.

Now that he was asleep, she peeled away from his heavy limbs and dressed. Watching him all the time, she went to his bathroom, where evidence of Prentice’s single life was everywhere. The small room wasn’t unhygienic, but it wasn’t clean either. The old iron bath had greenish stains where the brass taps dripped, and the sink hadn’t been cleaned after his morning ablutions. A wooden-handled shaving brush lay between the taps, still covered in lather, and the lid hadn’t been put back on a pot of hair-styling wax.

But none of this bothered her. It was his London pad, and he had been living in Warsaw for the past two years. What worried her was Borowski. She looked at the text again and then replied with a blank message, the agreed protocol. Moving fast, she removed the back of her phone and took out the SIM card, replacing it with another she kept in her purse. It had never been used before. She looked in again on Prentice as the phone rebooted, peering through a gap in the bathroom door. He seemed to stir, scratching himself before going back to sleep. Seconds later, a new message had appeared on the screen.