Jon Stock - Games Traitors Play

‘Daniel, I think you should know we’ve just had a call from Langley. NSA picked up a mobile intercept late this afternoon, from Salim Dhar in North Waziristan. One hundred per cent voice match.’

Marchant fell quiet, the hum of a Marrakech medina suddenly audible in the background.

‘Have they killed him?’

‘They think so. A UAV was in the area, eliminated the target within fifteen minutes of the intercept. I’m sorry.’

‘Without even checking? Without talking to us?’

‘The Americans aren’t really in the mood right now for cooperating on Dhar. You know that.’

‘But Dhar was here, I’m sure of it. In Morocco. Barely an hour ago, up near the Tizi’n’Test pass. The halaka spoke of a Roc bird.’

Fielding absently turned the pages of The Arabian Nights , hearing a younger version of himself in Marchant’s voice. Fielding had been less hot-headed, but he rated Marchant more highly than anyone of his generation. A part of him wondered again if Spiro had made a mistake, but it was hard to dispute the CIA’s evidence, at least those elements of it that they had pooled with Britain. The Joint Intelligence Committee was convening first thing in the morning, by which time Britain’s own voice analysis from Cheltenham would be in. GCHQ was running tests through the night, but Fielding didn’t expect a different result.

‘And how do I present your evidence to the JIC tomorrow?’ Fielding said, knowing it was an unfair question. Unlike police work, intelligence-gathering was seldom just about evidence, as he had explained to MI6’s latest intake of IONEC graduates earlier that day. Agents had to be thorough but also counter-intuitive; ‘Cutting the red wire when the manual said blue,’ as one over-excited graduate had put it.

‘Someone took him away. Whoever owns the helicopter has Dhar.’

‘And who does own it?’

‘It was white, UN, but no markings.’

‘White?’ Fielding’s interest was pricked. He knew that the Mi-8 was used by the UN, knew too that the government in Sudan wasn’t averse to flying unmarked white military aircraft to attack villages in Darfur.

‘I was about to tell you that when you interrupted me.’

Fielding could hear Marchant’s anger mounting. He had always preferred field agents who were passionate about the CX they filed to London. It made for better product.

‘Suppose it was just an exercise,’ he said, testing him.

‘An exercise? They shot someone, the man I’d been following from Marrakech, the same man who’d been listening to the storyteller.’ Marchant fell silent again. ‘Remember when Dhar sent me the text, after Delhi?’ he continued, trying to restore his Chief’s belief.

Fielding stood up, his lower spine beginning to ache. It always played up when he was tired, and he suddenly felt world-weary, as if he had been asked to live his entire life over again, fight all his old Whitehall battles, relive the fears of raised threat levels, the waking moments in the middle of the night.

‘Daniel, we’ve been over this many times,’ he said, thinking back to their journey down the river. They had both thought the text was from Dhar. GCHQ was less sure.

‘The words were taken from a song. Leysh Nat’arak .’

‘And that text was one of the reasons I gave you time in Morocco. I would have let you go earlier if I could. You were no good to anyone in London. Langley thought otherwise. We all hoped that you’d find Dhar, that he’d make contact. But that’s not going to happen now. I’m sorry. It’s time to come home.’

‘You really believe the Americans have killed him, don’t you?’

Fielding hesitated, one hand on the small of his back. ‘I’m not sure. But whatever happened in Morocco, I want you away from it. For your own sake. If someone was killed, and you saw it, we have a problem, and that wasn’t part of the deal. I also sent you to Morocco to keep out of trouble.’

‘ Yalla natsaalh ehna akhwaan . That was the lyric. Let’s make good for we are brothers .’ Marchant paused. ‘Dhar was out there, up in the mountains. I’m sure of it. And he wanted to come in. But someone took him, before he could.’

‘Someone? Who, exactly?’

Marchant tried to ignore the scepticism that had returned to Fielding’s voice. He had thought about this question on the way back to his apartment, wrestled with the possibilities, the implications, knowing how it would sound. But it was quite clear in his own mind, as clear as the Russian words he had heard on the mountainside: Nye strelai. Don’t shoot .

‘Moscow.’

Marchant swilled the Scotch around his mouth for a few seconds before swallowing it. He had hoped the alcohol would taste toxic, that his body would reject it in some violent way, but it was sweeter than he had ever remembered.

He was sitting under a palm tree in the courtyard of the Chesterfield Pub, a bar anglais at the Hotel Nassil on avenue Mohammed V. It was not a place he was particularly proud to be, but there was a limited choice of public venues serving alcohol in Marrakech. The Scotch was decent enough, though, and there were fewer tourists than he had feared. His only worry was if the group of British bikers had decided to turn back to Marrakech for the night and came here for a drink.

He had learned to trust his gut instinct since signing up with MI6, and at the moment it didn’t feel as if Salim Dhar was dead. The Americans had claimed to have killed a number of terrorists with UAVs in recent years and later proved to have been wrong. Only time would tell if they were right about Dhar. It would be too risky to send in anyone on the ground to collect DNA. Later perhaps. For now, the CIA would look for other evidence, listen to the chatter, assess jihadi morale.

Marchant knew, though, that Fielding was right: his Morocco days were over. He had already booked himself onto the early-morning flight back to London. In India, when he was a child, his father had once told him to live in each country as if for ever, but always to be ready to leave at dawn. At the time, his father was a middle-ranking MI6 officer who had served in Moscow before Delhi. He was used to the threat of his diplomatic cover being blown, of tit-for-tat expulsions.

Marchant wasn’t being expelled, but there had been an incident of some sort in the mountains and he had witnessed it. Whether anyone had seen him, he wasn’t sure, but he knew MI6 couldn’t afford for him to be caught up in another controversy, not after the events in India. And if he was right about Moscow’s involvement, an international row might be imminent.

After finishing his Scotch he ordered another. He had swapped his djellaba for jeans and a collarless shirt before coming to the pub, and guessed the waiter had marked him down as just another drunken Western tourist, tanking up before a night at the clubs. So be it. He needed to cut a different figure from the one who had ridden out to Tizi a few hours earlier.

It was after an hour and too much Scotch that Marchant saw the dark-haired woman walk up to the bar. He recognised her at once as Lakshmi Meena, the local Operations Officer the CIA had sent to keep an eye on him when he had first arrived in Marrakech. London had briefed him about her. She was a beneficiary of the CIA’s ongoing programme to recruit more people from what it called America’s ‘heritage communities’, particularly those who spoke ‘mission critical’ languages. MI6 had always recruited linguists, unlike the CIA, which had been found wanting after 9/11. Even in its National Clandestine Service, only 30 per cent of CIA staff were fluent in a second language. Meena spoke Hindi, some Urdu and, most importantly, the Dravidian languages of southern India, which had been upgraded to critical in the ongoing hunt for Salim Dhar, whose parents were originally from Kerala.