Jon Stock - Dead Spy Running

The secret of surviving waterboarding, Marchant told himself again, trying to work through the consequences of Dhar’s apparent role in the marathon attack, was not to fall for it. Because that’s all waterboarding was: a trick of the mind. The body wasn’t about to drown, the brain just thought it was. At the Fort, he was the only one who had remained cognisant of the training element. Now, as his entire upper body twisted with each new retch, he reminded himself that he was being interrogated in an equally safe context: the CIA wouldn’t kill an MI6 officer, even if he was the suspended son of a suspected traitor. The struggle happening now was taking place in his head, not in the room: his amygdalae, the oldest, most primal parts of the human brain, were in a desperate dialogue with his more reasoning solar cortex. That’s what the psychiatrist at the Fort had said, wasn’t it?

Marchant’s resilience was taking the two Americans to the limits of their trained self-control, and they were now swearing repeatedly at him. One of them finally flipped, ripped Marchant’s goggles off and grabbed him by the back of his neck, lifting his head off the table. For a moment they looked into each other’s eyes. Marchant saw more fear than he felt in the young CIA agent’s face. He pulled the gag out of Marchant’s mouth. Round two was also his.

‘He’s unreal, Joey. The guy’s unreal,’ the American said, tossing Marchant away, unable to cope with the eye contact. Marchant savoured the pain as the back of his head hit the table. He hung on to its sharpness, juggled with it in his hands as if it were a hot coal: it was real, physical; it would leave a mark, provide evidence that this had happened, and wasn’t just taking place in his head. He turned to one side, spat out some phlegm and then managed a desperate cough of a laugh.

‘Any chance of a drink of water?’ he asked. ‘My throat’s a little dry.’

Marchant knew it was essential to maintain the pretence, however false, of being in mental control, without pushing his interrogators so far that they killed him out of frustration. He also needed to keep them interested: a balaclava-clad face had just appeared behind the bars of the small opening above the door, disappearing as soon as Marchant had seen it. He managed a smile for his interrogators, knowing the consequences, and hung out his tongue like a panting dog.

‘You got something to say, save it for St Peter,’ Joey said, taking over from his colleague. He turned away, as if he had finished for the day, but Marchant knew he wasn’t done yet. Joey swung his arm in a long loop, smacking the back of his hand across Marchant’s face.

At the Fort, they had used clingfilm for level three, wrapped tightly around the face, making it impossible to breathe through the nose or mouth. A hole was cut for the lips, only it wasn’t for breathing, but as a way to fill the victim with water. This approach, like waterboarding itself, was nothing new. They liked to cut straight to level three in the seventeenth century, swelling the bodies of victims to three times their normal size — without the clingfilm, of course.

But Marchant never reached level three.

Nine hundred miles west of Poland, Marcus Fielding took a deep breath and plunged into the seventy-four-degree water, his dive long and shallow. The pool in the basement of Legoland had been a source of contention in Whitehall when the headquarters was built, adding to the overspend by several million, like the adjacent gym, but it was worth every penny, Fielding thought, as he surfaced halfway down the pool, jetting water from his mouth. He never swam with his glasses, leaving them on his neatly folded towel, next to his phone. Blurred vision, focused mind, he found, and he did his best thinking in the pool.

The MI5 document which had crossed his desk at lunchtime made it clear that, much as he had suspected, Dhar’s role in the attempted marathon bombing was far from certain. There was a South Indian element on the ground, as there had been in the previous year’s attacks, but there was no direct evidence to link the planning of the bombing to Dhar, and there were any number of other suspects in the frame.

Reports coming in from Arabic specialists at GCHQ’s sub-station in Scarborough were throwing up possible links to the wider Gulf region. In short, there was still not enough to nail the attack on Dhar, despite the South Indian connection and Dhar’s anti-American crusade. Harriet Armstrong had been flying a kite, hoping to please the Americans. Fielding had no intention of sharing this information with anyone, not yet. It made him feel better about Daniel Marchant, but guilty that he had handed him over so casually to Spiro.

Staff knew not to disturb their Chief during his swim, taken without exception at 3 p.m. every afternoon, when the pool was clear of the workers who used it during their lunch break. (Fielding didn’t realise it was actually empty because nobody wanted to be in the pool while the Chief was steaming up and down the fast lane.) Now, though, his phone was ringing with an internal tone. He headed for the steps and took the call, trusting that it was important. It was from Fielding’s deputy, Ian Denton, a former head of the East European Controllerate and one of his closest allies. He wanted an urgent meeting. Dripping with water, Fielding told him to come up to his office and wait. He knew Denton tried to deal with as much of the Chief’s day-to-day business as he could, never bothering him unless there was a serious problem.

‘We’ve picked up an undeclared flight into Szymany, northeastern Poland,’ Denton said ten minutes later, as Fielding looked out of his window at a solitary sandpiper bobbing in the Thames mud. Denton had spent much of his early career behind the Iron Curtain, where the fear of being overheard had become an obsession for Western case officers. As a result, his voice was so quiet that it was a struggle for anyone to hear him. But Fielding’s ear was fine-tuned, and he prided himself on never once having asked Denton to speak up.

‘Cheltenham’s analysed the data strings,’ Denton continued in a whisper. ‘ADEP was Fairford, and multiple onward dummy flight plans were filed. It was operating under special status.’

‘There’s a surprise,’ Fielding said, his back still to Denton, who was wrong-footed by the Chief’s apparent lack of concern. Denton — northern grammar school, Oxford, keen on carp fishing — began to regret his request for a meeting. All undeclared CIA flights anywhere in Europe had become a priority for MI6, following a personal request from the Prime Minister, who wasn’t as relaxed about them as his predecessor.

‘What’s strange is that it wasn’t picked up here,’ Denton continued. ‘Usually MI5…’

‘I know.’ Fielding turned and fixed Denton with a wry smile. ‘Leave it with me, Ian. Thanks.’

Denton was so thorough, Fielding thought, as he left the office. He liked that in an officer. His big break had come in the 1980s in Bucharest where, as a junior officer working under diplomatic cover, he had spent every weekend fishing for carp and bream at a lake on the edge of the capital. Nobody knew why until, nine months later, he hooked the head of Romania’s secret police, a fellow carper.

Fielding smiled. Maybe that was why Denton whispered: he didn’t want to scare the fish. Below him a yellow London Duck emerged out of the Thames, water pouring off it, and drove up the slipway that ran alongside Legoland’s outer perimeter wall. It was the only place the Second World War amphibious vehicle could get in and out of the water. Fielding had always wondered what the captain told the tourists as they passed by Legoland. One day he would take a ride and find out. Denton could come along too, with his rod.