Jon Stock - Dead Spy Running

‘Like the flower,’ he said, smiling back at her. His accent was a soft Dublin one, like his mother’s.

‘Thanks.’

‘My room’s covered in them.’

‘Oh, you’re in spring. Do you like it? Dom is a friend of mine. The artist.’

‘Groovy,’ he said, hoping the irony translated.

Monika laughed lightly as he walked off down the corridor towards the launderette.

‘Groo-vy,’ he heard her repeat, saying the word slowly.

Under the heading of sexuality, David Marlowe had been described as a ‘promiscuous heterosexual’. He wondered if that’s what it said on his own vetting file. In the early days at the Fort he had tried hard to prevent his relationship with Leila from becoming serious, deliberately dating other women. Spy school, he had joked, was no place to make an honest woman of her: it was where people learnt to cheat and lie, not to love. Marchant, though, had kept coming back to Leila, who seemed neither surprised nor resentful. At least until recently. In the months leading up to his suspension, just when he was finally ready to accept (and needed) their relationship, she had been hesitant to make the step up, oddly changeable in her emotions: one moment pulling him in, the next pushing him away.

As he emptied his bag of clothes into one of the hostel’s empty washing machines, Marchant knew that it wouldn’t require much effort for David Marlowe to pursue another woman. It would be harder for him, though, even if the hippy-chick charms of Monika held a certain nostalgic appeal. He must tap into his own past, rebuffing any pangs of guilt with the irritation he had felt at Leila’s recent reluctance to commit.

It had been a few years since he had mixed with anyone like Monika, or stayed in a place like the Oki Doki, but he was encouraged by how easily old habits returned, once the mental switch had been flicked. He thought about rolling a joint again, something he hadn’t done since joining the Service, and the joys of stoned sex.

His smile quickly faded, though, as he watched the load of washing turn and tumble. Wafting down the corridor from the hostel kitchen was the smell of Polish cooking: bigos , or maybe flaczki . His gag reflex twitched. Barely managing a nod at his new friend on reception, he headed outside to the street in search of fresh air. His stomach turned as he remembered the water, the panic.

He bent double over the gutter and vomited. Breathing in deeply, he stood up and walked down the empty street at a brisk pace, keeping to the shadows in the early-evening light. Then, a moment later, he heard a voice behind him. It was Monika’s.

‘Are you OK? You look terrible. Very un-groo-vy.’

The flower was now behind her other ear, but Marchant didn’t say anything: Marlowe wouldn’t have noticed.

‘I’m fine,’ he said, taking in her lissom figure for the first time. ‘Is there a barber around here? Nothing fancy, I just need a crew.’

‘Crew?’

‘All off,’ Marchant said, smiling. ‘Buzz cut…wiffle…GI One.’

Half an hour later he was sitting on a stool in a bedsit flat, around the corner from the hostel, with a whisky in his hand. Monika leant in against him as she shaved the last remnants of sandy hair from his head, her bare studded navel pressed against his back. In one hand she held the razor, in the other a large spliff. Vashti Bunyan was on the CD player. Monika had offered to cut Marchant’s hair herself, and he could think of no good reason to refuse. Her shift at the hostel was over, and he liked the anonymity her bedsit provided.

‘I’m done,’ Monika said, flicking away some loose strands. ‘Can I rub in some moisturiser? Your skin, it’s very dry.’ As she said this she leant forward, her smiling face appearing in the mirror at the side of his own, and placed the spliff in Marchant’s mouth.

‘Sure, whatever,’ Marchant said, assuming the dryness was down to something the Americans had put in the water. Before the weed dulled his senses he ran an eye around the room again, then went back over the last few hours, reassuring himself about her, their encounter. On balance, it was a good thing. The CIA would be looking for a single man, not a couple. Monika was in need of company, having recently split from her boyfriend, and she had already talked about spending the next few days together, looking at the antiques in Kolo Bazaar, drinking in the bars of Stare Miasto, although she knew he was booked on a flight the following morning.

‘I wish you weren’t going to India so soon, Mr Englishman,’ she said, moving around and sitting on his lap, facing him. She took the spliff out of his mouth and placed it back in her own. Marchant curled his arms around her lower back, and pulled her closer to him. For a moment all he could see was Leila, naked in the shower, watching him. He closed his eyes, breathed in deeply and thought hard about David Marlowe.

He stroked her cheek as he tried to calculate the risks and benefits of delaying his flight to stay with her. His brain was easing up. It slowed even more as she leant forward and kissed him, her spliff-free hand slipping inside his Levi’s.

‘Stay here for an extra day,’ she said quietly, holding him tightly. ‘I’d like that.’

‘What about my ticket?’ he said, slowly unpicking the mother-of-pearl buttons of her shirt. Leila was stepping out of the shower now, hair wrapped in a turban of towel.

‘What about it? I’ve got a friend, she runs a small travel agency not far from here. We send all our guests there. She can change it, she knows everyone up at the airport.’

But David Marlowe didn’t give a damn any more about his ticket, or Daniel Marchant, or Leila, as he eased Monika out of her shirt.

Sir David Chadwick had spent a lifetime brokering compromises in Whitehall meeting rooms, but even he was struggling to keep Marcus Fielding and Harriet Armstrong apart.

‘Before this gets referred to the PM, as it will, I need to know exactly what you’re alleging here, Harriet,’ he said, looking across his oak-panelled office at Armstrong, who was on the edge of her seat.

‘The Poles must have been tipped off by someone,’ Armstrong said, glancing at Fielding. He was sitting at a safe distance, equally upright though less on edge. On his lap was a clipboard, covered in a patchwork of blue and yellow Post-it notes. Armstrong had often wondered what Fielding wrote on them. No reminders to bring home dinner for his wife, because he had never had one, a fact that still intrigued her.

‘Marcus?’ Chadwick asked.

‘I think we’re underestimating our friends in Warsaw. The new government’s been looking for a way out of these renditions for some time now. I imagine someone was keeping the airbase under surveillance and decided that they no longer wanted a corner of their country run by America.’

‘Marcus, you rang me about the flight,’ Harriet said. Fielding’s poise riled her. Everything about him riled her: his equanimity, the Oxbridge intellect, those safari suits. And how could someone be ‘celibate’, as he had apparently defined his sexuality to the vetters, explaining that he was simply not interested in sex of any kind, with anyone? Her ex-husband had once accused her of something similar, but she hadn’t consciously chosen to deny him; it had just gone with the long hours.

‘True?’ asked Chadwick.

‘As you both know, we monitor all flights in and out of the UK, particularly ones that file dummy flight plans. To avoid confusion, I suggest that the next time the PM decides to authorise an undeclared CIA flight through British airspace, someone has the courtesy to tell us.’

‘Harriet?’ asked Chadwick, turning back towards her like a centre-court umpire.