Jon Stock - Dead Spy Running

So when the backlash came, as Carter knew it would, he didn’t feel so bad about having leaked details of Stare Kiejkuty to a few handpicked Washington journalists. And now, with a new President in office, he had no regrets at all about hastening Spiro’s demise. Langley might have spared him if Carter had stopped Marchant’s departure on an international flight out of Frederic Chopin airport. But Carter had said nothing, and Spiro sank.

Instead, he rang the CIA’s station head in Delhi, then put in a call to Langley, recommending that Marchant was followed rather than pulled in when he reached India. Langley told him to talk to the Vicar. It was Carter’s belief that the renegade MI6 officer would try to make contact with Salim Dhar, a far bigger prize for the CIA than Marchant. Then they could both be brought in; but he wouldn’t tell Fielding that, not yet.

‘We’re not interested in Daniel Marchant,’ Carter said, sipping a Bourbon. He was sitting opposite an upright Marcus Fielding in the dining room that adjoined the Vicar’s spacious office. The place had style, he thought, more than he would have guessed from its unpromising location on a busy traffic junction. And he began to understand why they called Fielding the Vicar. Music was playing quietly in the background somewhere: Bach, maybe his second Brandenburg concerto. He even had his own butler, which struck him as very English (even if the butler wasn’t), not to mention a fifty-something PA who wore red pantyhose.

‘Spiro wanted Daniel Marchant’s balls,’ Fielding said. ‘Is he suspended, or just taking a long holiday?’

‘Let’s call it a blood substitution.’

‘It’s never easy when one of your players is withdrawn from the field.’

Carter looked at him for a moment. ‘Marchant was good, I know that. It wouldn’t have been my call.’

‘Nor mine. What about Leila? Was that Spiro too? Did he recruit her personally?’

‘Of course. And I have similar regrets about her.’

‘Don’t we all. Where is she now?’

‘New Delhi station.’

‘I thought she was Spiro’s asset. The Agency’s planning on keeping her, then?’

‘She may prove useful if Marchant forgets the script.’

‘I’m assuming Spiro asked her to set Marchant up,’ Fielding said. ‘Handing him his old TETRA phone during the race.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know the exact details of her recruitment or her role within the Agency, Marcus. Let’s just say her debrief with Spiro after the marathon included some very leading questions.’

‘She told him what he wanted to hear, in other words. That Daniel was as guilty as his father.’ Fielding paused. ‘For the record, who made the first move? Spiro or Leila?’

Carter had been told to take the rap for the Leila operation, but he hadn’t expected someone so apparently cerebral as Fielding to come over all emotional. He was starting to ask questions a husband would put to his cheating wife.

‘Spiro was on the lookout for someone close to Daniel Marchant,’ he said, hoping to move on.

‘Moscow rules?’

‘Money. Her mother wasn’t in the best of health, needed expensive medication. And we’re very keen to support people like Leila’s mother. She’s a Bahá’í, one of the persecuted good guys in Iran.’

‘And you trust Leila?’

‘You obviously did. I’ve read the reports. Copper-bottomed. Only problem was, your vetters never figured her mother had moved back to Iran. Of course Leila should have told you, but she feared for her job. Spiro found out, used it as leverage when he recruited her.’

Carter didn’t want to fall out with Fielding. That wasn’t why he had come. He’d been keen to meet a man who enjoyed something approaching the status of a legend at Langley. Fielding was a very different kind of spy from Stephen Marchant. A fellow believer in espionage, he had the intellectual arrogance shared by all the MI6 officers Carter had ever met, but he had unquestionable form, too: Fielding had helped them to talk Muammar Gaddafi out of his nuclear ambitions, drawing on his enviable knowledge of the Arab world to defuse a delicate situation. If only their previous President had deployed the same tactics with Saddam Hussein.

‘Does our profession ever surprise you, Alan?’ Fielding asked. He had stood up from the table, and was now looking out of the buttressed bay window, his back to Carter. A couple of staff were taking a cigarette break on the open terrace below, the Union flag billowing above them.

‘Every day.’

‘It often appalled Stephen. He despised the people he turned, the people who made his reputation. Loyalty was something he valued higher than anything, which made traitors the lowest of the low, even if they were betraying the enemy.’

Carter stood up to join Fielding at the window. Outside, in the dark London night, the lights of a passing party boat sparkled on the Thames. It was nearly midnight. Legoland, like Langley, never slept. Up on the roof, the array of aerials and satellite dishes Carter had seen from Vauxhall Bridge linked the building with every time zone in the world.

‘Shall I tell you why I think Stephen took that flight to Kerala?’ Carter asked.

‘Please.’

‘He went out there because I think in Salim Dhar he saw what we’re all after: a senior AQ operative who might just be turned. Sure, we could have brought him in, knocked him about a bit in a remote detention site, found out what he did or didn’t know on the waterboard. That’s what Spiro wanted. But Stephen Marchant had other ideas.’

‘To be honest, I think he just wanted a name — the name of the mole in MI6 who had been making his life a misery.’

‘Come on, Marcus, he wanted much more, you know that. He wanted his own man high up in AQ.’

Carter had read all the files on Stephen Marchant, and knew that one of his biggest regrets was that MI6 had never infiltrated Al Qaeda on his watch. He was a Chief, after all, who had built a brilliant career on penetrating Dzerzhinsky Square, in the days when intelligence officers didn’t dunk the enemy, they blackmailed them with sordid photographs taken in seedy motel rooms. Far more civilised.

‘It became an obsession for him, didn’t it?’ Carter continued. ‘Someone on the inside. Particularly after 9/11. But we were going the other way. Round them all up rather than recruit them. It’s why the Company grew so suspicious of MI6. We thought you’d fallen asleep at the switch. What were you all doing, for God’s sake?’

‘Finding the intelligence to justify your wars,’ Fielding said.

‘But you weren’t beating up the bullies. Americans are a very simple people at heart. Somebody hurts us, we want to hurt them back. Publicly. It’s not subtle. And we sometimes hurt back the wrong people. It also puts those of us who believe in more covert methods out of a job.’

‘Salim Dhar would never work for the Agency.’

‘I realise that.’

‘So why do you think you might be able to turn him?’

‘I don’t. But he might respond to a British approach.’

‘Why?’

‘You tell me. Stephen Marchant knew something.’ Fielding walked away from the window, one hand on the small of his back.

‘Do you mind if I lie down?’ he asked.

‘Go ahead,’ Carter said. He had heard about the Vicar’s back problems. ‘Lower lumbar?’

‘All over.’

Carter watched as the Chief of MI6 calmly lay down on the floor of his dining-room suite, seemingly unaware of the figure he cut. Or perhaps he just didn’t care.

‘Do go on,’ Fielding said from the floor, but the wind had been taken from Carter’s sails. Had Fielding known what he was about to say?

‘Salim Dhar’s father worked in the American Embassy compound in the early 1980s,’ Carter continued, not sure where to address his comments. Looking down didn’t feel appropriate. ‘After he’d been sacked by your high commission. We’ve run some checks. It seems that someone was conduiting him a little bit of extra pocket money every month.’