Jon Stock - Dead Spy Running

Carter became aware of some activity outside the dining room, where his lady in red was working late.

‘The money came via one State Bank of Travancore in South India,’ Carter continued. ‘At least, it was meant to look that way. Seems like the rupees might have started life as greenbacks in the Cayman Islands. Or maybe even sterling in London.’ He paused. ‘I’ve got only one question, Marcus. Why were the Brits paying a salary to Dhar’s father?’

‘The payments stopped in 2001,’ Fielding said calmly, his eyes closed.

‘Twenty-one years after he’d quit working for your high commission.’

It should have been a bombshell, enough to make the British hand over Daniel Marchant, but the Vicar couldn’t have seemed less troubled.

‘We only discovered the payments ourselves a few days ago.’

‘Let’s hope it’s just you and me who know, then.’ Carter was suddenly annoyed that Fielding had managed to defuse his story by the simple ploy of lying on the floor. It had the effect of belittling everything he said. ‘I hate to think what Lord Bancroft would make of one of the world’s most wanted terrorists drawing down an MI6 salary.’

‘While you were funding a generation of mujahideen in Afghanistan.’

‘That was Spiro too, as it happens.’

‘We really don’t know where Daniel Marchant is,’ Fielding said. Outside the dining room, voices were getting more agitated.

‘We do.’

‘He needs to be left to find Salim Dhar. And with the greatest respect for your people’s tradecraft, he’s not going to do that with a ten-strong surveillance team on his case.’

‘I’m offering you a deal, Marcus. We keep quiet about the Cayman trust fund and let Marchant find Dhar, but when he does, we share the debrief.’

‘You’re assuming that Dhar will talk to him?’

‘Aren’t you?’

Carter knew that he was. MI6 must be staking everything on it. The discovery of the payments would have changed everything. Salim Dhar really might be one of theirs, one of Stephen Marchant’s most breathtakingly prescient signings. More likely he just got lucky. No one had seen Islamic terrorism coming in the 1980s. Dhar must have been a punt, one of the many people signed up by intelligence agencies around the world on the off-chance of coming good later. But in Dhar, Marchant had come up trumps, one of those breaks that happened once in a career. Would he have risked running him, though? Dhar’s track record of violence against the Americans would have made him a high-risk asset, particularly when the CIA was leading calls for Marchant to stand down as Chief.

Carter paced around the room, finding it easier to look at Fielding’s long, supine figure from different angles. ‘You don’t have to tell me if it was Stephen Marchant who personally authorised those payments, but I’m working on a wild guess here that it was. I’m also jumping to the crazy conclusion that you don’t know if all that money was well invested or not, which god Dhar prays to at night. From a ringside seat, it doesn’t look too good.’

Fielding’s eyes remained shut.

‘He has, however, only ever targeted Americans, which must give you people hope that he has the good manners not to bite the hand that fed him for the first twenty-one years of his life. And if that’s the case, there’s only one person he might possibly trust to run him: Stephen Marchant’s son, Daniel. We want some of that, Marcus. Salim Dhar could be the best penetration of AQ the West has ever had.’

There was a pause, Carter’s words hanging in the air, followed by a knock on the dining-room door.

‘Come,’ Fielding called out.

‘I’m sorry,’ Anne Norman began, glancing at Carter, then back to her boss on the floor. ‘We’ve just had Delhi station on the line. There’s been a bomb at the Gymkhana Club.’

Leila took it as a very public expression of gratitude that the CIA had assigned her to its team in Delhi who were liaising with the Secret Service in advance of the US President’s visit to the city. One of the agents had heard first-hand from a colleague at the London embassy about her role during the London Marathon, an event that seemed to have sealed her reputation as a player. ‘Though Turner Munroe never did get his fancy running watch back,’ he had joked on her arrival in Delhi that morning. ‘Good to have you on board.’

Neither side was calling it a defection, but relations had sunk so low between Britain’s and America’s intelligence communities that Leila had been told to treat officers from MI6’s Delhi station with the same caution as she would those from more traditionally hostile countries such as Iran and Russia. The paperwork called it a three-month exchange, but she knew there was no chance of her ever working — or living — in Britain again. She told herself that she had always preferred life abroad, and it was true that the sense of not being rooted anywhere was not a new one.

As she looked out of her room in the American Embassy, taking in the yellow of the laburnum trees lining the roads of Chanakyapuri, she forced herself not to think about Daniel, whether they would ever see each other again. For the past two years she had known that the day would come when she would have to confront the choices she had made in her life. Those choices had become much harder in recent months, but that day had not arrived. Not yet. For the time being she was able to keep his photo face-downwards on the table, to consign their life together to another place, where it could be guarded by the traditional sentinels of the spy’s conscience: if you live the lie, expect to be deceived, just as he had warned.

In those rare moments when her guard did drop, she could console herself that honesty of a kind had played its part, despite the deceptions. Her mother’s welfare had always been paramount in her life. She just wished she had been asked to get close to someone else, rather than a man she was struggling not to fall in love with.

Earlier that day, after an introductory meeting with her new colleagues, she had slipped out of the embassy compound and walked through the 40-degree heat of the May morning to a taxi rank. She had seen a public phone booth there when her car from the airport had driven past at dawn. As she dialled the number in Tehran, she glanced across at the taxi drivers, lying on string charpoys in the shade of a large canvas canopy, limbs hung listlessly as they listened to All India Radio blaring out from a nearby car, its doors flung open.

‘Mama,’ she began. The line was faint. ‘It’s Leila. Things will be better soon.’

But it wasn’t her mother’s voice that replied. ‘Your mother’s in hospital,’ a man said in Farsi. Leila’s stomach tightened. For the past year her mother had been in and out of the Mehr, a private hospital in Tehran, her treatment paid for by the Americans. Each time the doctors had prepared her for the worst. Normally, though, her neighbour had sent a text to tell her that she had been admitted to hospital.

‘Who is this?’ she asked. His voice sounded familiar.

‘A friend of the family,’ the man said. She could hear other male voices in the background. ‘She’s fine and, inshallah , will have the best treatment dollars can buy.’ The mocking tone was thinly disguised, his words addressed to the others in the room with him.

‘I want her looked after, that was always the deal,’ Leila said, trying not to raise her voice. A man outside the telephone booth glanced up at her. She knew she should be at her mother’s bedside, but that was impossible.

‘I will tell her you called,’ the voice said, then paused. ‘And that her health rests in your hands.’

The sun was at its highest as she walked back towards the embassy. In the distance, an unseen nutseller was rattling his spoon rhythmically against a frying pan. Otherwise there was a stillness in the midday air. Even the traffic police at the junction near the embassy had retreated to the shade, where they snoozed on flimsy wooden chairs. She had never minded dry heat. It somehow made her feel closer to her mother, who she knew needed her now more than ever.