Jon Stock - Dead Spy Running

‘Our female comrade in London did well to bring down the house of Marchant,’ Dhar said, managing a thin smile. It wasn’t returned.

‘Some brothers tried to kill the son, at the Gymkhana Club. They were worried about you.’ She paused. ‘But he is on the run, still alive.’

For a moment Dhar thought he detected emotion in her voice, disguised like his own.

‘Not if he finds me.’

They looked at each other, eye to eye, and then she was gone.

‘We were driving back from Chanakyapuri,’ Marchant began. ‘My mother, Sebbie, me.’ His hood tasted of stale clothes. ‘Usually we drove around in our Ambassador, but it was being fixed by a garage so my father had arranged for us to borrow a vehicle from the High Commission. It was used by the traffic police, a desi version of the American Jeep.’

‘Nice wheels,’ one of the guards said from the front. ‘Got one in the garage back home.’

‘Not these.’ Marchant paused. ‘Death traps. No safety belts in those days. Our driver, Raman, was normally so careful, but he was angry that day. The petrol pump attendant had ripped him off, served us up short. Raman disliked that more than anything. My mother was anxious, too. We had an ayah coming for a job interview, and we were late. She hated being late. So we were rushing, heading down towards Saket on a main road.’

Marchant was aware of the car slowing down. When it stopped, his hood was removed by one of the guards. He blinked in the bright sunshine.

‘Was this the place?’ Armstrong asked.

Marchant looked at the traffic all around him. They had pulled over on the side of a busy road, on the edge of a big junction. Then he glanced at Armstrong in the seat next to him, and tried to work out what was going on. He had been right about the number of people in the car. The two Marines were sitting up front with the driver, who was tapping the steering wheel nervously. It was a dangerous place to have parked. Armstrong must have asked them to leave her and Marchant on their own in the back.

‘I can’t be sure,’ Marchant said. ‘It was more than twenty years ago.’

‘Try to remember,’ Armstrong said quietly. ‘Because we’re not going anywhere until you do.’

Fielding climbed into the back of the cotton-white Ambassador and turned to look at the airport behind him. The Gulfstream was still sitting on the Tarmac, shimmering in the hazy heat. At least it had fuel now, and Denton and Carter would soon be clear of Delhi’s intolerable summer. They had been reluctant to let him go on his own, for their different reasons, but they knew it would have been impossible to smuggle three men out on the fuel truck, even though security at the airport was lax. ‘Don’t let her even get near the President, if only for me,’ Carter had said.

As the car drove off, with Prasannan, the local agent, sitting in the front, Fielding wondered what he would do if he found Leila. He knew he must stop her. It wasn’t enough to know that he had been right and the Americans were wrong. But he was a marked man himself now, on the run like Daniel Marchant. He assumed it was Armstrong who had entered his office in London. She would have loved marching into Legoland with a warrant, tearing the place up, questioning everyone.

‘The traffic is very vigorous today,’ Prasannan said, turning to Fielding. ‘It’s the President’s visit.’ The driver nodded in agreement. He was sitting almost sideways-on to the steering wheel, his back pressed against the door, one leg jigging up and down. Fielding thought he looked unduly anxious, even for someone about to drive through Delhi.

‘Do we have an itinerary yet?’ he asked.

‘I have a copy here, sir, acquired from the city police.’ Prasannan waved a sheet of paper in the air. Fielding thought he looked nervous too.

‘Where’s the President going today?’

‘He started at the Gandhi memorial, then visited the Lokh Sabha, the lower house of parliament. Lunch at the American Embassy was followed by Lodhi Gardens and then the Red Fort.’ Prasannan looked at his watch, then back at the sheet of paper. ‘He should be on his way now to the Lotus Temple, before a state banquet tonight hosted by the Indian President at the Rashtrapati Bhavan.’ He paused. ‘Sir, there is…’

‘What’s the Lotus Temple?’ Fielding interrupted, remembering something he had once read.

‘The Bahá’í house of worship. Built like a giant lotus flower. You will have seen photos of it. Very nice place,’ Prasannan added, rocking his head proudly.

‘Bahá’í? Why’s he going there?’ But Fielding already knew the answer.

‘To show solidarity with the Bahá’ís of Iran. Sir…’

‘We need to be at the temple now.’

‘Sorry, sir, there is one thing else. I have an urgent message from Harriet Armstrong. First we must go to Saket.’

Prasannan fastened his safety belt.

‘The police said later that the traffic lights were faulty,’ Marchant said, speaking slowly. The air conditioning was on, but struggling. ‘I remember seeing a traffic policeman — the thick white gloves — so perhaps the lights were out and he was in charge. Raman thought it was clear to go. We were at the front of the queue, but ten yards back from the junction for the shade. It was hot in the jeep, no A/C, of course. We accelerated forward, in case anyone tried to move in front of us, and then I just remember this awful noise of twisting metal and the policeman’s whistle, a desperate shrill sound that went on and on, as if he was trying to undo what had happened. The bus, a government one, had been coming from the left, and didn’t stop at the junction. Maybe it was going too fast, or the driver just ignored the policeman. It pushed our jeep thirty yards down the road.’

‘And you were unhurt?’

‘I was thrown across the back seat, so was my mother. But Sebbie…’ he paused, thinking back. ‘It was Sebbie’s turn to ride in the front with Raman. He loved Sebbie, loved us both. Sebbie was sitting on the left, by the door. He took the main brunt of the impact.’

Marchant looked up just as the British High Commission Ambassador hit them, pushing its proud Morris bonnet deep into the front passenger side of the people carrier in a shower of glass. Armstrong must have seen it moments before the impact, because she had reached a protective arm across him. The two Marines and the driver had no warning. In the slow, panicked seconds that followed, after their car had been shunted sideways across the junction, Armstrong slid open the side door and nodded for Marchant to get out. One of the guards was conscious, hanging forward in his seatbelt, but the other one appeared to be dead. The driver was slumped over the wheel, his chest jammed against the horn.

‘Bloody hell, I can’t do much more,’ Armstrong said. ‘Find her, and stop whatever she’s started.’

Marchant realised that Armstrong couldn’t move. Her left leg was bent forward at the knee.

‘I can’t leave you like this,’ Marchant said, unscathed for the second time in his life.

‘It’s better I’m found with them. Now go. Get on with it. The Chief’s waiting.’

‘Daniel, over here!’ a voice called from across the road. Marchant turned to see Marcus Fielding in the back of a rickshaw. The three-wheeler swung out into the road, where the traffic had come to a sudden halt, picked Marchant up and drove off in the direction of the Lotus Temple, a policeman’s shrill whistle fading behind them.

Salim Dhar brought the US President into focus with the telescopic sights of his semi-automatic Russian rifle. He seemed smaller than on election night, when Dhar had watched him on TV milking the adoring American public. A large group of suited Security Service personnel were bunched around him as he walked down the tree-lined avenue towards the Lotus Temple. They were scanning the crowd with the worried urgency of parents in search of a lost child. A clean shot was impossible, the President’s head partially obscured all the time. For a moment Dhar began to doubt the plan.