Jon Stock - Dead Spy Running

‘Daniel?’ The line went silent for a moment. ‘Christ, what’s he doing there? I thought he was suspended.’

‘Not now, Paul.’

‘Sure.’ Paul had changed up a gear. ‘2 SOPS are on the other line. I’ll patch them through.’

Marchant listened carefully as Leila talked him through what he had to do next. Her voice sounded different, faltering, lacking her usual confidence. Tower Bridge had been cleared of all crowds, she said. Half a mile ahead of him, at the twelve-mile point, there was about to be a roadblock, organised by plain-clothed police officers wearing race marshal tops. As he approached they would fan out across the road, using megaphones to order the runners to stop for safety reasons because of the intense heat. It would be the first time the London Marathon had been stopped, but the measure was not unheard of. (The Rotterdam Marathon had been abandoned in 2007 because of soaring temperatures.) In other words, there was an outside chance that the roadblock wouldn’t arouse the suspicion of Pradeep’s handler, should he be watching.

‘Are you all right?’ Marchant asked, after another hesitation from Leila.

‘Of course I’m bloody not,’ she said.

Marchant passed on the basic details of the plan, along with some more jelly beans, to Pradeep, who seemed to grow stronger at the news. The police would delay their intervention as long as possible, to avoid a crowd building up in front of them and slowing their pace. However, they should stick to the right of the road, as close as possible to the pavement, where a channel would be formed to let them pass through. To avoid being mistakenly challenged, Marchant was to call out that he was a doctor and must be allowed to pass.

‘Have you got all that?’ Leila asked.

‘What happens when we’re through the block?’ Marchant replied. His mother had always wanted a doctor in the family.

‘As you near Tower Bridge, the Americans are going to tweak the clocks on four GPS satellites orbiting 12,000 miles above you. When I give the word, you and Pradeep should gradually slow down to a walking pace. The Bomb Squad will join you and disable the belt as quickly as they can.’

‘How long have they got?’

‘Two minutes from the moment you start to slow.’

Marchant didn’t say anything for a few seconds. For the first time, he realised that his chances of survival were slim. Somehow he had assumed that everything would work out, but now he sensed that he might never see Leila again. She had already realised that. His life normally felt fairer in these moments of acute danger. Ever since that dark day in Delhi, he had been burdened with guilt: why had his brother been killed, while he walked away from the crash unscathed? When the odds were stacked against him, the weight briefly lifted: intense relief replaced the fear. The greater the danger, the closer he felt to Sebastian, the more able to look him in the eye.

But that wasn’t the case now. There was no frisson of higher justice or fateful euphoria. His body just felt more tired than it had ever felt in his entire life, even more than when they had found him drunk in Nairobi, face down in the gutter, his last night as a journalist.

‘Are you still there?’ Leila said.

‘I’m here.’ Another pause. He checked on Pradeep, who looked as if he had fallen into some sort of trance, eyes staring straight ahead, unaware of the outside world. But he was still running, that was all that mattered. ‘They’ve let you keep the mike then,’ Marchant continued.

‘Yes. In the circumstances, it was felt to be the best option.’

Drop the formal tone, he thought, but he knew she couldn’t; all the agencies would have live feeds by now: Thames House, Cheltenham, Langley.

Marchant imagined an aerial view of himself, as if taken from one of the satellites far above South London. He could picture the runners, tiny figures moving along toy streets, begin to bunch up in front of the police, who had appeared from nowhere. Zooming in on the scene, he could tell at once that there was no way through. Fifty yards out, he heard himself shouting at the top of his voice that he was a doctor. But no one else heard him. What was wrong with his voice? It sounded so faint, lost in the hubbub of the crowds, who were now jeering, protesting at the race being stopped. He shouted again, but his voice was too weak, barely audible above the sound of his own breathing, the megaphones, the helicopter above them. Pradeep looked at him in desperation as they began to slow down. And then Pradeep’s receiver beeped.

‘Leila, Leila, there’s no fucking way through!’ Marchant shouted into the phone. His hands were wet with sweat and he gripped the receiver tightly as he ran, like a relay baton. He could hear her talking urgently to other people in the background. ‘Jesus, Leila, we’re slowing down with five hundred people backing up in front of us.’

‘Head left, head left!’ a voice was suddenly saying. It wasn’t Leila’s. Left? For a moment, all Marchant could think of was the blue tartan shoes he had as a child, ‘L’ and ‘R’ embroidered in red on the toes. Then Pradeep pointed ahead of them at a marshal who was beckoning frantically. He was trying to direct them over to the far side of the crowd, where marshals were pushing runners back, making a channel.

Marchant couldn’t dredge up another word, let alone shout that he was a doctor, but in the end there was no need. They were suddenly through the roadblock, running on their own, the din of the crowd receding fast behind them. The marathon behemoth had spat them free.

Eight hundred yards ahead lay Tower Bridge, flags flying, eerily deserted. Marchant managed a faint smile, but not for long. Up until the roadblock, Pradeep’s mission would still have had the appearance of viability to any observer. Now, as the two of them ran on alone up the empty road, the suicide operation was blown. All Marchant could hope for was that Pradeep’s handler, if he had one out there, would wait until the iconic setting of Tower Bridge to cut his losses. The Ambassador wouldn’t die, there would be no ‘Carnage at the London Marathon’ headlines, but a suicide bombing at one of the capital’s most famous landmarks would still be worth something.

‘Leila?’ Marchant asked, still short of breath, struggling to grip the phone.

‘We copy you,’ an American man’s voice said.

‘Where’s Leila?’ he shouted. ‘Put Leila back on the line, do you hear?’

‘It’s OK, Daniel,’ a voice said. ‘She’s still here. We just patched you through directly to Colorado Springs. You’re now talking to me, Harriet Armstrong, in London.’

The bitch, he thought, but he said nothing. He was too tired.

‘They’re going to slow you down in a couple of minutes,’ Armstrong continued. ‘We’ve got two from the Bomb Squad waiting on the north side of the bridge. As soon as you’re walking, they’ll move in. Try to get more out of Pradeep. Cell names, contacts, who’s running him, anything. We’ll call you back in two minutes.’

It felt strange to run the London Marathon through deserted streets. He had always liked empty spaces, big yawning skies, mountains, the open sea. In cities he felt trapped, but he could live here if it was always like this. He suddenly thought of the Thar Desert, trudging over sand dunes with Sebastian on a camel beside him, their parents up ahead, smiling back at them.

As far as Marchant could tell, the police had cleared a corridor a hundred yards either side of the route. For a moment, he imagined that he was leading the field with Pradeep, having broken away from the leading pack in a ruthless final kick for home. Then his legs reminded him how tired he felt.

‘Where are you from, Pradeep?’ he asked. ‘Which part of India?’