Jon Stock - Dead Spy Running

Dhar’s line of sight was suddenly perfect. He found the President’s choice of a cotton Nehru suit even more offensive than his predecessor’s cowboy boots, but he didn’t need any further incentive. Inshallah , his job was almost done. The President was alone, his figure filling the lens as Dhar traced the crosshairs over his chest and neck, and up to his forehead, which was beaded with sweat.

But as he squeezed the trigger, distilling in that moment a thousand thoughts of anger, from his first day at the American School to the death of his father, a woman stepped forward and stared back at him through the lens. Dhar recognised the big eyes as the high-velocity bullet impacted between them, knocking her backwards and removing part of her skull.

In that shard of time, where there was no place for shock or regret, Dhar knew that he had killed the person who had betrayed his father: her job at the American Embassy, the English-accented Urdu, her seeming affection for Daniel Marchant. They all surfaced at once to shout out her guilt, which should have made missing the President more bearable.

A second shot was out of the question. The President had been thrown to the ground and smothered by a blanket of Security Service officers, as if he was on fire. There would be another opportunity in the future, Dhar told himself, but he knew it was unlikely. It no longer seemed to matter, either. He left the rifle where it was, hidden under the water tank, slid through a hatch in the roof, and made his way down to a rickshaw parked in the street below.

* * *

Marchant saw Leila pirouette to the ground, her spilt blood darkening the President’s white suit. He tried to push through the boiling crowd, but his world was slowing down, falling silent. The women all around him were mouthing muted screams, the men running everywhere and nowhere. A tide of people was carrying him away from Leila, out to the dark depths of the Arabian Sea, to level three. Sebbie was there, lying on the floor of the pool. Then he heard the sound of a police whistle and saw him on the road, twisted and bloodied, alone, eyes open with fear and confusion.

He saw Leila, too, ignored at the foot of the temple steps as the President was bundled away towards Marine One, its blades starting to stir the hot evening air. How could they leave her on her own like that? He was by her side now, lifting her wet head in his hands, shielding her from the downdraft.

‘Leila, it’s me, Dan,’ he said through his tears. ‘It’s me.’

But he knew it was too late. He bent over her, shoulders shaking, and kissed her still warm lips goodbye.

‘As far as we’re concerned, she took the bullet that was meant for our President,’ William Straker said on the secure video link. Daniel Marchant turned away from the screen to the window. A Dutch barge was making its way up the river below Fielding’s office. ‘That’s pretty special in our book, a loyal Agency employee who made the ultimate sacrifice,’ Straker continued. ‘The President wants a full state funeral.’

‘And we’ll be there, of course,’ Fielding said. ‘Leila was an extraordinary woman.’

Marchant caught Sir David Chadwick raising his eyebrows at Bruce Lockhart, the Prime Minister’s foreign policy adviser, who was sitting across from the Chief.

‘We appreciate it, Marcus, really,’ Straker went on. ‘It’s at times like this that Britain and America need to stand as one. No one here forgets the night after 9/11, when the Chief of MI6 somehow got a plane into Virginia to be with us. That’s how it should be. Madam, sirs, thank you.’

The screen went blank, and the six of them sat quite still, listening to the sound of an aircraft flying over London towards Heathrow. Harriet Armstrong, crutches propped against her chair, glanced at Chadwick, who looked away. It was Marchant who finally spoke.

‘Have they seen all the evidence?’

‘Everything,’ Armstrong said.

‘And they still believe she was working for them?’

‘No. But they need to believe she was,’ Fielding said. ‘The alternative is unthinkable. And why not? She saved their President. You heard Straker. She “took the bullet”. In the West’s war against terror, she’s a hero. And at the moment, America needs heroes. It doesn’t need traitors.’

‘So why did they agree to release me?’ Marchant asked. Two Secret Service officers had started asking questions when they took Leila’s body away in an ambulance and Marchant had insisted on accompanying them. An hour later he was in the cell in the basement of the American Embassy again. He had finally arrived back in Britain earlier that morning, landing at Fairford, the airbase he had flown out of two weeks earlier with a hood over his head.

‘In return for Britain publicly believing in Leila too.’

‘And that’s enough for them to free me? They thought I was involved in a plot to kill their Ambassador to London, that I was a traitor.’

Fielding shuffled his papers and looked around the room. The hesitation made Marchant feel uncomfortable, excluded. ‘There’s something more. What? Tell me.’

‘Leila sent me an email on the morning of the day she died,’ Fielding said, looking straight at Marchant. ‘In it, she provided the time and place of what would have been the next arranged dead drop with her Iranian handler. It was here in London, Hyde Park. We put the spot under surveillance, even though the world knew Leila had been killed. Someone from the Iranian Embassy duly turned up, in case she’d left something before she went to India. This man was unknown to us, not on the diplomatic list. Harriet pulled him in.’

‘He was senior officer in VEVAK, and he told us everything, in return for letting him leave the country,’ Armstrong said. ‘When Leila started to work for the Iranians, how they had given her no choice because of her mother, how the Americans recruited her. But it seems Leila struck a better deal than we thought. In some ways a very brave, selfless deal. In return for her spying for Iran, VEVAK would not only keep her mother safe, they would also suspend all police activity against the Bahá’í community in Iran.’

The room fell silent. ‘The latest human rights data appears to bear this out,’ Denton said quietly. ‘The number of Bahá’ís persecuted in the last six months is the lowest since the ’79 Revolution.’

‘We sent a transcript to Langley,’ Fielding said.

‘And? What did they say?’ Marchant asked.

‘Nothing,’ Fielding said. ‘We didn’t expect them to. Two days later, they agreed to a complete rehabilitation of your father. Lord Bancroft will be filing his report shortly. It will conclude that there is no evidence to doubt his loyalty to his country. There will be a full memorial service in Westminster Abbey, attended by the Prime Minister and the US Ambassador to London.’

‘All references to Salim Dhar and his family have been deleted from your father’s records, both here and at Langley,’ Armstrong added. ‘Privately, they still maintain that we’re honouring a traitor. Privately, we think they’re doing the same. But the world will never know.’

‘One day the truth will come out about Leila, though, we’ve insisted on that,’ Chadwick said. ‘Fifty years from now, historians will discover how she sabotaged our investigations into a terror campaign in Britain. Not only that, but it appears she was the main UK point of contact for the terrorists. It was a South Indian cell, your father was right about that.’ Chadwick looked Marchant in the eyes for the first time. ‘What Stephen didn’t know, what none of us knew, was that it was being run out of Tehran.’

‘Stephen visited Dhar, a rising star in the jihadi firmament, because he had hoped Dhar might know something about the cell,’ Fielding said.