Jon Stock - Dead Spy Running

‘He also wanted to meet his son for the first time,’ Marchant interrupted. Chadwick winced.

‘Stephen was convinced that this cell had help from inside the Service,’ Fielding continued, as if he hadn’t heard Marchant. ‘He was right about that, too. But the Iranians had kept Dhar out of the loop. He couldn’t tell Stephen who was behind the attacks in Britain, or who the mole was, because he didn’t know.’

‘Will the Iranians use him in the future?’ Lockhart asked. ‘He managed to eliminate Leila, one of their most priceless assets, someone who had infiltrated two Western intelligence agencies.’

‘Their interests might overlap again,’ Fielding said. ‘But it was an unusual alliance. Maybe that’s why no one saw it. We think Dhar’s future lies with AQ. The jihadi chatrooms are jubilant, praising him for getting so close.’

‘But is he ours?’ Lockhart asked. Marchant knew he was the only one who could answer the question. It had been on everyone’s lips from the moment the meeting had started.

‘Dhar is his own man,’ Marchant replied.

‘His war is with others, though, not with the British.’

‘So far his targets have all been American.’

‘Will he ever try to make contact?’ Lockhart asked.

Marchant remained silent. He knew that a part of him hoped so.

‘We have to leave this to Daniel,’ Fielding said. ‘We think Dhar’s only motivation will be personal. Family business,’ he added, looking at Marchant.

‘But if he does?’ Lockhart persisted.

‘Then this whole operation is deniable. Dhar is currently the most wanted man in the Western world. If contact was ever established between him and Her Majesty’s Government, it’s clearly not something we would boast about.’

‘In the unlikely event of him becoming a British asset, the PM must be ring-fenced, is that clear?’ Lockhart said, looking around the table. ‘He cannot be told, under any circumstances. Only the six people in this room will ever know.’

Marchant stood outside Legoland, on the Thames path, looking across the water to the Morpeth Arms. It was where he and Leila had sometimes gone after work in the early days, after they had graduated from the Fort. He had had time to think about her betrayal, about when the deception must have started, whether he had missed any obvious clues. It was easier to assume that her treachery had begun as something small, pieces of information here and there in return for her mother’s safety in Tehran, but that slowly it had gained an unstoppable momentum of its own, ending with the Americans recruiting her too, providing perfect protection against the hunt for a mole in MI6.

Leila was certainly right to have feared VEVAK’s threats to her mother. The day before the President’s visit to the Lotus Temple, a mob in a poor suburb of Tehran had dragged an old Bahá’í woman outside and stoned her. She had died in the night. Had VEVAK begun to suspect that Leila was losing her nerve?

Marchant turned away from the river and looked behind him, distracted by a noise. A yellow London Duck was coming down the slipway. The amphibious vehicle rumbled to a stop beside Marchant, who spotted Fielding sitting in the bow.

‘Hop on,’ he called down to Marchant.

Two minutes later, Marchant was sitting at the front of the Duck as it made its way towards Westminster, too low in the water for his liking. But he had his own particular reasons to fear water, and tried to take comfort from the other passengers, sitting towards the stern, who seemed untroubled.

‘I’ve always wanted to go on this bloody thing,’ Fielding said. ‘Hear what they tell the punters about Legoland.’

‘And?’

‘The usual Bond nonsense, M’s office. Although he did point up to the right windows. I must have a word afterwards. Are you all right? That was quite a meeting to fly into today.’

‘The Americans are sticking to their story, then?’

‘It’s the most convenient lie for everyone. And it’s bought us some leverage on the subject of your father.’

‘Sometimes I wonder if Dhar did know Leila was the mole.’

‘And that’s why he shot her? I doubt it.’

‘There was a real bond between Dhar and my father. Dhar spoke very fondly of him, even though they only met the once. That attack on the US Embassy in Delhi — I checked the dates again. It was just after my father died. Dhar was an angry man that day.’

‘Shooting the President of the United States would have been a far greater act of revenge than killing Leila.’

Marchant wasn’t so sure, but he knew that his own emotions were still too raw and confused for him to make a clear judgement of what had happened and why. Leila had betrayed a father; now she was dead, killed by a son. Greater forces seemed to have been at work.

‘I had a call this afternoon from Paul Myers, down at Cheltenham. He wanted to tell you himself, but he was wary of bypassing official channels.’

The Duck was passing the London Eye, sinking even lower into the water as it turned around and started to head upriver again.

‘How is he? He used to have quite a thing about Leila.’

‘Bruised. Armstrong’s people were a little heavy-handed with him. He’s come across an email account, thinks it’s Leila’s.’

‘Anything in it?’ For a moment Marchant hoped she had written him a message explaining everything, but he knew there was no simple answer.

‘Empty inbox, nothing sent. But he found this in the drafts folder, attached to a blank email addressed to you.’

Fielding reached into his jacket breast pocket and handed Marchant a pixellated A4 printout of a photo. It was of a small Indian boy, staring at the camera, holding a woman’s hand. Both figures were a little stiff, unsmiling.

‘The image is dated,’ Fielding said. ‘In the bottom corner. The Jpeg was called “Pradeep’s son, safe and well”.’

Marchant looked at it for a moment, grateful that the marathon bomber’s son had survived. VEVAK had clearly decided that Pradeep had done enough, dying so publicly on Tower Bridge. He was grateful to Leila, too, for letting him know. She must have tracked the family down when she was in Delhi, using her VEVAK contacts.

‘There’s something else you should know,’ Fielding said. ‘Armstrong got quite a lot out of the Iranian we brought in. Personal stuff we didn’t want to air in the meeting. We’ve all wondered why Leila didn’t tell us, or the Americans, as soon as she was compromised. It would have saved a lot of trouble, but not, it seems, her mother. They had someone outside her house twenty-four hours a day, ready to kill her the moment Leila told anyone she was working for them.’

‘She had no choice, you mean.’

‘She was close to her mother, as you know.’

‘When did the Iranians first make contact?’

‘Even before she turned up at the Fort, I’m afraid. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Harriet asked the Iranian a lot of questions, for your sake. She must have warmed to you in Delhi.’

‘Like a mother.’ Marchant managed a smile.

‘Initially, when she was working at the Gulf Controllerate in London, the Iranians just asked Leila for general information. It was only at the end that they asked her to target you personally, once they realised how close the two of you had become.’

‘Very comforting. Except that the “general information” she provided led to my father’s departure. It’s hard to forgive her for that.’

‘She couldn’t go through with the marathon attack, you know that. It was her one weakness as a traitor, her strength in other ways. We think she was meant to kill you, frame you at the very least. It was when they increased their demands that she insisted they stopped all attacks against Bahá’ís, not just against her mother. A courageous call.’