‘So what did this rag-head tell you about himself?’ Wylie asked, changing tack again.
Rag-head? Marchant marvelled at how unreconstructed MI5 still was. He thought it had become more ethnically diverse. ‘He said his name was Pradeep. He was originally from Cochin in Kerala. He called it Kochi, the local name, suggesting he was Indian.’ Marchant had always liked data. Hard facts, unquestionable stats–they were reassuring in his shifting world.
‘South India,’ Wylie said. ‘We all hoped that little terror campaign had gone away.’
Don’t bring my father into this, Marchant thought. Last year’s bombings, believed to have been run from South India, had stopped when his father stood down as Chief at Christmas, a point not lost on his enemies in MI5. ‘Pradeep also had a good knowledge of New Delhi,’ Marchant said, determined to remain calm. ‘He was living there with his wife and son. He seemed to know Chanakyapuri, the diplomatic enclave in the south of the city.’
‘An unusual part of town to know, where all the foreign embassies are.’
‘Possibly. It’s hard to tell. He revealed very little information about himself: spoke good English, with a heavy Indian accent. His child was four, maybe five, wearing a maroon school sweatshirt in a photo he showed me. If you hadn’t shot him, he might have been able to tell you a bit more about himself.’
Marchant saw the punch coming–it had been coming ever since MI6 first looked down its public-school nose at MI5–and raised his left forearm quick enough to deflect it upwards. His instinct, honed at the Fort, was to strike back at the same moment with his right hand, but he resisted, grabbing Wylie’s upper arm instead. Their faces were close before Marchant let him go.
‘Next time we’ll take you both down,’ Wylie said, sucking deeply on his inhaler.
5
Paul Myers drew heavily on his third pint of London Pride. ‘Another thirty seconds and the planes would have collided,’ he said. ‘The CAA’s lost the plot, wants to know how many other UK near-misses have been caused by Colorado tinkering with its atomic clocks.’
‘And?’ Leila asked, glancing around the pub. The Morpeth Arms, just across the river from Legoland, was a regular haunt for officers from MI5 and MI6. She recognised one or two colleagues at the bar, waiting to be served by the pub’s Czech and Russian barmaids.
‘Just don’t rely on your Tom-Tom if there’s a war on.’
Leila smiled, sipping at her glass of Sauvignon. She was tired. MI5 had let her go late in the afternoon, after a second day of interviews. The Americans had been present today: James Spiro, the CIA’s London chief, had asked lots of questions about Daniel Marchant, but no one would answer hers. She wanted to be with him, talk through the events of the marathon, hear it from his side, but nobody would admit that they knew where he was. Myers was a consolation prize. He had played his part that day, was proof that it had all actually happened. But it was the chatter that interested her.
‘It was good of you to call me yesterday,’ she said, touching his freckled forearm. Myers was wearing a fleece too big for him, pulled up at the sleeves.
‘We go back a bit, eh? I remember the first day you arrived at the Fort…’
‘Do you remember exactly what you heard? The chatter?’
Myers sat back awkwardly. ‘It was probably nothing. A South Indian we’d been monitoring. Talked about “35,000 runners”. Did you pass it on to anybody?’
‘Only Daniel. Briefly, just before the marathon started.’
Myers smiled, not sure where to look. Like most of the intelligence analysts Leila knew at GCHQ, he was socially dysfunctional, his head hanging too far forward over his pint, which he grasped with big nail-bitten hands. He was a good listener, though, not just to jihadi chatter, but to old friends like Leila. She knew that he still fancied her, partly because of his unsubtle glances at her breasts, but also because of the speed with which he had agreed to come up to London when she needed to talk. She knew, too, that it was wrong of her to exploit his enthusiasm; but she had no choice. The marathon had left her in desperate need of company.
‘I’m still trying to work out how it all happened, why he was the one who spotted the belt,’ Leila said, realising she shouldn’t have another glass of wine.
‘Come on, Leila, he’s always been a jammy little shit. Some people land the best postings, win on penalties, get the girl.’
Myers lifted his head briefly, his thick glasses glinting in the light. He was always at his most lyrical when he’d been on the ale, he thought, stealing another look at Leila’s heavy breasts.
‘I’m worried about him,’ she said. ‘After what happened to his father.’
‘He’ll get his job back. He saved the day, didn’t he?’
‘I hope the Americans see it that way. They never liked Stephen Marchant, and they don’t trust Daniel. I think it’s best neither of us mentions the chatter. It might not look too good for him.’
‘OK by me. I shouldn’t have told you anyway. The guys in Colorado Springs thought he was a bloody hero,’ Myers continued, draining his glass. ‘Any chance of kipping at your place for the night? Missed the last train back to Cheltenham.’
‘You can sleep on the sofa,’ Leila said, surprised by his confidence.
As they walked out onto the empty Embankment, looking for a cab, Leila turned to Myers. ‘You never thought it was true, what they said about his father?’
‘No. We would have known. We hear about everything at Cheltenham, sooner or later. It was political, expedient. They didn’t trust him. The PM. Armstrong. The whole bloody lot of them. Not because he was a traitor. They just didn’t understand him. He was old school, not their type.’
‘I sometimes wonder if there really was ever a mole,’ Leila said, looking out across the water towards Legoland, lit up in the night sky like some sort of rough-hewn pyramid.
‘It wasn’t Stephen Marchant, that’s all I know,’ Myers said, momentarily unsteady as he took in her legs. ‘Or his son. I can’t understand why they suspended him. No, Daniel’s one of the good guys. Good taste in women, too.’
Half an hour later, Leila lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling in her Canary Wharf flat, regretting that she had let Myers stay on her sofabed. He was already fast asleep, his body lying as if he had been dropped from a great height, and snoring loudly.
Leila thought again about her mother, how she had sounded on the phone the night before. The doctor who had first suggested a nursing home had told her not to worry, that she must expect her mother to sound increasingly confused, but it was still alarming. Sunday was not a day she usually called her, but the marathon that morning had left her frightened and tired. Alone in her flat, after four hours of questioning at Thames House, she had felt like a child again. When she was younger and needing to talk, she had never turned to her father, who had made little effort to know her. She had always confided in her mother, but now her voice had scared Leila even more.
‘They came tonight, three of them,’ her mother had begun in slow Farsi. ‘They took the boy–you know him, the one who cooks for me. Beat him in front
