struggled to control his urge to shout. There was no reason to bring Leila into this. She would tell them about her TETRA phone in a separate debrief. He spoke slowly and clearly, emphasising the words as if speaking to a child. ‘I chose to stay with Pradeep. I’m not sure it would have been that easy to identify him again. There were 35,000 runners out there.’
‘Including some of our officers,’ Wylie said.
Flat-footing it along at the back with the fifteen-minute milers, Marchant thought.
‘This attack didn’t come as a complete surprise,’ Wylie added.
‘I’m sure it didn’t.’ And if Marchant was writing the incident up, his report would have made that abundantly clear: MI5 saw it coming, and still screwed up.
‘You knew about it in advance, then?’ Wylie asked, his voice cracking again. This time he pulled out an asthma inhaler and sucked once on it, hard.
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘But your former colleagues knew. They just don’t like sharing information much, do they?’
Then Marchant thought he understood. Wylie was suggesting that his involvement was pre-planned: part of a conspiracy by MI6 to expose MI5’s failings, to get his job back.
‘I can’t answer for MI6,’ he said.
‘No, you’re right, you can’t. But you’d like to. Working for Six kept you sober. We’re seeing the real Marchant now, though, aren’t we? Oh, come on, you were tipped off. One of your old “mates”’–he exaggerated the word derisively–‘chose to tell you rather than us. You went out there this morning looking for a man with a belt. You didn’t just stumble across him, the one runner out of 35,000 who wanted to blow himself up.’
Marchant thought of Leila, what she’d said about Paul Myers picking up some chatter just before the marathon, and felt his palms moisten. Had someone logged the call from Myers to her? His chance encounter could begin to look anything but: Cheltenham tells MI6; MI6 informs suspended officer, who thwarts bomb attack under MI5’s nose. Wylie, though, had no idea of the fear he was sowing in Marchant’s mind.
‘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.’
