to proceed. ‘The Americans would very much like to find Salim Dhar. After Delhi, he went on to attack their compound in Islamabad, killing six more US Marines And now the CIA has established that a senior-ranking officer from MI6 visited Dhar in Kerala shortly before he was released in the hostage exchange.’
Marchant looked up. ‘And they think it was my father?’
‘They’re working on a theory that it was, yes. I’m sorry. There’s no official record of any visits. I’ve checked all the logbooks, many times.’
Marchant didn’t know what to think. It wouldn’t be unusual for the local station head from Chennai, say, to bluff his way into seeing someone like Dhar, but it would be extremely unorthodox for the Chief of MI6 to make an undeclared visit from London.
‘In the context of MI5’s own inquiries, I’m afraid it doesn’t look good,’ Fielding added. ‘There are those who are convinced that Dhar masterminded the British bombings, despite his preference for killing Americans.’
‘What do you think?’ Marchant asked. ‘You knew my dad better than most.’
Fielding stopped and turned to Marchant. ‘He was under a lot of pressure last year to clean up MI6’s act. The talk at the time, remember, was all about an inside job, infiltration at the highest level by terrorists with some sort of South Indian connection. Even so, why talk to Dhar personally?’
‘Because he couldn’t trust anyone else?’ Marchant offered. For whatever reason, he knew that it must have been an act of desperation on his father’s part.
‘The good news is that details of this visit haven’t crossed Bancroft’s desk yet, and they might never,’ Fielding said. ‘His job was to draw a line under your father’s departure, not to open the whole affair up again. He’ll need to be sure of the evidence before presenting it to the JIC, and there isn’t a lot at the moment.’
‘Is there any?’
‘Dhar’s jailer, the local police chief in Kerala. Someone blackmailed him to gain access to Dhar. It had all the hallmarks of an old-school sting.’
‘Moscow rules?’
‘Textbook. Indian intelligence found the compromising photos hidden in the policeman’s desk drawer. They were taken with one of our cameras. An old Leica.’ He paused. ‘The last time it was checked out was in Berlin, early 1980s. Your father never returned it.’
7
Marchant knew that someone was in his room as he walked up the worn wooden stairs of the safe house. It was one of those intuitive things they couldn’t teach at the Fort. After Fielding had dropped him off on his way back to London, Marchant had checked in with his two babysitters, who were watching porn in the small sitting room. They had hardly acknowledged his return, so he wasn’t overly concerned as he turned the handle on the bedroom door. Besides, he could already smell Leila’s perfume.
‘Dan,’ she said, getting up from the corner of the bed, where a newspaper was spread out across the covers: two pages on the attempted marathon terrorist attack. ‘I was beginning to wonder what you were doing with the Vicar in the woods.’
They made love slowly, their limbs still tender after their morning on the streets of London.
‘A proper debrief,’ he smiled, as she slid his boxers off and eased on top of him.
Neither of them was ready to discuss what had happened at the marathon. When he had still been working they would meet up for snatched weekends whenever they could, in Berne, Seville, Dubrovnik, but never on their own patch. And they always had a rule of not talking about work, which meant they spent a lot of time making love, as they had little life beyond their jobs, only opening up to each other at the airport, minutes before they flew their separate ways. Today, though, would be different, they both knew that.
But first Marchant fell into a deep sleep, something he had rarely been able to do in recent months. His brain must have concluded that lying in a protected safe house in the depths of Wiltshire, with Leila by his side, was as secure an environment as he could hope for. Fielding had authorised her visit, she said, which added to the sense of sanctuary.
When he awoke, he felt less rested than he had hoped. No nightmares, but a nagging memory of Leila’s hot tears, felt faintly through the layers of tiredness that had enveloped his aching limbs. He sat up, troubled that he had been unable to respond. Leila was taking a shower. The bathroom door was open, and from where he was lying he could see the brown haze of her breasts, a fuzz of pubic hair, blurred by the steamy glass of the shower cubicle.
As she tilted her head back, smoothing her long hair in the jet of water, he remembered the first time he saw her, when they were both waiting to be interviewed at Carlton Gardens in London. There had been a mix-up over times, and he had sat next to her in the reception, suspecting she was there for the same reason as him, but unable to ask. Instead they had spoken with agonising formality about the weather, the architecture, anything but the one subject that was occupying both their minds.
When they had met again, on their first day of training at the Fort in Gosport, there had been a palpable frisson between them. The freedom to talk about whatever they liked was intoxicating. An instructor asked all of them to stand up and introduce themselves in turn. (MI6 was no different from the rest when it came to toe-curling corporate practices.) Leila spoke first in English, and then briefly in fluent Farsi, explaining that her father was an Englishman who worked as an engineer in the oil and natural gas industry. He had met and married her mother, a Bahá’í Iranian and university lecturer, while posted to Tehran. After the Revolution in 1979, they had fled to Britain, along with many other Bahá’ís, hounded out by the Revolutionary Guard, who had no time for unrecognised religious minorities.
Leila was born and brought up in Hertfordshire by her mother, while her father worked in various jobs around the Gulf, sometimes joined by his family. Her earliest childhood memories were of the fifty-degree heat in Doha. When she was eight, they all went to live in Houston for two years. For as long as the Ayatollahs ruled, however, there was never a chance of returning to Tehran, because the Bahá’ís remained enemies of an Islamic state that continued to persecute them.
She told the room, in English, how she had applied to the Service in her last year at Oxford, after the master of her college, a former Chief (Stephen Marchant’s predecessor), had invited her for dinner. She feared the worst, not convinced she wanted to join an organisation that still seemed to recruit over a glass of Oxbridge Amontillado, but was surprised by his lack of pomposity, and by the vibrant mix of the four other young people who had been asked along to the same dinner. Only one of them was white, a demographic that was reflected in the room of aspiring spies that day at the Fort. It reminded her of the time she had visited the BBC’s World Service at Bush House.
‘Naturally suspicious, I went back to my room after dinner and sat up all night reading the website, about how people from ethnically diverse backgrounds would be welcome at MI6. I knew MI5 was recruiting multi-racially, but I thought the Service was the last bastion of the white, middle-class, safari-suit-wearing male. People like Daniel here.’ Laughter filled the room. ‘There was a catch, though, as we all know: you had to have at least one British parent. Luckily, my mother always had a thing about English men.’ More laughter. ‘The vetting takes an age, though, didn’t you find? They interviewed my mother for weeks. It must have been the shisha pipe she kept offering round.’
‘Have you ever been back to Iran?’ the instructor asked. He was the only one not laughing.
‘Back?
