to see it with my own eyes.’
‘Me too.’
‘You know I’ve worked hard over the last few years on the relationship. We’re meant to have a presidential visit next year, when it’s set to be upgraded from “special” to “essential”. That might not sound like a big deal, but it is in my world – the culmination of a lot of hard work by my staff in London. I’m not prepared to see it all going to waste over one lousy jet.’
‘Quite an expensive one, I gather.’
‘Production’s already halted on it. The F-35 will be the game-changer. And hey, we spent twenty billion last year on aircon alone in Afghanistan.’
On paper, Fielding should have despised Munroe. The Ambassador was widely regarded in Whitehall as a hawk, and he had been a surprise appointment by the incoming President in 2008. Like Spiro, he had fought in the first Gulf War and believed that military intervention was the only way forward in Iran. He was also a fitness fanatic, running 3.30 marathons around the world, whereas Fielding limited himself to a daily swim in the basement pool in Legoland. If all that wasn’t enough, he preferred Bruce Springsteen to J.S. Bach.
But despite their differences, Fielding was more than happy to step into his car. It was Munroe’s behaviour in the chaotic aftermath of the London Marathon that had changed his opinion of him. He had gone away, studied the evidence, and concluded that it was Leila, not Marchant, who had tried to kill him. Marchant had saved his life. And it seemed he was prepared to be equally open-minded about Marchant’s role in the air show. Unfortunately, his was a lone American voice.
‘There are people in Langley who want you out of office, Marcus, you know that.’
‘They’ve almost got their wish.’
‘You’re not going down without a fight, though?’
Fielding paused, looking out of the window at a slowly waking London. The street cleaners were out already, sweeping up the excesses of the night. He was too tired to fight.
‘The latest CX to cross my desk points to a Russian mole high up in MI6.’
‘When wasn’t there?’ Fielding knew what was coming. The Americans had long suspected him of treachery. He had been too close to Stephen Marchant, his predecessor.
‘My source says it wasn’t Hugo Prentice.’ Fielding flinched at the name of his old friend. No one had wanted to believe Prentice had been a traitor, least of all Fielding. ‘Apparently someone framed him to protect themself.’
‘And Langley thinks it was me?’ Fielding asked, wondering for the first time if there might be more to Primakov’s allegations about Denton than he had thought. Nothing would make him happier than clearing Hugo Prentice’s name, even if it were posthumously.
‘They want to believe it was you, but there’s no evidence.’
‘There’s a surprise.’
‘Find the mole and your position will be safe. Nothing scares us Yanks more than British intelligence run by Moscow.’
‘And does your source know who this mole might be?’ Fielding thought again about Denton. Why was he reluctant to point the finger at his deputy? Because it was he who had appointed him? Fielding had brought Denton on over the years, encouraged him to apply for jobs, happy to see the cosy old mould of MI6 being broken by an intelligent grammar-school boy from Hull.
‘I’m working on him. First, I wanted to check that you had the stomach for a fight. And that you’re close to finding Salim Dhar. That would kinda help the relationship.’
‘We’re close.’
29
Marchant walked into the high-ceilinged hall, stood still and listened. Somewhere far above him, he could hear the sound of a muffled voice. It wasn’t Dhar’s. He had heard it before, a long time ago, but he couldn’t place it at first. Then he remembered. What was Dhar doing?
He looked around and saw the old phone on a corner table. Above it, numbers had been written in ink by his father on a piece of paper stuck to the wall. He went over and saw his own mobile number next to the word ‘Daniel’. His father had never called him ‘Dan’, despite all his friends using the name. There were no work colleagues on the list, unless his father had given them codenames, which wouldn’t surprise him. He noticed, though, that the ink was green – a private joke.
Slowly, he moved up the stairs, thinking back to those times when, after a night out as a teenager, he had tried to reach his room without waking his father. He had always heard him. Marchant liked to think the reason was his father’s training, but he knew now that it was his own unsteady legs. Sebbie had died when he was eight, in a car crash in Delhi. They’d never got to share the teenage years, the parties, the dope, the girls. Sometimes Marchant wondered if that was why he had consumed so much alcohol in his life: he was always drinking for two.
He reached the landing, and listened again. To his right: the guest room, the bathroom, his father’s bedroom. He preferred to call it that, even though he had shared it for a while with his mother. She had played only a small part in his childhood, retreating into herself with depression, and was dead by the time he was seventeen. His father’s brief affair in Delhi with Dhar’s mother can’t have helped. Or perhaps it was a reaction to his wife’s illness. He had never found out.
His and Sebbie’s bedrooms were on the top floor, where the voice was coming from. He knew what it was now, even though it was still muffled. It was the first record his father had ever bought him: Sinbad the Sailor and Other Stories. Dhar must be playing it on the old wooden-cased HMV player in his room. The door was shut, but he could see that Sebbie’s was open. It hadn’t been a conscious intention to turn it into a shrine, but he and his father had decided to leave it as it was when he had died.
Marchant crept up the last flight of stairs, stopping to look at a photo of his father, Sebbie and himself. They were standing in front of the Taj Mahal. As he passed the leaded window, he thought he saw a flash of light over by the chapel, on the far side of the garden. It was a tiny Norman chapel of rest, where the hamlet gathered for services on special occasions. His father’s funeral had been at the bigger church in Rodmarton, down the road, but he was buried here.
He waited to see if the light appeared again, but there was nothing. Dawn had broken but it was still difficult to see clearly. He carried on up the stairs, thinking of Sebbie and how they used to race down them, bouncing on their bottoms. At the door he paused, listening to the story of Sinbad, and glanced behind him. He could see Sebbie’s bed, a toy tiger propped up on the pillow. Taking a deep breath, he turned and opened his own bedroom door.
Dhar was sitting on a pile of brightly coloured Indian cushions, his back to the wall. He had an unusually shaped bottle in one hand, a gun in the other. An empty bottle of vodka was lying on the carpet beside him.
‘You took your time,’ he said, pointing the gun at him.
30
Denton was touching 100mph in the outside lane of a deserted M4 when he took the call from Spiro on the hands-free. He had been weighing up when to ring the Americans, but Spiro had made the decision for him.
‘I’ve
