won’t listen to me.’
‘Are you definitely leaving the Agency?’
‘I’ve got no choice.’
‘Then there’s no harm telling you who the traitor is.’
This time Lakshmi returned his smile and sat down on the rocks next to him, close, her injured wrist slung playfully over his knees. ‘Let me guess, now. Marcus Fielding?’
They laughed together, the tension gone for a moment, a sudden brightness in her tired eyes that gave him hope: for them, the lives they had chosen. The thought of Fielding, Chief of MI6, being anything other than loyal was risible, they both knew that. Known as the Vicar, Fielding was the one constant in Marchant’s life. Lakshmi liked him, too. She had met him a couple of times, once at the Chelsea Physic Garden, and had warmed to his professorial ways. He had even visited her in hospital, brought her honey mangoes from Pakistan and Ecuadorian roses.
‘It’s true,’ Marchant said. ‘He’s defected to the Royal Horticultural Society – to head up their fight against moles.’
Lakshmi smiled again and fell silent, running her front teeth over her lower lip. They both knew better than to fall under Fielding’s avuncular spell. A few weeks earlier in Madurai he had turned Lakshmi and Marchant against each other for his own cold purposes, and he would gladly do so again if circumstances required it.
‘Spiro once told me that he thought you were a traitor,’ she said, her good hand sliding up Marchant’s leg, working the thigh muscles.
‘Sounds like Spiro – the guy thinks he’s James Jesus Angleton. Spiro also suspected my father for years, particularly when he was tipped for the top. I don’t think the CIA ever really got over Kim Philby.’
‘Don’t tell me who it is, Dan.’ Lakshmi was serious now, almost whispering, her sweet breath warm on his neck, her hand squeezing the top of his thigh. ‘You’ve got to go on, continue the fight. No one can stop Salim Dhar except you.’
But Marchant was no longer listening. His phone was vibrating, and there was only one person who rang him at this time of night: Fielding. He stood up to take the call, instinctively turning away from Lakshmi as if to shake off their intimacy, worried he had been caught.
‘It’s Paul here,’ the voice said. ‘Paul Myers.’
‘Paul? How are you doing?’ Marchant asked, relieved, walking down the beach. He turned and waved a hand of reassurance at Lakshmi, but he could already feel the shutters coming down, protocol kicking in. Myers had been injured when Dhar had bombed GCHQ’s headquarters in Cheltenham after downing the US jet. The bomb was meant to have been dirty, but Marchant had talked Dhar out of it.
‘Bit of a headache. Ears still ringing. But I’m back at my desk. Well, working from home. Spent the afternoon at A&E. The doc told me to stay away from GCHQ for a while.’
‘It could have been worse, trust me.’ Marchant felt bad that he hadn’t been to visit Myers, but Fielding had insisted on him staying at the Fort in the aftermath of the attack.
‘So I gather. I suppose I should be thanking you.’
‘Any time. What’s up?’
‘I couldn’t help listening in on the crash zone. I should have been resting, but you know how it is.’
Marchant knew exactly how it was. Myers lived and breathed for chatter, drawing it down from the ether with the dedication of a drug addict. Intercepts, voice-recognition, black-bag cryptanalysis, wiretaps, asymmetric key algorithms: he was a privacy kleptomaniac. The more measures people took to ensure their communications were private, the more Myers wanted to listen in. If Myers hadn’t been working for GCHQ, he would still have found a way to eavesdrop.
‘I picked up something just now that I thought you should know about,’ he continued.
‘About the crash?’ Marchant asked, glancing back at Lakshmi, who was heading up the steps to their room. Once again she had got under his skin, come too close when he should have been focusing elsewhere.
‘Maybe.’
According to Fielding, a trawler had been found with its autopilot on, drifting west in the Bristol Channel with three dead Russians on board. There had been no sign of Dhar, which troubled Marchant. He also remembered counting four crew when he had been in the sea with Dhar.
‘A Search and Rescue Sea King from RAF Chivenor was called out a few minutes ago. A man rang in from the coast, near Quantoxhead. Said he’d fallen down a cliff on the way home from the pub at Kilve. I was listening in on the call. He sounded in a lot of pain. And drunk.’
‘It’s the weekend, isn’t it?’ Marchant knew Myers was one of the best analysts at GCHQ, but this time he wondered if he had been on the beer too. Marchant didn’t blame him. He had been lucky to survive the bomb blast.
‘He also sounded Russian.’
3
Marcus Fielding was surprised to see the lean figure of Ian Denton already in position at the long coffin-shaped table, talking quietly with the Foreign Secretary. Less surprising was the sight of Harriet Armstrong, his opposite number at MI5, chatting with the Prime Minister at the far end of the airless conference room. She had always been good at the politics. As he watched them, silhouetted against a flickering mosaic of flat TV screens, the thought crossed Fielding’s mind that this might be his last COBRA meeting.
A part of him flinched at the idea. He wasn’t ready to step back from the fray. There was still so much to do, battles to be won, not just in the war on terror but in Whitehall. He knew he should be more like Armstrong and Denton, sweet-talking the politicians, but he had always preferred dealing with field agents rather than Foreign Secretaries. He was a Chief who liked to stay south of the river.
If this was to be his final COBRA, he wouldn’t miss the dimly lit Cabinet Office room with its low ceiling and brown curtains along one wall. It was past 1 a.m., but time was meaningless here. Night didn’t follow day. Instead, the room was trapped in a penumbral stasis. The air conditioning was too warm, the coffee cold. As for the meetings, they had become increasingly ineffective, a forum for political posturing rather than swift operational responses. That was why he liked to meet privately beforehand with the heads of MI5, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre and the Defence Intelligence Staff, away from ambitious ministers with their own agendas. Only this time, they had quietly demurred.
Fielding took his seat, nodding at the Director of GCHQ. It wasn’t reciprocated. Dhar’s bomb might not have been dirty, but it had still knocked some sugar off ‘the doughnut’, as GCHQ’s Cheltenham premises were known. Fielding felt a knot begin to tighten in his lower lumbar. Tonight wasn’t the moment for lying supine on the floor, as he was prone to do when his back played up. He was prepared for the meeting to be tense. For many of those gathered around the table, MI6 was in the dock. He also knew that he could never reveal the one piece of intelligence that might save his career.
‘Welcome, everyone,’ the Prime Minister began, looking down the room. His jacket was off, his tone businesslike. No small talk. ‘Marcus, I think it’s best if we start with you?’ In other words, Fielding thought, you got us into this Christawful mess, you can get us out of it.
‘The
