winch man and his colleague.
‘Remove your helmets,’ Dhar said, glancing up towards the cockpit. He had intended to shoot them both, but something made him change his mind. He hoped it wasn’t the vodka. The two men exchanged nervous glances and looked back at Dhar. Did they doubt him? Dhar felt another wave of panic, and raised the gun to their heads.
‘Remove your helmets!’ he barked.
It would be so much easier if they were dead, he thought. Without hesitating, the men unfastened their helmets and dropped them to the deck. Dhar motioned at the open door and they edged towards it. Had they realised who he was?
He watched as the winch man stood with his legs bent, head down, like a nervous child on a high diving board. The helicopter had arced out across the sea after picking up Dhar, and was heading towards the shore again. They would be over land in a few minutes. The winch man held onto the side, bent his legs further, and this time he was gone, dropping away in the darkness with a fading scream. The second man glanced at Dhar, at his gun, then he jumped too.
5
Lakshmi stood in the window, looking out across the Solent. It was well past midnight, and Marchant was still on his phone, pacing about at the far end of the beach, close to where a line of perimeter fenceposts waded into the water like determined bathers. A solitary yacht was heading into Portsmouth under engine, sails down, navigation lights on. Her body was beginning to ache, a cramplike pain tightening her limbs. She told herself it was her wrist, but she knew it wasn’t.
Her imminent departure from the CIA was timely. She and Marchant would have more chance of making a go of things if one of them was in the real world, where people were straightforward and honest, and used the regular mail rather than brush passes to communicate. A year earlier, they had circled each other like wild animals in Rabat, where she had been sent to keep an eye on him. Everyone had thought Marchant was crazy to believe that Dhar would show up in Morocco, but the renegade MI6 officer had been proved right.
She still didn’t fully understand why he had ended up in a Russian fighter jet with Dhar, but she believed him when he said a far worse disaster had been averted. And she had assisted him, in her own small way. She was glad she had done that, even if it had triggered something she hoped was behind her.
She went over to the bed and wrapped herself in a blanket, trying to stop the shiver that had set in. She thought again about the Soho restaurant where she had helped the Russians lift Marchant in a firefight. One of them, dead eyes beneath a black balaclava, had raised a machine gun to her head. She would have been killed if it hadn’t been for Marchant, who had screamed at him not to shoot. A stray bullet had already shattered her wrist.
She closed her eyes, trying to put out of her mind the paramedic who had turned up within minutes of the shooting. He had just been doing his job, a routine medical injection for trauma as she had slumped on the floor of the restaurant in agony.
The pain had dissipated within seconds, replaced by a surge of liquid pleasure that had spread out from her body like nectar. Time had begun to slip, too, taking her back three years to when she had been a medical student at Georgetown University. Her life had moved on since then.
She stared at the old wall of the Fort, tracing the lumps and cracks in its whitewashed surface. It would be only a matter of hours before she would be taken from here and flown back to Langley to be dismissed. Spiro would know that she could have done more to stop the Russians, that she had disobeyed orders. Her father would be disappointed, her mother relieved. They had always wanted her to be a doctor, but her father had recently begun to take pride in her work – not that he could boast about it to his Indian friends in Reston. ‘Government business’ was all he was allowed to say.
Wiping her nose, she noticed a voicemail message on her phone. It was Spiro, and he wasn’t ringing to fire her. After the message had finished, she got up from the bed, walked over to the deep-set window and called Spiro back. The blanket was still around her shoulders.
‘Do I have a choice?’ she asked, watching Marchant on the beach below, trying to ignore a rising nausea.
‘You’re an American, of course you have a choice. This isn’t India, for Christ’s sake.’
‘In that case, it’s a no.’
‘Listen, if it’s not you, we’ll get someone else. It’s as simple as that. I wasn’t sure how you’d feel about another woman getting up close and personal with Marchant.’
‘What makes you think he’ll drop his guard so easily?’
‘He’s done it before. You never knew Leila, did you?’
Not personally, she thought, but she felt as if she did know her. Marchant had talked often about Leila, the MI6 officer who had betrayed him.
‘And by all accounts, it’s not just his guard that he’s dropped with you.’
Lakshmi ignored the innuendo. ‘He’s told me nothing. He’s a professional.’
‘All the more reason we need someone like you. Can you believe it? The Brits are defending him. Fielding thinks Marchant’s a frickin’ hero. Try telling that to the head of the USAF. It’s a total clusterfuck. If Marchant’s helped Dhar once, he’ll help him again. It’s in the blood. Only this time we need to stop him. I’m just sorry you got hurt.’
Lakshmi wasn’t falling for Spiro’s sudden concern, not for one minute. She had taken up Fielding’s offer to stay in the sanctuary of the Fort in order to keep away from him.
‘I’m not interested.’
There was a pause, as if Spiro was idly looking around for something, a cigarette perhaps. Her reaction didn’t seem to surprise him.
‘Have you spoken to your folks recently?’
She didn’t like his change of tone: small talk concealing something more sinister. Her arm began to shake. ‘Give them a call some time. They’d appreciate it.’
Before Lakshmi could say anything, Spiro had hung up.
6
‘Primakov wrote me a letter,’ Marchant began, sitting on the rocks. He would return to Lakshmi in a minute. The wind coming in off the Solent was cold, and he was exhausted.
‘Go on.’ Marcus Fielding sounded tired too, more tired than Marchant could ever remember him sounding. Marchant felt guilty about his news.
‘He says that there’s a Russian asset high up in MI6. The letter was written after Hugo died. Primakov thinks the mole framed Hugo to protect himself.’
‘And does he give a name?’ Fielding asked.
Marchant paused. ‘Your deputy.’
There was a long silence. Marchant wondered if the news surprised Fielding, or if it confirmed a previous suspicion. Fielding was inscrutable face to face, even more so at the end of a phone line.
‘You know Primakov never liked Denton,’ Fielding said eventually. ‘There was history between them.’
‘I didn’t
