The Daniel Marchant Spy Trilogy: Dead Spy Running, Games Traitors Play, Dirty Little Secret. Jon Stock

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СКАЧАТЬ you trust Leila?’

      ‘You obviously did. I’ve read the reports. Copper-bottomed. Only problem was, your vetters never figured her mother had moved back to Iran. Of course Leila should have told you, but she feared for her job. Spiro found out, used it as leverage when he recruited her.’

      Carter didn’t want to fall out with Fielding. That wasn’t why he had come. He’d been keen to meet a man who enjoyed something approaching the status of a legend at Langley. Fielding was a very different kind of spy from Stephen Marchant. A fellow believer in espionage, he had the intellectual arrogance shared by all the MI6 officers Carter had ever met, but he had unquestionable form, too: Fielding had helped them to talk Muammar Gaddafi out of his nuclear ambitions, drawing on his enviable knowledge of the Arab world to defuse a delicate situation. If only their previous President had deployed the same tactics with Saddam Hussein.

      ‘Does our profession ever surprise you, Alan?’ Fielding asked. He had stood up from the table, and was now looking out of the buttressed bay window, his back to Carter. A couple of staff were taking a cigarette break on the open terrace below, the Union flag billowing above them.

      ‘Every day.’

      ‘It often appalled Stephen. He despised the people he turned, the people who made his reputation. Loyalty was something he valued higher than anything, which made traitors the lowest of the low, even if they were betraying the enemy.’

      Carter stood up to join Fielding at the window. Outside, in the dark London night, the lights of a passing party boat sparkled on the Thames. It was nearly midnight. Legoland, like Langley, never slept. Up on the roof, the array of aerials and satellite dishes Carter had seen from Vauxhall Bridge linked the building with every time zone in the world.

      ‘Shall I tell you why I think Stephen took that flight to Kerala?’ Carter asked.

      ‘Please.’

      ‘He went out there because I think in Salim Dhar he saw what we’re all after: a senior AQ operative who might just be turned. Sure, we could have brought him in, knocked him about a bit in a remote detention site, found out what he did or didn’t know on the waterboard. That’s what Spiro wanted. But Stephen Marchant had other ideas.’

      ‘To be honest, I think he just wanted a name–the name of the mole in MI6 who had been making his life a misery.’

      ‘Come on, Marcus, he wanted much more, you know that. He wanted his own man high up in AQ.’

      Carter had read all the files on Stephen Marchant, and knew that one of his biggest regrets was that MI6 had never infiltrated Al Qaeda on his watch. He was a Chief, after all, who had built a brilliant career on penetrating Dzerzhinsky Square, in the days when intelligence officers didn’t dunk the enemy, they blackmailed them with sordid photographs taken in seedy motel rooms. Far more civilised.

      ‘It became an obsession for him, didn’t it?’ Carter continued. ‘Someone on the inside. Particularly after 9/11. But we were going the other way. Round them all up rather than recruit them. It’s why the Company grew so suspicious of MI6. We thought you’d fallen asleep at the switch. What were you all doing, for God’s sake?’

      ‘Finding the intelligence to justify your wars,’ Fielding said.

      ‘But you weren’t beating up the bullies. Americans are a very simple people at heart. Somebody hurts us, we want to hurt them back. Publicly. It’s not subtle. And we sometimes hurt back the wrong people. It also puts those of us who believe in more covert methods out of a job.’

      ‘Salim Dhar would never work for the Agency.’

      ‘I realise that.’

      ‘So why do you think you might be able to turn him?’

      ‘I don’t. But he might respond to a British approach.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘You tell me. Stephen Marchant knew something.’ Fielding walked away from the window, one hand on the small of his back.

      ‘Do you mind if I lie down?’ he asked.

      ‘Go ahead,’ Carter said. He had heard about the Vicar’s back problems. ‘Lower lumbar?’

      ‘All over.’

      Carter watched as the Chief of MI6 calmly lay down on the floor of his dining-room suite, seemingly unaware of the figure he cut. Or perhaps he just didn’t care.

      ‘Do go on,’ Fielding said from the floor, but the wind had been taken from Carter’s sails. Had Fielding known what he was about to say?

      ‘Salim Dhar’s father worked in the American Embassy compound in the early 1980s,’ Carter continued, not sure where to address his comments. Looking down didn’t feel appropriate. ‘After he’d been sacked by your high commission. We’ve run some checks. It seems that someone was conduiting him a little bit of extra pocket money every month.’

      Carter became aware of some activity outside the dining room, where his lady in red was working late.

      ‘The money came via one State Bank of Travancore in South India,’ Carter continued. ‘At least, it was meant to look that way. Seems like the rupees might have started life as greenbacks in the Cayman Islands. Or maybe even sterling in London.’ He paused. ‘I’ve got only one question, Marcus. Why were the Brits paying a salary to Dhar’s father?’

      ‘The payments stopped in 2001,’ Fielding said calmly, his eyes closed.

      ‘Twenty-one years after he’d quit working for your high commission.’

      It should have been a bombshell, enough to make the British hand over Daniel Marchant, but the Vicar couldn’t have seemed less troubled.

      ‘We only discovered the payments ourselves a few days ago.’

      ‘Let’s hope it’s just you and me who know, then.’ Carter was suddenly annoyed that Fielding had managed to defuse his story by the simple ploy of lying on the floor. It had the effect of belittling everything he said. ‘I hate to think what Lord Bancroft would make of one of the world’s most wanted terrorists drawing down an MI6 salary.’

      ‘While you were funding a generation of mujahideen in Afghanistan.’

      ‘That was Spiro too, as it happens.’

      ‘We really don’t know where Daniel Marchant is,’ Fielding said. Outside the dining room, voices were getting more agitated.

      ‘We do.’

      ‘He needs to be left to find Salim Dhar. And with the greatest respect for your people’s tradecraft, he’s not going to do that with a ten-strong surveillance team on his case.’

      ‘I’m offering you a deal, Marcus. We keep quiet about the Cayman trust fund and let Marchant find Dhar, but when he does, we share the debrief.’

      ‘You’re assuming that Dhar will talk to him?’

      ‘Aren’t you?’

      Carter knew that he was. MI6 must be staking everything on it. The discovery of the payments СКАЧАТЬ