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

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СКАЧАТЬ over and picked up the receiver. It was Anne Norman.

      ‘Marcus?’ She had never called him that before.

      ‘Anne?’ He had never used her first name.

      ‘There’s someone who’s very keen to speak to you. From India.’

      ‘Who is it?’

      ‘It’s Daniel. Daniel Marchant.’

      The boat left after breakfast, just as Shankar had promised. Marchant met its owner outside the café and walked with him down to the water’s edge, where his son was stowing a tangle of blue fishing nets in the bow. The owner was jovial, with a proud potbelly, and was soon joking with Marchant about his misfortune the previous evening.

      ‘You were floating in the water like a great big jellyfish!’ he said, slapping him on the back.

      Their laughter stopped, though, when Marchant nodded towards two local fishermen smoking bidis, who had stepped out from the shade of the coconut trees at the back of the beach and were walking across the sand towards them. He knew at once from their detached manner that they had come to take him to Dhar. They looked on silently as the owner and his son struggled to launch the boat, helped by Marchant. Once it was afloat, the two men waded out into the shallow water and climbed aboard, ignoring the son’s offers of assistance. The owner threw Marchant a nervous glance, started up the engine and steered the boat out towards the headland.

      To his relief, Marchant couldn’t see the frigate on the horizon any more. He looked inland at the rocky coastline and the hills beyond, one of which was topped with a communications mast covered in satellite dishes and aerials. In the past, he would have been depressed by its presence in such a rugged, timeless setting, but he knew they were everywhere in modern India, and today the sight of its distinctive red and white stripes reassured him.

      After twenty minutes, Marchant spotted a small beach where some huts, made of laterite bricks cut from the local Konkan soil, had been built into the hillside. He thought he could make out one or two Westerners on the beach, but the owner kept going down the coast. If it wasn’t for the two silent men sitting behind him on the boat, Marchant would have enjoyed the spray and the sunshine of the open sea, but their stony presence was a constant reminder of what lay ahead.

      An hour later, the owner finally nudged the tiller away from him and steered the boat towards the shore. The son jumped out first, and dragged the boat ashore. Marchant stepped down into the shallow blue water and walked up onto the beach, followed by the two fishermen. It was in a small cove, barely fifty yards across, and sheltered on both sides by steep cliffs. At the top of the beach was a tatty shack made from wood and woven palm leaves, and a few hammocks hung in the dappled shade of some coconut trees. A sign said ‘Shanti Beach Café’, painted in the colours of the Indian flag. There were no Westerners around, no sign that anyone was staying here. As Marchant took in the view, the two men pushed him forward, signalling for him to walk on.

      He followed them to the shack, and they led him in through an open doorway. Inside was a small table, and a man standing with his back to them, talking on a mobile phone. He turned briefly to look at Marchant, a cigarette in his hand, and continued to chat quietly in what sounded like Kannada, the local language. He was better dressed than the fishermen, new jeans, printed shirt, sunglasses perched on the top of his head. For a moment his boyish good looks reminded Marchant of Shah Rukh Khan. Marchant glanced at the faded postcards that had been stuck to the central wooden post holding up the roof: London, Sydney, Cape Town.

      It was a reasonable effort at cover, Marchant thought.

      ‘Welcome to the Shanti Beach Café,’ the man said, putting away his phone. He looked Marchant up and down. ‘Just our sort of guest.’

      ‘I’ve come to see brother Salim,’ Marchant said, tensing his stomach muscles. A part of him expected to be punched, bound and hooded at any moment.

      ‘He’s been waiting for you. It’s a long walk from here. I don’t know who you are, where you’ve come from, but these two will kill you if you try anything. Salim’s orders.’

      Four hours later, Marchant reached the crest of the hill and looked back down over the tops of the dense vegetation towards Shanti Beach. It had been a hot, hard climb, and he was out of breath, dripping with sweat. The two fishermen pushed him on. ‘Chalo,’ the taller one urged. Neither had said anything else to him for the whole journey, ignoring his attempts to speak Hindi.

      Marchant walked on from the crest, enjoying the first stretch of downhill since they had set off from the beach. He wondered whether he would ever leave this beautiful place alive. A pair of Brahmani kites soared high above him, enjoying the thermals. Why had Dhar agreed to see him? And would he have any answers about his father? The Namaste Café must have been used by Uncle K as a contact point when he was trying to run Dhar. Word would have reached him that a white man had asked for ‘brother Salim’.

      The sound of a gunshot made Marchant drop to the ground and look around desperately for cover. For the first time since they had left the Namasté Café, the taller fisherman, who had kept walking as if he had heard nothing, smiled at Marchant, lying in the red dust. It was an awful smile, teeth stained with blood-coloured betelnut juice. Another shot rang out. Marchant listened carefully to it this time, calculating that it was from a high-powered rifle, fired from as close as twenty yards away. He had excelled in his fire-arms training at the Fort. Looking along the path ahead, he saw a figure approaching, a .315 sporting rifle slung over one shoulder. He knew at once that it was Salim Dhar.

      42

      Leila listened as Monk Johnson finished running through the itinerary of his new president’s forty-eight-hour visit to Delhi. There were more than two hundred people in the hall, about as many as it could hold. They were almost all Secret Service personnel, who had been in India for the past month as part of the Presidential Advance Team, trying in vain to impose their fixed manual of security demands on a very fluid country. There were a few CIA officers present, too, including Spiro, who was sitting on the stage next to Johnson, sweating in the heat. The US Embassy air conditioning was struggling to keep a lid on the temperature.

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