Dirty Little Secret. Jon Stock

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      2

      Daniel Marchant sat on the rock, throwing stones into Southampton Water. It was past midnight, and he still didn’t have a strategy. Lakshmi Meena was asleep in the room behind him. To his left and right, a high green steel fence, topped with barbed wire, marked the perimeter of Fort Monckton, MI6’s training centre at the tip of the Gosport peninsula.

      Marchant was on a small private beach in front of the Fort’s accommodation block. Two old cannon and a row of dark inlets in the sea-facing wall were a reminder of the Fort’s role in the Napoleonic Wars, while an MoD sign saying NO LANDING ON THE FORESHORE hinted at its current purpose. The accommodation was usually occupied by MI6’s most recent recruits, fresh-faced graduates on the Intelligence Officers’ New Entry Course, but the latest batch had left for a two-week stint in Helmand station, and the rooms were empty.

      He glanced up at the row of white sash windows, checking that there wasn’t a light on in his room. It was a warm night, and he had tried to sleep with the window open, but sleep had never come. How could it, after what he’d just been through? A few hours earlier he had nearly died in a plane with Salim Dhar, and he knew he wouldn’t be thanked for it. Never mind that he had thwarted one of the most audacious terrorist attacks ever mounted against mainland Britain.

      And now this. He had already woken Lakshmi once to talk to her about the letter in his hands, but he hadn’t been able to share its contents. Perhaps it was training. A genuine trust had built up between them over the past few weeks, a rapport that was edging towards something stronger, but she was still a CIA officer, although he suspected not for much longer. She was too honest, too nuanced for Langley. And she had become too closely associated with him.

      But he knew it was more than training. As long as the contents of the letter remained known only to him, he could discount them, imagine they weren’t real. He read them again, holding the paper up in the moonlight.

       … Moscow Centre has an MI6 asset who helped the SVR expose and eliminate a network of agents in Poland. His codename was Argo, a nostalgic name in the SVR, as it was once used for Ernest Hemingway.

       The Polish thought that Argo was Hugo Prentice, a very good friend of your father, and I believe a close confidant of yours. He was shot dead on the orders of the AW, or at least of one of its agents. Hugo Prentice was not Argo.

       That mistake was a tragedy, destroying his reputation and damaging your father’s. The real Argo is Ian Denton, deputy Chief of MI6.

      An hour earlier, while Lakshmi was sleeping, he had tried to call his Chief, Marcus Fielding, but the line was busy. He never liked leaving messages. He would call again when he had gathered his thoughts. Not for the first time, Marchant was struck by the solitude of his trade. He threw another stone towards the sea, harder this time. It missed the water and ricocheted between rocks like a maverick pinball.

      Ian Denton had been good to him over the years, shared his distrust of America. And he was different from the smooth set at MI6, an outsider: a quiet northerner from Hull. But his awkward stabs at camaraderie at the terrace bar, the whispered words of encouragement in the corridor – they had all been a pack of lies.

      ‘Are you OK down there?’ It was Lakshmi, who had appeared at the bottom of the stone steps down to the beach, wearing an oversized dressing gown. Her left wrist was in plaster. Marchant knew as soon as he saw her that this time he would reveal what was in the letter. He understood that look in her eyes, the weariness of isolation. The CIA was about to throw the book at her for failing to bring him in. She had crossed the divide, reached out to a fellow traveller. Fielding had promised Marchant that his own job was safe, but the Americans were after Lakshmi’s head, too. And they would get what they wanted, sooner or later. They always did.

      He held Lakshmi’s gaze and then looked at the stone in his hands, rubbing it between finger and thumb. If only he could break free, leave the distrust behind.

      ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said.

      ‘You were going to share something earlier,’ Lakshmi said, walking over to him. Her feet were bare except for ankle chains, which tinkled like tiny bells as she crossed the stony beach. The sound brought back childhood memories of India, Marchant’s ayah approaching across the marble floor with sweet jalebi from Chandni Chowk.

      ‘Maybe if you told me, you might get some rest,’ she continued, standing beside him now, tightening the cord on her dressing gown as she shivered in a gust of wind. She rested her hand on Marchant’s neck and began to work the tight muscles.

      Marchant breathed in deeply. There was no point being enigmatic. If he was going to tell her, he would be blunt about it. ‘The Russians have got an asset high up in MI6,’ he began, raising a hand up to hers. ‘Very high.’ He needed to feel her warmth. Or was it to stop her slipping him thirty pieces of silver? It was the first time he had told tales out of school.

      ‘I thought he’d been killed.’ Lakshmi’s tone sounded casual, which annoyed Marchant, even though he knew it was unintentional. She was referring to Hugo Prentice, his close friend, fellow field officer and mentor in MI6. Prentice had been accused by the Poles of working for Moscow, and was gunned down in front of Marchant on the streets of London. The Americans had been only too ready to believe that he was a traitor. For Fielding and Marchant, it had been harder to dismiss him so quickly.

      ‘It wasn’t Hugo. None of us wanted to believe it was him, but we did. We forced ourselves, recalibrated our pasts. Now it turns out it wasn’t him after all.’

      ‘And that makes you mad.’

      ‘It makes me feel cheap, sordid. Hugo was a family friend. Close to my father. He looked out for me.’

      ‘Perhaps now you can remember him as he was, without the guilt.’

      Marchant let his hand drop, and picked up another stone. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me who the traitor is?’

      ‘I can’t do that, Dan,’ she said, ignoring his flippant tone. ‘You’ve got a career to return to. You’re a hero, remember? The man who talked Salim Dhar out of killing thousands.’

      Marchant laughed. Sometimes Americans saw things in such black and white: heroes and СКАЧАТЬ