Games Traitors Play. Jon Stock

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ then he was through them, the sound of their anger fading in his ears.

      He liked the bike, but he didn’t want to steal it. Turning the headlight back on, he glanced in the mirror and saw that no one had decided to give chase. A madman had clearly stolen their bike, and he would be dead quicker than they could catch him. When he looked ahead again, he saw the oncoming lorry’s headlights, but there was no time to think. Instinctively, he swerved inside the vehicle and was almost thrown by the draught as it passed him, horn blaring in the darkness.

      He moved back onto the correct side of the road. The petrol station where he had picked up the bike was shut, but he parked it there, flashing the headlight on and off once. A mile back up the road, one of the bikers broke away from the group and started to ride towards him. But Marchant was long gone by the time he had arrived, heading into the heart of Marrakech across rough ground, talking on his mobile to London.

       11

      Marcus Fielding, Chief of MI6, looked out of his fourth-floor window at the commuters walking home across Vauxhall Bridge beneath him. Two of them had stopped, jackets slung over their shoulders, to take in the evening sun as it set over a hot summer London. The Thames was out, the muddy shores busy with sandpipers. On the far bank, below the Morpeth Arms, a woman weighed down with plastic bags was searching through the flotsam and jetsam.

      Beside Legoland, one of the Yellow Duck amphibious vehicles that took tourists around London was parked up on the slipway, waiting while its captain briefed passengers on what to do if it sank. Sometimes, Fielding wished it would. Its proximity to Legoland had long made him uneasy, the guided tours attracting too much publicity, too many fingers pointing up in his direction. Still, Fielding couldn’t deny that he had enjoyed the time he had taken the Duck with Daniel Marchant. They were happier days then, full of hope. Marchant had received a text while they were on board together, and the Morocco plan had been born. But that was over now.

      Fielding was supposed to be going to the opera tonight, but he needed to wait for Marchant to ring in again from Marrakech. The call had come through earlier on Marchant’s mobile, but the line had dropped, the encryption software unhappy with the integrity of the local network. He knew Marchant wouldn’t make contact unless it was urgent, but it all seemed irrelevant now. He wondered how best to break the news about Salim Dhar to Marchant.

      There was a chance, of course, that James Spiro was mistaken. He had been wrong before, most famously about Marchant’s late father, Stephen, Fielding’s predecessor as Chief of MI6. According to Spiro, Stephen and Daniel Marchant were both infidels, worshiping at the altar of a very different god to the rest of the West. Spiro had tried to bring down the entire house of Marchant, and MI6 by implication, until the son had cleared the father’s name.

      But the evidence coming out of North Waziristan suggested that this time Spiro was right. The CIA had finally nailed their man. Two intercepted phone calls, a red-hot handset last used in south India: it was hard to disagree with them. GCHQ was running its own tests on the voice, but the match was perfect, as Spiro had repeatedly told him a few minutes earlier on the video link.

      There were few people Fielding despised more than Spiro. He should have been cleared out with the old guard when the new President was sworn in, hung out to dry with the attorneys who had sanctioned torture, but somehow he had survived, thanks to the President himself, of all people. The White House’s attitude to the Agency had changed overnight after the assassination attempt in Delhi. Briefly a champion of noble values, it was now an admirer of muscle, and in particular of Spiro, who had taken all the credit for protecting his leader. The clenched fist had replaced the hand of friendship. Now, God help them all, there was no stopping him. Spiro’s star was in the ascendant again. Not only were his enhanced methods back in fashion, but the CIA had been given permission to resume playing hardball with its allies.

      Salim Dhar’s elimination was a particularly sweet victory for Spiro. The Agency had never seen Dhar in the same way as the British, struggling to countenance the possibility that he might one day represent an opportunity rather than a threat. For them, Dhar was the problem, not a potential solution, a man who had come close to heaping the ultimate shame on them. From where Fielding stood, it was all deeply frustrating: the President had promised an era of more nuanced attitudes to intelligence, but it appeared to be over before it had begun.

      Fielding turned away from the reinforced window and walked across to the cabinet behind his desk. The collection of books reflected his Arabist tastes, charting his career through the Gulf and North Africa. He envied Marchant his time in Morocco, operating on his own, without the bureaucracy of Legoland. It was how he had worked best when he was Marchant’s age, drifting through the medinas, talking to the traders, listening, watching.

      He took out a volume of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, presented to him years ago by Muammar al-Gadaffi after he had helped to persuade the Libyan leader to abandon his nuclear ambitions. It was Sir Richard Francis Burton’s ten-volume 1885 limited edition, for subscribers only, and he had never enquired too closely about its provenance. Fielding had been obliged to declare the gift to Whitehall, but it was his counter-intelligence colleagues across the Thames who were most interested, subjecting the volumes to weeks of unnecessary analysis.

      The rivalry between the Services had bordered on war in those days, and Fielding had assumed that MI5 would do all it could to embarrass the Vicar, as he knew they called him. Gifts from foreign governments were a favourite cover for listening devices. No one had forgotten the electric samovar presented to the Queen at Balmoral by the Russian Knights aerobatics team, later suspected of being a mantelpiece transmitter, or the infinity bug hidden inside a wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States, given by Russian schoolchildren to the US ambassador to Moscow at the end of the Second World War.

      But the sweepers at Thames House found nothing, and resisted the temptation to insert something of their own. The volumes were reluctantly passed back over the river to Legoland. There was talk of donating them to the British Library, but the Vicar was eventually allowed to keep his unholy gift.

      As he began to read about Shahryar and Scheherazade, there was a knock on the door and Ann Norman, his formidable personal assistant, appeared. She was wearing her usual red tights and intimidating frown, both of which had protected four Chiefs from Whitehall’s meddling mandarins for more than twenty years.

      ‘It’s Daniel Marchant. Shall I put him through?’

      ‘Line three.’

      Fielding went over to his desk and sat down, placing the open book in front of him, next to the comms console that linked him to colleagues around the world as well as to his political masters. The book’s presence made him feel more connected, less detached from Marchant’s world. He let him talk for a while, about a halaka, and his trip out into the High Atlas. Fielding stopped him as he began to talk of helicopters.

      ‘Daniel, I think you should know we’ve just had a call from Langley. NSA picked up a mobile intercept late this afternoon, from Salim Dhar in North Waziristan. One hundred per cent voice match.’

      Marchant fell quiet, the hum of a Marrakech medina suddenly audible in the background.

      ‘Have they killed him?’

      ‘They think so. A UAV was in the area, eliminated the target within fifteen minutes of the intercept. I’m sorry.’

      ‘Without even checking? Without talking to us?’

      ‘The Americans aren’t really in the mood right now for cooperating on Dhar. You know that.’

      ‘But СКАЧАТЬ