Dirty Little Secret. Jon Stock
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of need-to-know, its culture of compartmentalised knowledge. Even as deputy, he wouldn’t expect to be informed of every operational detail. But there was a new-found confidence in his manner, a lack of deference that made Fielding wonder if the Foreign Secretary had already offered him his job.
‘We knew the Russians were shielding Dhar,’ Fielding said as his Special Branch driver, separated from them by a soundproof glass divide, turned right onto the Embankment. ‘The only way to get to him – and to stop whatever atrocity he was planning – was to persuade the Russians that Marchant wanted to defect. You’ll understand why I could tell no one at the time. Nikolai Primakov, Moscow’s cultural attaché in London, had agreed to work for us again. He had access to Dhar, and acted as our middle man.’
‘Just like old times, then.’
‘Quite. Primakov likes working with Marchants.’
For the first time, Fielding detected a trace of bitterness in his deputy, the Hull accent less suppressed. Marchant’s father, Stephen, had recruited Primakov in Delhi in the 1980s. It had been a game-changing signing in the Cold War, as good as Oleg Gordievsky, and had fast-tracked Stephen to the top of MI6. Denton, then a young officer in the SovBloc Controllerate, was the contact man, clearing the dead-letter drops and trying – in vain – to keep Primakov sweet. The two men had not warmed to each other.
‘As far as I can recall, we never got round to telling the Americans about Primakov,’ Denton said.
‘No, and I would ask you, in your new role, that it should stay that way.’
The last thing Fielding needed was some CIA goon going over the Primakov files.
‘That could be a problem. As part of our efforts to rebuild trust with Washington, we’ve agreed to an independent investigation into the events at Fairford and Cheltenham. It’s no secret that the Americans want to throw the book at Marchant and Lakshmi Meena.’
‘Then it’s up to us to protect them, isn’t it?’
Fielding had expected a witch hunt. Top-down, no stone left unturned, the usual Whitehall hysteria: craven civil servants running around doing the Americans’ bidding. It was why he had sent Marchant and Lakshmi to Fort Monckton. They would be safe there, at least for the time being.
‘What the Americans are struggling to understand – and I see their point – is why Marchant didn’t eliminate Dhar.’ Fielding thought Denton looked increasingly at home in the Range Rover, sitting back, at ease, elbows out, his sinewy body expanding with new authority. In the past, he had never relaxed when Fielding had given him a lift, perching on the buttermilk leather like a watchful lizard. ‘Once he’d won his trust by defecting,’ Denton continued, ‘there must have been opportunities to kill him. In Russia. On board the plane.’
Fielding could never tell him the real reason why Marchant hadn’t killed Dhar. He could never tell anyone. He tried to change the focus.
‘I think we’re forgetting who we’re dealing with here,’ he said. ‘When Marchant reached Russia, Dhar forced him to shoot Primakov, a family friend, for being a Western spy. The bigger question is why Dhar didn’t kill Marchant. He could have done so at any time. Marchant was exceptionally brave.’
‘So why didn’t Dhar kill him?’
Fielding turned away, looking down the Thames as they drove over Battersea Bridge. It was almost 3 a.m. He always felt depressed when he saw Albert Bridge at night, lit up like a gaudy old whore in pearls. ‘Perhaps he was curious. They’re half-brothers, after all. And Dhar only met his father once, when he was in jail in India. Maybe Marchant reminded him of his father, I don’t know.’
‘The Americans want answers, Marcus, not cod bloody psychology.’
‘I don’t remember you always being so ready to oblige them.’
Fielding was struggling to remain civil as the Range Rover drew up outside a nondescript terrace house on Battersea Bridge Road. Denton’s anti-US views had been well known in the Service, causing Fielding enough problems in the past. It appeared that he had put them to one side with the promise of promotion.
‘They also want to find Dhar. Marchant was the last person to see him alive. I assume we can circulate his Fort debriefing?’
‘It will be on desks in the morning,’ Fielding said.
Denton got out of the car and leant in through the open door.
‘Thanks.’ He tapped the roof, as if he’d just chosen the vehicle in a showroom. ‘For the lift.’
‘There’s one thing I can tell you,’ Fielding said. ‘Daniel Marchant’s one of the good guys. Trust me. Let’s not throw him to the lions. Not yet.’
11
Marchant lay staring at the vibrating phone. It was still dark outside, and for a moment he didn’t know where he was. He didn’t even know if he was awake. His dreams had been about dead sailors and Dhar. The phone display said that ‘Dad – Home’ was calling. He hadn’t been called from that number since his father had died seventeen months before.
The call was from the family home at Tarlton, outside Cirencester in the Cotswolds. Nobody lived there any more. The house was closed up, and would remain that way until Marchant decided what to do with the place. As the only surviving member of the family, he had inherited his father’s flat in Pimlico, where he now lived, and the large family house in Tarlton. He could never envisage living there, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to sell it.
Marchant slid out of bed, checking that Lakshmi was asleep. Her eyes were closed, her breathing uneven. He would call a doctor in the morning, get her wrist checked out. Careful not to wake her, he stepped into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. He was glad the phone was on vibrate, as he could tell himself it was the phone and not his hand that was shaking. Who would call from his home? And at 4 a.m.? Once a month, his father’s cleaning lady dropped by to check on the place, but she would only ring if there was a problem. Perhaps there had been a fire?
‘Who is this?’ Marchant said quietly.
‘Your pilot.’
12
Omar Rashid wasn’t comfortable with promotion. For a start, he had too many people in his SIGINT unit who were twice his age. It was just plain awkward asking a fortysomething analyst at the National Security Agency to work a bit harder. It was like a freshman telling a senior how to hit on girls. But the new job had its perks. Instead of trawling through the real-time night traffic in AfPak, hoping to nail some careless jihadi in an internet café in Karachi, he could sit back in his small office and catch a bit of girl-on-girl action on RedTube while others did the hard work.
He blamed Salim Dhar, whose voice he had picked up in North Waziristan a few weeks earlier. Only it hadn’t been his voice. Dhar had duped them, strapped a tape recorder to his cell phone and planted it with six kidnapped US Marines. None of them had stood a chance when the Reaper deployed its Hellfire missiles twenty minutes later. His boss had taken the drop, leaving the unit without a leader.
In all the confusion and recriminations that followed, someone seemed to overlook the fact that it was Rashid who had made the original intercept, and he was given the job. Promotion by incompetence, that’s what he called it. What fiasco would it take for him to reach the top of the NSA?
‘Sir, we have a priority level five,’ his PA said, putting her head around the door. He switched browser windows, confident she had seen nothing, and checked out her rear as he followed her into the main room. One day he would be brave enough to ask her out for a drink, maybe the Havana Club in Baltimore.
‘What’ve we got?’ Rashid said, an awful sense of déjà vu washing over him. His unit normally sat at separate terminals. Now, though, most of them were gathered around one analyst’s screen. Like everyone