Czytaj książkę: «The Daniel Marchant Spy Trilogy: Dead Spy Running, Games Traitors Play, Dirty Little Secret»

Dead Spy Running

Jon Stock
Dead Spy Running

Contents

1

A bright Blackheath morning and it was already hot, too…

2

It took ten minutes for Marchant to find Pradeep again.

3

Paul Myers was unpicking encrypted emails and eating his fourth…

4

Daniel Marchant looked out across the shallow valley and watched…

5

Paul Myers drew heavily on his third pint of London…

6

Marchant watched from his bedroom in the safe house as…

7

Marchant knew that someone was in his room as he…

8

It was a long-held custom that the first half of…

9

Later that day, Fielding accepted Chadwick’s offer of a sharpener…

10

Leila headed back to London that night, leaving Marchant to…

11

The gang of Year Five boys in the corner of…

12

The undisputed waterboarding world champion was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Marchant…

13

Nine hundred miles west of Poland, Marcus Fielding took a…

14

Leila turned the key in the front door and slipped…

15

For a moment, Marchant wasn’t sure if the explosion was…

16

After a bone-breaking, hundred-mile drive through the Polish countryside, Marchant…

17

Marchant knew that the best legend for a spy was…

18

Sir David Chadwick had spent a lifetime brokering compromises in…

19

Hassan was the only asset Leila had ever slept with.

20

Spiro didn’t like the CIA sub-station in Warsaw. He didn’t…

21

Marchant lay on the bed, watching Monika as she undressed…

22

Leila had met Jago, a tousle-haired six-year-old, once before, but…

23

Spiro looked again at the grainy image of a two-tonne,…

24

Six miles south-west of the shopping mall, Daniel Marchant sat…

25

Prentice sent the pre-written text while his hand was still…

26

Daniel Marchant pushed open the blue door, not sure what…

27

‘It was a precaution, Marcus, nothing more,’ Sir David Chadwick…

28

After twenty-four hours in India, Daniel Marchant concluded that he…

29

It was Alan Carter’s first visit to Legoland, but after…

30

Leila took it as a very public expression of gratitude…

31

Marchant felt the weight of a body lying on top…

32

‘Can we assume that Marchant was at the club?’ Fielding…

33

In another life, a different time, Marcus Fielding and William…

34

Paul Myers had been drinking heavily all evening in the…

35

Marchant heard the police before they reached his carriage. He…

36

Fielding had ordered his driver to turn round and head…

37

Marchant stood in the shade of a stall selling strings…

38

Fielding’s office clock said 7.30 a.m.

39

Marchant listened to the rustle of the necklaces slung loosely…

40

Paul Myers hadn’t been hit so hard since he was…

41

Fielding lifted the flute to his lips and began to…

42

Leila listened as Monk Johnson finished running through the itinerary…

43

There was something about the network of cave-like huts on…

44

Fielding put down the phone and looked around the room,…

45

‘Sons turn out in the strangest ways,’ Carter said. ‘My…

46

William Straker sat back in the DCIA’s office in Langley,…

47

Marchant heard the mobile phone begin to ring moments before…

48

Marchant lifted his head towards the cell door and listened…

49

‘The Prime Minister was adamant that you shouldn’t be killed,’…

50

Dhar watched the rickshaw driver’s legs seesaw through the Chandni…

51

Straker took the call in one of the small private…

52

Marchant couldn’t decide if it was a good or bad…

53

Salim Dhar brought the US President into focus with the…

54

‘As far as we’re concerned, she took the bullet that…

55

Marchant stood outside Legoland, on the Thames path, looking across…

Acknowledgements

Copyright

1

A bright Blackheath morning and it was already hot, too hot for twenty-six miles. Daniel Marchant scanned the crowd and wondered again why he was about to run a marathon. Thousands of people were stretching in the early sunshine, massaging limbs, sipping at water. It was like the stillness before battle. A woman in a baseball cap strapped an iPod to her arm; the man beside him tied and retied his laces. Another runner poured water over his hair and shook it like a dog, droplets catching the light. Whatever it takes, Marchant thought. In his case, too much Scotch the night before and not enough training.

‘One last try,’ he said, turning to Leila. She was sitting on the grass, leaning back on her hands, staring straight ahead. Why was she taking it so seriously, he thought, as he strolled over to join a long queue for the Portaloos. If the going got tough, they could walk, enjoy the day out. Wasn’t that how she had sold it to him? But he knew that would never happen: they would crawl before they walked. It was a stubbornness they shared, a bloody-mindedness he could sometimes do without.

He inched forward in the queue. The sweet smell of Deep Heat hung heavy in the spring air, reminding Marchant of school changing rooms, the similar imminence of pain. He always felt like this before they went out running in Battersea Park, only for his resentment to subside when the endorphins kicked in; that and the sound of her rhythmic breathing, her easy footfall. He still wondered why he was about to run twenty-six miles, though, and at such short notice. Their longest training run had been the weekend before, eighteen miles down the towpath to Greenwich and back. But how could he have said no when he barely realised she was asking him? That was her job, after all: persuading people to do what they shouldn’t, to say what was meant to remain unsaid.

After queuing for five minutes, Marchant changed his mind and returned to Leila, who had stripped down to her running kit. From the day they had first met, he had promised himself not to fall in love with her, but she had never made it easy. Today was no exception. Her limbs were long, but she touched her toes with ease, shorts tightening against toned muscles. He looked away at the hot-air balloons behind her, swaying in the gentle breeze, desperate to rise up into the brilliant blue sky. In front of them lorries were parked up like a military convoy, piled high with runners’ plastic bags, ready to be transported across London to the finish line.

Marchant took both their bags and handed them in to a marshal. He tried to imagine how he would feel when they were reunited with them again, three, more like four, hours later. Despite his protests, he knew that it was the right thing to be doing. The training, however inadequate, had kept him sane during the last few weeks, helping him to focus on what must be done.

‘Too many people,’ Leila said, pushing hair out of her eyes as Marchant rejoined her. He noticed she was holding her mobile phone. He followed her gaze over towards the main start, where an army of 35,000 runners was now massing. Afterwards, he thought, the dead and the wounded would be laid out in St James’s, wrapped in shiny foil.

‘It’ll be fine, a stroll in the park,’ Marchant said. ‘Just like you promised.’ He put a hand on her shoulder as he stretched one calf muscle, searching her large eyes. It was a hint of the exotic that had first attracted him, the dark, lustrous hair, her olive skin. ‘You’re not nervous, are you?’ he asked, trying to sound bullish. There was suddenly something distracted about her, an unsettling distance. She was usually so upfront, eye to eye.

‘Not about the running,’ she said.

‘What, then?’

‘Cheltenham picked up some chatter last night,’ she said quietly, looking around.

‘About the marathon?’ Marchant kept his hand on her shoulder, face close to hers, stretching the other calf. Leila nodded. ‘Now you tell me.’

‘And you know I shouldn’t,’ she said, pushing him away. ‘Paul’s just called, heard I was taking part.’

‘Paul? What’s he monitoring these days? Runners’ World chatrooms?’

‘Come on, Daniel. You know I can’t.’

Marchant had been out of MI6 for two months now, suspended on his case officer’s full pay. Leila knew how angry he still felt about everything that had happened: his father’s death, the rumours that wouldn’t go away. She knew the toll it was taking on his health, too, the late, solitary vigils at the pub. Marchant’s youthful features were tiring around the eyes, a greyness starting to fleck his dirt-blond hair. He was only twenty-nine, but sometimes, in a certain light, Leila looked at him and thought she saw his father.

‘Remember not to go too fast at the beginning,’ she said, changing tack as they jogged over to join the crowded start. Leila still worked for MI6, although she often wondered why. The Service was slowly killing them both.

‘That shouldn’t be a problem.’ Marchant surveyed the sea of people around him, more carefully now. ‘Remind me why we’re doing this?’

‘Because you love running and because you love me.’ Leila brushed her lips against his cheek as a helicopter arced across the South London sky. ‘More than you should.’

She had never kissed him like that before. Earlier she had woken him very differently, pulling him up through the languid hours of dawn with a passion that had almost frightened him.

‘Shouldn’t we be saving our energy for the marathon?’ he had whispered afterwards, the rising sun filtering through the blinds of her Canary Wharf apartment. His eyes ached at the thought of all that daylight.

‘My mother always told me to live each day as if it was the last.’

‘My dad used to say something similar, only in Latin.’

She lay with her head on his chest, eyes open, stroking his stomach. A police siren faded somewhere near the Thames.

‘I’m so sorry about your father.’

‘Me too.’

Later he had found her in the kitchen, stirring a saucepan of porridge for them both as she looked out of the window towards the O₂ Dome. There was an empty bottle of whisky on the granite-top island, next to a couple of stacked dishes from the previous night and the remains of a big bowl of pasta. He pedalled the chrome bin and quietly slid the bottle in, his eyes on Leila. She was wearing knickers and an old London Marathon T-shirt with a slogan on the back: ‘Never again…until the next time’. The whisky had been a mistake, he realised that now. The next time he would realise earlier. The pain behind his eyes was spreading.

‘What’s this?’ he asked, picking up a single sheet of paper from the island.

She turned, and then looked back out of the window. ‘You’ve never really been religious, have you?’ she asked.

‘Hey, I was a Sufi once, in my year off in India.’

‘Who wasn’t?’

‘Is this a Bahá’í thing?’

‘It’s not a thing, it’s a prayer. My mother used to make me say it every morning, before I went to school.’

Leila wasn’t particularly religious either, but she had grown interested in her mother’s Bahá’í faith in recent months. Marchant’s own knowledge of it was patchy, based on an internal MI5 briefing that had crossed his desk about Dr David Kelly, the weapons inspector and Bahá’í member who had been found dead in a wood in Oxfordshire.

He looked at the sheet again, and read a passage of the prayer out aloud: ‘“Armed with the power of thy name, nothing can ever hurt me, and with thy love in my heart, all the world’s afflictions can in no wise alarm me.” Is it reassuring?’

‘She said it would protect us.’

Marchant thought he could do with a little protection now, as he looked up at the blur of helicopter blades above Blackheath. He suddenly felt claustrophobic, pressed down upon from above as well as from all sides. There was no room for personal space any more, normal rules of behaviour no longer applied. A runner next to him fumbled at his shorts with an empty plastic drinking bottle. Another hung his head, clearing one nostril, then the other. Somebody else yelled with joy (or was it fear?). The crowd responded, calling back like restless animals. They were all part of the larger herd now, surging forward as one towards the start line.

Marchant instinctively flexed his elbows as people pushed in, trampling on his old running shoes. For a few seconds he lost Leila, then he spotted her again, five yards ahead, turning back to look for him. Despite himself, he loved her more than ever in that fleeting moment, her beauty framed by a thousand strangers. He moved up alongside, squeezed her hand. She smiled back, but her look was far away. The call from Paul Myers had unsettled her.

Above them two helicopters now circled, the drone of their blades more menacing than ever. There was a new sound, too, top notes cutting through the background noise. Marchant couldn’t work out what it was at first, but then he realised. Runners everywhere were synchronising and calibrating, making final adjustments to their bleeping stopwatches and heart monitors. He glanced instinctively at the hands of his own silent watch. In the same instant, the starter’s klaxon hooted, oddly hesitant, an uncertain call to arms. The only thing Marchant could do was run.

It was fifty minutes into the marathon that Marchant first noticed him, tucked behind a small knot of runners twenty yards ahead. The man–Asian, mid-thirties, fragile frame, heavy glasses–was moving at a similar pace to them, but looked uncomfortable, stumbling on the cobbles as he rounded the bow of the Cutty Sark. He was sweating profusely, too, even for this heat; but it was the belt around his waist that had caught Marchant’s well-trained eye.

Leila’s talk of Cheltenham had put Marchant on edge, reawakening old skills. The world around him was suddenly full of threats again, of brush passes and dead drops, and the belt troubled him. It consisted of a number of pouches, each one containing an isotonic energy drink. The drinks were in soft, bulging cartons, silver with small orange screwcaps. He’d seen other runners loading up with drinks belts at the start, but none with so many pouches.

It was just a precaution on a hot day, Marchant told himself, lengthening his stride. Running had always come naturally to him, a benefit of being tall. He caught up with the group as they left Greenwich for Deptford, heading down Creek Road. The crowds were thinner here, but still noisy, heckling runners with the names they had written on their vests. ‘Where’s Grommit?’ someone shouted, as a fun-runner dressed as Wallace ran past. ‘Go Dan!’ two young women screamed. For a moment, Marchant thought they must be supporting someone else, but then he remembered Leila had insisted on writing ‘Dan’ on the front of his own running vest. He turned his head to take another look but they were already lost in the crowd, cheering on other strangers.

‘What are you doing?’ Leila called out from behind Marchant. ‘We were doing fine.’

‘Give me a minute,’ he said. The group of runners ahead of the man also bothered him. Two were heavily set, struggling in the heat and bearing all the unsubtle hallmarks–bulging vests, GI One haircuts–of the American Secret Service. The third man was lean and sinewy, a born runner. He looked familiar.

As Marchant drew near, he knew at once that something was not right. He could taste it in his mouth, like corked wine. His father had always taught him to trust his instinct, whether it was a bad feeling on first meeting a potential agent or pulling out of a rendezvous for no other reason than that it felt wrong. It wasn’t tradecraft; it was more visceral than that.

Marchant positioned himself as close as he could behind the man, trying to get a better look at the belt, but the running field was still tightly packed. He counted six drinks pouches. They were eight miles into a hot race, but none of the pouches had been opened.

Then he noticed what looked like an oversized watch on the man’s wrist. Leila had something similar for long runs. It was a basic GPS receiver, relaying her position, speed and when she should speed up or slow down. (He remembered how she had once said it beeped ruthlessly at her when her pace dropped below a pre-programmed speed.) It wasn’t as sophisticated as the military units he and other case officers had been issued with in Africa, but it wasn’t a toy either.

‘What’s happening?’ Leila said, appearing on his shoulder. ‘We were going so well.’

Marchant nodded at the man in front and slowed up a little, falling away from the group.

‘See the guy with the belt,’ he said, as they both slowed to their former pace. Marchant was short of breath as he continued. ‘I don’t think those cartons are for drinking.’

‘Why not?’ Leila asked.

‘And that man up there, the tall one all in white. Isn’t he the US Ambassador?’

‘Turner Munroe? Dan, what’s going on?’

Marchant knew what Leila was thinking. He was deluded, still drunk from the night before, seeing things where there was nothing to see. He’d watched it himself in other case officers who had been called in from the field and tethered to a desk in Legoland (the name employees had given to MI6’s headquarters in Vauxhall), drinking themselves to death to alleviate the boredom of captivity. In his case, though, he didn’t even have a desk. That was the hardest part: knowing there might never be a way back. And now here he was, hard on the heels of a runner in the London Marathon, convinced that the man was shortly to kill himself and everyone around him, including the US Ambassador to Britain. He’d run agents who were less paranoid.

‘What exactly did Cheltenham pick up last night?’ Marchant asked, breathlessly.

‘Nothing like this.’ He guessed Leila was already making her own calculations, weighing up risks. ‘How can you be so sure about the belt?’

‘By asking him,’ Marchant replied.

‘Don’t be stupid, Dan.’

‘For a drink.’

‘Dan…’

Marchant ignored her and moved towards the runner again, pulling up alongside. The man was clearly in trouble. Sweat was pouring off him as his head bobbed like a donkey’s.

‘Hot one,’ Marchant said. The man glanced at him nervously and looked ahead again, wiping his thick eyebrows with the back of his hand. ‘Did you see that last drinks station?’ Marchant continued. ‘Crazy. Shouldn’t have to queue for water, not on a day like this.’ Marchant smiled at the man, nodding towards his belt. Inside, his stomach turned. He was right. ‘Couldn’t have one of yours, could I?’

‘Who are you?’ the man said aggressively. His accent was thick, from India: another cell from the subcontinent. Marchant knew immediately there would be consequences, for him, for his father, but they would have to wait.

‘No problem. Any idea who that is?’ Marchant gestured at the US Ambassador. ‘Brought his own fan club with him.’

‘Please, stay away,’ the man said.

The two of them ran on in silence. Marchant’s mind was racing. Post 7/7, it was bulky clothing that had attracted attention. Here was a man wearing explosives on the outside, and it was so bloody bold no one had noticed. The pouches must be wired together inside the belt, he thought. But if the man was a running bomb, why hadn’t he blown himself up by now? Why was he warning him to stay away? And if his target was the Ambassador, he could easily have bunched in close to him and his babysitters and taken them all out before now.

He remembered the last suicide bomber he had seen, in Mogadishu. They had been talking in the marketplace, making nervous progress. Then a phone rang. Twice. Marchant had run for his life. The man’s head was found on the corrugated-iron roof of a nearby café. The bomber hadn’t wanted to die, Marchant was sure of that. Afterwards, in the British Embassy bar, as his hand shook the Johnnie Walker out of his glass, he kept telling himself, over and over, that the bomber had not wanted to die. It had made it easier to understand. The handler knew it too, which is why he had detonated the bomb himself.

This time, he had to keep his man talking, establish the method of detonation, hope the mobile networks would be too busy for a phone call from a third party. Like the bomber in Mogadishu, this man was also not a volunteer. He had been forced to wear the belt. It was happening more and more these days: genuine suicide bombers were becoming hard to find. Trust your gut feeling, his father had said.

‘That watch you’ve got there,’ Marchant said. ‘GPS?’

‘Sat-Runner,’ the man replied. Better, Marchant thought, much better; a gear and gadgets man.

‘Useful piece of kit.’

The man nodded. Then the GPS beeped. Both of them looked at it. ‘Please, you must go,’ the man said to Marchant. They weren’t the words of a suicide bomber hoping to take as many people with him as he could.

‘Why’s it beeping?’ Marchant asked, recalculating the risk to himself, to others. His lungs tightened, making words difficult. ‘Does it do that when you slow down, when your pace drops?’ he asked, trying to remember how Leila had explained it, cursing himself for not showing more interest at the time.

The man nodded. He had been coerced into this, Marchant repeated to himself, which meant that he could be talked out of it.

‘Then what?’ Marchant glanced down at the belt again.

‘Can you help me?’ They looked at each other for a moment, gauging the fear in each other’s eyes.

‘I can try. What’s your name?’

‘Pradeep.’

‘Keep it going, Pradeep. You’re doing fine. Just fine. Don’t go anywhere. I’m coming straight back.’

Pradeep glanced over his shoulder, stumbling again, as Marchant dropped back down the field to search for Leila, but he couldn’t see her in the crowd. How much faster than her had he been running? He slowed up some more, looking at everyone who overtook him. He shouldn’t have left her, he knew that now. There were too many people, too much noise.

Above him the helicopters circled low again, drowning out the jazz band playing on the roof of a pub. Children by the roadside cheered, holding out bags of sweets. Stout women from St John’s Ambulance were offering outstretched hands of Vaseline. And then he spotted her, over on the far side of the road, hidden behind a small group of club runners. He cut across the flow of people to join her, almost tripping on the heels of another runner. His legs were tiring, more than they should have been at this stage of the race. He was desperate for more water, too.

‘Leila, we’ve got a problem,’ he said, short of breath. ‘A big problem.’

‘Where have you been? I couldn’t see you anywhere.’

In between swigs from her drinking bottle, he told her about the GPS, and how he thought it was linked in some way to the pouches around Pradeep’s waist, which he was now convinced contained explosives–enough to kill dozens of people if he was in a tightly bunched group. He knew how he sounded: a has-been desperate to prove himself in the field.

‘My guess is, if he drops below a certain pace, the isotonics will blow,’ he added.

‘Daniel…’

Leila’s face told him she was struggling to comprehend the situation, trying to decide whether his reading of it was deluded or credible. She was momentarily tearful.

‘You’ve got to leave this to others,’ she pleaded. ‘You must. You’re no longer…I need to make a call,’ she said, removing her mobile phone from a pocket at the back of her running shorts.

‘You won’t get a signal,’ Marchant said, glancing at the phone. With its stubby, inch-long aerial, the unit looked very familiar.

She held the phone in front of her, tripping and grabbing at Marchant’s arm for support.

‘Who are you ringing? MI5? The networks will be congested,’ he said. ‘Too many people.’

She looked at him again, her face suddenly professional, drained of all emotion, and then she dialled.

‘It’s a TETRA handset,’ she said coldly. The secure encrypted digital network used by the emergency and security services was one of the perks Marchant missed. ‘They’re not answering. Daniel, please. This is not your responsibility, not mine. If what you say is true, it’s one for MI5, Anti-Terrorism Command. We must leave it to them.’

Marchant looked at the road ahead, and reckoned he knew where the runner was, give or take a few hundred people. ‘I’ve got him talking. He doesn’t want to go through with it.’

Leila hesitated, weighing up the options. Had she conceded he might have a role to play? She looked at him again, swallowing hard.

‘OK. If you take my phone, I’ll drop out, find a phonebox and tell Five about the situation. Once the networks have been knocked out, I’ll give you a call on TETRA.’

Marchant was thinking fast now, like he used to in the field. The head of station in Nairobi had once predicted that a glittering career stretched ahead of him; he might even follow his father to the top if he quit the whisky and womanising. Next time they met, Marchant was suspended and burying his father.

‘Alert MI5. I’ll stay with him,’ he said, trying not to think about the funeral in the Cotswold frost, how they had treated his father. ‘My guess is we can’t pull him off the course, even if he keeps running. Deviating from waypoints could trigger the belt too.’

‘Daniel, you shouldn’t be doing this.’

‘I know.’ He also knew there weren’t many alternatives. If they both stopped, it would be almost impossible to find the bomber again. ‘I could tell the Americans. The Ambassador’s got company, and I think they’re wired.’ Leila glanced at him for a moment. They were both reluctant to involve the Secret Service, who didn’t always play by the same rules as everyone else. ‘The Ambassador is the target here?’ he asked.

‘He must be.’

Marchant had missed the adrenalin, but it was draining his energy, too. Lactic acid was building in his legs, weighing them down like lead.

‘Here,’ Leila said, holding out the phone. Their eyes met.

‘No blues and twos, nothing to alert him, OK?’ he said, taking the handset. He was increasingly short of breath. ‘Someone else might have their finger on the button. It’s happened to me once before.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Keep your distance from him.’

‘Who gave you this?’ he asked, looking at the handset again. It was a Motorola MTH800. ‘Just like my old one.’

‘Services. Mine was knackered. If you don’t hear from me in fifteen minutes, try calling the office.’ She paused. ‘Speed-dial 1. They’ll find me.’

Marchant glanced back at Leila as she pulled up on the side of the road, feigning a hamstring injury. She looked up at him, and for a moment he wondered if she might never make the call, leaving him to run on in his imaginary world of bombers and belts.

He knew she had tried to walk away from what they had together–God, how they had both tried–but each time one of them had relented. It wasn’t like him at all. For the first time in his life, a woman had got under his skin. Now they might be at the heart of a major security incident, and his involvement wouldn’t do her career any favours. Suspicion still hung over the Marchant family like a poisoned fog.

She gave a small wave and disappeared in the sea of runners.

2

It took ten minutes for Marchant to find Pradeep again. His head was bowed, his feet scuffing the road, running like a drunken tramp. The American Ambassador was in the group immediately ahead of him, still with company. He was moving strongly, chest out, no signs of tiredness. Worryingly, the field seemed to be tightly bunched around Pradeep, not as spread out as it was further back. And then Marchant saw the reason why: up ahead, just beyond the Ambassador, was an official pacemaker, running with a sign above him: eight minutes a mile. Stick with him and the marathon was yours for three hours thirty minutes. Marchant looked at Pradeep again, and feared that he didn’t have long, maybe ten minutes at most.

‘Pradeep? It’s me. You’re doing great.’

‘It’s too late.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m so tired, too weak.’

‘Do you want to stop, take a rest?’ Marchant said, bluffing. One final check, just to reassure himself about the GPS.

Pradeep’s glance at his belt gave him his answer. He was right.

‘How about we keep running, but turn off the course, up here, say, right at the pub?’

Pradeep shook his head.

‘Is the marathon route programmed into your GPS, your Sat-Runner?’ Marchant asked. That was something else his father had told him, shortly after he’d joined the Service: never ask a question you don’t know the answer to.

Pradeep didn’t respond. He was really struggling now, continually losing his footing. Marchant looked at his frame, lean and sinewy, and thought that in other circumstances he would be a natural marathon runner. No doubt that was why he had been chosen. But the mental pressure on Pradeep was sapping every ounce of his energy. Marchant could feel them slowing moments before the GPS beeped.

‘Come on, Pradeep, we’re going to get through this,’ Marchant said, trying to pick up the pace again. They had to keep running until Leila rang. She would have an answer.

‘Two beeps and we’re gone,’ Pradeep replied, suddenly grinning, almost laughing. Marchant realised Pradeep was losing control. ‘You don’t understand, my friend,’ he continued. ‘The American. I can’t leave him.’

‘The Ambassador?’

Marchant looked up at Turner Munroe, who was five yards in front of him. The Ambassador checked his watch, and for the first time Marchant noticed that its bulky design was identical to Pradeep’s.

‘Eight minutes a mile. He always runs the same,’ said Pradeep, suddenly sounding like a trainer admiring one of his charges.

‘Three hours thirty,’ Marchant said. ‘He’s running a 3.30.’

‘One hour forty.’

‘What?’

‘He reaches Tower Bridge after one hour forty minutes.’

‘And?’

Pradeep smiled again, tears welling now. They had been running for one hour thirty minutes. Marchant desperately wanted Leila to ring, more than when they had first tried to split up, more than after their first date at the Fort, MI6’s training centre in Gosport. He looked at the phone in his hand and saw that the commercial networks had been knocked out. Should he try ringing her? The office would be surprised to hear his voice, but she would have told them and they would patch him through to wherever she was. He lifted his head, looked around, and for a moment he thought he saw his father running ahead of him, trundling along at a surprising speed for his age.

He blinked, wiping the sweat away from his eyes, and looked again at the handset. He had to stay on top of this: Pradeep was wearing a belt of explosives linked in some way to the GPS receiver on his wrist. He seemed to be an unwilling participant, rather than a suicide bomber. If he slowed down, the explosives would detonate: ditto if he took any deviation from the marathon course, the waypoints for which had been entered into his GPS. And for some reason it seemed that Pradeep had to stay close to the Ambassador, possibly because of a similar GPS receiver on his wrist.

Suddenly Leila’s TETRA phone was vibrating in his hand. A couple of runners ahead of him glanced around at the sound of the loud ringtone.

‘Leila?’ he said, hearing the panic rise in his own voice. He had to remain calm.

‘Did you try ringing me?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘Don’t, OK?’ she insisted. ‘Please. Just don’t. There’s some sort of problem with TETRA. Are you still with him?’

‘Yes.’ Marchant glanced across at Pradeep, managed a smile, then pulled back a few yards, out of earshot.

‘Listen very carefully,’ Leila was saying. ‘I’m on the grid at Thames House. MI5 picked up someone in Greenwich and have been sweating him all morning. You’ve got to get the GPS off the Ambassador’s wrist.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s just like you said. The Asian guy’s GPS receiver is linked to his belt using Bluetooth. Only we think the belt can be triggered by Munroe’s GPS too.’

‘If Munroe drops off the pace as well, you mean,’ Marchant said.

‘Yes.’ Marchant thought of Pradeep’s words, how he said he couldn’t leave the Ambassador. ‘And maybe if the link between the two GPSs is broken, if they’re separated,’ Leila added. ‘Technical’s working on the permutations now.’

Marchant could hear other people in the background. He imagined the scene at Thames House, MI5’s headquarters, as news of the situation spread and increasingly senior people arrived, duty officer giving way to Harriet Armstrong, MI5’s Director General, who had helped to hound his father out of office. Leila would be consulted less and less, particularly once his own involvement had become clear. It was a nightmare for MI5: having to rely on someone from MI6, and a discredited case officer, too. It would confirm their worst suspicions about their rivals south of the river. And then the US Secret Service would try to take over, reigniting old turf wars.

‘What about the Americans?’ Marchant asked. ‘Are they running the show now?’

‘Not yet. They wanted to lift Munroe and for us to escort the bomber down a side road, away from the crowds, but the risk of collaterals is too high. We don’t know how quickly the belt might be triggered by removing Munroe.’

‘So I get to wear the Ambassador’s GPS, then what?’

Leila paused. ‘You both keep running while Cheltenham tries to intercept the satellite signals.’

‘Tries?’

‘They’re keen to pull you out, Daniel, put someone else in.’

‘I bet they are.’

‘But it’s going to take time, and we haven’t got any.’

‘Pradeep’s knackered.’

‘I know. We’ve got a feed from the BBC helicopter above you now.’

Marchant had forgotten about it, hovering high above him. So Armstrong could see them, he thought. He could never forgive what she and others in MI5 had done to his father. Stephen Marchant was a man who had lived and breathed for the Service, only to be accused, at the pinnacle of his career, of the very thing he had always despised in others. Some people died of a broken heart; his father had died of shame, within weeks of being forced to retire as Chief. There was nothing more important to his father than loyalty. Even the best assets he had recruited, the ones who made his reputation in Delhi, Moscow, Washington, Paris, had filled him with a deep loathing for mankind and its willingness to betray.

‘Don’t Munroe’s babysitters have a radio link?’ Marchant asked. Things might become easier for him and Leila after this; the family’s reputation might be restored; he might get his old job back.

‘They’re linked to each other,’ Leila replied, ‘not to the outside world.’

‘That figures. Is there a code for this yet? Something to reassure the Ambassador I’m not from Albania when I relieve him of his watch.’

‘Tell them it’s a Defcon Five. Try “Operation Kratos” if that doesn’t work. Once you’ve got the GPS, persuade Munroe to leave the course as soon as possible. He must be out of there before Tower Bridge.’

‘What is it with the bridge?’ Marchant asked, remembering Pradeep’s words.

‘It’s where the biggest crowds are, apart from the finish. We’re trying to clear the area now. Bomb disposal are on the way. We’ve got blues assembling in all the back streets, from you to Tower Bridge.’

The line suddenly dropped. There was not much more to say. Marchant moved up to join Pradeep again.

He had some jelly beans on board for the final few miles, but he decided to pull the bag out from his pocket now and offer them to Pradeep, who visibly rallied at the sight of them.

‘Beats the gels,’ Marchant said, taking a couple himself after Pradeep had grabbed a desperate handful. ‘I’m going to talk to the Ambassador, then I’m coming back,’ Marchant said. ‘It’s going to be OK. I promise. Sab theek ho jayega, Pradeep. Everything’s going to be fine.’

Marchant hoped his rusty Hindi had reassured Pradeep as he moved up towards the Ambassador. He knew a bit about Turner Munroe, who had arrived in London six months ago. He was a hawk, best known for his outspoken views on Iran, where he favoured regime change by military intervention. And he had fought in the first Gulf War, serving with distinction. Marchant now knew that he was also a fitness fanatic, who liked to run with an iPod.

Experience had taught Marchant to stick to protocol when dealing with the Americans (it reduced the chances of being shot), so he approached the Ambassador’s outriders first. When he explained that they were in the midst of a critical, Defcon Five incident, they asked him for some ID, as Marchant knew they would. They finally agreed to let him approach the Ambassador when he name-checked one of his old CIA contacts who was still based in London, but only after they had briefed their boss.

‘How you doing?’ Munroe asked, taking an earpiece out of his right ear. Marchant swore he was listening to Bruce Springsteen. ‘Tell me you’re kidding about the Defcon Five.’

‘No, sir, I’m afraid it’s true,’ Marchant said, knowing Munroe would appreciate the ‘sir’.

‘You realise I’ve never run a 3.30 before? Boston: 3.35.10, Chicago: 3.32.20. Right now I’m heading for 3.29.30, and you’re telling me to quit?’

‘You might never be able to run again if you hang around here,’ Marchant said.

‘Is that so?’ Munroe said sarcastically. Marchant glanced at one of the sweating Security Service officers, who was nodding towards the side of the road.

‘Sir, we need to break off,’ the officer said, moving alongside the Ambassador. At the same time, his colleague closed in on the far side.

‘But first I need your Sat-Runner,’ Marchant said.

‘Am I being mugged here?’ Munroe said. ‘That’s what it feels like. Mugged on the London Marathon. Can you believe it?’

‘I really need the GPS,’ Marchant said, as the Ambassador’s babysitters began to ease him across the road. ‘And please don’t slow down.’

Munroe looked at him as he undid the strap and handed the receiver over. ‘3.29.30. A PB was on the cards here, never mind the heat. Somebody’s going to pay for this.’

He watched as Munroe was almost lifted to the kerb, where he stopped, reluctantly. Then Marchant strapped the GPS to his own wrist. Pradeep was now ahead of them, glancing anxiously over his shoulder.

‘We’re in this together now,’ Marchant said, coming up on Pradeep’s shoulder and showing him his wrist.

3

Paul Myers was unpicking encrypted emails and eating his fourth Snickers of the day when he took Leila’s call. He’d always liked her, ever since she had attended his course on jihadi chatrooms and had asked the first question, filling the awkward silence that always followed his introductory talks. All MI6’s new recruits were invited up to GCHQ in Cheltenham for a week, to give them a break from training at the Fort, and, Myers thought, to show them where the real work was done.

Paul had liked Leila’s boyfriend, too, though only begrudgingly at first. On the surface, Daniel Marchant had seemed to be the archetypal obnoxious MI6 man: Oxbridge, well travelled, smooth-talking, handsome and good at games–everything Myers wasn’t. But then he read his file and learnt about the dark stuff–the benders, the brawls, the twin brother who was killed when he was eight in a car crash in Delhi, the mother who never recovered, dying a depressive–and began to warm to him. Everyone in life was struggling to keep it together, he thought. According to Leila, Marchant had never got over losing his brother, and had been drinking himself slowly to death until he stumbled out of journalism and into the Service. It must have been like coming home, what with his old man running the show.

They might have been friends sooner if Paul hadn’t somehow convinced himself that Leila carried a torch for him, despite the obvious chemistry between her and Marchant. He knew it was insane, an attractive case officer like her falling for a short-sighted, overweight desk analyst, and common sense soon prevailed, but those early feelings for her had stayed with him. Now she was on the phone, breathless and posing one of the most interesting questions he had been asked in months: could he screw up the Americans’ GPS network for a few minutes?

Given the history of the navigation system, and in particular the US military’s policy of ‘selective availability’ in the 1990s, when they degraded the signal’s accuracy for everyone else, Myers relished the opportunity. Bring on Galileo, he thought, Europe’s own network of navigation satellites. The sooner Britain could wean itself off its dependency on GPS, the better.

‘Do you think you can do it?’ Leila asked, knowing that the challenge would appeal. Myers had been at the heart of a recent exercise in the West Country, when the entire network was jammed to thwart a simulated attack by an Iranian missile flying into British airspace on GPS. Car Tom-Toms went haywire, and the papers were full of stories the next day of lorries stuck in narrow country lanes.

‘Technically it’s possible,’ Myers said, warming to his theme. ‘Each of the thirty GPS satellites has its own atomic clock–well, four clocks actually. 2nd Space Operations Squadron in Colorado Springs sends out a navigational update once a day to make sure they’re all telling the same time–’

‘Paul, we don’t have long.’

‘Sure. We’ll get on to 2 SOPS now, find out which four satellites this guy is linked in to, and see if they can accelerate those particular clocks.’

‘Will that help?’

‘It’ll trick the receiver into thinking it’s travelling faster across the surface of the earth than it really is. The Americans aren’t going to like it, but I guess if we tell them their Ambassador is the target…How long do you need?’

‘The Bomb Squad want ten minutes.’

‘Two, maximum.’

‘Two?’

‘We’d have some serious shipping incidents in the Channel if those clocks are out for too long. I don’t even want to think about the main approach to Heathrow. How’s Daniel these days, by the way?’

Myers was aware that Marchant was persona non grata in the Service, but he had always liked his father, and had been upset by the manner of the Chief’s departure and the subsequent news of his death. It had left Marchant an orphan, which struck a chord with Myers. He was adopted, and had always assumed his own parents were dead.

‘Actually, he’s running alongside the guy with the belt.’ Leila had not intended to tell him, but she needed to focus his mind.

‘Daniel?’ The line went silent for a moment. ‘Christ, what’s he doing there? I thought he was suspended.’

‘Not now, Paul.’

‘Sure.’ Paul had changed up a gear. ‘2 SOPS are on the other line. I’ll patch them through.’

Marchant listened carefully as Leila talked him through what he had to do next. Her voice sounded different, faltering, lacking her usual confidence. Tower Bridge had been cleared of all crowds, she said. Half a mile ahead of him, at the twelve-mile point, there was about to be a roadblock, organised by plain-clothed police officers wearing race marshal tops. As he approached they would fan out across the road, using megaphones to order the runners to stop for safety reasons because of the intense heat. It would be the first time the London Marathon had been stopped, but the measure was not unheard of. (The Rotterdam Marathon had been abandoned in 2007 because of soaring temperatures.) In other words, there was an outside chance that the roadblock wouldn’t arouse the suspicion of Pradeep’s handler, should he be watching.

‘Are you all right?’ Marchant asked, after another hesitation from Leila.

‘Of course I’m bloody not,’ she said.

Marchant passed on the basic details of the plan, along with some more jelly beans, to Pradeep, who seemed to grow stronger at the news. The police would delay their intervention as long as possible, to avoid a crowd building up in front of them and slowing their pace. However, they should stick to the right of the road, as close as possible to the pavement, where a channel would be formed to let them pass through. To avoid being mistakenly challenged, Marchant was to call out that he was a doctor and must be allowed to pass.

‘Have you got all that?’ Leila asked.

‘What happens when we’re through the block?’ Marchant replied. His mother had always wanted a doctor in the family.

‘As you near Tower Bridge, the Americans are going to tweak the clocks on four GPS satellites orbiting 12,000 miles above you. When I give the word, you and Pradeep should gradually slow down to a walking pace. The Bomb Squad will join you and disable the belt as quickly as they can.’

‘How long have they got?’

‘Two minutes from the moment you start to slow.’

Marchant didn’t say anything for a few seconds. For the first time, he realised that his chances of survival were slim. Somehow he had assumed that everything would work out, but now he sensed that he might never see Leila again. She had already realised that. His life normally felt fairer in these moments of acute danger. Ever since that dark day in Delhi, he had been burdened with guilt: why had his brother been killed, while he walked away from the crash unscathed? When the odds were stacked against him, the weight briefly lifted: intense relief replaced the fear. The greater the danger, the closer he felt to Sebastian, the more able to look him in the eye.

But that wasn’t the case now. There was no frisson of higher justice or fateful euphoria. His body just felt more tired than it had ever felt in his entire life, even more than when they had found him drunk in Nairobi, face down in the gutter, his last night as a journalist.

‘Are you still there?’ Leila said.

‘I’m here.’ Another pause. He checked on Pradeep, who looked as if he had fallen into some sort of trance, eyes staring straight ahead, unaware of the outside world. But he was still running, that was all that mattered. ‘They’ve let you keep the mike then,’ Marchant continued.

‘Yes. In the circumstances, it was felt to be the best option.’

Drop the formal tone, he thought, but he knew she couldn’t; all the agencies would have live feeds by now: Thames House, Cheltenham, Langley.

Marchant imagined an aerial view of himself, as if taken from one of the satellites far above South London. He could picture the runners, tiny figures moving along toy streets, begin to bunch up in front of the police, who had appeared from nowhere. Zooming in on the scene, he could tell at once that there was no way through. Fifty yards out, he heard himself shouting at the top of his voice that he was a doctor. But no one else heard him. What was wrong with his voice? It sounded so faint, lost in the hubbub of the crowds, who were now jeering, protesting at the race being stopped. He shouted again, but his voice was too weak, barely audible above the sound of his own breathing, the megaphones, the helicopter above them. Pradeep looked at him in desperation as they began to slow down. And then Pradeep’s receiver beeped.

‘Leila, Leila, there’s no fucking way through!’ Marchant shouted into the phone. His hands were wet with sweat and he gripped the receiver tightly as he ran, like a relay baton. He could hear her talking urgently to other people in the background. ‘Jesus, Leila, we’re slowing down with five hundred people backing up in front of us.’

‘Head left, head left!’ a voice was suddenly saying. It wasn’t Leila’s. Left? For a moment, all Marchant could think of was the blue tartan shoes he had as a child, ‘L’ and ‘R’ embroidered in red on the toes. Then Pradeep pointed ahead of them at a marshal who was beckoning frantically. He was trying to direct them over to the far side of the crowd, where marshals were pushing runners back, making a channel.

Marchant couldn’t dredge up another word, let alone shout that he was a doctor, but in the end there was no need. They were suddenly through the roadblock, running on their own, the din of the crowd receding fast behind them. The marathon behemoth had spat them free.

Eight hundred yards ahead lay Tower Bridge, flags flying, eerily deserted. Marchant managed a faint smile, but not for long. Up until the roadblock, Pradeep’s mission would still have had the appearance of viability to any observer. Now, as the two of them ran on alone up the empty road, the suicide operation was blown. All Marchant could hope for was that Pradeep’s handler, if he had one out there, would wait until the iconic setting of Tower Bridge to cut his losses. The Ambassador wouldn’t die, there would be no ‘Carnage at the London Marathon’ headlines, but a suicide bombing at one of the capital’s most famous landmarks would still be worth something.

‘Leila?’ Marchant asked, still short of breath, struggling to grip the phone.

‘We copy you,’ an American man’s voice said.

‘Where’s Leila?’ he shouted. ‘Put Leila back on the line, do you hear?’

‘It’s OK, Daniel,’ a voice said. ‘She’s still here. We just patched you through directly to Colorado Springs. You’re now talking to me, Harriet Armstrong, in London.’

The bitch, he thought, but he said nothing. He was too tired.

‘They’re going to slow you down in a couple of minutes,’ Armstrong continued. ‘We’ve got two from the Bomb Squad waiting on the north side of the bridge. As soon as you’re walking, they’ll move in. Try to get more out of Pradeep. Cell names, contacts, who’s running him, anything. We’ll call you back in two minutes.’

It felt strange to run the London Marathon through deserted streets. He had always liked empty spaces, big yawning skies, mountains, the open sea. In cities he felt trapped, but he could live here if it was always like this. He suddenly thought of the Thar Desert, trudging over sand dunes with Sebastian on a camel beside him, their parents up ahead, smiling back at them.

As far as Marchant could tell, the police had cleared a corridor a hundred yards either side of the route. For a moment, he imagined that he was leading the field with Pradeep, having broken away from the leading pack in a ruthless final kick for home. Then his legs reminded him how tired he felt.

‘Where are you from, Pradeep?’ he asked. ‘Which part of India?’

‘How do you know I’m from India?’

‘I used to live there.’

‘Which place?’

‘Delhi. Chanakyapuri.’

‘Very nice,’ Pradeep said, moving his head from side to side, managing a faint smile. Talk of home seemed to give him strength.

‘All I remember is the yellow blossom of the laburnum trees. I was very young.’

For a few seconds their steps were synchronised, rising and falling together. They both noticed it, momentarily entranced. ‘Are we going to die?’ Pradeep asked.

‘No. We’re not.’

‘My home place is Kochi.’

‘Kerala?’

‘My wife, she is also from there. We have one son, living with us in Delhi. They will kill him if I don’t do this today.’

‘Who’s “they”?’

Pradeep didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled out a small photo from a pouch at the front of the belt and showed it to Marchant.

Marchant looked at the young face that smiled back at him. This hadn’t been a part of his calculations. Pradeep might have been a reluctant bomber, but he now had a motive to see it through. His heart sank. Pradeep had missed his target, the Ambassador, but he could still honour his word by blowing himself up at Tower Bridge to save his son. Marchant glanced at his watch: one hour thirty-nine minutes.

‘But you don’t want to go through with this, do you?’ he asked. ‘You don’t want to die.’ Before Pradeep could answer, Marchant’s phone started to ring. It was Colorado Springs.

Again, Marchant imagined himself from high above, the bridge looking even more like a child’s model than it did from the ground. He listened to the young American on the phone, calm and authoritative, talking to him, to Armstrong, to someone else. And then, at last, it was time to slow down.

‘If the GPS makes any sound at all, increase your speed immediately, do you copy that?’ the American asked.

‘Copy that.’

‘Now take it down slowly, sir. Your window is open. Two minutes and counting.’

Marchant looked at Pradeep, suddenly unsure of his cooperation. For so long he had wanted him to keep on running; now he was praying he would slow down. But Pradeep’s pace remained constant, his eyes looking straight ahead. If anything, he was growing stronger. He was hanging on until they reached the bridge.

‘Remember, you’ve got time to speed up again if the GPS doesn’t like it,’ the American said. ‘Ease it down now. One minute forty-five and counting.’

Marchant moved closer to Pradeep and grabbed his arm. ‘It’s OK, we can slow down. We can stop. We’ve done it.’ They were at the edge of the bridge, approaching the first tower, still not slowing. Marchant knew that tears were mixing with Pradeep’s sweat as he tried to struggle on, for his young son, to the middle of the bridge. But his legs were beginning to buckle, first one, then the other, and soon he was in Marchant’s arms, sobbing, as they slowed to a walking pace. Marchant glanced at his receiver to check their speed: it still said that they were running at eight minutes per mile.

Marchant never established the exact order of what happened next. He remembered two bomb disposal officers, weighed down with protective khaki clothing, running across from the far side of the bridge, shouting at him to remain where he was. And he later learnt that at the same time, somewhere in the skies above Heathrow, two passenger planes started their final approaches sooner than they should have, setting themselves on a collision course that was only averted by an extra-vigilant air traffic controller.

The double-tap gunshot that rang out on the bridge, jerking Pradeep’s head back, must have been fired just before the bomb disposal squad reached them. Marchant remembered holding Pradeep’s limp body for a second and then slumping down with him to the tarmac. The two dum-dum bullets had spread out inside Pradeep’s skull, rather than passing through it. The back of his head felt like moist moss.

The belt was cut free and disarmed in the subsequent blur, but as Marchant was led away in a cacophony of sirens, all he could recall thinking about was Pradeep’s son, and whether he would now be allowed to live.

4

Daniel Marchant looked out across the shallow valley and watched as a flock of Canada geese flew along the canal, rising from its surface to turn right towards the village. A faint mist hung above the water, streaked with blue smoke from the early-morning stoves of canal boats moored along the far bank. Beside the canal was the railway to London, and a small, three-carriage train was waiting in the station for the first commuters of the day. In the woods on the hillside beyond, a woodpecker was hammering in short bursts. Otherwise, there was stillness.

Marchant had slept only intermittently, despite his exhaustion, and he knew that another day of questioning lay ahead. At least he was now out of London, in a safe house somewhere in Wiltshire. After the marathon, an unmarked car had taken him from Tower Bridge to Thames House, where he had showered and changed into clothes brought over from his flat by Leila. He saw her briefly, gave back the mobile phone, but their conversation was stilted. The look on her face came as a surprise. He had been keen to meet, to thank her for helping him through the race, but he was grateful for her withdrawn manner; it had put him on guard.

It wasn’t that he had expected to be fêted as a hero, but neither had he thought he would be led down into the basement of MI5’s headquarters for hours of questioning in a small, airless room. A debrief in Legoland would have been more appropriate, given he was still on MI6’s payroll. But it was clear, from the moment he had arrived at Thames House, that another agenda was being followed. He just wasn’t sure exactly what it was.

His role in the marathon bomb plot was problematic for the intelligence community, he accepted that. It troubled him, too: why he had been there, why no one else had been suspicious of the belt. A have-a-go hero had saved the day, except that he wasn’t an ordinary member of the public, he was a suspended MI6 officer; an officer whose late father had been suspected of treason; a son who wanted to clear the family name.

He knew MI5 was behind the decision to suspend him, just as it had been the driving force behind his father’s removal as Chief of MI6, which had added an extra degree of tension to his interrogation in the basement.

‘You can see how it looks from our point of view,’ his interrogator was saying, as he walked around Marchant in the plain, whitewashed room, chewing gum. Marchant, sitting on the only chair, didn’t recognise the man, who called himself Wylie. Shortly after his father’s forced retirement, Marchant had been interviewed at Thames House by a panel of officers, but it hadn’t included this man. Wylie was in his late forties, flat-footed with thinning red hair, his skin pale and too dry. If he passed you in the street, Marchant thought, you would guess he was an overworked police officer, or an inner-city schoolteacher, someone who saw more paperwork than daylight, knew his colleagues better than his wife.

‘Two men, running together, desperate to reach Tower Bridge for maximum publicity. One of them fresh from the subcontinent, strapped up with explosives. The other–’ Wylie paused, as if his disdain for Marchant had suddenly overwhelmed him–‘the other, a former member of the intelligence services with “issues”, making sure he reaches his target.’

‘Suspended, not former,’ Marchant said calmly. ‘His target was Turner Munroe, the American Ambassador.’ Wylie, Marchant knew, was employing a standard interrogation strategy: push the less plausible of your two main theories (ex-MI6 man with a grudge) as far as you can, and see how much of your more plausible theory (ex-MI6 man saves MI5’s skin) is validated by the interviewee’s answers. He’d learnt it at the Fort, with Leila.

‘When the order was given to slow down, you both kept on running at the same pace in order to reach your target, which was Tower Bridge,’ Wylie continued, getting into his own stride, chewing faster on his gum. He spoke with an enthusiasm that drew Marchant in, until his ear became tuned to the underlying sarcasm. ‘In fact, you helped to keep this man going, at one point holding his arm to support him.’

Wylie tossed a black-and-white surveillance photo onto the table. It was of Marchant and Pradeep approaching the bridge, taken with a zoom lens. Marchant was shocked at how exhausted he looked: Pradeep seemed to be propping him up. His limbs felt weak again as he shifted his legs under the table.

‘Why didn’t you slow down, as ordered?’ Wylie asked, standing behind Marchant now.

Marchant picked up the photo and took his time to answer, trying to get a measure of the person behind him as he ordered his thoughts. The exact events of the endgame were still not clear in his mind. Had they fired at Pradeep because he wasn’t slowing down? He had thought the shots rang out afterwards, once they were walking.

‘Pradeep was an unwilling suicide bomber,’ Marchant said, talking over his shoulder. ‘My own feeling is that he was coerced into the operation. When I first approached him, he was happy to be helped. It was a primitive response: “How can I stop myself from being killed?” Once his initial survival instincts had been addressed, he started to think of others, in this case his son, who would be killed if he didn’t see his mission through. As we approached the bridge, this concern became paramount in his mind. He didn’t slow down when I asked him to, and as you can see, I had to intervene to reduce his pace.’

Marchant dropped the photo back on the table. Both of them watched in silence as it spun around and came to a halt. Marchant wished there was a fan in the room.

‘Did it ever cross your mind that you had no authority to take the actions you did?’ Wylie asked, still behind him. ‘You were suspended, after all.’

Marchant noted his interrogator’s change of tack. ‘I was behaving like a responsible member of the public.’

‘Responsible?’ Wylie laughed. ‘Everyone knows you’ve gone to seed, Marchant.’

Marchant stared ahead, his tone even. ‘I saw something suspicious, and in this instance, ringing the terrorist hotline wasn’t really an option.’

‘Why not?’ Wylie barked, walking around in front of Marchant. His voice had an odd habit of cracking and rising in pitch when he was angry. The effect should have been funny, but it was unsettling.

‘Why not?’ Marchant echoed, louder now that he could see Wylie again. ‘Because I didn’t have a bloody phone with me.’

Marchant struggled to control his urge to shout. There was no reason to bring Leila into this. She would tell them about her TETRA phone in a separate debrief. He spoke slowly and clearly, emphasising the words as if speaking to a child. ‘I chose to stay with Pradeep. I’m not sure it would have been that easy to identify him again. There were 35,000 runners out there.’

‘Including some of our officers,’ Wylie said.

Flat-footing it along at the back with the fifteen-minute milers, Marchant thought.

‘This attack didn’t come as a complete surprise,’ Wylie added.

‘I’m sure it didn’t.’ And if Marchant was writing the incident up, his report would have made that abundantly clear: MI5 saw it coming, and still screwed up.

‘You knew about it in advance, then?’ Wylie asked, his voice cracking again. This time he pulled out an asthma inhaler and sucked once on it, hard.

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘But your former colleagues knew. They just don’t like sharing information much, do they?’

Then Marchant thought he understood. Wylie was suggesting that his involvement was pre-planned: part of a conspiracy by MI6 to expose MI5’s failings, to get his job back.

‘I can’t answer for MI6,’ he said.

‘No, you’re right, you can’t. But you’d like to. Working for Six kept you sober. We’re seeing the real Marchant now, though, aren’t we? Oh, come on, you were tipped off. One of your old “mates”’–he exaggerated the word derisively–‘chose to tell you rather than us. You went out there this morning looking for a man with a belt. You didn’t just stumble across him, the one runner out of 35,000 who wanted to blow himself up.’

Marchant thought of Leila, what she’d said about Paul Myers picking up some chatter just before the marathon, and felt his palms moisten. Had someone logged the call from Myers to her? His chance encounter could begin to look anything but: Cheltenham tells MI6; MI6 informs suspended officer, who thwarts bomb attack under MI5’s nose. Wylie, though, had no idea of the fear he was sowing in Marchant’s mind.

‘So what did this rag-head tell you about himself?’ Wylie asked, changing tack again.

Rag-head? Marchant marvelled at how unreconstructed MI5 still was. He thought it had become more ethnically diverse. ‘He said his name was Pradeep. He was originally from Cochin in Kerala. He called it Kochi, the local name, suggesting he was Indian.’ Marchant had always liked data. Hard facts, unquestionable stats–they were reassuring in his shifting world.

‘South India,’ Wylie said. ‘We all hoped that little terror campaign had gone away.’

Don’t bring my father into this, Marchant thought. Last year’s bombings, believed to have been run from South India, had stopped when his father stood down as Chief at Christmas, a point not lost on his enemies in MI5. ‘Pradeep also had a good knowledge of New Delhi,’ Marchant said, determined to remain calm. ‘He was living there with his wife and son. He seemed to know Chanakyapuri, the diplomatic enclave in the south of the city.’

‘An unusual part of town to know, where all the foreign embassies are.’

‘Possibly. It’s hard to tell. He revealed very little information about himself: spoke good English, with a heavy Indian accent. His child was four, maybe five, wearing a maroon school sweatshirt in a photo he showed me. If you hadn’t shot him, he might have been able to tell you a bit more about himself.’

Marchant saw the punch coming–it had been coming ever since MI6 first looked down its public-school nose at MI5–and raised his left forearm quick enough to deflect it upwards. His instinct, honed at the Fort, was to strike back at the same moment with his right hand, but he resisted, grabbing Wylie’s upper arm instead. Their faces were close before Marchant let him go.

‘Next time we’ll take you both down,’ Wylie said, sucking deeply on his inhaler.

5

Paul Myers drew heavily on his third pint of London Pride. ‘Another thirty seconds and the planes would have collided,’ he said. ‘The CAA’s lost the plot, wants to know how many other UK near-misses have been caused by Colorado tinkering with its atomic clocks.’

‘And?’ Leila asked, glancing around the pub. The Morpeth Arms, just across the river from Legoland, was a regular haunt for officers from MI5 and MI6. She recognised one or two colleagues at the bar, waiting to be served by the pub’s Czech and Russian barmaids.

‘Just don’t rely on your Tom-Tom if there’s a war on.’

Leila smiled, sipping at her glass of Sauvignon. She was tired. MI5 had let her go late in the afternoon, after a second day of interviews. The Americans had been present today: James Spiro, the CIA’s London chief, had asked lots of questions about Daniel Marchant, but no one would answer hers. She wanted to be with him, talk through the events of the marathon, hear it from his side, but nobody would admit that they knew where he was. Myers was a consolation prize. He had played his part that day, was proof that it had all actually happened. But it was the chatter that interested her.

‘It was good of you to call me yesterday,’ she said, touching his freckled forearm. Myers was wearing a fleece too big for him, pulled up at the sleeves.

‘We go back a bit, eh? I remember the first day you arrived at the Fort…’

‘Do you remember exactly what you heard? The chatter?’

Myers sat back awkwardly. ‘It was probably nothing. A South Indian we’d been monitoring. Talked about “35,000 runners”. Did you pass it on to anybody?’

‘Only Daniel. Briefly, just before the marathon started.’

Myers smiled, not sure where to look. Like most of the intelligence analysts Leila knew at GCHQ, he was socially dysfunctional, his head hanging too far forward over his pint, which he grasped with big nail-bitten hands. He was a good listener, though, not just to jihadi chatter, but to old friends like Leila. She knew that he still fancied her, partly because of his unsubtle glances at her breasts, but also because of the speed with which he had agreed to come up to London when she needed to talk. She knew, too, that it was wrong of her to exploit his enthusiasm; but she had no choice. The marathon had left her in desperate need of company.

‘I’m still trying to work out how it all happened, why he was the one who spotted the belt,’ Leila said, realising she shouldn’t have another glass of wine.

‘Come on, Leila, he’s always been a jammy little shit. Some people land the best postings, win on penalties, get the girl.’

Myers lifted his head briefly, his thick glasses glinting in the light. He was always at his most lyrical when he’d been on the ale, he thought, stealing another look at Leila’s heavy breasts.

‘I’m worried about him,’ she said. ‘After what happened to his father.’

‘He’ll get his job back. He saved the day, didn’t he?’

‘I hope the Americans see it that way. They never liked Stephen Marchant, and they don’t trust Daniel. I think it’s best neither of us mentions the chatter. It might not look too good for him.’

‘OK by me. I shouldn’t have told you anyway. The guys in Colorado Springs thought he was a bloody hero,’ Myers continued, draining his glass. ‘Any chance of kipping at your place for the night? Missed the last train back to Cheltenham.’

‘You can sleep on the sofa,’ Leila said, surprised by his confidence.

As they walked out onto the empty Embankment, looking for a cab, Leila turned to Myers. ‘You never thought it was true, what they said about his father?’

‘No. We would have known. We hear about everything at Cheltenham, sooner or later. It was political, expedient. They didn’t trust him. The PM. Armstrong. The whole bloody lot of them. Not because he was a traitor. They just didn’t understand him. He was old school, not their type.’

‘I sometimes wonder if there really was ever a mole,’ Leila said, looking out across the water towards Legoland, lit up in the night sky like some sort of rough-hewn pyramid.

‘It wasn’t Stephen Marchant, that’s all I know,’ Myers said, momentarily unsteady as he took in her legs. ‘Or his son. I can’t understand why they suspended him. No, Daniel’s one of the good guys. Good taste in women, too.’

Half an hour later, Leila lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling in her Canary Wharf flat, regretting that she had let Myers stay on her sofabed. He was already fast asleep, his body lying as if he had been dropped from a great height, and snoring loudly.

Leila thought again about her mother, how she had sounded on the phone the night before. The doctor who had first suggested a nursing home had told her not to worry, that she must expect her mother to sound increasingly confused, but it was still alarming. Sunday was not a day she usually called her, but the marathon that morning had left her frightened and tired. Alone in her flat, after four hours of questioning at Thames House, she had felt like a child again. When she was younger and needing to talk, she had never turned to her father, who had made little effort to know her. She had always confided in her mother, but now her voice had scared Leila even more.

‘They came tonight, three of them,’ her mother had begun in slow Farsi. ‘They took the boy–you know him, the one who cooks for me. Beat him in front of my eyes.’

‘Did they hurt you, Mama?’ Leila asked, dreading the answer. The confused stories of mistreatment grew worse each time she rang. ‘Did they touch you?’

‘He was like a grandson to me,’ she continued. ‘Dragged him away by his feet.’

‘Mama, what did they do to you?’ Leila asked.

‘You told me they wouldn’t come,’ her mother said. ‘Others here have suffered, too.’

‘Never again, Mama. They won’t come any more. I promise.’

‘Why did they say my family are to blame? What have we ever done to them?’

‘Nothing. You know how it is. Are you safe now?’

But the line was dead.

Leila wanted to be with Marchant now, to hold him close, talk about her mother. If only they had met in different circumstances, other lives. Marchant had often said the same. But their paths had tangled and could never be undone, even though both had learnt to keep a part of themselves back that no one–agents, colleagues, lovers–could ever touch. Marchant, though, was unlike anyone she had come across before. He was driven, pushing himself to the limits of success and failure. Nothing in his life ever happened in half measures. If Marchant drank, he would keep drinking until dawn. When he needed to sleep deeply, he could lie in until midday. And when he needed to study, he would work all night.

She remembered the day, two weeks into their new entrants’ course at the Fort, when she woke early after a fitful sleep. The wind had been blowing in off the Channel all night, and the old windows of the bleak training centre, a former Napoleonic fort on the end of the Gosport peninsula, were rattling like milk bottles on a float. The three female recruits were in a large, shared room on the north side of the central courtyard, while the seven men were in a block of separate bedsits on the east side, overlooking the sea. She went to the window and saw a light. She couldn’t be sure it was Marchant’s, but she pulled on a jumper, wrapped herself in a dressing gown and made her way quietly across the cold stone courtyard.

When she reached the row of men’s rooms, she knew immediately that it was Marchant’s weak light seeping out from under the old wooden door. She hesitated, shivering. The day before had been dedicated to the theory of recruiting agents. People could generally be persuaded to betray their country for reasons of Money, Ideology, Coercion or Ego: MICE. It had been a long day in the classroom, with only a brief drink in the bar afterwards. Marchant had studiously ignored her then, even though they had been in the same group all day, exchanging what she thought were meaningful glances.

She knocked once and waited. There was no sound, and for a moment Leila thought he must be sleeping; or perhaps he was partying down in Portsmouth and had left the light on as a crude decoy. But then the door opened and Marchant was standing there, in a faded surfer’s T-shirt and boxer shorts.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘Can I come in?’ Marchant said nothing, but stood to one side, letting her step into the small room. ‘Aren’t you cold? This dump is freezing.’

‘It stops me falling asleep.’ Marchant picked up a pair of trousers that were slung across the unmade bed, dropped them in the corner and sat back down at his desk. ‘Make yourself at home. I’m afraid there’s only one chair.’

Leila perched herself on the edge of the bed. A pile of papers was stacked up on Marchant’s small desk, bathed in a pool of light from a dented Anglepoise. A half-empty bottle of whisky stood next to the papers. For a few moments they were silent, listening to the plangent wind outside.

‘What are you reading?’ she asked. He turned half away from her, flicking through the printed sheets.

‘Famous traitors. You know Ames is still owed $2.1 million by the Russians? They’re keeping it for him in an offshore account, should he ever escape from his Pennsylvania penitentiary. There was no higher calling, just the need for cash. His wife’s shopping bills were more than his CIA salary. So simple.’

‘It’s four o’clock in the morning.’

‘I know.’

‘Why now?’

Marchant turned back to look at her. ‘It’s not enough for me just to pass out of here. I need to fly out of this bloody place with wings.’

‘Because of who your father is?’

‘You heard the instructor yesterday. It’s quite clear he thinks I’m not here on merit. My dad’s the boss.’

‘That sort of thing doesn’t happen any more. Everyone knows that.’

‘He didn’t.’

Marchant turned back to his desk and looked out of the deep, stone-lined window. In the distance, the lights of an approaching Bilbao-to-Portsmouth ferry winked in the dawn light. Beyond it, on the far side of the main channel, he could make out the faint silhouette of the rollercoaster they had all been on two days earlier, as part of a team bonding exercise. Leila stood up, came over to him and started to work his shoulders. It was the first time she had touched him. He didn’t recoil.

‘You should get some beauty sleep,’ she said, close to his ear.

‘I didn’t mean to seem off with you tonight,’ he replied, lifting one hand slowly to hers.

‘You were with your friends, boys together. I should have left you to it.’

‘It wasn’t that.’

‘No?’

He paused. ‘I’m not going to be a particularly pleasant person to be around for the foreseeable future.’

‘Isn’t that for others to decide?’

‘Perhaps. But we’re spending the next six months learning how to lie, deceive, betray, seduce. I’m not sure I want what we might have mixed up with that.’

‘And what might we have?’ Leila asked. Her hands slowed.

Marchant stood up, turned and looked at her. His eyes were anxious, searching hers for an answer she could never give. She leant forward and kissed him. His lips were cold, but they were both soon searching for warmth before Marchant broke off. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, sitting down at his desk. ‘I must finish this tonight.’

‘You don’t sound very determined.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Shall I go?’

‘No. Stay, please. Get some sleep.’ He nodded at the bed.

Ten minutes later, she was tucked up under his old woollen blankets, struggling to keep out the cold, while he continued to read about motives for betrayal. He had bent the Anglepoise lower, to reduce the light in the room. She wondered if he could feel any heat from the lampshade, close to his cheek. The sea air was freezing.

‘What made you sign up?’ he asked, glancing in her direction. She managed a sleepy smile.

‘The need to prove myself, like you. Your father’s the Chief, my mother was born in Isfahan.’

Later, she was aware of him in bed next to her, holding her for warmth as sleet lashed the windows. She hoped that he was wrong about them, that what they might have could somehow survive the months ahead.

6

Marchant watched from his bedroom in the safe house as the train pulled out from the village for London. He thought again of Pradeep dying on the bridge. For a moment he wondered if one of the two bullets had missed its intended target. Did they mean to shoot him as well as Pradeep? It was the right moment to fire–Pradeep collapsing in his arms–if they weren’t bothered about collateral.

Below him a Land Rover was making its way along the road that ran along the valley. He assumed it was heading into the village, but the driver turned off onto the track that led up to the safe house. It was a tatty, dark-blue Defender, and as it bumped its way towards the house, Marchant could make out the local electricity board’s logo on both sides. Downstairs he could hear movement. His babysitters were stirring, ready to confront the driver, play out whatever cover story they had been given.

Next to the safe house was a small electricity sub-station for the village, enclosed by spiked green metal fencing and with its own orange windsock, billowing gently in the early-morning wind. The compound also housed an old nuclear bunker. A small sign, put up by the local history society, explained that it was used by the Royal Observer Corps during the Cold War, and could house three people for up to a month.

The surrounding area was all fields. Marchant assumed that the Land Rover belonged to the electricity board’s maintenance staff. It must be a routine check on the sub-station, he thought, but as it parked up below his window, he recognised the man who stepped out of the front passenger seat. It was Marcus Fielding, his father’s successor.

From the moment he had joined the Service, fifteen years earlier, Fielding had been marked out as a future Chief. The media had branded him the leader of a new generation of spies, Arabists who had joined after the Cold War and grown up with Al Qaeda. They had learnt their trade in Kandahar rather than Berlin, cutting their teeth in Pakistani training camps rather than Moscow parks, wearing turbans rather than trenchcoats.

‘I don’t suppose anyone has actually thanked you yet,’ Fielding said, as they walked down a path in the Savernake Forest. Marchant wasn’t fooled by the bonhomie. Fielding had always been supportive of Marchant, dismissing his suspension as a temporary setback in the escalating turf war between MI5 and MI6. But the events during the marathon would have tested his loyalty, ratcheting up another notch the tension between the services.

All around them rainwater dripped off the leaves, resonating like polite applause through the trees. Marchant glanced back to where the Land Rover was parked. Two men from the safe house stood quietly at the foot of a monument to George III which rose out of a clearing in the woods.

‘It was quite a show you put on,’ Fielding continued. ‘Saved a lot of lives. The Prime Minister asked me to pass on his personal thanks. Turner Munroe will be in touch, too.’

‘He probably just wants his watch back. MI5 weren’t quite so appreciative.’

‘No, I’m sure they weren’t.’

They walked on together for a while through the ancient wood, watched by its sentinel oaks. Fielding was lean and tall, professorial in appearance, with a high, balding forehead and hair swept back at the sides. His face was oddly childish, almost cherubic. To compensate, he wore steel-rimmed glasses, which added to his donnish air and broke up the expanse of forehead. Colleagues had been quick to dub him the Vicar. He had been a choral scholar at Eton, and it was easy to imagine him still in a cassock and collar. He didn’t drink, nor was he married. Prayer, though, had played little part in his rise to the top.

‘I’m sorry about Sunday,’ he continued. ‘We tried to get you out of Thames House as soon as we could, but, well, you’re not strictly our man at the moment. MI5 insisted you were their guest.’

‘You would have thought I was the one wearing the belt.’

‘Nothing too unpleasant, I hope?’

‘Six hours of amateur Q and A. First they suggested I was helping the bomber, then they thought it was a set-up by MI6 to get my job back. No wonder they didn’t see it coming.’

‘That’s just it, I’m afraid. The whole incident doesn’t reflect well on them. Or on us, to be honest. Everyone had assumed that last year’s attacks were over. No one saw it coming. You’re certain he was from South India?’

‘Kerala, born and bred.’

‘We were all hoping that threat was over. The one person to come out of this with any credit is you, and you shouldn’t have been there.’

‘Can’t it be spun as a general intelligence-led operation?’

‘The media’s not the problem. It’s the PM. He can’t understand why a suspended officer was all that stood between a marathon and carnage. I’m not sure I fully understand either.’

That had always been Fielding’s way: his subjects rarely realised that they were being interrogated, such was his seeming politeness. But just when you had dropped your guard, he hit you hard with a disguised uppercut of meticulous accuracy.

‘Leila signed us up at the last minute. A friend of hers works for one of the sponsors. It was stupid, we hadn’t done enough training. On race day, I saw a dodgy belt and did something about it. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t.’

‘And you had no warning? You’ve heard that Cheltenham picked up some chatter on the Saturday?’

‘No warning, no.’ There was little point in mentioning Leila, he thought. It would sound wrong, as if she had said more than she had, when in fact she had barely told him anything. It had been a passing remark, no hard information. It worried him, though, that Fielding also doubted that it had been an entirely chance encounter.

‘I couldn’t have done it without Leila,’ Marchant added. ‘You know that?’

‘She did very well. A bright future should lie ahead of her. Ahead of you, too, if that’s what you want.’

Marchant knew Fielding was referring to his behaviour of the past few months, when old demons had broken free again, unchecked by the discipline of intelligence work. Fielding stopped at one of the Savernake’s oldest oaks. Storms had removed the upper boughs, leaving only the trunk, strained and contorted, as if in pain. He bent down to look at the base of the tree, putting one hand to the small of his back. Sometimes his pain was so severe that he would take to lying down in his office, conducting meetings supine.

‘Spring morels,’ he said, pulling aside some brambles to get a better look. Marchant stooped to study them more closely. ‘Exquisite fried in butter.’ Everyone in Legoland knew how seriously Fielding took his food. An invitation to one of his gourmet dinners at his flat in Dolphin Square was better than a pay rise. He stood up again, both hands now pressed against his back, as if he was about to address his congregation. They both stared out across the woods, the sun streaming through gaps in the canopy, forming spotlit pools of limelight on the forest floor.

‘Tell me, are you still committed to pursuing your own inquiries into your father’s case?’

Marchant didn’t like his tone. In a quiet moment at his father’s funeral, two months earlier, Fielding had told him to let his office know if he turned up anything. All he had asked was that he went about his inquiries quietly. Become another whistleblower like Tomlinson or Shayler and he would throw the book at him. His father would have said the same: he despised renegades too. Only once had Marchant lost it, at a pub near Victoria, when an evening had ended in a brawl. A junior desk officer had been dispatched to the police station to release him and smooth things over.

‘Wouldn’t you want to know what happened?’ Marchant replied.

‘I have a pretty good idea already. Tony Bancroft has almost finished his report.’

‘But he’s not going to clear my father, is he?’

‘None of us wanted him to go, you know that? He was a much-loved Chief.’

‘So why did we let MI5 get one over us? There was never any evidence, no proof against him.’

‘I know you’re still angry, Daniel, but the quickest way to get you working again is for you to keep your head down and let Tony finish his job. MI5 don’t want you back, but I do. Once Bancroft is on record saying you pose no threat, there’s nothing anyone can do about it.’

‘But Bancroft won’t clear my father’s name, will he?’ Marchant repeated.

They walked on, Fielding a few yards ahead of him. Marchant had met with Lord Bancroft and his team, answered their questions, and knew that he had no case to answer. He knew his father was innocent, too, but the Prime Minister had needed someone to blame. Mainland Britain had been subjected to an unprecedented wave of terrorist attacks during the past year. Nothing spectacular, but there was enough public fear to keep MI5 on a critical state of alert: electricity sub-stations, railway depots, multi-storey car parks. The evidence soon pointed to a terrorist cell based in South India, drawn from workers who had taken poorly-paid jobs in the Gulf.

The pressure to nullify the threat had grown, but the terrorists always seemed to be one step ahead. Soon the talk was of a mole, high up in MI6, helping the hunted. Daniel’s father had become obsessed with the theory, but he had never managed to prove it, or to halt the bombings. Suspicion had finally fallen on him. When his position as Chief became untenable, the Joint Intelligence Committee, guided by Harriet Armstrong, MI5’s Director General, recommended that he be retired early. The attacks had stopped.

Fielding paused at the point where their path met another. As Marchant joined him, they instinctively looked both ways before crossing, even though the forest was empty. A muntjac deer barked in the distance.

‘Are you still drinking?’ Fielding asked.

‘When I can,’ Marchant said.

‘I’m not sure we can bail you out a second time.’

‘How long will I be kept at the safe house?’

‘It’s for your own security. Someone out there’s not happy you thwarted their attack.’

They walked on together, both at ease with the forest’s noisy dampness. ‘There are no surprises in what I’ve read of Bancroft’s report, no moles uncovered,’ Fielding said, as they began on a loop back towards the car. ‘It’s not Tony’s style, not why he was appointed. Just a summing up of what happened on your father’s watch and a measured assessment of whether anything more could have been done. There were too many attacks, we all know that.’

‘And someone had to take the bullet.’

‘The PM’s a former Home Secretary. He was always going to favour MI5 over us.’

Marchant had heard all this before, but he knew from Fielding’s manner that he was holding something back.

‘Unfortunately, the Americans have been pushing for more, day and night, trying to establish that it was conspiracy rather than complacency on your father’s part. We’ve resisted, of course, but the PM is indulging them. And now it seems they’ve persuaded him to hold back on the report’s publication, saying the CIA have something specific.’

‘On my father? What?’

‘How much do you know about Salim Dhar?’

‘Dhar?’ Marchant hesitated, trying to think clearly. ‘On the shortlist for masterminding last year’s UK bombings, but no evidence to link him directly. Always been more anti-American than British. It’s a while since I read his file.’

‘Educated in Delhi, the American school, then disappeared,’ Fielding said. ‘The Indians arrested him two years later in Kashmir, and banged him up in a detention site in Kerala, where he should be now. Only he isn’t.’

‘No?’

‘He was one of the prisoners released in the Bhuj hijack exchange at the end of last year.’

It wasn’t his region, but Marchant knew the incident had been an almost exact copy of the Indian Airlines hijacking at Kandahar in 1999. Then, Omar Sheikh had been released, amid much international condemnation. It was never made public who was freed at Bhuj.

‘AQ must have rated him,’ Marchant said, wondering where his father fitted in.

‘We had Dhar down as a small-time terrorist until Bhuj. They wanted something spectacular in return for his freedom. Within a month, Dhar was launching RPGs into the US compound in Delhi.’

Marchant had read about the attack, in the blur of grief. It had taken place just after his father had died, before the funeral. Nine US Marines had been killed.

‘What’s this got to do with my father?’

Fielding paused before answering, as if in two minds whether to proceed. ‘The Americans would very much like to find Salim Dhar. After Delhi, he went on to attack their compound in Islamabad, killing six more US Marines And now the CIA has established that a senior-ranking officer from MI6 visited Dhar in Kerala shortly before he was released in the hostage exchange.’

Marchant looked up. ‘And they think it was my father?’

‘They’re working on a theory that it was, yes. I’m sorry. There’s no official record of any visits. I’ve checked all the logbooks, many times.’

Marchant didn’t know what to think. It wouldn’t be unusual for the local station head from Chennai, say, to bluff his way into seeing someone like Dhar, but it would be extremely unorthodox for the Chief of MI6 to make an undeclared visit from London.

‘In the context of MI5’s own inquiries, I’m afraid it doesn’t look good,’ Fielding added. ‘There are those who are convinced that Dhar masterminded the British bombings, despite his preference for killing Americans.’

‘What do you think?’ Marchant asked. ‘You knew my dad better than most.’

Fielding stopped and turned to Marchant. ‘He was under a lot of pressure last year to clean up MI6’s act. The talk at the time, remember, was all about an inside job, infiltration at the highest level by terrorists with some sort of South Indian connection. Even so, why talk to Dhar personally?’

‘Because he couldn’t trust anyone else?’ Marchant offered. For whatever reason, he knew that it must have been an act of desperation on his father’s part.

‘The good news is that details of this visit haven’t crossed Bancroft’s desk yet, and they might never,’ Fielding said. ‘His job was to draw a line under your father’s departure, not to open the whole affair up again. He’ll need to be sure of the evidence before presenting it to the JIC, and there isn’t a lot at the moment.’

‘Is there any?’

‘Dhar’s jailer, the local police chief in Kerala. Someone blackmailed him to gain access to Dhar. It had all the hallmarks of an old-school sting.’

‘Moscow rules?’

‘Textbook. Indian intelligence found the compromising photos hidden in the policeman’s desk drawer. They were taken with one of our cameras. An old Leica.’ He paused. ‘The last time it was checked out was in Berlin, early 1980s. Your father never returned it.’

7

Marchant knew that someone was in his room as he walked up the worn wooden stairs of the safe house. It was one of those intuitive things they couldn’t teach at the Fort. After Fielding had dropped him off on his way back to London, Marchant had checked in with his two babysitters, who were watching porn in the small sitting room. They had hardly acknowledged his return, so he wasn’t overly concerned as he turned the handle on the bedroom door. Besides, he could already smell Leila’s perfume.

‘Dan,’ she said, getting up from the corner of the bed, where a newspaper was spread out across the covers: two pages on the attempted marathon terrorist attack. ‘I was beginning to wonder what you were doing with the Vicar in the woods.’

They made love slowly, their limbs still tender after their morning on the streets of London.

‘A proper debrief,’ he smiled, as she slid his boxers off and eased on top of him.

Neither of them was ready to discuss what had happened at the marathon. When he had still been working they would meet up for snatched weekends whenever they could, in Berne, Seville, Dubrovnik, but never on their own patch. And they always had a rule of not talking about work, which meant they spent a lot of time making love, as they had little life beyond their jobs, only opening up to each other at the airport, minutes before they flew their separate ways. Today, though, would be different, they both knew that.

But first Marchant fell into a deep sleep, something he had rarely been able to do in recent months. His brain must have concluded that lying in a protected safe house in the depths of Wiltshire, with Leila by his side, was as secure an environment as he could hope for. Fielding had authorised her visit, she said, which added to the sense of sanctuary.

When he awoke, he felt less rested than he had hoped. No nightmares, but a nagging memory of Leila’s hot tears, felt faintly through the layers of tiredness that had enveloped his aching limbs. He sat up, troubled that he had been unable to respond. Leila was taking a shower. The bathroom door was open, and from where he was lying he could see the brown haze of her breasts, a fuzz of pubic hair, blurred by the steamy glass of the shower cubicle.

As she tilted her head back, smoothing her long hair in the jet of water, he remembered the first time he saw her, when they were both waiting to be interviewed at Carlton Gardens in London. There had been a mix-up over times, and he had sat next to her in the reception, suspecting she was there for the same reason as him, but unable to ask. Instead they had spoken with agonising formality about the weather, the architecture, anything but the one subject that was occupying both their minds.

When they had met again, on their first day of training at the Fort in Gosport, there had been a palpable frisson between them. The freedom to talk about whatever they liked was intoxicating. An instructor asked all of them to stand up and introduce themselves in turn. (MI6 was no different from the rest when it came to toe-curling corporate practices.) Leila spoke first in English, and then briefly in fluent Farsi, explaining that her father was an Englishman who worked as an engineer in the oil and natural gas industry. He had met and married her mother, a Bahá’í Iranian and university lecturer, while posted to Tehran. After the Revolution in 1979, they had fled to Britain, along with many other Bahá’ís, hounded out by the Revolutionary Guard, who had no time for unrecognised religious minorities.

Leila was born and brought up in Hertfordshire by her mother, while her father worked in various jobs around the Gulf, sometimes joined by his family. Her earliest childhood memories were of the fifty-degree heat in Doha. When she was eight, they all went to live in Houston for two years. For as long as the Ayatollahs ruled, however, there was never a chance of returning to Tehran, because the Bahá’ís remained enemies of an Islamic state that continued to persecute them.

She told the room, in English, how she had applied to the Service in her last year at Oxford, after the master of her college, a former Chief (Stephen Marchant’s predecessor), had invited her for dinner. She feared the worst, not convinced she wanted to join an organisation that still seemed to recruit over a glass of Oxbridge Amontillado, but was surprised by his lack of pomposity, and by the vibrant mix of the four other young people who had been asked along to the same dinner. Only one of them was white, a demographic that was reflected in the room of aspiring spies that day at the Fort. It reminded her of the time she had visited the BBC’s World Service at Bush House.

‘Naturally suspicious, I went back to my room after dinner and sat up all night reading the website, about how people from ethnically diverse backgrounds would be welcome at MI6. I knew MI5 was recruiting multi-racially, but I thought the Service was the last bastion of the white, middle-class, safari-suit-wearing male. People like Daniel here.’ Laughter filled the room. ‘There was a catch, though, as we all know: you had to have at least one British parent. Luckily, my mother always had a thing about English men.’ More laughter. ‘The vetting takes an age, though, didn’t you find? They interviewed my mother for weeks. It must have been the shisha pipe she kept offering round.’

‘Have you ever been back to Iran?’ the instructor asked. He was the only one not laughing.

‘Back? I never lived there.’

‘It must have sometimes felt like home, though,’ the instructor continued. The room’s relaxed atmosphere tensed.

‘I went there once, in my year off,’ she said, fixing the instructor’s eye. ‘I assume everyone here was asked the same question in their first interview, whether they had ever persuaded someone to do something illegal. Well, I told them about my trip to Iran, how I talked a guard on the Turkmenistan border into letting me across to visit the rose harvest in Ghamsar for my PhD on perfume. The gardens were beautiful. I’ll never forget–whole families picking roses in the dawn mist, the dew still wet on the scented petals.’

Marchant had spoken next, knowing that he could never match Leila for presence. Her sassy smile, the sexual poise, that worldly, cosmopolitan voice: sorted rather than arrogant. He explained that he had grown up abroad, moving from one embassy to another around the world until he had been packed off aged thirteen to a boarding school in Wiltshire. He had been told to be upfront about his father, who had recently taken over as Chief, so he joked about keeping it in the family. ‘Spies are like undertakers, they run in families,’ he continued. ‘And I’m in good company, I guess. Kim Philby’s father, St John Philby, had been a senior member of the Service.’ It was a quip he later regretted.

‘After Cambridge, I worked for a couple of years as a hard-up foreign correspondent, stringing from Africa for various British broadsheets and drinking too much cheap Scotch. I landed some of my best stories, including a splash about Gaddafi, thanks to a contact at the High Commission in Nairobi. It was only later that I discovered he worked for I/OPS in Legoland. I was young and naïve at the time, and didn’t realise that it was his job to present the media with stories that helped the national cause. It was on his advice that I eventually returned to London to apply.’

He looked around at his new colleagues, gauging how honest he should be. The room had fallen awkwardly silent. ‘I was in a bad way, to be honest. Rudderless. Broke. You know what hacks are like. There were also a few personal issues that needed resolving.’ He paused again, deciding not to mention his brother. ‘The bloke from I/OPS found me in downtown Nairobi one night, worse for wear. Told me to stop being in denial and apply. I’d always wanted to make my own way in life, not rely on my parents, my father, but I guess the family calling eventually proved too strong.’

Leila came back into the safe-house bedroom, a towel wrapped around her drying hair like a turban. ‘Remember that first day at the Fort, when we all had to stand up and speak?’ Marchant asked, putting on a cotton dressing gown.

‘Yes, why?’

‘We never did find out who was lying.’

After everyone had spoken, their instructor had announced that the life story of one person in the room was entirely false. They had each been told to write down who they thought it was, and why.

‘I don’t think it was any of us,’ Leila said. ‘The only one lying that day was the arsy instructor.’

‘It wasn’t you, then?’ Marchant asked.

‘Me? Is that who you wrote down?’

‘All that Bahá’í back-story. I’m amazed they let you in.’

‘It happens to be true, you cheeky sod,’ she said, kissing his forehead as he lay there on the bed, watching her pull on some knickers. ‘My mother’s an amazing woman. The only reason I made it to Cambridge. I actually found the vetting process very therapeutic, answering all those questions about her, learning more about the Bahá’í faith, her allegiance to Britain.’

‘Were the vetters worried, then?’

‘Not by the time they’d finished. She’d lived in Britain for twenty-five years.’

‘You never talk about her any more.’

Leila fell quiet. He remembered her tears again and reached up to her waist, gently pulling her down to sit beside him on the bed.

‘What is it?’ he asked quietly.

‘Nothing,’ she said, wiping beneath an eye with the back of her hand.

‘The marathon?’

‘No. It’s OK.’ She rested her head on his shoulder, trying not to lose control, taking comfort in his warmth.

The only time Marchant had ever seen Leila cry was when she had come off the phone to her mother in their early days of training at the Fort. She hadn’t wanted to talk about it. When he tried to raise the matter later, she had resisted.

‘Is it your mother?’ he asked. ‘Have you spoken to her recently?’

Leila remained in his arms. She had once told him that her mother often talked of returning to Iran one day. She wanted to be a widow amongst her own family, her people, and to care for her own, ageing mother. But Leila had told her that it was too risky for a Bahá’í to return to Iran while her religion was being systematically persecuted.

Instead, she had been admitted into a nursing home in Hertfordshire, after showing early signs of Alzheimer’s. Leila said that she was bitterly unhappy there, and was soon complaining of being badly treated by the staff, but it was impossible to prove anything or to work out how much was a result of her confused state of mind. Marchant had offered to accompany Leila on a visit, but she didn’t want him to form his only impression of her mother when she was not herself.

‘You did well yesterday, I hope Fielding told you that,’ Leila said, more together now, walking over to the dressing table. ‘You thwarted a twisted plan.’

‘I couldn’t have done it without your help,’ Marchant said, then paused. ‘Pradeep had a son. He showed me a photo.’

The events of the marathon were finally catching up with him, too. Leila sensed the change in his voice. She came back over to the bed and stroked his neck. ‘They were going to kill the boy if he didn’t go through with it,’ Marchant continued. ‘Do you think they did?’

‘He died trying to carry out his mission, and the London Marathon was cancelled for the first time in its history. Probably not.’

Leila had returned to her usual, unsentimental self. Marchant felt relief. Her professional manner put a distance between them, a reminder not to let her break his heart. He had been unsettled by her earlier display of emotion. It had made him want to talk more about the race, the incessant beeping of Pradeep’s GPS, how such an innocent sound could have announced both their deaths, the exhilarating feeling of being on an operation again, the surprising heaviness of Pradeep’s dead body in his arms. But her coolness now made him feel more detached from the events of yesterday. He knew it was the only way they had survived in their jobs.

‘Fielding also talked about my father,’ Marchant said, raising and lowering his aching limbs. ‘My legs are killing me.’

‘Anything new?’ Leila stood up and went back to the dressing table, where she started to dry her hair.

‘The Americans are leaning on Bancroft. Seems they might have something on him after all.’

‘The Americans?’ she said, turning to face him. ‘What’s it got to do with them?’

Marchant told her what Fielding had said, the pressure MI5 was putting on Lord Bancroft to identify his father as the mole, the Americans’ belief that he had met Salim Dhar before last year’s embassy bombings in Delhi and Islamabad.

‘I remember the Leica,’ Marchant continued. ‘It was like a museum piece, beautifully made. He showed it to me once, at Christmas, just after I’d been accepted by the Service.’ He paused. ‘I’m not helping your case, you know that. I think you should keep your distance for a while.’

She glanced at him in the mirror, her eyes flicking down his body. ‘I’m not going to stop screwing you because of MI5.’

‘I appreciate the loyalty, but it’s not going to do you any favours, that’s all I’m saying.’ He got up from the bed and stood behind Leila, cupping her bare breasts in his hands as they looked at their reflection. His chin rested on her shoulder. ‘If they can suspect my dad, they can suspect me, too.’

‘I thought the Vicar wanted you back,’ Leila said, turning her face sideways to kiss him. ‘Particularly after yesterday.’

‘He does, but it might not be up to him if Bancroft finds against my father.’

‘Your dad never really took to me, did he?’ Leila said, unpeeling herself from Marchant’s arms to apply some mascara.

‘That’s not true.’

‘That time when we went to your home for lunch in the country, he was very ill at ease with me. Almost rude.’

‘He was wary of all my girlfriends, suspicious of women generally. Two boys, you see, no daughters. And a distant wife.’

‘Can’t say it runs in the family.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The Wariness of Women gene. I’m not sure he passed it on.’ She smiled at him and he knew she was right, standing there in the evening light. He had never felt less wary of anyone in his life.

8

It was a long-held custom that the first half of the Joint Intelligence Committee’s weekly meeting in the Cabinet Room at Downing Street was attended by senior officers from the American, Australian and Canadian intelligence services. The second half was only for the British. Marcus Fielding could barely wait for the foreign contingent to be shown the door, but for the next few minutes he would have to listen to James Spiro, the CIA’s London chief, who had announced, with his usual hard-man hyperbole, that he had some ‘weapons-grade HUMINT to bring to the party’. Fielding had already got the gist of it earlier that morning, thanks to one of several new listening devices installed at the recently opened American Embassy in Vauxhall (near Legoland), but he sat there, ramrod-straight, as if he was hearing it all for the first time.

‘We are now certain that Stephen Marchant travelled to Kerala and met up with Salim Dhar in jail,’ Spiro began, as ever liking the sound of his own voice. ‘I appreciate Dhar’s role in last year’s UK bombings is far from clear, but there is absolutely no doubt that he tried to bomb the hell out of our embassies in New Delhi and Islamabad. Ask the families of the fifteen dead US Marines.’

So far, nothing new, Fielding thought, looking around the coffin-shaped oak table. The usual mix of Whitehall suspects were in attendance, including the heads of MI5 and Cheltenham, as well as mandarins from various departments, all presided over by the chairman of the JIC, Sir David Chadwick, who was sitting at the far end, in front of the double windows which had buckled when the IRA lobbed a mortar bomb into the Downing Street rosebeds. Everyone had flung themselves on the floor that day, the Cabinet Secretary lying next to the Prime Minister.

If it happened again this morning, Fielding idly thought, Harriet Armstrong, Director General of MI5, would do her best to prostrate herself next to Spiro. She glanced tersely at Fielding, as if reading his mind. They had never liked each other, their relationship chilling even further when she had enlisted Spiro’s support to remove Stephen Marchant.

‘What we do now know, however, thanks to Harriet here, is that Dhar was behind Sunday’s foiled bombing of the London Marathon, an attack that I don’t need to remind you was targeted at our Ambassador to London.’

Fielding looked up. This had not been in the transcript he had read in the car coming over from Vauxhall. He glanced across at Armstrong, who was studiously avoiding his eye. It was a stitch-up. Until now, any connection between Dhar and the London Marathon had been purely circumstantial, based on the nature of the target and Dhar’s historical predilection for attacking Americans. If his involvement could now be proved, as Spiro claimed, it would cast Stephen Marchant and his son in a new and far more compromising light.

‘I’ll leave the domestic implications of this to the second half of your meeting, but clearly Dhar has just become a priority one target, and I’d be grateful if, on this occasion, the Service leaves him to us.’

‘Marcus?’ asked Chadwick, sounding as if Spiro had raised a mere technicality, rather than made it considerably more likely that the former Chief of MI6 had betrayed Queen and country. His clandestine meeting with Dhar had taken place two weeks before the attack on the American Embassy in Delhi.

‘Dhar is of great interest to the UK, too,’ Fielding said, buying time. ‘Given his–apparent–role in the attempted London Marathon attack, I would expect a joint operation at the very least.’

‘I’m sorry, Marcus, but this one just got personal,’ Spiro said. ‘Dhar’s problem is clearly with us: the embassy attacks last year, now our Ambassador to London.’

‘An attack which was foiled by one of our agents,’ Fielding replied.

‘With a little help from Colorado Springs, I gather,’ Spiro continued, turning to Chadwick. ‘Which brings me to my next point. Can we have a little chat with your suspended superhero?’

‘Daniel Marchant? That shouldn’t be a problem,’ Chadwick said. ‘Harriet?’

‘Marcus?’ Armstrong deflected the question.

‘Is he not with you?’ Chadwick asked.

‘Right now, we’re taking care of him,’ Fielding interrupted. ‘Given he’s still on our payroll.’

‘Well, Marcus, I’ll repeat my question to you,’ said Spiro. ‘Can we have a talk with Marchant Junior? Preferably when he’s not been on the sauce.’

‘If we’re working together on Dhar, I’m sure we can cooperate on Daniel Marchant,’ Fielding replied coolly.

Spiro turned towards Armstrong for support.

‘We’d clearly like to talk to Marchant again, too, in the light of Dhar’s role in the marathon,’ Armstrong obliged. ‘Perhaps we could take care of him?’

‘Our own debrief is still ongoing,’ Fielding said.

‘Shouldn’t that read “detox”?’ Spiro said, smiling around the table. Only Armstrong smiled back.

‘We will, of course, circulate our findings once we’re finished with him,’ Fielding said. He had always known that there was little he could do about Stephen Marchant, whose reputation was ultimately in other people’s hands, but he had hoped he could do something for his son. MI6 had fished Daniel Marchant out of the international pool of inebriated hacks, and turned him into one of the Service’s best officers. Fielding wasn’t going to let him go lightly, if only for his father’s sake. Marchant’s presence at the marathon, however, was beginning to look too much of a coincidence. He doubted whether Armstrong had any hard evidence–it was too soon–but the link with Dhar had been made, and would be duly recorded in the JIC’s minutes. In the light of his father’s meeting with Dhar, Daniel Marchant’s role looked less heroic by the minute.

After further curt exchanges and an offer from Chadwick to square Fielding and Spiro’s differences, the foreign contingent left the room, leaving the British to assess Spiro’s ‘weapons-grade HUMINT’.

‘Well gentlemen, Harriet, do we believe him?’ Chadwick began, looking around the room, still sounding unruffled.

‘There’s no reason for them to lie about Stephen Marchant,’ Armstrong said.

‘Unless they want to go after Dhar themselves,’ Fielding replied. ‘Until we see the evidence, we have no way of knowing whether Stephen Marchant did or did not meet Dhar.’

‘Let’s be quite clear about this,’ Chadwick said. ‘If they do hand over the evidence, hard proof that Marchant met Salim Dhar, we would have to pass it on to Bancroft. His report would then become an investigation into whether the former head of MI6 should be posthumously investigated for treason.’

‘The PM wouldn’t buy it,’ said Bruce Lockhart, the Prime Minister’s foreign adviser. Fielding got on with Lockhart, liked his bullish Fife manner. ‘I thought Bancroft was given this job to quieten things down, not stir them up.’

‘The Americans aren’t trying to make trouble,’ Armstrong said. ‘Quite reasonably, they want to stop Dhar attacking their assets and to establish why the Marchant family seem to be helping him.’

‘Helping him?’ Fielding interjected. ‘Let’s not get carried away here. Bancroft has so far found nothing to substantiate any suspicion that my predecessor was anything other than complacent. For the record, I happen to think the Americans are right: Stephen Marchant probably did meet up with Dhar. I’m just not sure why. Until we find out, it remains idle conjecture, and Bancroft shouldn’t touch it.’

‘So we leave Dhar to the Americans?’ asked Armstrong.

‘We need to find him, too, given that he was behind the attempted attack on the marathon,’ Fielding said, turning to Armstrong and adding quietly, ‘Nice of you to pool that one.’

‘I’d forgotten how much you liked to share information,’ Armstrong replied.

‘I think Marcus is right,’ Chadwick said. ‘We need to find Dhar.’ He had always found that steadfastly ignoring tension between departments seemed to reduce it. ‘Dhar targeted the London Marathon, Tower bloody Bridge, for God’s sake. If that’s not an attack on the fabric of this country I don’t know what is. And it’s also the only way we’ll ever draw a line under Stephen Marchant. If the two of them did meet, which seems likely, we need to find out why, and what was actually said.’

‘We’re sure there’s no record anywhere of Stephen Marchant or anyone else recruiting Dhar?’ Lockhart asked. ‘At this meeting or before? The PM wants specific reassurance on this point.’

‘We’ve been through all Marchant’s files many times,’ Fielding said. ‘Cross-referenced every database we have. Nothing. No one else in MI6 or MI5 has ever approached Dhar. We think the Indians once tried a deniable approach, but failed.’

Armstrong nodded her head in agreement, glancing at Fielding.

‘And what about his son?’ asked Chadwick. ‘Do we let the Americans talk to him? You can see it from their point of view: Stephen Marchant meets Dhar, Dhar bombs US embassies; Daniel Marchant meets Dhar’s running friend; Dhar’s friend tries to kill US Ambassador.’

‘And Marchant stops him,’ said Marcus. ‘That’s the point here.’

But he knew the point was lost.

9

Later that day, Fielding accepted Chadwick’s offer of a sharpener at the Travellers on Pall Mall. He was not a natural clubman, but in the past few years, as Stephen Marchant had begun to waver at the top, Fielding had been wined and dined by various senior Whitehall hands, including Chadwick, while his own suitability as Chief was assessed. He knew there was unease amongst the old guard that he was not married, but times were changing, and the general view was that the Vicar was celibate rather than gay. Fielding could live with that.

The Travellers used to double up as MI6’s staff bar, in the days when the Service was situated in Century House, its drab premises in Southwark. Since the move to Legoland, with its plush second-floor bar and terrace overlooking the Thames, where people could drink outside in the summer, the Travellers had become less of a draw for junior staff. But old habits died hard for senior officers, and Fielding acknowledged a couple of familiar faces as he took his seat in the panelled library.

‘I’m offering you a deal,’ Chadwick said, swirling his Talisker around the glass. He was one of the safest pairs of hands in Whitehall, brought in at the end of a successful but unstartling career to steady the intelligence ship after the fiasco of Marchant’s departure. Evidence, Fielding concluded, that mediocrity can take you surprisingly far in big organisations like the Civil Service.

‘The Americans have agreed to drop their investigation of any meeting between Dhar and Stephen, providing they can have access to Daniel Marchant and we leave Dhar to them.’

‘Access?’

‘They want to sweat him.’

‘Why?’

‘Come on, Marcus. I know he was one of your best, but it’s bloody odd he was there at the marathon. They think he might be able to tell them something about Dhar. And, to be honest, the idea of someone taking Marchant off our hands is quite appealing. We all know he’s been drinking too much. The last thing the PM needs right now is another renegade spy on the loose.’

Fielding thought about defending Daniel Marchant again. Perhaps it was the effect of his gin and lime, but he was no longer as troubled by Chadwick’s proposal as he might have been. A part of him resented having to protect Marchant any longer, given the headache his suspension had caused. Chadwick was right: Marchant had been the most promising case officer of his generation, just the sort of young blood the Service was trying to attract. But Fielding knew, too, that his suspension was entirely because of the accusations swirling around his father. And he needed those accusations to go away: they were continuing to cause too much damage to the Service. The sooner the Americans forgot about any meeting between the former Chief and Dhar, the better for everyone.

There was only one concern, and that was the ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques favoured by the CIA. The new President might have banned torture, but old habits die hard in Langley. Despite everything, Marchant was still one of his own, and right now he was fragile.

‘He mustn’t leave the country,’ Fielding said, finishing his gin. ‘And I want him back alive.’

10

Leila headed back to London that night, leaving Marchant to dwell on Fielding’s visit over a bottle of malt she had smuggled in with her. He knew he was drinking too much. The training runs with Leila, the impulsive decision to run the marathon, had been an attempt to impose some routine on his life, which had lost all shape since his father’s death. He had never been fitter than when he was working for MI6. The drinking dulled the pain of loss, but it also dragged him back to another life, to dissolute, carefree days at the Nairobi Press Club.

The first weeks of his suspension had been the toughest. In his sober hours, Marchant had thought only of the mole who had supposedly penetrated MI6. It was his way of grieving, channelling his anger. Rising at dawn, head bursting, he had paced the empty streets of Pimlico, holding the rumours about his father up to the early-morning light, looking at them from every possible angle. He would stand on Vauxhall Bridge, watching the barges pass below before turning to look up at Legoland and the buttressed windows of the Chief’s office. Had the whole thing been cooked up as a Machiavellian way of removing his father, or was there a genuine possibility that Al Qaeda had infiltrated MI6?

The terms of his suspension meant that he wasn’t allowed to step inside Legoland, or to talk with colleagues about work, or to travel overseas. All his cover passports had been seized. His mornings had been spent in internet cafés around Victoria station (he didn’t trust the computer at his flat on Denbigh Street), going over each of the attacks again and again, looking for something that might link a cell based in South India to anyone in MI6, a Legoland colleague with connections to the subcontinent.

Now, at last, he had that link, but it was between his own father and Salim Dhar. Never once had it crossed Marchant’s mind that his father had brought suspicion upon himself. Fielding was right: meeting Dhar privately was an irregular thing to have done. And Marchant knew, as Leila’s whisky burnt his throat, that he too would have to meet him, wherever he was. It was the only way to clear his father’s name. He needed to ask Dhar why the Chief of MI6 had run the risk of meeting with him. The consequences of such an encounter could prove equally disastrous for him, but the reality was that he didn’t have much to lose.

As he gazed out across the Wiltshire countryside towards the woods beyond the canal, a grey heron lifted itself heavily from the water and rose into the air. His father used to say that they were like B-52s, but then he had always had a thing about bombers. During the Cuban Missile Crisis he had driven down to Fairford and watched them standing on the end of the runway, engines running, waiting for the order.

Marchant remembered the morning his father had called him with the news that he was to step down as Chief. The power and authority had gone from his voice, as if he had been using a megaphone all his life and someone had suddenly switched it off. Marchant had taken the call at Heathrow airport, on his way back from Mogadishu to London for Christmas.

‘Have you cleared immigration?’ his father had asked, almost absent-mindedly.

‘I’m waiting for a taxi. Why? Is everything all right, Dad?’

‘Take the Underground as far as Hammersmith, then a minicab from that place on Fulham Palace Road we used to use. Ask for Tarlton. They’ll know.’

‘Dad, what is this? Is everything OK?’

‘I’ve been put out to pasture. Watch yourself.’

Marchant had immediately gone on his guard again, as if in a foreign airport. He moved swiftly down to the Underground, trying to work out the implications of their conversation, for his father, for him. He knew pressure had been building in recent weeks. There had been questions in the House about the incompetence of Britain’s intelligence services, aggressive newspaper leaders about the wave of attacks and what more should have been done to prevent them.

His father paid off the minicab in cash, and insisted on taking his son’s two bags. It was a cold December day, and the apple and cherry trees at the front of the house were laced with frozen cobwebs. A thin twist of smoke rose from the chimney. The house was in effect two Cotswold cottages knocked together, surrounded by lawns and a meandering drystone wall. It was a private location, half a mile out of Tarlton, a small hamlet near Cirencester. Marchant always felt strange when he was here. The house had been the only constant in his shifting childhood, a place where they came for brief respites from foreign postings, a home he had once shared with his brother. Its Englishness was overwhelming, not just because of its Cotswold prettiness, but because it had come to represent all that he missed about home: new-mown grass, autumn bonfires, orchards. And, of course, it had always disappointed, unable to live up to childhood dreams of Albion.

‘Good of you to come,’ his father said, walking through the back door in front of Marchant. ‘Mind if we go for a drive?’

Ten minutes later, they were speeding through the cold open countryside in his 1931 Lagonda, barely able to hear each other above the roar of the two-litre engine. Frost had sharpened the hedgerows, and the road was black with hidden ice. But Stephen Marchant didn’t seem to mind, wrapped up in a thick woollen scarf and gloves. Daniel sat next to him. He had forgotten how cold a car could feel.

‘Can’t trust the house,’ his father said, changing down the gears as they approached a junction. Home, Marchant knew, had been wired to a level of protection befitting the Chief’s weekend retreat. Now that security was working against him.

‘MI5?’ Marchant asked, the smell of musty canvas and hot oil taking him back to another distant part of his childhood. He and his father had always been close, both of them at ease in each other’s company, seldom needing to explain or open up. Even when Marchant had been expelled from school, his father hadn’t been angry, just annoyed that he had been caught.

‘I’m becoming a threat to national security,’ he shouted, releasing the brake lever on the side of the car and accelerating away towards Avening. Marchant hoped he would age as well as his father, whose silver hair was blowing about in the strong breeze. He had thick, fair eyebrows and a compact, square face, like a barn owl, Marchant always thought. And then there were those famous family ears, which had only got longer, more distinguished, with age. Tribal lobes, his father had once called them.

After twenty minutes, Stephen Marchant pulled the Lagonda up in a lay-by at the top of Minchinhampton Common, on the brow of a hill looking west towards Bristol. He switched off the engine and they sat there for a few minutes in silence, absorbing the timeless landscape as steam rose off the bonnet. Below them the Cotswolds stretched out in a necklace of icy hamlets, threaded with quiet country lanes, each with its handsome manor house, enduring church, frosted green. Thin drifts of snow covered the shaded corners of fields.

‘I look at this and wonder out of which pore of our beautiful country it’s seeping from,’ Stephen Marchant began. A bead of moisture had gathered on the end of his cold nose. ‘Do you know what they said?’

‘Tell me,’ Marchant replied, noticing the emotion that had slipped into his father’s voice.

‘That they can no longer be sure my interests coincide with the country’s.’ He paused, struggling to keep control. ‘Thirty years’ service and I have to listen to a group of jumped-up pricks in shorts telling me that.’

‘And it’s all coming from the DG?’ Daniel asked.

‘Of course. Apparently I’m obsessed with the enemy within, and have taken my eye off the greater threat.’

‘Dinner at the Travellers didn’t do the trick, then.’

‘God, no. Total disaster. She’s not like the women you and I know, Daniel. This one’s got balls, and I’ve been shafted, well and truly. They don’t want me back in the office after Christmas. I’m afraid they’re also talking about suspending you. Sins of the father. I’m so sorry.’ Marchant turned away, his mind racing instinctively to calculate the threat, assess the damage. He hadn’t expected it to affect him. Then he stopped, guilty that he had thought of himself rather than his father, whose career was in tatters after half a lifetime of service.

‘Don’t worry about me. You know I’ve never asked for help. I can look after myself.’

‘The Service can’t. If MI5 gets its way, Legoland will be sold off to the Japanese tomorrow and turned into a Thameside hotel. Come on, the idiots have arrived.’

Marchant looked behind them, and saw a white saloon car driving slowly up the hill.

‘Do you know the best way to shake off a tail?’ his father asked, firing up the Lagonda again in a plume of blue smoke. ‘Better than anything they might have taught you at the Fort?’

‘What?’ Marchant said, watching the car in the mirror as it slowed to a crawl four hundred yards behind them, its exhaust loitering in the cold air.

‘Drive faster than them.’

11

The gang of Year Five boys in the corner of the playing field knew all of the helicopters that flew through the Wiltshire airspace above their primary school: Chinooks were their favourite, flying low down the route of the canal, the sound of their twin blades reverberating like thunder in their tender eardrums. They knew their Merlins from their Sikorski Pumas, and barely commented these days on the black-and-yellow Wiltshire Police helicopter, which flew in every Friday for low-level practice over Bedwyn Brail. So when the boys saw the MD Explorer coming in towards the village from Hungerford, it was such a familiar sight that nobody noticed that it was a Thursday, not a Friday.

Half a mile south-west of the school, Daniel Marchant crossed over the two bridges and turned right onto the towpath of the Kennet canal. He smiled to himself as he remembered how his father had dropped down from Minchinhampton at more than 90 mph, the Lagonda’s low chassis threatening to shake itself apart as they raced through the frosty hedgerows without any real brakes, until their pursuers had finally given up.

Marchant wasn’t sure if he could run faster than his minders, but he wanted to find out. The marathon was five days ago, and this was his first run since he had arrived at the safe house. He knew he couldn’t keep going like this: the drinking followed by the guilt-runs. One of them had to prevail. The babysitters from MI6 had been replaced the previous evening by heavier-built types from MI5. Relations chilled accordingly, and conversation had all but dried up.

Marchant wasn’t unduly worried by the change of guard. At worst, he assumed that he might be subjected to Wylie again, the man who had interviewed him at Thames House. More worrying was the silence from Leila. He had no means of contacting anyone in the outside world. There was no phone at the house, no computer or internet connection, and the babysitters kept their mobiles strapped to their expansive waistlines.

His plan this morning, as he gradually increased his stride, was to stretch the two from MI5, see how long they could cope with a six-minute-mile pace. They hadn’t been keen on the idea of a run, but relented when Marchant agreed to show them on a map his exact route to the nearby village of Wilton and back. They preferred a shorter loop, along the canal towpath, up through the woodland known as Bedwyn Brail, and then back along the lanes into the village. Marchant agreed, tickled by the idea of pushing these two to their limits. The fitness levels in MI6 had always been greater than those of MI5, whose gym was no match for the one that glistened in the basement of Legoland, out of sight of Whitehall’s bean counters.

But it was not proving nearly as entertaining as Marchant had hoped. His whole body hurt like hell. And both men from MI5 responded with unnerving ease to his initial kick, and he soon found them on his shoulder.

‘Don’t be a muppet, marathon man,’ one of them said, barely out of breath.

Without answering, Marchant kicked again, turning off the towpath, as agreed, and carving out a diagonal route up the hillside towards the Brail. Near the top of the hill, he glanced over his shoulder and saw the lead minder floundering at the bottom of the slope. It looked as if he had slipped. Exhilarated to be alone for the first time since Sunday, Marchant upped his pace again.

It was as he crested the hill that he became aware of the black MD Explorer hovering in the field behind him, to his left. He slowed a little, taking in the scene, assessing the situation. His first thought, as he read the yellow police lettering on the side of the helicopter, was that he had stumbled on an incident of some kind. But seconds later, as his two minders drew level, the helicopter was no longer hovering, but tracking him across the field.

Marchant looked out across the stretch of farmland in front of him. It was at least two hundred yards to the woods on the far side, but he thought he could make it to the safety of the trees if he ran hard. He glanced above him and saw the face of the pilot in his helmet and visor, looking down at him with wasp-eyed indifference. At the same moment, he felt a minder on his shoulder and shrugged him off. The man fell away, swearing as he stumbled, but before Marchant could accelerate, the other minder was on his back, dragging him down.

They seemed to slow as they fell, Marchant rolling the man over so that they hit the ground with him on top. All around them, the flattened grass danced in the helicopter’s downdraft. He grabbed the man by his hair and pushed his face hard into a flintstone lying in the earth. For a moment there was stillness. Marchant stood up and started to run, aware of the first man coming up behind him, the helicopter above. The woods suddenly seemed a mile away.

Twenty yards from the trees, Marchant began to believe that he could make it. Once he was inside the Brail, the helicopter would be useless, providing he kept to the cover of the trees. But he still had the man on his right. Five yards short of the trees, he saw a branch on the ground, heavy with the rain of winter. He veered off his path and picked it up, arcing the sodden log behind him in the same movement. As it collided with the side of the man’s face, knocking him backwards, the blades above him seemed to grow louder, roaring their disapproval. Marchant sprinted into the dark woods, sidestepping through the trees like a street thief eluding his pursuers.

He had run barely thirty yards when the woods opened up into a small clearing. The helicopter swooped low overhead, touching down on the patch of grass in front of him long enough for two more men to jump out. Tired now, Marchant turned and headed back into the woods, but he was soon being dragged towards the helicopter, the smell of aviation fuel filling the air.

Marchant calculated that he had been in the air for fifteen minutes before the helicopter touched down, which made Fairford the most likely airfield. It was run by the Americans, who had spent $90 million extending the main runway for its B-2 Spirit Stealth bombers and the Space Shuttle. He suspected he would be travelling in something smaller. He couldn’t confirm which airfield it was for himself because of the hood over his head, and he couldn’t hear any cockpit talk because a pair of headphones had been slipped over the hood. His hands had been tied tightly behind his back, and his feet were bound together too. But he wasn’t in any real discomfort, not yet.

Mentally, he was as together as anyone could be who knew he was in the process of being extraordinarily renditioned by the CIA. It was the only logical reading of the situation he found himself in, given that it was unlikely MI5 or even MI6 would use such extreme methods on one of their own. During his short flight he had concluded that Fielding, for reasons as yet unclear, must have agreed to hand over the keys of the Wiltshire safe house to MI5, who had duly allowed the Americans to remove him for their own questioning. What made his stomach tighten now, as he lay on the cold metal floor of the stationary helicopter, was the thought of the physical and mental pain that lay ahead.

12

The undisputed waterboarding world champion was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Marchant knew this thanks to a flippant email that had leaked its way from Langley to Legoland. The architect of 9/11, the Bali nightclub bombings and a thwarted attack on Canary Wharf, ‘KSM’ (as the CIA called him) deserved some silverware for his efforts, but instead Al Qaeda’s number three had to make do with grudging respect from his interrogators. Two minutes thirty seconds–there were no officials, but that was the time clocked when he was waterboarded in early March 2003. At two minutes thirty-one seconds he broke, finally believing that he was about to drown. He screamed like a baby and filled his diaper. As the email concluded: the smell of victory is the whiff of excrement.

Marchant knew everything there was to know about waterboarding, a method of interrogation that had been favoured by the Gestapo and, thanks to the CIA, had been enjoying a revival in recent years, until the new President put a stop to it. The sensation of water being poured onto his mouth and nose convinced the victim that he was about to drown, triggering an immediate, involuntary gagging response. Because the feet were raised higher than the head, however, water did not flood the lungs, thereby avoiding death and allowing governments to categorise it as an enhanced interrogation technique rather than torture.

Marchant knew all about the three different levels, the same unrelenting message that each sends to the brain, the convenient absence of physical marks, the acute mental trauma that can be triggered for years afterwards: by taking a shower, washing up, watering the windowbox.

What his interrogators didn’t know was that Marchant had broken KSM’s record during his survival training course at the Fort. It wasn’t official, because Marchant had been aware, at least before the water started flowing, that it was an exercise. KSM had thought he was about die. But two minutes fifty seconds was still a record of sorts, good enough to make him the toast of the Fort. As Marchant was told afterwards, no CIA agent who had tested the technique on himself had lasted more than fourteen seconds.

Marchant liked to joke that his ability to endure waterboarding was honed at birth–he was born underwater. His mother had told him that he came out with his eyes open, looking around like a startled carp. Others, like Leila, said it was his Indian childhood: a case of Yogic mind over matter. As he lay in the dark now, his tightly bound feet raised above his hooded head on a cold metal table, he tried to recall the banter in the Portsmouth pub afterwards: his voice sounding funny because of the water still blocking his nose; Leila’s tenderness beneath the bravura; her wet-mouthed kiss that he thought would asphyxiate him.

He suspected he was in Poland, or maybe Romania. The CIA had been ordered to shut down its network of black sites, but Langley was in no rush. It knew the bureaucrats would struggle to verify the closure of facilities that had never officially existed. After the helicopter had touched down, he had been escorted, still blindfolded, across the tarmac to another plane, a Gulfstream V, he guessed. Dubbed the Guantanamo Bay Express by enemy combatants, his flight had lasted two hours, although for Marchant, travelling in detainee class (complimentary boilersuit and adult nappies), it had felt like a lifetime.

He heard the two men enter his cell, closing the door behind them. Waterboarding was just a trick of the mind, he told himself, involuntarily flexing his fingers. They said nothing as they checked his wrists, bound tightly in shackles by his side, and pulled the cotton hood further down over his head. In a moment they would pour water continually over his porous hood.

When the water came, sooner than he expected, Marchant instinctively tried to turn his head away, but the man on his left held his jaw firmly while the other poured water onto his face, and then over his chest and legs, soaking his boilersuit. He could feel the panic rising. There was his twin brother, lying at the bottom of the pool in Delhi, staring up at him through the clear water. He screamed for the ayah, jumped in and tried to grab his brother’s arm. Sebastian, barely six years old, stared back at him, his hair floating like a rockpool anemone, unaware that he was about to drown.

The flow of water was constant, Marchant told himself, struggling to control his breathing. That suggested that they were using a hose rather than a watering can, the preferred method at the Fort. He screamed again, at his interrogators, at his mother, who had come running out from the house, but his cries were muffled by the damp cotton hood pressing down against his face. He could feel the water starting to seep through, running up his nose and into his mouth. It was warm, just as the training manual stipulated. This was an exercise, he told himself: they weren’t going to kill him. The new President wouldn’t allow it.

‘Where’s Salim Dhar?’ one of the Americans shouted, twisting Marchant’s jaw violently towards him. Marchant was shocked by how young the voice–Midwest–sounded. ‘Tell us where he is and your brother will live.’

Marchant said nothing, waiting for Sebastian to start breathing, watching his mother bent over the tiny body. ‘Is he OK?’ he begged her. ‘Is Sebbie going to be OK?’

His interrogator held the hose closer to his mouth. ‘Where’s Salim Dhar?’ he repeated.

Why were they asking him? He wasn’t his father. The water started to pour in through the cotton hood. Marchant kept his lips pressed tightly together, breathing in slowly through his nose, but that was what he was meant to do: the water flooded up both nostrils. His lungs were bursting, desperate now for air. He tried twisting his head away, then he saw Sebastian spluttering back to life, vomiting the pool water, his tiny chest convulsing, coughing into his mother’s perfumed embrace.

Marchant remembered what his trainer had told him: ‘Your interrogator’s greatest fear is that you might die on the board before you sing. Hold on to that. It’s the only power you have over him.’ He clutched this thought close to him as he lay still, feeling the water rise up through his nose and down into the back of his throat. The gag reflex kicked in as the water tumbled over his epiglottis. He knew it would sound as if he was choking. His interrogators pulled off his hood just as he vomited, turning away to conceal their faces. They cursed him: round one was his.

Waterboarding at level two required one airway to be sealed off. The taller of the Americans handed him a pair of tight swimming goggles and ordered him to put them on, all the time shielding his face. They must be embarrassed to be doing this to one of their own, Marchant thought. What about the real enemies? The West had enough of those without having to do this to each other.

The goggle lenses had been painted black, and he found the darkness a relief. The building they were in, wherever it was, was inhospitable, anonymous. He had glimpsed four dirty white plaster walls, a low ceiling, with some sort of crude plumbing running down one corner. Above the door was a small, reinforced aperture. The room’s ordinariness made Marchant feel alone, vulnerable, accentuating his sense that he could be anywhere in the world. His two interrogators were wearing regulation army fatigues, but the brightness of his own orange jumpsuit had surprised him.

He closed his eyes behind the goggles, but before he could seek solace in the blackness a piece of cloth was pushed into his mouth as far in as it could go. Marchant gagged as the cloth touched his epiglottis. The American, satisfied that the material was in place, pushed it in still further, working the cloth in a circular motion against the back of Marchant’s throat, swearing at him all the time in his young voice. Marchant gagged again, and for the first time he thought he was going to die.

Instead, he forced himself to remember how his instructor had told them that there were only two types of people who could control the gag reflex: sword swallowers and deep-throat hookers. As Marchant gagged again, his stomach contorting, lifting the small of his back off the metal table, the hose was on him, more pressure this time, the water colder. Marchant could feel the cloth swell with water, pushing against the sides, the roof, the back of his mouth. He instinctively tried to breathe through his nose, only for his nostrils to fill up with water again. Panic gathered in the wings of his consciousness. He thought of his father polishing the Lagonda in the bright morning sunshine. As a child, he used to stand there watching him, one leg crossed in front of the over, a grubby hand leaning against the glistening passenger door.

‘Get your filthy little hands off my car!’ a voice shouted. ‘Where’s Salim Dhar?’

Marchant could feel round two slipping away from him. His nausea was now mixed with an intense claustrophobia, a sense that he would never be able to escape the cloth expanding down his throat, the water, the permanent imminence of drowning. He focused on his interrogator’s questions, the reasoning behind them. There hadn’t been a mistake. They were asking him about Dhar because somebody must have linked him to the marathon attack. ‘Tell us about your fucking running buddy,’ the shorter one was shouting, in between shoving the cloth deeper still into his mouth. ‘How long did he know Dhar?’

The secret of surviving waterboarding, Marchant told himself again, trying to work through the consequences of Dhar’s apparent role in the marathon attack, was not to fall for it. Because that’s all waterboarding was: a trick of the mind. The body wasn’t about to drown, the brain just thought it was. At the Fort, he was the only one who had remained cognisant of the training element. Now, as his entire upper body twisted with each new retch, he reminded himself that he was being interrogated in an equally safe context: the CIA wouldn’t kill an MI6 officer, even if he was the suspended son of a suspected traitor. The struggle happening now was taking place in his head, not in the room: his amygdalae, the oldest, most primal parts of the human brain, were in a desperate dialogue with his more reasoning solar cortex. That’s what the psychiatrist at the Fort had said, wasn’t it?

Marchant’s resilience was taking the two Americans to the limits of their trained self-control, and they were now swearing repeatedly at him. One of them finally flipped, ripped Marchant’s goggles off and grabbed him by the back of his neck, lifting his head off the table. For a moment they looked into each other’s eyes. Marchant saw more fear than he felt in the young CIA agent’s face. He pulled the gag out of Marchant’s mouth. Round two was also his.

‘He’s unreal, Joey. The guy’s unreal,’ the American said, tossing Marchant away, unable to cope with the eye contact. Marchant savoured the pain as the back of his head hit the table. He hung on to its sharpness, juggled with it in his hands as if it were a hot coal: it was real, physical; it would leave a mark, provide evidence that this had happened, and wasn’t just taking place in his head. He turned to one side, spat out some phlegm and then managed a desperate cough of a laugh.

‘Any chance of a drink of water?’ he asked. ‘My throat’s a little dry.’

Marchant knew it was essential to maintain the pretence, however false, of being in mental control, without pushing his interrogators so far that they killed him out of frustration. He also needed to keep them interested: a balaclava-clad face had just appeared behind the bars of the small opening above the door, disappearing as soon as Marchant had seen it. He managed a smile for his interrogators, knowing the consequences, and hung out his tongue like a panting dog.

‘You got something to say, save it for St Peter,’ Joey said, taking over from his colleague. He turned away, as if he had finished for the day, but Marchant knew he wasn’t done yet. Joey swung his arm in a long loop, smacking the back of his hand across Marchant’s face.

At the Fort, they had used clingfilm for level three, wrapped tightly around the face, making it impossible to breathe through the nose or mouth. A hole was cut for the lips, only it wasn’t for breathing, but as a way to fill the victim with water. This approach, like waterboarding itself, was nothing new. They liked to cut straight to level three in the seventeenth century, swelling the bodies of victims to three times their normal size–without the clingfilm, of course.

But Marchant never reached level three.

13

Nine hundred miles west of Poland, Marcus Fielding took a deep breath and plunged into the seventy-four-degree water, his dive long and shallow. The pool in the basement of Legoland had been a source of contention in Whitehall when the headquarters was built, adding to the overspend by several million, like the adjacent gym, but it was worth every penny, Fielding thought, as he surfaced halfway down the pool, jetting water from his mouth. He never swam with his glasses, leaving them on his neatly folded towel, next to his phone. Blurred vision, focused mind, he found, and he did his best thinking in the pool.

The MI5 document which had crossed his desk at lunchtime made it clear that, much as he had suspected, Dhar’s role in the attempted marathon bombing was far from certain. There was a South Indian element on the ground, as there had been in the previous year’s attacks, but there was no direct evidence to link the planning of the bombing to Dhar, and there were any number of other suspects in the frame.

Reports coming in from Arabic specialists at GCHQ’s sub-station in Scarborough were throwing up possible links to the wider Gulf region. In short, there was still not enough to nail the attack on Dhar, despite the South Indian connection and Dhar’s anti-American crusade. Harriet Armstrong had been flying a kite, hoping to please the Americans. Fielding had no intention of sharing this information with anyone, not yet. It made him feel better about Daniel Marchant, but guilty that he had handed him over so casually to Spiro.

Staff knew not to disturb their Chief during his swim, taken without exception at 3 p.m. every afternoon, when the pool was clear of the workers who used it during their lunch break. (Fielding didn’t realise it was actually empty because nobody wanted to be in the pool while the Chief was steaming up and down the fast lane.) Now, though, his phone was ringing with an internal tone. He headed for the steps and took the call, trusting that it was important. It was from Fielding’s deputy, Ian Denton, a former head of the East European Controllerate and one of his closest allies. He wanted an urgent meeting. Dripping with water, Fielding told him to come up to his office and wait. He knew Denton tried to deal with as much of the Chief’s day-to-day business as he could, never bothering him unless there was a serious problem.

‘We’ve picked up an undeclared flight into Szymany, northeastern Poland,’ Denton said ten minutes later, as Fielding looked out of his window at a solitary sandpiper bobbing in the Thames mud. Denton had spent much of his early career behind the Iron Curtain, where the fear of being overheard had become an obsession for Western case officers. As a result, his voice was so quiet that it was a struggle for anyone to hear him. But Fielding’s ear was fine-tuned, and he prided himself on never once having asked Denton to speak up.

‘Cheltenham’s analysed the data strings,’ Denton continued in a whisper. ‘ADEP was Fairford, and multiple onward dummy flight plans were filed. It was operating under special status.’

‘There’s a surprise,’ Fielding said, his back still to Denton, who was wrong-footed by the Chief’s apparent lack of concern. Denton–northern grammar school, Oxford, keen on carp fishing–began to regret his request for a meeting. All undeclared CIA flights anywhere in Europe had become a priority for MI6, following a personal request from the Prime Minister, who wasn’t as relaxed about them as his predecessor.

‘What’s strange is that it wasn’t picked up here,’ Denton continued. ‘Usually MI5…’

‘I know.’ Fielding turned and fixed Denton with a wry smile. ‘Leave it with me, Ian. Thanks.’

Denton was so thorough, Fielding thought, as he left the office. He liked that in an officer. His big break had come in the 1980s in Bucharest where, as a junior officer working under diplomatic cover, he had spent every weekend fishing for carp and bream at a lake on the edge of the capital. Nobody knew why until, nine months later, he hooked the head of Romania’s secret police, a fellow carper.

Fielding smiled. Maybe that was why Denton whispered: he didn’t want to scare the fish. Below him a yellow London Duck emerged out of the Thames, water pouring off it, and drove up the slipway that ran alongside Legoland’s outer perimeter wall. It was the only place the Second World War amphibious vehicle could get in and out of the water. Fielding had always wondered what the captain told the tourists as they passed by Legoland. One day he would take a ride and find out. Denton could come along too, with his rod.

Harriet Armstrong took Fielding’s call in her official Range Rover, on her way to spend the weekend at Chequers. Fielding had heard about the invitation, one which had yet to be extended to him.

‘Hope I haven’t disturbed you,’ Fielding began, failing to sound sincere.

‘If you’re calling about Marchant, I can’t help you,’ she said brusquely. ‘We passed him on to Spiro.’

‘I know. And I thought you should know, given you’re seeing him this weekend, that we’ll be filing a report to the PM on an undeclared CIA flight which left Fairford for Poland this morning. I seem to remember he was quite keen to know about such flights.’

‘So keen, he signed this one off himself,’ Armstrong said. ‘I’ll tell him you called.’

Fielding briefly considered phoning Sir David Chadwick, to remind him of their agreement at the Travellers that Marchant wasn’t to leave the country, but other measures were now needed. Armstrong’s increasingly close relationships with Spiro and the PM were beginning to irritate him. She might have removed Stephen Marchant from his post, but he had no intention of giving her the same satisfaction as far as he himself was concerned.

He called through to his secretary. ‘Get me Brigadier Borowski of the AW in Warsaw on the line.’

14

Leila turned the key in the front door and slipped into Marchant’s basement flat in Pimlico, across the river from Legoland. She was shocked by its untidiness, the unmade bed, clothes strewn across the floor, bottles spilling out of the wastepaper basket under his desk. Had the place been searched? She used to be a regular visitor here, and it had always been kept immaculate, almost too tidy. When he was suspended they had stopped staying over at each other’s places, except for the night before the marathon, when she had insisted he stayed. Marchant was determined to limit the fallout from his father’s departure to himself and no one else. They had stolen the occasional night away in the country, but Marchant had found it hard to relax. Until he had cleared his father’s name, he couldn’t be himself.

That self she had fallen for in those early days smiled up at her now from the photo of their final day at the Fort, propped up on his desk in the corner of the room. A group of them were in the SOE memorial room, posing in front of the wall where previous members of the Service had been honoured. Marchant’s arm was slung casually around her shoulders, like a college friend, giving no clue that they had slept together for the first time the night before. Already they were learning to deceive in love, mixing up their jobs with their private lives, just as Marchant had feared.

Next to the group photo was a picture of his father up a ladder in the orchard at Tarlton, in happier, idyllic Cotswold days. An eight-year-old Marchant in shorts was lying in a hammock strung between two apple trees, grinning confidently up at the camera. His twin brother, Sebastian, was lying next to him. They weren’t identical, but they shared the same smile. Sebastian’s face was turned towards his mother, who was standing at the bottom of the ladder, a basket of fruit in her arms. She was strikingly beautiful, confident, at ease with motherhood.

Marchant had only talked about the crash once, after they had both nearly drowned during survival training at the Fort. Sebbie, as Marchant sometimes called him, must have died a few weeks after the photo had been taken, in a traffic accident when they had returned to Delhi at the end of the English summer. Marchant had been in the jeep too when it collided head-on with a government bus, but he and his mother had survived unscathed.

Marchant’s family had stayed on in Delhi until the end of his father’s tour, which surprised colleagues. Later, he told Marchant that he hadn’t wanted to return home immediately because his family would have spent the rest of their lives hating India, and he couldn’t countenance that.

Marchant’s seemingly easy manner, Leila knew, dated back to those Delhi days. Everyone who met him now thought he was relaxed, charming, sociable (his ayah had described him as ‘easy go happy’), but it was his way of protecting a place he wasn’t prepared to go with anyone: a place where he was still an eight-year-old child, staring at his brother beside the wreckage of the car, watching the bus driver flee from the scene; a place she knew he had revisited when his father had died. His father’s death had meant that Marchant was the only one left of his family. She sometimes felt like that too, her mother as good as dead to her, her father no longer alive. He had never been a happy presence in her childhood, either away on work or distant when he was at home, drinking too much at night and showing her mother too little respect.

Leila went over to Marchant’s unmade bed and lay on it, turning her head to one side and inhaling his faint aroma on the pillow. He would try to make contact, let her know he was all right. The confinement of a safe house would drive him crazy, but he was better off there than in the outside world. He was now a marked man, wanted not just by MI5 but by whoever had sent Pradeep.

Sometimes, when they lay side by side after making love, in those brief moments before they headed back to the airport and their separate lives, they had talked about where in the world they would most like to be. Marchant always spoke first, about dreams of the Thar Desert, the African savannah–rangy, open spaces, wide skies–or sometimes the shady apple orchards of Tarlton in a Cotswold summer. When it was her turn, she would fall quiet, the memory of her one, all too brief visit to Iran silencing her with its beauty, before she began to speak of the bare mountains that circled Ghamsar’s fertile plains, the scent of rose water, the village workers with cloth bags full of fragrant petals hanging from their necks.

Her mother had painted other pictures of Iran when she was younger, keen to keep the country alive for her daughter. She told her bedtime stories of Isfahan, homilies from the poems of Hafez, and, when she was older, tales of drinking Turkish tea in Tehran’s cafés with elderly academics in berets and black suits. But it was always to Ghamsar’s rose gardens that Leila’s thoughts returned, an aching glimpse of what might have been.

Leila must have been asleep for at least an hour when her phone woke her. For a moment she expected it to be her mother, but it was Paul Myers, on an encrypted call from his mobile.

‘The Americans have got Daniel,’ he said.

‘What?’ Leila sat up on Marchant’s bed, barely awake, confused by her surroundings and now by the sound of Myers’s voice.

‘I can’t say any more,’ he said, choosing his words carefully. Even on an encrypted call, he knew key words might alert someone. ‘Seems he left on a flight to Poland.’

‘When?’ Fielding must have given in to the Americans, been persuaded of a link between the Marchant family and Dhar.

‘Hard to say. Last couple of days?’ Myers paused. ‘It’s not exactly a sight-seeing trip.’

‘No.’

‘He’ll cope, right?’ Myers said, surprising Leila with his sudden, urgent concern. ‘He’s tough as they come, doesn’t everyone say that?’

Leila thought back to that night at the Fort when he sat beside her in the pub, still shaking, barely able to talk after his waterboarding training.

‘I’ll call you.’ She paused. ‘Paul?’

‘Yes?’

‘Thanks.’

Leila hung up and looked around the messed-up room. Her eyes rested on the picture of her and Marchant at the Fort. She walked over to the desk, knowing that she might never see him again. If Fielding had let him go, the Americans could hold him for years. She felt her eyes moisten. Leaning forward, she placed the photograph face down on the desk and slipped quietly out of the flat.

15

For a moment, Marchant wasn’t sure if the explosion was part of the interrogation. His face had just been wrapped in clingfilm, so tightly that it had flattened his nose to one side, when he felt a loud blast to the left of him, followed by shouting in Polish. He couldn’t see anything, because he was wearing the blackened goggles again, but he could hear the Americans choking. Moments later he was being unstrapped from the table, his shackles removed with bolt cutters, and the goggles and clingfilm removed.

He counted six men in the room, wearing gasmasks and army uniforms, all of them with semi-automatic weapons. One of them strapped a mask onto Marchant just as he was starting to taste the rancid tang of teargas, while another checked the two Americans for vital signs. Then he was bundled out of the room and into the back of a waiting black van.

‘Hugo Prentice,’ said a weatherbeaten man sitting opposite him. ‘Warsaw station. Worked with your father in Delhi. Fielding sends his love, apologises for the slap and tickle.’

Fielding glanced at his watch, added an hour for Poland, and wondered how long it would be before Spiro was on the phone. Give him half an hour, he thought, looking at the files spread across his desk. HR had printed out the most recent employment profiles of Leila, Daniel and Stephen Marchant, and he had also requested the South Asia Controllerate’s dossier on Salim Dhar. He glanced down the opening page, marked ‘Confidential, For UK Eyes Only’, and thought, not for the first time, that he was missing something, a piece of information that linked Dhar with his predecessor as head of MI6. What was it that had made Stephen Marchant fly five thousand miles to visit him in Southern India?

Dhar, according to the file, had been born Jaishankar Menon, to a middle-class Hindu couple in Delhi on 12 November 1980. His father worked at the British High Commission as an administrative officer. Shortly before Dhar was born his contract was terminated, but he soon picked up a similar job at the US Embassy. Dhar later attended the American School in Delhi–s someone had handwritten ‘employment perk?’ in the file, below another mark that said ‘bullied?’–but left at sixteen.

The next time Dhar showed up, two years later, he was in Kashmir, where the police arrested him for trying to blow up an army base. His charge sheet listed him as ‘Salim Dhar’. Somewhere between Bangalore and Srinigar, he had converted to Islam and become radicalised, focusing his hatred of the West on America.

At this point, RAW, India’s Research and Analysis Wing, had stepped in and tried briefly to recruit him, sensing an opportunity to play him back into the Kashmiri separatist movement. But Dhar was having none of it. In another report, sent over from RAW as part of Bancroft’s investigation into Stephen Marchant, it was concluded that Salim Dhar was ‘utterly unpersuadable’ and ‘totally unsuitable’ for recruitment. His commitment to the establishment of an Islamic caliphate, starting with the reunification of Kashmir and culminating in the destruction of America, was absolute. A year later, he escaped from jail and went to ground in Pakistan, later resurfacing in Afghanistan.

There was only one thing that caught Fielding’s eye: in the psychological profile of Dhar, attention had been drawn to the poor relationship he had with his father, who unlike his son loved all things American, and hoped one day to emigrate to New York. It was cited as a possible reason Dhar had left school, and Delhi. If Stephen Marchant had tried to recruit Dhar, for whatever reason, had he held some information on Dhar’s father? It was the one possible point of leverage Fielding could find in the file. Salim Dhar appeared to have led a clean life, his only points of conflict inspired by ideology rather than anything more basic. No women, drinking, stealing, corruption–nothing to blackmail him with.

In Fielding’s mind, Stephen Marchant’s tenure in Delhi had been in the late 1970s, while Jimmy Carter had been in the White House. It was there, in the aftermath of ‘Smiling Buddha’, India’s first nuclear test, that Marchant had made a name for himself. Few people in the Service hadn’t heard of him. Partly that was because of his audacious recruitment of a senior player at the Russian Embassy in Delhi, who rose to great heights within the KGB when he returned to Dzerzhinsky Square, but also because of the family tragedy that had engulfed him.

Fielding reopened Marchant’s file and looked through his postings. As he suspected, Marchant had arrived in India in August 1977, as a case officer, moving back to Britain in July 1980 for the birth of his twins (his wife had endured a difficult pregnancy and spent much of it in London, avoiding Delhi’s oppressive heat). But Marchant had returned to India five years later, this time as station head and with his young family in tow. Then, in 1988, disaster had struck when Sebastian was killed in a car accident.

Fielding recalled it all more clearly now. Everyone in the Service had felt wretched about Marchant’s loss, the subsequent deterioration in his wife’s mental health, and his stoic refusal to leave Delhi until his tour of duty was over.

Fielding turned to Dhar’s early life again, checking the dates of his father’s employment at the British High Commission in Delhi. He had started in January 1980, which meant that Marchant and Dhar’s father had overlapped for six months. Delhi was a big mission, second only to the British Embassy in Washington, but there was a chance the two might have come into contact with each other. It wasn’t much to go on, but Fielding knew it was something. He picked up the phone and asked for Ian Denton.

16

After a bone-breaking, hundred-mile drive through the Polish countryside, Marchant found himself in the bar of the brand new British Embassy in Warsaw with a glass of Tyskie beer in his hand. He had been unable to speak for most of the journey, retching from the water still in his system and the potholed roads, drifting in and out of sleep. But he did register Prentice explaining that his interrogation had taken place at Stare Kiejkuty, a former outpost of the SS’s intelligence wing during the Second World War.

Fifteen minutes from Szymany airport, the site had subsequently been used by the Soviet Army, when Brezhnev was planning to crush the Prague Spring. More recently it had been occupied by a secret division of the Wojskowe Słužby Informacyjne, Poland’s military intelligence service, who were more than happy to oblige the CIA’s request for a secure facility in which to interrogate their High Value Detainees–in return for cash, of course. It was a canny, if ironic, choice by the Americans, Prentice had explained. The WSI wasn’t subject to the same levels of public scrutiny as civilian agencies such as the new Agencja Wywiadu, and its officials, many of whom were survivors from the old communist era, could claim protection under NATO because of their military status.

‘You’re in good company–Stare Kiejkuty boasts some fine alumni,’ Prentice had added. ‘It’s where they dunked KSM in 2003.’

The dank cell where Marchant had been waterboarded couldn’t have been more different from the airy, glass and steel edifice he now found himself in. He knew that the sleek new building was a blueprint for British embassies of the future. Delayed and redesigned after the bombing of the consulate in Istanbul, it remained accessible to the public but was now built to withstand a major terrorist attack. It also incorporated a security feature required of all new Foreign Office buildings. In the event of a physical assault, an ‘onion’ layering of doors and walls protecting an inner sanctum that should take at least forty minutes to penetrate would allow sensitive documents to be shredded and hard drives wiped.

The bar was empty except for Marchant and Prentice and a couple of local embassy staff. They weren’t sure what to make of the guest who talked strangely through his nose, and had left a pair of king-size, water-soaked nappies in the wastepaper basket of his guest room.

‘Come, we need to have a proper chat,’ Prentice said, stubbing out his Marlboro cigarette. Marchant followed him through the main atrium entrance of the embassy and down a series of pristine white corridors. ‘This place has just been swept, but we should still use the safe-talk room,’ Prentice said. All embassies had one, an interview room lined with lead beneath the plaster, which not even the most powerful bugs could penetrate. Marchant had spent a good deal of time in them over the past few years, and some were more basic than others. This one, with its crisp white walls and sunken lights, felt like a cross between a Swiss bank vault and a Harley Street consulting room.

‘We’re all still cut up about your old man,’ Prentice said, gesturing at one of two chairs on either side of a rectangular glass table. There was a bunch of flowers in a vase on the table, a clear sign that waterboarding was off the agenda. Prentice closed the heavy door behind him and punched a code into the keypad by the handle, activating a further layer of electronic protection. ‘The word in Warsaw was that the Americans were behind it. Armstrong wouldn’t have got her way without their support.’

‘Sounds about right,’ Marchant said, still aware of his nasal tones. Despite the flowers, the two chairs and the table were strictly functional.

‘So imagine our delight when the call came through from London,’ Prentice said.

‘And the Poles were equally overjoyed?’

‘The new government’s through with renditions, been waiting for an excuse ever since they pulled their troops out of Iraq. Stare Kiejkuty’s run by the WSI, hardline communists who knew their time was up and were grateful for the dollars. What can the CIA do? Protest to the UN that one of their black sites has been blown? It was meant to have been closed down months ago.’

Marchant estimated that Prentice was in his late fifties. Chief of Station, Poland, at his time of his life was not immediate evidence of a brilliant career, but Marchant had heard of Hugo Prentice. Everyone who joined the Service had heard of him. Expelled from Eton for selling marijuana to fellow pupils in the 1970s, he had a rakish air, a full head of greying hair swept back and an expensive taste in platinum cufflinks and Patek Philippe watches.

He had never been a career officer, bent on promotion, but one of those rare people who had signed up to the Service because he loved the spy’s life, wanted to be out there turning people on the ground, persuading the waverers of a greater good with a traditional mix of ideology, subterfuge and, even if not always necessary, brutality. For Prentice it was all about the expenses rather than the salary, the mistresses rather than the marriage.

‘How’s life in Legoland, anyway?’ he continued, offering a cigarette to Marchant, who took one. ‘Is it true the Vicar’s banned fags in the bar?’

‘Only inside. On the terrace is fine. It wasn’t Fielding, though. It was the government.’

‘We’re all screwed if the spooks start listening to the politicians. Christ, who’s going to check? Health and Safety? Your father would sooner have died than listen to the government.’ The conversation stalled awkwardly. ‘I’m sorry. Crass.’ Prentice sat back and blew smoke into the air above them.

‘It’s fine,’ Marchant said. ‘Really.’

‘You look a bit like him, you know–same jawline,’ Prentice continued. ‘I’ll be happy if a quarter as many people turn up for my funeral. But what happened to the PM? Why wasn’t he there?’

‘Too busy, officially,’ Marchant said, thinking back to the people spilling out of the small village church. He didn’t recall seeing Prentice there, but staff had flown in from all over the world. There was, however, a noticeable absence of Establishment figures, a reluctance to honour a possible traitor.

‘The bastard.’

‘Are you sending me back to Britain?’ Marchant appreciated Prentice’s solidarity, but wanted to know where the conversation was heading.

‘Not exactly, no,’ Prentice said, his voice quieter, as if he had suddenly recalled a piece of bad news. Marchant picked up on the change of tone and shifted in his seat. The metal table had chafed his lower back. ‘London sent you this,’ Prentice said, pulling out a brown A5 envelope from his jacket pocket and handing it to Marchant. Marchant glanced inside: dollars, an Irish passport, airline ticket, some visa paperwork. ‘We can’t help you any more. You’re too hot.’

‘Meaning?’

‘You tell me. You’re the first serving MI6 officer I’ve ever come across who’s wanted by the CIA and MI5. Watch your back. Give it a couple of hours and Warsaw will be crawling with Yanks looking for you. The WSI might like a little chat, too.’

‘Any message from Fielding?’ Marchant asked.

Prentice leant forward. ‘Go get Salim Dhar.’

‘Where is he?’ Harriet Armstrong asked. Fielding sat back in his chair and looked down the river in the direction of her office at Thames House.

‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ he replied, talking on the speakerphone.

‘I’ve just had Spiro on the line,’ Armstrong said, ‘threatening to go public about Dhar and your predecessor.’

‘That could be embarrassing, but not as awkward as a member of the British intelligence services being renditioned by the CIA to Poland. Particularly if the PM nodded it through. I’d hate that to get out.’

‘Where is he, Marcus? He’s a threat to national security.’

‘I’d question that,’ he said. ‘You saw my memo about Dhar? Seems like he had nothing to do with the marathon attack after all. But in answer to your question, I have no idea where he is. You had him last, no?’

Armstrong had already hung up. Fielding swivelled around in his chair, killed the speaker and read through the memo in front of him. The Polish economy would take a hit when the Americans started to pull business contracts. The confidential commercial information he was about to release to Brigadier Borowski, head of the AW, his opposite number in Warsaw, was the least he could do for a friend. The AW was involved in a fierce turf war with the old communist guard at the WSI. Borowski and others seemed to be winning, despite the best efforts of the CIA, whose dollars and High Value Detainees had done much to prolong the careers of its former Cold War enemies in Poland.

The information should give one of Poland’s biggest IT companies the edge when it made its bid next month for a multi-million-euro e-government contract in Brussels. MI6’s intelligence reports were still known as ‘CX’, after its first Chief, Mansfield Cumming (‘Cumming Exclusively’). Fielding reached for the pen and signed in green ink, another Cumming touch. Borowski would like that.