Marchant caught Sir David Chadwick raising his eyebrows at Bruce Lockhart, the Prime Minister’s foreign policy adviser, who was sitting across from the Chief.
‘We appreciate it, Marcus, really,’ Straker went on. ‘It’s at times like this that Britain and America need to stand as one. No one here forgets the night after 9/11, when the Chief of MI6 somehow got a plane into Virginia to be with us. That’s how it should be. Madam, sirs, thank you.’
The screen went blank, and the six of them sat quite still, listening to the sound of an aircraft flying over London towards Heathrow. Harriet Armstrong, crutches propped against her chair, glanced at Chadwick, who looked away. It was Marchant who finally spoke.
‘Have they seen all the evidence?’
‘Everything,’ Armstrong said.
‘And they still believe she was working for them?’
‘No. But they need to believe she was,’ Fielding said. ‘The alternative is unthinkable. And why not? She saved their President. You heard Straker. She “took the bullet”. In the West’s war against terror, she’s a hero. And at the moment, America needs heroes. It doesn’t need traitors.’
‘So why did they agree to release me?’ Marchant asked. Two Secret Service officers had started asking questions when they took Leila’s body away in an ambulance and Marchant had insisted on accompanying them. An hour later he was in the cell in the basement of the American Embassy again. He had finally arrived back in Britain earlier that morning, landing at Fairford, the airbase he had flown out of two weeks earlier with a hood over his head.
‘In return for Britain publicly believing in Leila too.’
‘And that’s enough for them to free me? They thought I was involved in a plot to kill their Ambassador to London, that I was a traitor.’
Fielding shuffled his papers and looked around the room. The hesitation made Marchant feel uncomfortable, excluded. ‘There’s something more. What? Tell me.’
‘Leila sent me an email on the morning of the day she died,’ Fielding said, looking straight at Marchant. ‘In it, she provided the time and place of what would have been the next arranged dead drop with her Iranian handler. It was here in London, Hyde Park. We put the spot under surveillance, even though the world knew Leila had been killed. Someone from the Iranian Embassy duly turned up, in case she’d left something before she went to India. This man was unknown to us, not on the diplomatic list. Harriet pulled him in.’
‘He was senior officer in VEVAK, and he told us everything, in return for letting him leave the country,’ Armstrong said. ‘When Leila started to work for the Iranians, how they had given her no choice because of her mother, how the Americans recruited her. But it seems Leila struck a better deal than we thought. In some ways a very brave, selfless deal. In return for her spying for Iran, VEVAK would not only keep her mother safe, they would also suspend all police activity against the Bahá’í community in Iran.’
The room fell silent. ‘The latest human rights data appears to bear this out,’ Denton said quietly. ‘The number of Bahá’ís persecuted in the last six months is the lowest since the ’79 Revolution.’
‘We sent a transcript to Langley,’ Fielding said.
‘And? What did they say?’ Marchant asked.
‘Nothing,’ Fielding said. ‘We didn’t expect them to. Two days later, they agreed to a complete rehabilitation of your father. Lord Bancroft will be filing his report shortly. It will conclude that there is no evidence to doubt his loyalty to his country. There will be a full memorial service in Westminster Abbey, attended by the Prime Minister and the US Ambassador to London.’
‘All references to Salim Dhar and his family have been deleted from your father’s records, both here and at Langley,’ Armstrong added. ‘Privately, they still maintain that we’re honouring a traitor. Privately, we think they’re doing the same. But the world will never know.’
‘One day the truth will come out about Leila, though, we’ve insisted on that,’ Chadwick said. ‘Fifty years from now, historians will discover how she sabotaged our investigations into a terror campaign in Britain. Not only that, but it appears she was the main UK point of contact for the terrorists. It was a South Indian cell, your father was right about that.’ Chadwick looked Marchant in the eyes for the first time. ‘What Stephen didn’t know, what none of us knew, was that it was being run out of Tehran.’
‘Stephen visited Dhar, a rising star in the
‘He also wanted to meet his son for the first time,’ Marchant interrupted. Chadwick winced.
‘Stephen was convinced that this cell had help from inside the Service,’ Fielding continued, as if he hadn’t heard Marchant. ‘He was right about that, too. But the Iranians had kept Dhar out of the loop. He couldn’t tell Stephen who was behind the attacks in Britain, or who the mole was, because he didn’t know.’
‘Will the Iranians use him in the future?’ Lockhart asked. ‘He managed to eliminate Leila, one of their most priceless assets, someone who had infiltrated two Western intelligence agencies.’
‘Their interests might overlap again,’ Fielding said. ‘But it was an unusual alliance. Maybe that’s why no one saw it. We think Dhar’s future lies with AQ. The
‘But is he ours?’ Lockhart asked. Marchant knew he was the only one who could answer the question. It had been on everyone’s lips from the moment the meeting had started.
‘Dhar is his own man,’ Marchant replied.
‘His war is with others, though, not with the British.’
‘So far his targets have all been American.’
‘Will he ever try to make contact?’ Lockhart asked.
Marchant remained silent. He knew that a part of him hoped so.
‘We have to leave this to Daniel,’ Fielding said. ‘We think Dhar’s only motivation will be personal. Family business,’ he added, looking at Marchant.
‘But if he does?’ Lockhart persisted.
‘Then this whole operation is deniable. Dhar is currently the most wanted man in the Western world. If contact was ever established between him and Her Majesty’s Government, it’s clearly not something we would boast about.’
‘In the unlikely event of him becoming a British asset, the PM must be ring-fenced, is that clear?’ Lockhart said, looking around the table. ‘He cannot be told, under any circumstances. Only the six people in this room will ever know.’
55
Marchant stood outside Legoland, on the Thames path, looking across the water to the Morpeth Arms. It was where he and Leila had sometimes gone after work in the early days, after they had graduated from the Fort. He had had time to think about her betrayal, about when the deception must have started, whether he had missed any obvious clues. It was easier to assume that her treachery had begun as something small, pieces of information here and there in return for her mother’s safety in Tehran, but that slowly it had gained an unstoppable momentum of its own, ending with the Americans recruiting her too, providing perfect protection against the hunt for a mole in MI6.
Leila was certainly right to have feared VEVAK’s threats to her mother. The day before the President’s visit to the Lotus Temple, a mob in a poor suburb of Tehran had dragged an old Bahá’í woman outside and stoned her. She had died in the night. Had VEVAK begun to suspect that Leila was losing her nerve?
Marchant turned away from the river and looked behind him, distracted by a noise. A yellow London Duck was coming down the slipway. The amphibious vehicle rumbled to a stop beside Marchant, who spotted Fielding sitting in the bow.
‘Hop on,’ he called down to Marchant.
Two minutes later, Marchant was sitting at the front of the Duck as it made its way towards Westminster, too low in the water for his liking. But he had his own particular reasons to fear water, and tried to take comfort from the other passengers, sitting towards the stern, who seemed untroubled.
