Dead Spy Running

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 — 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