Dead Spy Running

worked late into the night. For a moment, she longed for a normal job. She drew the souk-bought curtains, sent by her mother, took another scarf from a drawer, and tied it over Hassan’s eyes. He sighed with approval, mouthing a kiss at her. ‘Darling Leila,’ he whispered, but she put her finger to his lips.

‘Ssshh,’ she said, passing him the mouthpiece of the ghalyun, an Iranian hookah that she kept in the flat. Her father had brought it back from Tehran in 1979. As Hassan drew heavily on the mix of tobacco and hashish, she moved up onto the bed, straddling his chest, her back to him. Somehow it was more bearable if she couldn’t see his face. Taking him in one hand, she reached across with the other to the candles on the bedside table.

‘Are you ready?’ she said quietly, working him firmly. She turned and removed the hookah pipe from his mouth.

‘I’ve never been more ready in my life,’ he said.

Hassan, Leila suspected, was a coward at heart, despite the bravado. Too much pain and he would cry for his mother. ‘How brave are you feeling?’ she asked, holding a candle six inches above him, then lowering it to three so the beeswax had less time to cool.

He screamed, as she knew he would, writhing for a few seconds as the near-boiling wax dripped onto his sensitive skin. But his smile returned as the wax hardened. Hassan, she realised, was weirder than she had thought. She caught the smell of his sweet cologne as she dripped more boiling wax onto him. Suddenly his presence in her home was overwhelming. She resented him, her job, the compromising position she found herself in; but then she thought of what they were doing to Marchant, wherever he was, and moved the candle even lower.

Half an hour later, Leila was running out of tricks, and Hassan still hadn’t told her anything. Earlier, in the taxi from Park Lane to Docklands, he had insisted that his information was so potentially compromising, for him and for his country, that he would need something special to round off their home fixture. Only then would he talk.

She placed the hookah back in Hassan’s mouth and told him to inhale deeply. For a moment she feared she had misjudged him, that he might pass out before telling her anything. But Hassan did as he was told, as he had done all evening, and gave her a stoned smile as she went over to her fridge and opened the fast-freeze compartment.

An air steward on a late-night flight back from Abu Dhabi had once told her how to make a man sob with pleasure. He was gay, but he reckoned ‘the Narcissus’ worked for most men. It tapped into their fundamental egos, he said, particularly if they liked blowing hot and cold. Which was why, after Hassan’s initial cries of pain, Leila had moulded the solidifying wax around him. Once it had hardened, she had carefully slid it off and filled it with water. That water had now frozen, and was sitting upright next to a bag of peas. She peeled away the wax, looked at what she had in her hand with some satisfaction, and returned to Hassan in the bedroom.

‘Turn over,’ she said, unfastening his hand ties. It was time to find out what he knew about the marathon.

20

Spiro didn’t like the CIA sub-station in Warsaw. He didn’t like the coffee, he didn’t like the tired, 1970s hellhole of an embassy in which the Company was housed (an opinion confirmed when his driver took him past the glistening new premises of the British Embassy), but most of all he didn’t like the station chief. By rights, Alan Carter should have been fired years ago. He had messed up over the Agency’s post-9/11 rendition flights to Stare Kiejkuty, a programme based on tight cooperation between the CIA and the WSI. Its basis was total denial, but word had got out, and Spiro blamed Carter.

Now he had messed up again. Marchant’s release was in danger of sparking a three-way diplomatic row between Poland, America and Britain. Poland’s new prime minister had already been in touch, saying it had been a case of mistaken identity. His office had received reports of a Westerner at the remote airport, and a team of special forces had been sent over to take a look. When the Poles had come under fire, they had returned the compliment, and the detainee escaped. Spiro had never heard such bull-shit, but there was nothing he could do. His allies in WSI were becoming increasingly powerless, and the protocol simply didn’t exist for lodging a complaint about a deniable project such as Stare Kiejkuty, particularly as it was meant to have been shuttered.

Spiro looked around at the bank of screens in the dimly lit room at the back of the US Embassy, a team of five junior officers keeping their heads down as he made his displeasure clear.

‘Do we have eyes at the airport?’ he barked at Carter.

‘We’ve picked up a feed from CCTV in immigration,’ Carter said. ‘We’ll see him if he’s got a passport.’

‘And the Brit Embassy?’

‘Still trying. It’s pretty secure over there.’

Unlike here, Spiro thought.

‘We’re also live at the station, and most of the city’s malls,’ said another officer.

‘What have we got on him?’ Spiro asked.

A photo of Marchant and Pradeep, running side by side in the marathon, was projected onto the wall in front of the computers. In the foreground, Turner Munroe, the US Ambassador to London, was clearly identifiable.

‘Close to his target, wasn’t he?’ Spiro said. ‘Too fucking close.’

‘Sir,’ one of the youngest officers asked tentatively, looking up at Carter for support. ‘Shouldn’t London be helping us on this one?’

‘Don’t even go there,’ Spiro snapped. ‘We’re flying solo, that’s all you need to know.’ He turned to Carter. ‘Where else might Marchant be heading? Krakow? The border? Why are we so sure he’s coming to town?’

‘We have an asset in a village four miles south of Stare Kiejkuty. He says an unmarked military truck drove through the village on the main road to Warsaw at fifteen hundred hours. Our guys at the airbase raised the alarm at twenty hundred last night, approximately five hours after Marchant was freed.’

‘Five friggin’ hours? What were they doing? R and R in the waterboarding pool?’

‘Sir, they had been drugged, bound and gagged by the Poles — they were Grom, elite special forces. It’s a credit to their training that they managed to free themselves at all.’

‘Is that right? Well, it isn’t a credit to your training that we have no fucking idea where Marchant is now.’

‘We’re into the city police’s traffic cameras,’ another officer announced, hoping to bail his boss out of trouble. They worked hard for Carter, and didn’t like to see him humiliated.

‘Screen one,’ Carter said. A moment later, black-and-white images of slow-moving traffic were being projected onto the main wall.

‘Gridlock,’ Spiro said. ‘Just like Route 28 after a Red Sox game.’

‘If the truck was coming into Warsaw, it would have entered the city on the Moscow-Berlin road,’ Carter said, looking over his junior colleague’s shoulder at the computer screen again. He was avoiding eye contact with Spiro as much as he could. The screen was split into three sections: the main traffic image, a city map, and a database displaying a list of camera positions throughout the city. ‘Switch to camera 17,’ Carter said. The junior officer scrolled down the list.

A new image, less grainy than the first, was projected onto the wall. The queue of traffic leaving the city was moving slower than the cars arriving.

‘How long does it take to get from Stare Kiejkuty to Warsaw by truck?’ Spiro asked.

Carter nudged the junior officer, who looked at his map again and zoomed out from the city to an image of the north of the country. A route highlighted in red wormed its way almost instantly from the airbase to Warsaw.

‘Two hours fifteen,’ Carter said, reading from the screen.

‘Can you get us into traffic archive?’ Spiro asked him.

‘It’ll take some time.’

‘I want everything from eighteen to twenty-one hundred hours. Let’s see if that truck showed up in the city last night. We also need passenger lists from Warsaw, Krakow and Gdansk airports. And I want the names of any