Dead Spy Running

‘You can talk to Marchant, but I need to be present,’ Prentice said.

‘He’s a proven threat to America,’ Spiro said.

‘Who isn’t these days?’

‘The deal was that we could talk to him.’

‘I know. And you can. Just without the watersports. Your new President banned torture, remember?’

‘Where is he?’

‘I’m at a café, ground floor, Zlote Tarasy.’ Prentice knew he didn’t have to tell Spiro, but he still wanted his old rival to feel empowered. ‘When Marchant sees we’re on our own — don’t piss about, he’s good — he’ll come and join us for a latte.’

Marchant and Monika handed their passports over the airline counter. The luck of the Irish, he thought, as the check-in woman took his green passport and studied it. He presumed Monika’s passport had been cleared already. How far was she going to take this pretence? All the way to the plane?

He wasn’t sure if she was on her own or had back-up. He still hadn’t noticed anyone who might be AW, but they both clocked the man pushing a luggage trolley past them while their passports were being checked. Neither of them reacted when he looked in their direction for a moment longer than a stranger would, or when he reached for his phone, talked briefly as he glanced at Marchant again, and then quickened his walk to the main exit.

Carter looked hard at the image on his screen of Marchant and Monika as they waited for their passports to be handed back. There was something about them that troubled him: the lightness of skin around the man’s hairline that suggested he had shaved his head recently; the pairing of Irish and Polish passports.

‘Sir, I think you should take a look at this,’ he said, turning to Spiro.

‘Are all airport units on their way to the mall?’ Spiro asked, ignoring him.

‘They’re mobile, sir, but I think you should…’

‘Every floor, every exit. I want Marchant in a van before he’s even smelled Prentice’s coffee,’ Spiro said.

As Spiro took his coat and strode out of the room, Carter hung back and looked again at the live feed from the airport. Marchant and Monika were moving out of the image towards passport control. Then his phone rang.

Operational cover was something that an agent never dropped, not until the job was done, but Marchant hoped that Monika might make an exception now. Their flight had been called, and they were queuing to board. He wasn’t in India yet, but the dangers of the departure hall were behind them, and there was little that the Americans could do now. And he knew, from the way that they had hung back, waiting to be last in the queue, that she wouldn’t be flying with him to India after all. These were to be their last few minutes together.

‘I think we can drop…’

‘Ssshh…’ she said, putting a finger on his lips and nodding at the three check-in staff. There were still twenty people between them and the gate.

‘Thank you,’ he said, gently taking her hand from his face and holding it. ‘I won’t forget this, the time we had together.’

‘Here, take this,’ she said, pulling out a chrome pendant from her pocket. It was small and silver, attached to a piece of thread. She took it in both hands and slipped it over Marchant’s head. ‘It’s an Om symbol, the sound of the universe. You can’t go backpacking around India without one.’

As Marchant looked down at it she leant forward, kissed him on the lips, then hugged him. He wanted to taste her mouth again, but before he could, she was whispering in his ear, holding his head tightly in her hands.

‘There’s a man in Delhi called Malhotra. Ask for him, Colonel Kailash Malhotra, at the Gymkhana Club. Plays bridge there every Wednesday night. You may remember him; he knew your father. And he knows where to find Salim Dhar.’

Before he could reply, she peeled herself away, nodded at the check-in supervisor, and disappeared. Two minutes later, in the departure hall, she texted Prentice to tell him that he could finish his coffee and disappear too.

She didn’t recognise Carter as she left the exit, but he noticed her, and reached for his mobile. Two thousand miles away, a phone began to ring in the crucible of a Delhi summer.

26

Daniel Marchant pushed open the blue door, not sure what to expect. There had been no chowkidar on the front gate, and he knew the house was deserted, but for some reason he hoped that Chandar, the family cook, would be in his little outhouse, on his charpoy, sleeping off the Bagpiper whisky of the night before. It was an absurd thought, he knew. He had last seen Chandar twenty years ago, all four foot nine of him, standing proudly in his baggy High Commission chef whites as he oversaw his Nepali cousins serving chicken curry to his father and mother for their sad, farewell dinner.

The small room was hot and empty. He had forgotten how stifling Delhi could be in May, or perhaps he hadn’t noticed the heat when he was last here, as an eight-year-old child. A bare wire dangled from the ceiling, where once a lightbulb had hung. Apart from that, there was no evidence that anyone, let alone Chandar, had ever called the place home.

The other three staff rooms were similarly empty. Together they formed a single block, set apart from the main house. He struggled to recall who had lived in them all: the mali, he thought, or perhaps the ayah’s smiling brother, who sat behind a humming sewing machine all day in the searing heat. Chandar’s room was the only one he and Sebastian used to enter as children. In the afternoons, when the twins were meant to be sleeping, they would slip past the dozing ayah and help Chandar roll the chapattis he made for his own late lunch. He could still hear the hiss of the blue flame, feel the comfort of the chapattis, folded like warm blankets. Chandar’s wife sometimes came down from Nepal to stay in the tiny room too. The brothers’ visits were never the same when she was around: she scolded Chandar for feeding the sahib’s sons with cheap flour, and pinched their cheeks too hard.

Marchant walked over to the main house and peered in through a window which, like all the others on the ground floor, was protected with ornate metal bars. He remembered the cold marble hall floor, big and smooth enough for him, Sebastian and Chandar to play cricket on, although it was shiny when he lived here, not black and soiled as it was now. How long the house had stood empty he wasn’t sure. The padlock and chain on the front door suggested it must have been for years.

Behind him was the swimming pool. Its bottom was caked with several seasons of big leaves, rotting in a few inches of brackish water. The tiles, once blue and pristine, were chipped or missing, leaving a patchwork of decay. Marchant tried to force the thought away, but an image of Sebastian came into his mind, staring up at him from the bottom of the pool.

As he turned back towards the gate, he became aware of someone watching him, a figure beneath the neem tree on the far side of the lawn, where the generator used to belch out its black smoke. He walked across the brown, untended grass, reaching the trees just in time to see a young boy climb over the wall and drop down into the neighbouring garden.

‘Hey, wait,’ Marchant called, struggling to recall the correct Hindi. ‘Suno, Kya Chandar abhi bhi yahan rahta hai?’ Does Chandar live here any more?

The name ‘Chandar’ seemed to have an effect, even if his Hindi didn’t. The boy’s black hair reappeared above the brick wall a few moments later.

‘Chandar Bahadur?’ he asked tentatively, still partly concealed behind the wall.

‘Tikke,’ Marchant said, smiling. The boy’s whole face had now appeared, and Marchant knew from the glint in his eyes that he was looking at Chandar’s son.

Ten minutes later, Marchant was sitting in the cramped staff quarters of the neighbour’s house, eating chapattis and dhal with Chandar, his wife, who remained standing, covering her head with a scarf, and their only child, Bhim. Chandar’s hair was still jet-black, but there