Leila had already been introduced to Kumar as a fellow newcomer. One of the Agency’s brightest analysts, he had been flown in from Langley earlier in the week, and knew more than anyone about Salim Dhar. He knew all about Daniel Marchant, too. Marchant, he said, had left Poland and was already somewhere in India.
‘Widespread military collateral, high-profile US target,’ Kumar continued. ‘We can’t rule out Daniel Marchant either. Right now, that whole situation’s a little complicated. He’s just become the subject of an ongoing level-five covert run by Clandestine, Europe.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Baldwin said, glancing at Leila. ‘I’m speaking to Alan Carter in ten.’
‘OK, let’s re-meet in two hours,’ Johnson said. ‘Unless another bomb goes off. What’s wrong with Texas? Why can’t POTUS go there and shake a few hands?’
Marchant didn’t know who he was fleeing from as he picked his way through the wreckage of the bar and climbed out of a large broken window. It went against every instinct to leave Colonel K, but there had been an urgency to his voice that persuaded Marchant to leave.
He stumbled across the lawn, still dazed, glancing back at the wounded building, curtains lolling from its windows like lacerated tongues. No one could blame him. The Gymkhana Club reception would confirm that a respected Indian colonel had signed him in. But Uncle K was an old friend of his father. He was also travelling as David Marlowe, not Daniel Marchant. Uncle K was right. Daniel was on the run, and once his presence at the club had been discovered, his name would be in the frame. If he could be blamed for the marathon, they would try to pin this one on him too. He thought of the look the man at the bar had given him, purposefully catching his eye. Who was he? Who had sent him?
Marchant had walked through an unmanned side gate and was now on a main road, but the traffic was not as noisy as it should have been. He could barely hear a passing goods lorry, its horn eerily muted. It was then that he realised his ears were resonating with a high-pitched tone that didn’t stop when he shook his head. He looked back towards the club building again, black smoke threading up into the Delhi sky. A rickshaw slowed, its driver eyeing him with a mixture of hope and wariness. Marchant slumped into the back seat and asked for Gokarna.
‘Gokarna?’ the driver asked, smiling in the rear mirror as he throttled the tiny two-stroke engine. ‘Too far, sir, even for Shiva. Airport?’
‘Railway station.’
‘Gymkhana, firework problem?’
Marchant nodded, gripping the side bar of the rickshaw to stop his hand shaking. ‘Big problem,’ he said. On the opposite side of the road, a diplomatic car drove past at speed. Marchant turned back to look at the blue number-plate. It was American. For a moment he thought he recognised the female figure in the back of the car.
32
‘Can we assume that Marchant was at the club?’ Fielding asked, off the floor and back sitting upright at the dining-room table.
‘It’s a Wednesday night,’ Denton said, glancing at the flat screen mounted on the wall. It was now relaying Sky images of a burning Gymkhana Club. ‘We’ve spoken to Warsaw. Bridge night was all he had to go on.’
‘Are you saying you knew where Marchant was?’ Alan Carter asked. He had joined them again after stepping outside the Chief’s office to make a couple of calls to Langley. At Fielding’s request, Anne Norman had reluctantly connected him on a secure line.
‘I thought you knew too,’ Fielding replied.
‘We knew he was in India.’
‘He was to make contact with a colonel who used to work in Indian intelligence. Kailash Malhotra, former number two at RAW. He played in a bridge drive at the Gymkhana on Wednesday nights.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Carter said. ‘The DCIA wants Marchant brought in. I’ve just spoken to his office. He’ll be patched through shortly on the secure video link.’
‘I thought you were more interested in Dhar.’
‘We are. But we’ve also got our new President flying into Delhi Saturday.’
‘We must let Marchant find Dhar.’
‘The timing of this bomb couldn’t be worse, Marcus. I’m not going to be able to hold the hawks back if Marchant was at the club. Spiro isn’t completely out of the picture. The Director and him go way back. It’s a Marines thing. After this, Spiro will be telling him to go after Dhar with everything we’ve got. And it’s hard not to agree with him.’
‘Except that you don’t know where Dhar is.’
‘But the colonel did. He could have told us, told you, saved a lot of time, a lot of lives.’ Carter glanced again at the TV screen. Burnt and blistered bodies were being lined up beneath the club’s Lutyens porch.
‘He would never have told us,’ Fielding said. ‘Our relationship with Delhi is better than yours, but Dhar’s an embarrassment to them. RAW tried to recruit him once.’
‘But he was happy to tell Marchant of Dhar’s whereabouts.’
‘We hoped he might be. He was once very close to his father. But we don’t know what he said. Right now, we don’t even know if Marchant and Malhotra are alive.’
Carter paused. ‘It doesn’t look great, does it? Daniel Marchant, suspected of trying to kill the US Ambassador in London, now at the scene of a bomb blast in Delhi, three days before the President arrives there.’
‘Except that you and I both know that Daniel Marchant wasn’t behind either of those incidents.’
‘He just happened to be present at both. I’m losing my nerve here, Marcus. Remind me why Marchant’s on our side?’
‘Because he’s being set up. And if it’s not by you, then someone’s got us both by the balls.’
‘What makes you so certain?’
‘I knew Stephen Marchant. And I know Daniel. If he’s still alive, he’ll make contact with Dhar.’
‘Who’s walking around Delhi blowing up clubs.’
‘This wasn’t Dhar, Alan. Trust me on this one. Whoever planted this bomb was after Marchant.’
There was a knock on the door, and Anne Norman’s head appeared. She looked straight at Fielding, ignoring Carter. ‘Sir, I’ve got Langley on the line. The DCIA’s ready to join you.’
‘Screen two,’ Fielding said. ‘Thank you, Anne.’
‘Mind if I take the lead on this one?’ Carter said as she closed the door.
‘He’s all yours,’ Fielding said. William Straker, Director of the CIA, flickered into life on a screen next to the one that showed a smouldering Gymkhana Club.
Daniel remembered the red-shirted porters from his last visit to India, when he had travelled the length and breadth of the subcontinent by rail. But he had never seen so many of them before, bobbing through the crowded concourse of Nizamuddin station with suitcases on their scarved heads, sweating, sometimes smiling, always shouting, followed by anxious tourists trying to keep up. For once, nobody pestered him. Porters approached and then melted away, clocking that the
He had washed as best he could when the rickshaw dropped him off at the entrance to the station, buying some bottled water at a food stand on the main concourse. It had been the right decision to come straight there, rather than try to pick up his rucksack from the guesthouse. His room would have been searched and ransacked by now. Marlowe’s passport and money were strapped safely to his leg. He would buy new clothes when he was safely out of Delhi. His ticket, third-class, to Karwar, near Gokarna, was in his pocket. All he had to do now was find platform 18, where the Mangala Express to Ernakulam would be leaving in half an hour, twelve hours behind schedule, which wasn’t so bad for a seventy-seven-hour journey.
As he made his way across the concourse, stepping over sleeping bodies and broken clay
