Dead Spy Running

‘If you don’t hear from me in fifteen minutes, try calling the office. Speed-dial 1.’ He remembered the exchange vividly, like much of what was said that day.

‘You know it wasn’t my mobile,’ he said, swallowing hard, still thinking of the look in Leila’s eyes when she had handed him the TETRA unit. ‘My old one maybe, but it was Leila who brought it with her.’

‘That’s what Fielding said, what you told us in your debrief. But I’m afraid we all believed Leila, who debriefed very differently. MI5 was finally allowed into Legoland yesterday. We found the person who signs out the handsets, sweated the truth out of him.’

Marchant knew what that meant, but he felt no sympathy. All he could think of was that Leila had been prepared to kill him.

‘It seems she used her charms to check out your old phone without actually signing for it. She told him it was for sentimental reasons.’

For the first time, Armstrong’s tone was condemnatory, as if she could stomach the treachery, but not the promiscuity. Marchant’s response was entirely personal, too. The implications for his country would have to wait. Leila had betrayed him.

He had come to accept that her failure to exonerate him after the race could not be easily explained. Some sort of collusion with America had been the most likely reason, but now he knew it was worse than that. Far worse. He tried to hang on to the fact that she had chosen not to separate him and Pradeep into a thousand body parts. ‘Did you try ringing me? Don’t, OK? Please. Just don’t.’ Her voice had been insistent, but it wasn’t much consolation. Leila was the mole. His heart was hardening instinctively, to protect him from the blast, but he knew it was too late.

He remembered that night at the Fort when she had come into his room at dawn, how he had told her he wanted to keep their relationship separate from the deceit of their chosen profession. But he had slowly relented, won over by her laughter and love. Now it appeared that there had been no distinction for her. It had all been work: one big, dirty, duplicitous job.

Was that the Leila he had known? He had to believe that a part of what they had meant something to her. The Iranians must have presented her with such a hideous alternative that she was forced to go along with their plan.

‘So are you and Fielding best friends again?’ he asked.

Armstrong ignored the sarcasm. ‘He’s disappeared. We think he’s here in India, trying to find Leila.’

‘Is she here too?’ Marchant couldn’t conceal his interest.

‘She asked for a transfer to the CIA station in Delhi, before Fielding found out.’

‘Why Delhi?’

‘She wanted to protect the President.’

They looked at each other for a moment. An image of Leila and Dhar together flashed through his mind. He had to get out of there.

‘Have you come to release me? We need to find her.’

‘That’s not in my gift, I’m afraid. We failed to convince Langley that Leila has betrayed them as well as us. I’m not sure we ever will. At least Straker’s allowed me to debrief you about Salim Dhar. He remembered your stubbornness in Poland. You’re meant to be my prisoner.’

She looked at the bowl of bloody water.

‘You can tell him that Dhar headed north, two hours before the Seals arrived.’

‘Thank you.’

‘And that he likes shooting US presidents for target practice.’

50

Dhar watched the rickshaw driver’s legs seesaw through the Chandni Chowk traffic. ‘You will only have one chance,’ the woman next to him said. ‘At 5.35 p.m. the President will pause at the foot of the five flights of steps leading up to the Lotus Temple entrance. He will be greeted by a delegation of senior Bahá’ís. One will present him with a garland of flowers. At this point, and this point only, his security detail will withdraw a few steps. Your line of sight should be clear.’

‘I won’t miss,’ Dhar said. ‘Inshallah.’

They sat in silence, watching the sea of faces flow past them on either side. She had already been through all the practical arrangements for the evening and there was a sense that their meeting should now come to an end.

‘It must have been difficult, so much time-passing with the kafir,’ Dhar said. Across the street, two Western tourists, money belts slung below their thick waists, were taking photos of a man with no legs, perched on a board with wheels, pushing himself along with raw knuckles.

‘Those who work with animals get used to the smell.’

They were still wary of each other, both retreating to the muscled vernacular of the jihadi. There was no reason for either of them to trust each other beyond this short encounter. But there was something about the woman that intrigued Dhar. Her head was wrapped in a black scarf, concealing most of her face except for her big Meenakshi eyes. She spoke perfect Urdu, but with a slight accent that Dhar couldn’t quite place.

‘Some people are saying that the Americans were behind the jihad in Britain, the petty squabbles of the enemy doing our work for us.’

‘Is that what they say?’ she asked.

‘The talk is of nothing else. The American infidel recruited someone to destroy its allies from the inside.’

Dhar had a question for his passenger before he dropped her off at the town hall: the name of the insider in London. His father, whom he had met only once, was dead, but he still needed to know, for himself, for his brother.

‘The enemy within has succeeded,’ she said. ‘The Britishers are facing turmoil.’

‘Inshallah.’ The rickshaw speeded up, free of traffic now. ‘Your work is at the infidel’s embassy. You must know who this person is in Britain.’

‘Why do you ask?’

Because his jihadi world, so recently turned upside down, would begin to make sense again if he could be certain that it was an American who had betrayed his father. But he said nothing.

‘The infidels believe it was one of their own,’ she continued, ‘but the credit lies elsewhere. Not with Britain or America, but with someone, a woman, who tricked them both.’

‘Another woman?’ Dhar shifted in his seat. ‘It would be an honour to meet her,’ he said quietly, without conviction.

‘An honour?’ she asked. ‘What’s honour got to do with it?’

‘It can’t have been easy. Like you, she was living amongst the infidel, but acting in the name of Allah.’

‘Was she?’

But even Dhar wasn’t sure any more.

51

Straker took the call in one of the small private booths in the White House’s refurbished Situation Room complex. Moments before, he had stepped out of the Telecommunications Room next door, where the Vice President, the Director of National Intelligence, the White House Chief of Staff and a raft of other security advisers who wanted his job had been waiting for him to assess the threat matrix in India. It was a meeting he had been postponing ever since word had reached him that Salim Dhar had not been captured in Karnataka.

‘Harriet, I hope you have some decent CX for me. Otherwise I’m going to have to dunk our friend Marchant’s