‘I can’t be sure,’ Marchant said. ‘It was more than twenty years ago.’
‘Try to remember,’ Armstrong said quietly. ‘Because we’re not going anywhere until you do.’
Fielding climbed into the back of the cotton-white Ambassador and turned to look at the airport behind him. The Gulfstream was still sitting on the Tarmac, shimmering in the hazy heat. At least it had fuel now, and Denton and Carter would soon be clear of Delhi’s intolerable summer. They had been reluctant to let him go on his own, for their different reasons, but they knew it would have been impossible to smuggle three men out on the fuel truck, even though security at the airport was lax. ‘Don’t let her even get near the President, if only for me,’ Carter had said.
As the car drove off, with Prasannan, the local agent, sitting in the front, Fielding wondered what he would do if he found Leila. He knew he must stop her. It wasn’t enough to know that he had been right and the Americans were wrong. But he was a marked man himself now, on the run like Daniel Marchant. He assumed it was Armstrong who had entered his office in London. She would have loved marching into Legoland with a warrant, tearing the place up, questioning everyone.
‘The traffic is very vigorous today,’ Prasannan said, turning to Fielding. ‘It’s the President’s visit.’ The driver nodded in agreement. He was sitting almost sideways-on to the steering wheel, his back pressed against the door, one leg jigging up and down. Fielding thought he looked unduly anxious, even for someone about to drive through Delhi.
‘Do we have an itinerary yet?’ he asked.
‘I have a copy here, sir, acquired from the city police.’ Prasannan waved a sheet of paper in the air. Fielding thought he looked nervous too.
‘Where’s the President going today?’
‘He started at the Gandhi memorial, then visited the Lokh Sabha, the lower house of parliament. Lunch at the American Embassy was followed by Lodhi Gardens and then the Red Fort.’ Prasannan looked at his watch, then back at the sheet of paper. ‘He should be on his way now to the Lotus Temple, before a state banquet tonight hosted by the Indian President at the Rashtrapati Bhavan.’ He paused. ‘Sir, there is…’
‘What’s the Lotus Temple?’ Fielding interrupted, remembering something he had once read.
‘The Bahá’í house of worship. Built like a giant lotus flower. You will have seen photos of it. Very nice place,’ Prasannan added, rocking his head proudly.
‘Bahá’í? Why’s he going there?’ But Fielding already knew the answer.
‘To show solidarity with the Bahá’ís of Iran. Sir…’
‘We need to be at the temple now.’
‘Sorry, sir, there is one thing else. I have an urgent message from Harriet Armstrong. First we must go to Saket.’
Prasannan fastened his safety belt.
‘The police said later that the traffic lights were faulty,’ Marchant said, speaking slowly. The air conditioning was on, but struggling. ‘I remember seeing a traffic policeman — the thick white gloves — so perhaps the lights were out and he was in charge. Raman thought it was clear to go. We were at the front of the queue, but ten yards back from the junction for the shade. It was hot in the jeep, no A/C, of course. We accelerated forward, in case anyone tried to move in front of us, and then I just remember this awful noise of twisting metal and the policeman’s whistle, a desperate shrill sound that went on and on, as if he was trying to undo what had happened. The bus, a government one, had been coming from the left, and didn’t stop at the junction. Maybe it was going too fast, or the driver just ignored the policeman. It pushed our jeep thirty yards down the road.’
‘And you were unhurt?’
‘I was thrown across the back seat, so was my mother. But Sebbie…’ he paused, thinking back. ‘It was Sebbie’s turn to ride in the front with Raman. He loved Sebbie, loved us both. Sebbie was sitting on the left, by the door. He took the main brunt of the impact.’
Marchant looked up just as the British High Commission Ambassador hit them, pushing its proud Morris bonnet deep into the front passenger side of the people carrier in a shower of glass. Armstrong must have seen it moments before the impact, because she had reached a protective arm across him. The two Marines and the driver had no warning. In the slow, panicked seconds that followed, after their car had been shunted sideways across the junction, Armstrong slid open the side door and nodded for Marchant to get out. One of the guards was conscious, hanging forward in his seatbelt, but the other one appeared to be dead. The driver was slumped over the wheel, his chest jammed against the horn.
‘Bloody hell, I can’t do much more,’ Armstrong said. ‘Find her, and stop whatever she’s started.’
Marchant realised that Armstrong couldn’t move. Her left leg was bent forward at the knee.
‘I can’t leave you like this,’ Marchant said, unscathed for the second time in his life.
‘It’s better I’m found with them. Now go. Get on with it. The Chief’s waiting.’
‘Daniel, over here!’ a voice called from across the road. Marchant turned to see Marcus Fielding in the back of a rickshaw. The three-wheeler swung out into the road, where the traffic had come to a sudden halt, picked Marchant up and drove off in the direction of the Lotus Temple, a policeman’s shrill whistle fading behind them.
53
Salim Dhar brought the US President into focus with the telescopic sights of his semi-automatic Russian rifle. He seemed smaller than on election night, when Dhar had watched him on TV milking the adoring American public. A large group of suited Security Service personnel were bunched around him as he walked down the tree- lined avenue towards the Lotus Temple. They were scanning the crowd with the worried urgency of parents in search of a lost child. A clean shot was impossible, the President’s head partially obscured all the time. For a moment Dhar began to doubt the plan.
He and the woman had synchronised their watches in Old Delhi, close to Chandni Chowk’s clock market, the biggest in Asia. Most of them were fakes, unlike his own, a Rolex Milgauss, given to him by Stephen Marchant as he left the jail. Made in 1958, it had been designed to withstand strong magnetic fields, Marchant had explained. Dhar hadn’t worn it when he met Daniel, unsure how their meeting would go, but it was on his wrist now. He needed to keep perfect time with the West.
It was 5.33 p.m. The President was moving at a steady pace, waving at the crowds, but equally concerned that the TV cameras were getting a clear view of him. Dhar had similar worries. He was one thousand yards to the north, lying on the flat roof of a two-storey building that formed part of a small housing estate near a large school. The owner, a brother who worked for India’s Forest and Wildlife Department, was away on leave, but he had hidden the Dragunov sniper rifle before he went, just as the woman had said he would. The gun had been used against tiger poachers, and Dhar recognised it as an SVD59, a model favoured by the Indian army. Two brothers had recently been killed in Kashmir by a Dragunov’s steel and lead bullets.
The whitewashed roof was hot, but at least Dhar was out of direct sunlight. He was also out of view of the three helicopters, two American, one Indian, that were circling low above the temple complex. They had been in the air all day. According to the woman, Delhi police officers, accompanied by members of the Security Service, had also searched every house within a two-kilometre radius of the temple.
All the houses on this particular estate had water tanks on their roofs, but the brother’s had been raised eighteen inches off the ground, resting on breeze blocks. It was also the only one with a false bottom, where the gun had been hidden. From the air, the tank looked identical to all the others. It was impossible to see Dhar, who was lying in the gap between the roof and the bottom of the tank, his gun resting on a tripod. The only risk was from the infrared cameras that Dhar assumed were strapped to the undersides of the helicopters. But the water above him had been in the sun all day, and he hoped that its heat profile would mask the warmth of his body.
The President was well within range of the Dragunov, a weapon Dhar had used with accuracy at fifteen hundred yards, but he was still nervous as he panned the sights away from his target. For a moment he was distracted by some movement in the VIP enclosure, behind the avenue. A tall white man was trying to push his way through the crowd. Dhar moved on, panning across the remainder of the avenue, then settled on the first step, waiting for the President to enter the frame. He rested his finger on the trigger. It was 5.34 p.m.
