had worked out what was going on. It was the second time Dhar had spoken. He wouldn’t have known what was happening the first time he heard his voice. But when he spoke again, Oaks would have realised that there was nobody else in that hut apart from the six Marines. He was trying to give Fort Meade a message, tell them it was a mistake, that there was a tape recorder strapped to Dhar’s phone. Just like this one.’
With uncharacteristic panache, Myers reached into his fleece pocket and pulled out a small mobile phone strapped with masking tape to an equally thin tape recorder. Myers was turning out to be a natural showman, Fielding thought, despite the phone catching awkwardly on his pocket. Next up, he’d be pulling rabbits from a hat, sawing Harriet Armstrong in half, performing the Indian rope trick. Armstrong would like that. She wasn’t afraid to play to the gallery. At Cambridge, she had played the fairy godmother in a university production of
The two units were linked by a small audio lead, which might have looked like a detonator to an inexperienced eye. The room didn’t exactly gasp — those present were too versed in the modern tools of terror to be surprised — but there was a shuffling of papers that Fielding had come to recognise over the years as civil servants’ applause.
‘As soon as Lieutenant Oaks heard the voice a second time,’ Myers said, brandishing the phone, ‘the penny dropped and he screamed, but it was too late. The phone had already disconnected. Except that it wasn’t too late. We heard him, and we know Dhar’s still alive.’
Spiro knew as soon as Myers had spoken that he was right. He thought back to the UAV trailer at Creech, to the sensor operator who had cast doubt on the target. For a moment, Spiro had imagined he had seen what looked like a crucifix, but the image was blurred and he had shut it out of his mind. Just as he had removed the operator’s suspicions from his official report afterwards.
It took almost a minute for someone to speak after Myers had shuffled back to his seat. Chadwick was the one who broke the silence, and his comments were addressed to Spiro.
‘I think I speak for all of the British agencies when I say that we offer you our unconditional sympathy. It’s at times like this that allies must pull together and help one other.’
Whitehall shorthand for
‘That’s good of you,’ Spiro said quietly. America wasn’t used to needing its allies. ‘I must make some calls.’
Fielding thought that Spiro looked a genuinely broken man as he stood up to leave. But again there was no sympathy, just the thought of what could be leveraged from the situation.
‘Before you go,’ Chadwick said, ‘I want you to know that there’s no reason why our official position should change: Dhar is thought to have been killed, but it is believed, with great regret, that six US Marines whom he had taken were killed too. Adopting such a line carries a political risk, and the Prime Minister will make no official statement on the incident, but our experience of Dhar is that he’s not the sort of
23
‘Please, have a rinse,’ Abdul Aziz said.
Marchant sucked at the straw that was put to his bruised lips, swilled the liquid round his mouth and then spat out a mixture of blood and fragments of his lower right molar. Aziz held a kidney-shaped stainless-steel dish up to his mouth, resting it on his lower lip, and caught the debris.
The moment Aziz had introduced himself as a dentist, two men had appeared from behind the economy- class curtain. Aziz had stood up to let them through to Marchant, who had put up a fight, taking one of them out, but it was still two against one, although Aziz had held back, limiting himself to a gratuitous kick to Marchant’s groin. Eventually, he was forced down into an aisle seat, his wrists bound to the armrests with plasticuffs and his legs secured to the footrest.
The two men left the plane before it took off, one helping the other, leaving only Aziz and a pilot on board. Lakshmi Meena never showed, but Marchant assumed she was the one who had set him up with Aziz. He regretted opening up to her in their chat the previous night, knew he should have listened to his instinct, not trusted anyone. The sole grain of comfort was his right hand. In the struggle to secure him to his seat, he had been cut in the soft flesh of his wrist. It wasn’t a deep incision, but it was painful enough to give him hope, because it meant that somewhere there was a sharp edge.
Marchant had heard of Aziz, knew the enhanced techniques he had used on enemy combatants as they had passed through black sites in Morocco on their way to Guantanamo; but what was it with the polite small talk? Had he once trained as a real dentist? He’d be offering him an old copy of
‘We don’t have to do this, Daniel,’ Aziz said, adjusting the settings on the steel brace that held Marchant’s head in position. Marchant couldn’t reply. His mouth had been wedged open with a metal clamp that tasted of linseed oil. He was also barely conscious. At least his business-class seat was upright. Up until now it had been fully reclined, reminding him of an actual dentist’s chair, which was no doubt the point. Aziz’s entire approach — the perverse offer of mouthwash, his authentic tools of the trade — seemed designed to remind him of the real thing. Except that there was no soothing classical music, no funny posters on the ceiling. Just the hum of the aircraft and a silence behind the curtain that confirmed Marchant’s worst fears. He was the only passenger who had proceeded to boarding.
‘All I need to know is what you saw in the mountains and if it had anything to do with Salim Dhar,’ Aziz said. He was standing in the aisle, examining an ultrasonic scaler that was buzzing in his hand. The reverberating whine began to shake down memories from the walls of Marchant’s skull.
‘Unfortunately, this instrument is a bit faulty,’ Aziz apologised, lowering the scaler into Marchant’s mouth. ‘I borrowed it from a horse vet who didn’t seem to care so much about maintenance. The problem is the sharp tip at the end — it isn’t being cooled by water, so it becomes red hot. Normally, a dentist moves quickly from one tooth to the next to prevent overheating, but I am not a normal dentist.’
Marchant screamed as Aziz pressed down with the instrument, scorching into the soft pulp of his molar. The surrounding gum seemed to explode into flames, the heat spreading through his head, licking down into his neck and shoulders until it felt as if his whole upper body was being blowtorched.
‘Please try to remember the mountains, Daniel. Because if what you saw did involve Salim Dhar and I didn’t know about it, the Americans will remove my teeth after I’ve finished pulling yours.’
Aziz unfastened the clamp and put down the scaler. He then picked up a steel dental drill and tested it. More whining, as if the drill was suffering pain rather than about to inflict it.
‘Tungsten carbide,’ Aziz said, inspecting the drill’s burr. ‘You see, I’m meant to hear about everything that happens in Morocco, or as our friend James Spiro put it so politely, “every fucking fart from Fes to Safi”. I know it’s not fair, but that’s the way it goes. The Americans, they expect a lot from us, and I would hate to let them down.’
‘I didn’t see anything unusual,’ Marchant repeated, his voice thick with blood. He thought back to what he had said a few minutes earlier, knowing that if he repeated it verbatim, it would be a clear indication that he was lying. He remembered the instructor — army moustache, tight-fitting T-shirt — who had taught him at RAF St Mawgan in Cornwall, where all new MI6 recruits were sent for basic SERE (Survival, Evasion, Rescue and Escape) training. Small errors and variations were more convincing than perfect recall, which suggested a fake story that had been well rehearsed.
‘It was my last night in Marrakech,’ Marchant continued. ‘I wanted to go up into the mountains one last time, so I borrowed a friend’s motorbike, went for a ride.’
‘Sometimes I think you British believe Moroccans are a genuinely inferior people,’ Aziz said. Marchant
