‘We go public about Dhar if anything happens to Marchant, is that clear?’
Spiro paused, looking at Denton, listening to his accent, its roughness softened by the quiet delivery. Denton’s eyes were soulless, unblinking behind small oval glasses. It had been a smart move by Fielding to make him his deputy. Every Chief needed a troubleshooter, a hard man to sort out the messy stuff. Fielding liked to refer to Denton as his gallowglass. Spiro had played a similar role himself for the previous DCIA. But Denton was different, less muscular, more serpentine. Apparently, he had once saved Fielding’s life in a tight spot in Yemen. Now it was payback time.
‘Congratulations on your promotion, by the way. I never got the chance to say.’
Denton refused to rise to the bait. Instead, he just looked at him with his lifeless eyes.
‘Marchant’s doing fine, Ian,’ Spiro continued, turning to head off into the park. ‘The tooth fairy’s watching over him.’
27
Lakshmi Meena took a deep breath before the member of the ground-crew staff opened the plane’s heavy door. Her life seemed to be punctuated by deep-breath moments, she thought: informing her father that she wasn’t going to pursue a career in medicine; telling Spiro that she wasn’t prepared to sleep with him or with anyone else at Langley to further her career.
Now her lungs were full again, her chest tight. Did other people have to summon composure in the same way, make such a conscious choice to square up to the world each day? Her father, a structural engineer, had always stressed the importance of blending in, but when she looked at him now, designing bridges in Reston, West Virginia, she sometimes struggled to see anyone at all.
She bunched her right hand tightly around a silk handkerchief and nodded at the two ground crew. The three of them were standing at the top of a set of steps, bringing them even closer to the hot Moroccan sun. There was no shade on the runway, but at least the twin-turboprop had taxied to a quiet corner of Agadir airport, away from the restless tourists queuing to return home to Britain. Beyond the plane, a military ambulance stood waiting, two medics idling by its open doors, smoking and talking to an armed policeman and a couple of Aziz’s intelligence colleagues.
One of the men put a hand up unnecessarily to keep the door open as Meena stepped into the plane. She had learned to command authority since joining the Agency, but it still felt like an act, not something that came naturally. She hoped Marchant hadn’t suffered too much. Despite their differences, she liked him, envied his equanimity. He seemed to possess an inner calmness that she would never know. And although she had refused to help Spiro set Marchant up with Aziz, she knew she could have done more, protested formally to Langley.
It had also taken too long for her to be patched through to the pilot. As she had suspected, he had been given orders to circle for two hours and then return to Agadir. He had had no contact with Aziz during the flight. The cockpit door was locked, and Meena sensed that the pilot preferred it that way. It clearly wasn’t the first time Aziz had taken a passenger on a tour of the Med.
Meena saw Aziz first, head back and to one side, his mouth wide open, as if he was singing grotesquely in his sleep. But there was no sound, and for a second she thought he was dead. She moved forward, trying to process the scene: the clamp in Aziz’s mouth, the dark, congealed stain on his cheek, the faint rise and fall of his chest, the tools littered across the floor. Her orders were to get Marchant away from Aziz, but where the hell was he?
She glanced around at the two rows of seats in business class. Aziz was in an aisle seat, its upholstery stained and torn. The seats around were also flecked with blood, the crisp paper headrests ripped or missing. Then Meena saw him, slumped on the floor, his back against the open door of the lavatory, hands by his side. Marchant’s eyes were open, but he was barely conscious. The bottom half of his face was badly bruised, his lips bloodied and swollen like slices of overripe peach.
‘Daniel,’ she said, putting the handkerchief to her mouth, as much to reassure herself about her own lips as to cut out the stale smell of burnt flesh, which was suddenly overpowering. She rushed over, but by the time she was kneeling down beside him, Marchant’s eyes had closed.
28
Giuseppe Demuro was good at recognising guests. It was part of his job, one of the reasons they came back to his resort year after year. Guests liked to be remembered. Some of his colleagues kept notes on the high rollers, hoping that a personal aside on arrival — namechecking the children, asking after a relative — would secure a more generous tip. But Demuro was in no need of any props. He also had a unique manner, honed over the years into what he hoped was a self-respecting obsequiousness, somewhere between a butler and the boss. But it was his memory for faces that had helped him rise to become manager of one of the most luxurious resorts in Sardinia. It was also why he was in the employ of several of the world’s intelligence agencies, who provided more reliable revenue streams than gratuities.
These organisations weren’t after state secrets or sexual scandal. (A friend of his at a nearby resort made even more money by tipping off the newspapers whenever politicians came to stay with unsuitable companions, but that was beneath Demuro.) All they wanted to know about was unusual combinations of visitors: patterns. In recent years, the resort had become popular with Russians, from oligarchs who moored their yachts offshore to extended families who paid in cash, stayed mostly in their rooms (always sea-facing), lifted weights in the gym and consumed vast quantities of watermelon and cucumber. If an oligarch’s holiday overlapped with a prominent politician’s, Demuro would ring the relevant contact.
He liked working for the British the most. There was something glamorous — almost Italian — about the MI6 officers he had met, particularly the man they called the Vicar. He would have preferred working for a priest, of course, but he didn’t complain, provided his monthly retainer was in euros.
Demuro had no hesitation, then, in dialling a secure London number after the young American woman checked in to a sea-facing room with a recuperating guest. It wasn’t that he recognised her as CIA. Nor that she had a sick companion. The Americans had brought injured people before. It was the fact that a young Russian couple had arrived shortly after them, asking to be near the sea, too.
Normally, he would have greeted the couple in fluent Russian. The previous winter, in the off-season, he had been sent to study at a language school in St Petersburg for three months. There were now more Russian than Italian guests at the resort during July and August. But something made Demuro hold back, and speak in broken English. As he walked with the couple to their room, pointing out the tennis courts, pool and restaurant, he overheard a brief exchange between them. It was only a few Russian words, but when he repeated them on the phone, the Vicar hinted at a bonus and Demuro offered a quiet prayer of thanks.
29
Marchant awoke to the sound of a chipping noise. It took him a few seconds to realise that it wasn’t coming from inside his mouth. He put his hand up to his jaw, which felt disfigured and swollen. His gums were throbbing, but the pain was less than it had been on the plane. Where was he? He was lying on white cotton sheets, in a whitewashed room. The ceiling was high and latticed with cream-coloured wooden beams. On one wall there was a large mirror, framed in pearl mosaic. A twenty-four-inch television screen perched on a chest of drawers, and fruit — peaches and apricots — had been left in a bowl in front of it. Beside his bed, on a writing table, there were several bottles of pills next to an orchid and some mineral water. He leaned across and picked up one of the bottles: it was amoxicillin, an antibiotic. The other was diamorphine.
He sat up with some effort. His neck muscles were sore and his head throbbed more when he moved. A net
