Games Traitors Play

school flamboyance. Both had done long spells in Poland. Everyone knew Prentice gambled, drank too much, but for as long as he continued to come up with good product, Fielding turned a blind eye. Denton knew a part of him envied Prentice. He was still out there in the field, where agents belonged, while he himself had chosen to climb Legoland’s greasy pole.

He walked to the door, leaving Fielding in preoccupied silence. Not for the first time in his career, Denton felt that he had merely confirmed information already known to his Chief rather than told him something new. It was in such moments that he felt destined to be a deputy, one of life’s permanent number twos. He glanced back at Fielding, pacing his spacious office, and closed the door with more force than was necessary.

Fielding didn’t like to exclude Denton from anything, but sometimes it was unavoidable. The thoughts in his head were forming too fast to share even with his loyal deputy, the implications backing up like a restless queue. He went back to his desk, opened a drawer and removed a file on Nikolai Primakov.

31

The next time Marchant woke, it was to the sound of a Russian voice, talking on a mobile phone on the terrace outside his room. Marchant’s Russian was rusty, but good enough to understand what was being said.

‘Yes, he’s here.’ A woman’s voice, not Meena’s. ‘Still sleeping.’ He could see her outline through the net curtain, turning towards him, holding something in her hand, a photo perhaps. ‘The American woman’s gone, left yesterday…He’s a little under the weather, but it’s incredible, he looks just like his father.’

Marchant tried to rouse himself, but he couldn’t even turn over. It was as if he was lying in thick treacle, the sort his father used to pour over sponge puddings on those rare occasions when they spent Christmas in Britain, at the family home in the Cotswolds. It was his father’s only contribution in the kitchen. He stared at the lace curtain, billowing gently in the breeze, and tried to work out where he was, who the woman might be, why he didn’t care. His mouth wasn’t hurting any more, but he couldn’t distinguish one part of his body from another. A numbness had cocooned him. He looks just like his father — the words floated around his medicated head until he drifted back to sleep again.

‘Marchant’s got a babysitter,’ Prentice said, grinding a cigarette into the dusty ground outside the roadside bar with his heel. The pine trees were shading him from the hot Sardinian sun, their roots pushing up through the dry soil, moulding it like a plasticine map of mountainous terrain. He had taken a walk out of the resort’s gates and down to a collection of shops eight hundred yards along the straight main road. The only shop that was open was a deserted supermarket, where he had bought two bottles of chilled Prosecco, a packet of Marlboro cigarettes and too many Lotto tickets. Next door was a closed fishmongers and an empty bar, run by a woman in a short skirt whose red-lined eyes and swollen stomach suggested she drank more beer than she served.

‘She’s called Lakshmi Meena,’ Fielding said, getting up from his desk in Legoland.

‘Not unless she’s dyed her fanny hair.’

Fielding knew Prentice was trying to shock him. He had a habit of being crude at inappropriate moments. Perhaps it was a reaction against his own proper background, or frustration at never having taken to the stage. Like so many agents Fielding knew, Prentice was a natural actor, the office joker who could mimic everyone in authority. (Fielding had once overheard Prentice’s impression of his own voice: a combination of camp archbishop and repressed Eton housemaster.) Give or take a few venial sins, he was also one of the best agents he had in the field.

‘Oh yes, and she’s speaking Russian.’ Prentice winked at a small boy who had appeared at the end of the bar, legs crossed, one hand in his mouth, the other tugging at his mother’s nylon skirt. Prentice turned his back and walked away from the bar, cutting across the scrubland that lay between the shops and the main highway to Cagliari. He stepped carefully over the pine roots as he went. Despite the dust, his polished yard boots glistened in the high sun.

‘Is she on her own?’ Fielding asked, surprised at the speed of events in Sardinia.

‘She checked in to a double room, near Marchant’s. On the beach. Two sets of flip-flops outside the door, couple of towels. Husband-and-wife cover.’

‘But you haven’t seen the husband yet?’

‘I only reached here last night. What do you want me to do? Get him out of here? She’s a swallow, sent to seduce him.’

‘And Meena’s definitely gone?’

‘Checked out yesterday.’

‘A little too hasty, no?’

‘We met at the airport. She was embarrassed. Told me Marchant’s room number, the medication he was on, then buggered off. Marchant’s a sitting duck if the Russians want to compromise him.’

‘They probably have already.’

32

The woman made no effort to cover herself as she stepped from the shower, walked across the bathroom and removed a towel from the radiator. She tilted her head, drying her blonde, shoulder-length hair as she looked over at the bed and smiled. Marchant wondered if she had been waiting for him to open his eyes. Her actions had a rehearsed choreography about them, more subtle than a porn star’s but no less calculated.

He knew before she began to speak that it was the same woman who had been sitting on the terrace earlier, whenever that might have been. Bells were ringing so loudly in his head that he thought, for a moment, that they were the reason he had woken. He hoped that something visceral in his sleeping state had raised the alarm. An uninvited Russian woman in his hotel room was about as bad as it could get for an MI6 field agent, the sort of scenario they taught on day one at the Fort.

If the implications weren’t so serious, his situation was almost funny. Textbook honeytrap, perfected in the 1960s, fell out of fashion after the Cold War, seemingly back with a vengeance. A British diplomat had recently been fired after he was filmed by the FSB with a couple of Russian tarts in a hotel room.

His head was clearer now, but he couldn’t be sure how long he had been lying in bed. Several days, at least. Where was Lakshmi Meena? Why had no one from London been to visit him? Hadn’t she said that MI6 knew where he was? And what was a naked woman doing in his bathroom?

He propped himself up in bed and took in his surroundings, tried to order random memories. He was in Sardinia, brought here by Meena after the Americans had handed him over to Abdul Aziz. He touched his mouth again, which was less swollen. He looks just like his father.

‘You’ve been sleeping for three days,’ the woman said. Her English was good, but there was no disguising the Russian mother tongue that thickened her cadences. She was standing in the doorway now, between the bathroom and the bedroom. Her shoulders were broad, like a swimmer’s, her breasts high and firm. Marchant estimated she was in her early thirties. Despite himself, he began to stir. Her pubic hair was tidy, trimmed rather than shaved, its soft brownness framed by tanned thighs.

‘I tell you this because I know how much the British men like to be in control,’ she smiled, glancing at the sheet covering Marchant. ‘On top of things.’

For a moment, Marchant felt pity for her, the wooden lines spoken with all the conviction of a hard-up lap dancer. But something about the way she moved across the hotel room and picked up a hair dryer made Marchant’s hands begin to sweat. And it wasn’t because of any desire she might have roused. Despite the air of a performance, her manner had a lover’s familiarity, an easiness born of intimacy. Instinctively, he felt about on the sheet next to him, trying to be discreet. It was damp.