‘And if he’s not my kind of artist?’ Marchant asked, knowing the answer. As far as they were concerned, he had already been compromised enough to guarantee his cooperation.
‘Our friend will be very disappointed,’ Valentin said.
‘We all will,’ Nadia added, smiling at him with a coyness that made Marchant’s palms moisten again.
‘You and your father, you both seem to share a dislike of America.’
‘I wouldn’t put words into my mouth,’ Marchant said, touching his jaw. ‘It’s not a nice place to be at the moment.’ Despite the bravura, Valentin’s comment unsettled him. The Americans had long accused his father of disloyalty, eventually driving him from office.
‘But they didn’t treat you very well.’
‘That wasn’t the Americans.’
‘Of course not. And they couldn’t have cancelled your appointment with Dr Aziz.’
Marchant looked at him.
‘Our friend is eager to see you again,’ Valentin said. ‘Your father once gave him a photo of all his children. He still treasures it.’
‘All?’
‘You, Sebastian…’ Valentin paused, looking hard at Marchant, as if he hadn’t finished.
‘And?’
‘And your father.’
Marchant didn’t buy it. ‘All his children’ was an odd phrase for two sons, even allowing for some loss in translation. The Russians knew about Salim Dhar.
34
Fielding had told him he was coming. It was courtesy, but it was also a matter of security. Giles Cordingley lived at the top of Raginnis Hill, overlooking the Cornish fishing village of Mousehole, ten miles from Land’s End, and visitors to his granite farmhouse were rare. He was too old for surprises. A security camera was positioned discreetly to the left of the high oak gates, and it took a while for them to swing open and let Fielding’s Range Rover pass through into the gravel courtyard. His driver parked in front of an old stable block and took a look around, taking in other security cameras, the high walls that enclosed a forgotten orchard. Then he made a call on his mobile and returned to the car, leaving Fielding to approach the house on his own.
Cordingley had been Chief of MI6 in the 1990s, serving for three years before becoming master of an Oxford College and then retiring to Cornwall. He was the last of the Cold War Chiefs, the end of an era. Well into his sixties by the time he reached the top, he had enjoyed a long career that had begun with a role in Oleg Penkovsky’s recruitment. He had managed the defection of Vladimir Kuzichkin when he was head of station in Tehran, overseen the handling of Oleg Gordievsky, and lost agents at the hands of Aldrich Ames. Most importantly, he was one of the few people who knew about Nikolai Primakov, having personally authorised his recruitment.
There was no answer when Fielding rang the doorbell and he eventually found Cordingley behind the house, tending to a row of beehives in what must have been the old vegetable garden. Fielding thought his face looked fleshier than he remembered, like pale putty, big heavy-rimmed glasses making it seem rounder, more vulnerable. Despite the dramatic clifftop setting, there was no sense of a man enjoying his retirement in the great outdoors, no ruddy, windblown cheeks or healthy complexion. He looked like a man unused to daylight. For a moment, Fielding wondered if he was ill, if that was why he had moved to Cornwall.
‘Good of you to see me, Giles,’ Fielding began, knowing that it would be futile to wait for him to stop tending his bees. Cordingley was wearing a protective veil but no gloves or suit. His hands looked feminine, unthreatening. Fielding assumed he had operated the main gates with the device that was hanging around his neck. His hospitality didn’t seem to extend beyond allowing entry, and he hadn’t bothered to come round and greet his visitor. It was a reminder that Cordingley’s relationship with the Service was complicated, that he had left under a cloud of homophobia, been denied a KCMG, the usual gong for a Chief.
‘Duty rather than goodness,’ Cordingley said, putting a lid back on one of the hives. Fielding kept his distance, knowing that angry bees were all part of the welcome. The garden, he thought, looked tatty and tired. Only the hives were well tended. A gentle wind was blowing in off the sea far below. On the far side of the bay, St Michael’s Mount rose out of the water like a fairytale castle. A brace of beam trawlers were returning home to nearby Newlyn under a high mackerel sky, their nets hung out on either side for a final trawl of the bay. If it wasn’t for the
Cordingley walked past him towards the back door of the house, a slow amble that still drew a cloud of bees in his slipstream. Fielding swatted one away as nonchalantly as he could. He felt a sharp pain on the back of his hand.
‘They only sting when they sense fear,’ Cordingley said, entering the house. He was almost eighty, but he hadn’t missed Fielding’s flinch.
35
Marchant knew that there was something wrong with his room twenty yards before he reached it. The sliding doors were open, and he could hear a couple inside, the unmistakeable soundtrack of sexual pleasure. At least, he could hear a woman; the man sounded more subdued, set upon. The Russian couple had told him to rest, agreed to meet for a drink before dinner, talking as if he had the liberty to do as he pleased. But he knew it was a pretence, that he had no freedom. They were already back at the villa next door, watching, waiting. Marchant wasn’t a guest at the resort, he was a prisoner.
As he approached the sliding glass doors, he could see the blue flicker of a TV screen reflecting off his apartment’s white walls. Had he got the wrong number? The layout of the sprawling resort, each house set back from the smooth-tiled paths that meandered through them, was confusing, but the number by his apartment matched the key in his hand.
He stepped into the small garden, careful not to touch the half-open iron gate, and edged towards the glass doors. He knew what was going on now, but he still kept his approach silent, in case he was wrong, in case there really were people in his room. But he knew there weren’t. Not in the flesh.
He looked at the large TV screen for a second, distracted by the rhythmic movement of Nadia’s taut buttocks, the winking recesses. Then he realised that it was his body beneath them, and felt sick. He stepped into the room and grabbed the remote, which was on the table beside a replenished bowl of watermelon. It was only as he turned away that he saw Hugo Prentice standing by the bathroom door, arms folded, watching the screen with a smirk on his fifty-something face.
‘It’s showing in my room, too,’ Prentice said, careful to remain out of sight from the window. ‘On a loop. Every room in the resort, nationwide release. It’s the most exciting thing I’ve seen on an in-house hotel channel in years.’
‘You took your time,’ Marchant said, turning off the TV and dropping the remote onto the bed, which had been freshly made. ‘Fielding send you by boat?’
‘Take off your shirt and close the curtains. You’re tired, remember? Sent to your room for a sleep.’
Marchant looked at Prentice for a moment, then pulled off his shirt, threw it on the bed and walked to the glass doors. Nadia was sitting outside her villa now, sunbathing topless, waiting to see how he would react to the video. She gave him a coy wave. He didn’t wave back, but drew the thick curtains.
Prentice remained by the bathroom door as Marchant went over to the pedestal sink and splashed water on his face. He didn’t want to dwell on the video, the fact that Prentice had just witnessed him having sex. Strangely, he found that more troubling than the implications for his career, the consequences of being compromised by a textbook honeytrap. Perhaps it was because Prentice had been a good friend of his father, who had perfected the
