‘You’re a guy in a hurry.’ It was Lakshmi Meena, sitting at the wheel of an Audi TT convertible. Its roof was down.
‘Working off dinner,’ Marchant said, continuing to walk.
‘Fielding said I might find you around here. He wants us to talk.’
‘Well, now you can tell him we have.’
Marchant stopped, glancing back down the road, scanning the pedestrians for signs, shoes. He could see four of them in total. They had broken cover, making no attempt to conceal themselves. Their body language was more lynch mob than watcher. Marchant recognised the one at the back from Sardinia. He opened the door of Meena’s car and climbed in.
‘Aziz is dead. Last night in the military hospital in Rabat,’ Meena said, looking in the rear-view mirror as they drove off. ‘Complications unrelated to his original injuries, but clearly he wouldn’t have been in there if you hadn’t ripped half his mouth off.’
‘Are they lodging an official protest?’
‘Not their style. They don’t want to draw attention to what they did to you first.’
‘On your orders.’
‘Spiro’s.’
‘And you do whatever he says.’
Meena pulled up at a red light and glanced again in the mirror, her knuckles whitening on the steering wheel. ‘Look, I’m sorry for what happened. Truly.’
Marchant felt the gap in his gum with his tongue, but decided not to say anything. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Your flat, then Heathrow.’
‘Heathrow?’
‘Fielding wants us to go to India. Our flight’s tonight, and you need to pack.’
‘Our flight? Not so fast. I’m not going anywhere until I’ve spoken to him.’
Marchant shifted in his seat. He hadn’t been back to India since the US President’s trip, Leila’s death.
‘Fielding’s meeting us at Heathrow. He’ll explain everything. How was Primakov, by the way?’
Marchant hesitated. A new arrival at the Russian Embassy in London would arouse even the doziest CIA desk officer, but her question still surprised him.
‘The sous-chef at Goodman’s is one of ours,’ she continued by way of explanation. ‘It’s one of the most popular Russian restaurants in town. You showed up on our grid before you’d even ordered your herring with mustard. How can you eat that stuff?’
‘You’re not from Calcutta then?’
‘Reston, Virginia, actually. Why?’
‘Bengalis like their mustard.’
‘I meant the fish.’
‘They like that too. Primakov was fine. Fatter than I remember him. He was an old friend of my father.’
‘Friend?’
‘Sparring partner.’ He paused. ‘So who showed up first on your grid? Me or Primakov?’
Meena hesitated. ‘OK, I’ll admit, we don’t have a great deal on Primakov. Cultural attaché, brought out of retirement, medium-ranking KGB officer before the fall.’
‘But you have a bulging dossier on me. Says it all, doesn’t it? So where in India are we heading?’
‘The south, Tamil Nadu. Where my parents are from.’
‘Great. Meet the in-laws time. A bit premature, isn’t it? We haven’t even slept together.’
Meena drove on in silence, glancing in the rear-view mirror.
‘I’m sorry,’ Marchant said, more quietly now. It had been a crass thing to say. Sometimes it was easy to forget Meena’s Indian heritage. She talked like a ballsy, confident American, trading coarse comments with colleagues, but there was an inner dignity about her that he recognised as uniquely subcontinental.
‘Actually, we’re going to find your father’s lover.’
He looked across at her for more.
‘Our Chennai sub-station is closing in on Salim Dhar’s mother. Fielding thought you should be there when we bring her in.’
50
Salim Dhar turned the navigation lights on as the canopy closed, and took a deep breath. Then, after running through the cockpit checks he had practised so often on his ancient PC, he leaned forward and flicked the switch to start the right engine. The RPM dial in front of him spooled up to 65 per cent, and the exhaust-gas temperature rose to 300 degrees. He did the same with the left engine, lowered one stage of flap and used his thumb to reset the trim to neutral.
For a moment, he was back in Afghanistan, sitting in the cockpit of the crashed SU-25. He remembered a solitary poppy pushing up through a broken dial. It was the first time in his adult life that he had been happy. The camaraderie at the training camp had made him realise how little friendship he had found until then. The darkest days of his childhood had been at the American school in Delhi, where his father had insisted on sending him. There were a few Indian pupils, sons of New Delhi’s business elite, but he was not like them, nor was he like the diplomats’ children, who made no effort to talk unless it was to taunt him —
He turned the landing lights on, requested taxi clearance from the control tower, and again flicked the trim switch, setting it for take-off. Then he tested the wheelbrakes as he ran the throttle up to 70 then 80 per cent.
‘Brakes holding, airbrake closed,’ he said to himself as he felt for the switch on the side of the throttle. As jets went, the SU-25 wasn’t a demanding plane to fly. Unlike its more recent successors, it didn’t have a modern avionic suite, but it was a reliable ground-pounder, which was why it had been in Russia’s air force for so long. According to Sergei, his instructor, the SU-25 could operate at very low speeds without ‘flaming out’. Nor did it stall easily. ‘It can take a real beating and still bring you home,’ Sergei had said. But Dhar knew there would be no return flight.
After taxi-ing to the runway threshold and running through his pre-take-off checks, he waited for his clearance from control. At last it came. He took his position on the runway’s centreline, gazing at the white ribbon that stretched away as far as he could see. Engaging the wheelbrakes, he ran the power up to 90 per cent and checked that all the gauges were still in the green. Then he released the brakes and applied full military power, watching the air speed build quickly to 260 kmh.
Something was wrong.
‘Sometimes you need to add a little right rudder as you firewall the throttles,’ Sergei had said, but Dhar remembered too late. His fingers fumbled to deploy the twin drogue chutes, but it was hopeless. There was too little tarmac left. ‘Eject, eject!’ said a voice in his head. But as he overcompensated for the yaw, the plane lurching right, left, right again, the right wingtip hit the ground, breaking off in a shower of sparks and fire. He thought of his mother, closed his eyes and prayed.
51
Fielding took the call in the back of his chauffeur-driven Range Rover on the way to Heathrow. Cars didn’t particularly interest him, but he couldn’t deny that he had been impressed with the latest security upgrades to his official vehicle. Most of them were to do with jamming opportunist electronic eavesdroppers, but the car had also benefited from lessons learned in Afghanistan, where IEDs had caused such havoc. Its floor was now protected by
