Games Traitors Play

account of the increased air traffic. More classroom theory, more work on the simulator.

He tried to think back to the time he had met Marchant in India. The Britisher’s appearance had been different then, a crude cover identity. His hair had been shorter, his clothes more dishevelled, like those worn by the Westerners he had seen and despised in Goa. He reached out for the photo, gently prised it from the wall, and studied it more closely. According to Primakov, it had been taken by a young SVR agent from the top of a number 36 bus in London. Marchant was in a suit, looking through the window of a motorcycle showroom, across the road from MI6’s headquarters in Vauxhall.

Dhar had never been to London, but he felt he knew the city well. Although he had studied at the American school in Delhi, his education had been heavily influenced by Britain. He didn’t know why at the time, but his mother used to bring home books about London, talk to him about the country in a way that he realised now expressed a heartfelt affection. She had only been employed briefly at the British High Commission in Delhi, before he was born, but she had loved the place and its values. Dhar remembered playing Monopoly with her under a lazy fan, wondering at the names on the board: Old Kent Road; The Angel, Islington; Marylebone Station.

He had thought about the game again when the London Underground was attacked on 7 July 2005: Liverpool Street, King’s Cross. For some reason, his mother had always liked to buy up the stations.

‘Mama, but the maximum rent is only £200,’ he used to tease her.

‘I know,’ his mother had said, smiling, with a knowing tilt of the head. ‘But there are four stations, and only two or three of everything else.’

Dhar was in Afghanistan at the time of the London attack, fighting American troops, but he hadn’t joined in the cheering when news reached his camp of the bombings.

‘Why do you not salute our brothers in Britain, Salim?’ the commander of the camp had asked.

Dhar had walked off. Such methods had never been his style. His approach had always been to target the West’s troops and political leaders rather than its people. It was why he preferred to operate alone whenever he could, outside al Q’aeda’s indiscriminate umbrella. But he knew it was something else, too. In his mind, it was his mother’s world that the 7/7 bombers had desecrated; a board-game fantasy, but still her world. It was only later that he had understood why: it was his father’s, too.

It would have been easy for Dhar to dismiss Marchant’s bond of half-brotherhood as worthless. In his childhood he had had countless ‘cousin brothers’, distant relatives who played up family connections whenever it was convenient. It was acutely compromising, too, for a jihadi to be related to a Western spy Chief. But now that Dhar understood his father’s loyalties, he knew that he had to see Marchant again. The Britisher had been a potential ally when they had met in India. He was a man on the run from the CIA, but who had returned to a job at the infidel’s castle on the shores of the Thames, ignoring his coded text to join him in Morocco. Now, according to Primakov, he was finally ready to betray his country, to follow in their father’s footsteps.

Dhar pinned the photo of Marchant back on the wall. He knew there was another in London who could help him, but he had insisted to the Russians that it should be Marchant, telling them that the mission was off if it was anyone else. It wasn’t ideology. It was curiosity. There were too many questions he wanted to ask him. How had he coped with being waterboarded by the Americans? Who was the beautiful woman in Delhi he had shot instead of the President, the woman whose meenakshi eyes had haunted him ever since? And, most of all, what was their father like, the man who had hoodwinked the West for so long?

57

There was a queue of people waiting to enter the Meenakshi temple by the east gate. A female police officer checked the women, frisking their saris with a lollipop-shaped metal detector, while a male officer did the same with the men. No one was wearing any shoes, not even the police. Marchant and Meena had left theirs around the corner at a stall with thousands of others, not expecting to see them again.

Marchant approached the policeman and stood with his arms out and legs apart. Security seemed to be tight today, he sensed — thorough rather than a gesture — and he wondered if the temple was on a heightened state of alert. It wouldn’t have anything to do with Salim Dhar’s mother, but it might make things more difficult when they lifted her. They had already had to abandon their plan of using their wires in the temple, as they would have been picked up by the police detectors.

He smiled at the policeman once he was done and walked on, waiting for Meena at the bottom of the stone steps. He couldn’t be certain, but he thought he detected a slight hostility towards her from the female officer, who glanced over at him as she frisked her. Meena had daubed her hair parting with vermilion, a sign of marriage, but she couldn’t do much about the colour of Marchant’s skin. Perhaps mixed-race marriages didn’t play well in Madurai.

‘Sometimes I remember why we left this country,’ Meena said as she joined him. They walked down a colourful colonnade of pillars, leaving the sunlight behind them. Marchant thought he heard the sound of hesitant slokas being recited in a distant classroom. In front of them he could make out the profile of an elephant, its head almost touching the ornate roof, from which carved lions looked down. A queue of worshippers was waiting to be blessed by the animal. In return for a banana, bought from the elephant’s mahout, it would raise its trunk and touch their heads.

Before they had entered the temple complex, the CIA officer from Chennai had given Meena an update, in between shooting a tourist video of devotees queuing up to smash coconuts before entering the temple.

‘It’s kind of quaint, isn’t it?’ he had said. ‘Signifies leaving one’s identity behind.’

Marchant wasn’t sure if the American was playing his legend or being himself. He showed them a video he had shot earlier of a Russian behaving erratically outside the east entrance. Marchant recognised the tall figure as Valentin.

They walked further inside the temple complex, the light fading until all Marchant could see were pillared halls and corridors disappearing off into the darkness in all directions. In every corner there seemed to be small shrines to Hindu deities, like tiny puppet theatres, the gods visible deep within dark recesses, their bright colours lit by flickering oil candles. Stone sculptures of animals with lions’ bodies and elephants’ heads reared out of the shadows. A man wearing only a lunghi around his waist was lying prostrate, hands in prayer above his head, in front of a statue of Ganesh. They stepped around him and walked on, passing briefly through a courtyard where three camels were tethered. All around them, Hindu prayers were being chanted over a loudspeaker system, the priests’ voices distorting at full volume.

‘I told you it’s another world,’ Meena said, stopping beside a pillar encrusted with what seemed like centuries of crumbling red turmeric powder and candle wax. ‘This is Lakshmi, my goddess,’ she added, looking at an idol of a benign woman with four arms. Its surface was also streaked with yellows and reds, and weathered by generations of worship. ‘The goddess of wealth and fortune, courage and wisdom.’

‘And beauty,’ Marchant added, looking at the lotus flower the goddess was sitting on. He thought back to the Lotus Temple in Delhi, where Leila had been killed. Her lips had still been warm as she had lain lifeless in his arms, her hair sticky with blood. He watched Meena daub some red on her forehead and bow in front of the statue. For a moment, she seemed genuinely at peace. Then she turned to a man standing behind a trestle table beside the idol. On it were tumbling garlands of white jasmine, coconuts and pyramids of turmeric. She gave him a few rupees and picked up a garland. At the same time, they exchanged a few words, too quietly for Marchant or anyone else to hear. Then she placed the fragrant flowers around Lakshmi’s neck, turned back to the table and dabbed her finger in the turmeric.

‘Come on, Indian boy,’ she said, smudging a tilak on Marchant’s forehead and walking on. ‘She’s here.’

A moment later, she pulled him back from the main thoroughfare, just as a white cow came running out of the shadows, draped in a gold-embroidered cloak and accompanied by two breathless temple priests. The tips of the cow’s horns had been painted red and green, and two drums had been strapped to its back, one on either side. The priests, chests bare and glistening with oil, were beating the drums, accompanied by the jangling silver bells that swung from the cow’s neck.

After the cow had gone, Marchant and Meena headed towards Shiva’s shrine, walking through a thriving