out her revenge instead.
She was spoilt for choice in London, but had settled on a Turkish gang with a proven record and an obsession with forensics. They had never been caught, and they asked for more when she told them the West End venue.
‘It’s very public.’
‘Good. I want everyone to know.’
General Borowski would certainly know, but at least this way there was a chance of protecting herself afterwards, providing the political will was there. She was in his hands now.
69
Dhar listened in silence as Primakov told him about his mother’s rendition. He knew that anger was a weakness, but it took all of his strength to remain calm and listen. The only outward sign of distress was a twitch in his lower left eyelid.
‘This Spiro is the bane of many brothers’ lives,’ Dhar said. He was sitting upright, his hands flat on the table in front of him, on either side of a glass of water. They were talking in the hangar at Kotlas. Outside, it was raining again, rattling the metal roof.
‘He was the one who waterboarded Daniel Marchant.’
Dhar tried not to think where the Americans would take his mother, how she would cope.
Reaching for the glass of water, he watched Primakov walk over to the window and look outside. Sergei was right. There was something about the Russian — other than the mix of cologne and garlic — that made Dhar wary. But he had no option but to work with him. He had come straight from seeing Marchant in India.
‘If it’s any consolation, your British half-brother is distraught,’ Primakov said, turning back to face him. ‘He gave your mother his personal word that she would be taken to London. If Spiro hadn’t been armed, Marchant would have killed him.’
‘He is ready to help us, then?’ Dhar asked, happy to move the conversation away from his mother.
‘Marchant could forgive the West once. But now, following your mother’s rendition, he is struggling to call Britain his home.’
Dhar flinched again at the mention of his mother. He closed his eyes, trying to calm the twitch, control the body with the mind.
‘We need to be sure,’ he said, raising a reluctant hand to steady his eyelid. It was too much. ‘Rendition’ and ‘mother’ were words he never wanted to hear together again. ‘After all that happened to Marchant before, he still went back to work for the infidel.’
‘He wants to meet you. I have told him everything about your father, how I recruited him in Delhi, his twenty years of service to Moscow.’
‘How did he react?’
‘Like you, I think he suspected already. There was relief in his eyes. Let us see. He must pass one final test before he joins us.’
70
‘I thought I should drive to Heathrow, pick Daniel up,’ Ian Denton said, standing in front of Marcus Fielding’s desk. Fielding was lying on the floor behind it, partly out of sight, trying to relax after another back spasm. ‘He must be pretty cut up after what happened in Madurai.’
‘It’s OK,’ Fielding said. ‘I’ve just sent Prentice. With orders to get Marchant drunk. Look out for him when he’s back in the office, though. He’ll have no desire to talk to me.’
Fielding was touched by Denton’s concern. Despite his cold-blooded demeanour, he had a warm heart. And he had always taken an interest in Marchant’s welfare.
‘Of course.’ Denton paused. ‘Is everything all right with Daniel?’
‘As much as it ever is with him,’ Fielding said. He wanted to confide more in his deputy, but he couldn’t. Denton’s own deep suspicion of the Americans had brought him close to Marchant in recent months, but Fielding knew that the plan to help Marchant defect must remain known only to himself.
‘I’ll leave it to Prentice, then,’ Denton said. ‘And look forward to signing off his exorbitant expenses.’
Fielding sometimes wished his deputy would unbutton a little, let things go, but he could never remember an occasion when Denton had got drunk. After he had left, Fielding unzipped the second encrypted audio file from GCHQ and listened, reading the covering note from his opposite number at Cheltenham. Grushko again, this time talking to an unnamed colleague in Moscow Centre. It had been recorded a few hours earlier.
The recording ended suddenly. ‘Argo’ was an unusual choice, nostalgic. It was the codename the KGB had assigned to Ernest Hemingway in the 1940s. Fielding tried to linger on the historical detail, delay the realisation, the rising nausea, but it was impossible. In one awful moment, he had traced the line of succession, identified the inheritor. He reached for the phone, too heavy in his hand, and dialled General Borowski, head of Agencja Wywiadu, Poland’s foreign intelligence agency, at his home on the outskirts of Warsaw.
71
‘Come on, Daniel. That’s what we do. We use people.’
Marchant hadn’t been pleased to see Prentice waiting for him at arrivals. It was a sight that was starting to annoy him, particularly as this time Prentice explained that he had been sent as a peace envoy by Fielding. But he was an old family friend, someone he had always found it easy to confide in. His offer of alcohol was welcome, too. Marchant had been drinking on the plane, and was happy to keep going. A bender loomed. Prentice had driven him into central London, and they were now sitting at an outside table at Bentley’s Oyster Bar in Swallow Street, off Piccadilly. It was one of Prentice’s favourite restaurants.
‘Are you using Monika?’ Marchant asked, a smile softening the question’s harsh undercurrent. Something about their relationship was still bugging him, and he was sure it wasn’t jealousy.
‘You’ve got a thing for her, haven’t you?’ Prentice washed an oyster down with a deep draft of Guinness. ‘I can see why. She’s a great lay.’
‘I’m sorry, Marcus, we should have informed you of our suspicions.’
Usually, Fielding’s conversations with General Borowski were upbeat. He was an old-school spy who liked to be taken to the Traveller’s Club for a sharpener whenever he came to London. Now, as they talked, Fielding felt only numbness. There was always the chance in his line of work that the man sitting at the next desk was praying to a different god, but it had still come as an almighty shock. Was this how the happily married felt when they discovered their partner had been cheating all along?
‘How long have you known?’ Fielding asked, trying not to think back, recalibrate the past, reassess the
