Games Traitors Play

Bristol Channel. After a brief pause, during which Air Command consulted COBRA, the order came back to hold fire. Marcus Fielding had finally managed to get through to the Chief of the Defence Staff.

In the event, there was no need for the Typhoons to deploy their missiles. Dhar had been battling to keep the aircraft airborne, and it had now become a lost cause. He had managed to reach the Bristol Channel, but they were a mile short of the planned rendezvous with the Russian trawler.

‘Prepare to eject,’ Dhar said calmly. Marchant realised that his ejection seat was controlled by Dhar. He could have removed him from the plane at any time. It gave him hope that Cheltenham had been spared too.

‘I promise I’ll take care of your mother,’ Marchant said, as he closed his eyes and braced himself.

104

‘Are you telling me that Daniel Marchant should be regarded as a hero?’ Jim Spiro said incredulously, looking around the table. The Joint Intelligence Committee was at full strength, with senior intelligence officials from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain and America in attendance.

‘Salim Dhar was on a mission to Britain to destroy three targets,’ Fielding began. ‘The F-22 Raptor because it was a symbol of American military might; the delegation of Georgian and US military personnel as a thank-you to the Russians for protecting him; and GCHQ as part of his own personal crusade.’

‘And he achieved two of the three,’ said Spiro. ‘Remind me why exactly we should be thanking Marchant?’ He nodded towards the director of GCHQ on his left. ‘I’m not sure Cheltenham will be putting a photo of him in their hall of fame. If any halls are still standing.’

Fielding had hoped he could let Spiro down gently, as relations with America had to continue, but it was hard to resist giving him a bumpy landing.

‘We believe Dhar was carrying two air-to-air missiles, and two thousand-pound laser-guided bombs. One of them was packed with radioactive caesium-137. I don’t need to remind anyone here of the devastation that would have been caused by a dirty bomb dropped either on the crowd at Fairford or on a town the size of Cheltenham. I’ve just come back from a debriefing with Marchant, and he confirmed that it was always Dhar’s intention to drop the dirty bomb on GCHQ — a personal bête noire of his. As we all know, the thousand-pound bomb that struck the building was, thankfully, a conventional one, and there was only minimal structural damage and one life lost.’

‘How can we be sure the bomb he didn’t drop was dirty?’ Spiro asked.

‘Royal Navy divers have found wreckage of the SU-25 in the Bristol Channel, and are in the process of stabilising the unexploded ordnance. They’ve confirmed the presence of caesium-137. We’re lucky it wasn’t detonated by the impact of the crash.’

‘So why did Dhar bother to drop anything?’ the director of GCHQ asked. ‘He’d clearly had a change of heart.’

‘Marchant talked him out of the dirty option, but failed to persuade him to abandon the whole idea,’ Fielding replied. He had to be careful what he said at this point. It was fair to say that Marchant might have been able to prevent the conventional attack too, but had been mindful of Dhar’s jihadi credentials. A discredited Dhar would have been of no use to anyone. Nobody in the room, not even Harriet Armstrong, knew that Dhar had finally been turned, and had the potential to be the biggest asset MI6 had ever run.

‘So what you’re saying is that Dhar only achieved one of his original three targets,’ Armstrong said, seemingly supportive.

‘Correct. And for that we must thank Daniel Marchant.’

‘It’s all very well you guys patting each other on the back,’ Spiro said. ‘I’ve got to explain to Washington why the most advanced jet fighter ever built was taken out by a lousy lump of old Russian hardware, flown by the world’s most-wanted jihadi and a rogue MI6 agent.’

‘You can tell them that if it hadn’t been for the presence of an MI6 agent in the cockpit — and, for the record, Daniel Marchant is no rogue — the damage would have been incalculably worse.’

‘There’s only one thing that’s going to make my President happy, and that’s the scalp of Salim Dhar. Are we any closer to knowing how he disappeared?’

‘The helicopter that found Marchant reported nobody else in the water. The entire area continues to be searched as we speak, but so far it’s as if Dhar never existed.’

Fielding was lying, of course. He had no choice. According to Marchant’s debrief, the SVR had arranged for a trawler to be in the area. It had taken it a few minutes to find Dhar, as the plane had fallen short of the agreed ejection zone, but by the time the search-and-rescue helicopter had arrived, Dhar was on the trawler and heading out towards the Irish Sea.

105

Marchant still had a sore back from the Zvezda ejection seat, but otherwise he felt fine as he waited in one of the debriefing rooms for Fielding to return for a second visit. At Marchant’s request, the helicopter had taken him to the Fort, MI6’s training facility at Gosport, after picking him up from the Bristol Channel. The pilot had initially objected, but it was eventually agreed after some calls had been put through to Whitehall. Marchant had been given a physical check-up, then allowed to rest in one of the old rooms overlooking the sea, where he had studied as a new recruit with Leila.

As Marchant had explained to Fielding, he had thought Dhar was dead when he first spotted him in the water, a hundred yards away. He had released himself from his parachute and swum over to him, dreading what he might find. A dead Dhar suited America, but not Britain. But Dhar was fine, if a little groggy. Marchant had doubted whether the trawler would show up, but a forty-foot vessel registered to St Ives was soon approaching from the south-west.

‘For a few moments, I thought I was going to drown,’ Dhar had said.

‘I know the feeling,’ Marchant had replied. When he had first hit the sea and water had filled his nostrils, memories of being waterboarded had come flooding back.

‘You know I cannot take you with me,’ Dhar said.

‘I’m not sure I’m invited,’ Marchant replied, glancing at the approaching trawler. They were both shivering, speaking slowly as they trod water. ‘Thanks, by the way.’

‘For what?’

‘For letting me come along. And for not destroying Cheltenham. Will the Russians be happy to see you?’

‘No. Georgia’s drunken generals will still try to impress America. But it is time for me to move on. Islam is sometimes useful to Russia, but mostly it is a threat.’

‘And you never did get to see Tarlton.’

‘Next time, perhaps.’

‘How will you make contact? The storytellers of Marrakech?’

Dhar smiled at Marchant. ‘You know me too well. My taxi is here.’

Marchant swam away as the trawler drew near. He wanted to be at a safe distance in case the SVR had already concluded that he wasn’t such a committed defector after all.

‘Our father, he would have approved,’ Marchant called out, hoping that Dhar could still hear him. ‘Family business.’

Now, as he heard someone approaching the debriefing room at Gosport, Marchant was certain that he had turned Dhar. Last time, after India, he had hoped in vain.

It was Fielding who knocked and appeared in the doorway.

‘I’ve brought someone along to see you,’ he said, slipping away as Lakshmi Meena entered the room.

‘Is your arm OK?’ Marchant asked as they embraced. Her wrist was in plaster, and her hug was not quite as warm as his.