Dead Spy Running

19

Hassan was the only asset Leila had ever slept with. It wasn’t usually her style, but at least he was young and good-looking. Most agents were paid, but Hassan had always been an exception, ever since he’d provided her with enough information to thwart an attack on a passenger plane over Heathrow. After that he could name his price, which in his case was hard sex rather than hard cash.

According to Fielding, fragments of intelligence in the wind pointed to some sort of Gulf connection to the attempted attack on the marathon. Word had gone out for all assets, however tenuous, to be harvested for HUMINT. Hassan knew more about what was happening in the Gulf than any Western analyst in Whitehall, drawing on his Wahabi roots to keep informed of the region’s complex terror network. Ostensibly he was a travel journalist, writing for one of the many English-language newspapers in Qatar, but he didn’t need the salary. His family was worth more than MI6’s annual budget, which was why he was asking Leila if she could leave the media awards dinner early and host her first home match.

‘You’ve always played away,’ he said, topping up her glass of fizzy water. The dinner, in the ballroom of the London Hilton, was dry, which was why a herd of Western journalists was migrating steadily to the hotel’s bars. It was a dry affair in other ways, too. There was little cross-cultural mingling, despite the evening’s theme of global unity and despite the best efforts of the MC, a risqué, half-Iranian, half-British female comedian (‘Whenever I tell people my biological clock is ticking, everyone ducks’).

Leila had wanted to find her, say how much she had enjoyed her act, but Leila was acting too. She was attending the evening in the guise of a Gulf-based travel PR, one of her regular operational covers. It was the first time she had used it on British soil, and she felt more nervous than usual.

‘I’ve booked a room here,’ Leila said, wrestling with a sudden urge to join the hacks at the bar. She was used to having sober sex with Hassan, but tonight she felt the need for a drink.

‘Leila, that’s very thoughtful, but do you know what? The Hilton bores me. Hotels bore me. I spend all my life in hotels. Let’s go back to your place. Why not? It’s your first time on home soil.’

Hassan was proposing that she step over a line she had never crossed before. Apart from the security implications of taking an asset back to her home, there were personal issues too. Sex in a hotel room was one thing, but at home, the place where she retreated from Legoland, the sanctuary she returned to after postings abroad? That was different.

‘I’m sorry, Hassan. I’ve paid for the room. And it’s a long way back to where I live.’ But she knew, as soon as she spoke, that she had said the wrong thing.

‘You’ve paid for a room?’ he laughed. ‘So what? I’ll pay.’

She looked away at the myriad of tables, each with its candles and extravagant flower display, spread out across the ballroom floor like an illuminated orchard. She hated not being in control.

‘It’ll be worth it,’ he said, leaning forward to touch her arm. ‘I know who supplied the isotonics.’

Earlier that day, after her final debrief at Thames House, Leila had returned to her desk at Legoland for the first time since the marathon. The building was still buzzing with the attempted attack. In the canteen she noticed the glances, overheard people talking about her with an obviousness unbecoming of spies. The Gulf Controllerate, where she worked, was like a City traders’ pit. There were no flickering international share prices, but the hum of ringing phones and the vast data-analysis charts on the walls, linking hundreds of names across the world, conveyed a similar chaotic urgency. Her line manager said it was even busier than in the days immediately after 9/11.

It had been a relief when Marcus Fielding had called Leila in to his office and asked about Marchant, how she had found him the day before. He had also praised her for the way she had thrown herself back into work, and repeated the need for her to be patient. Marchant, he said, was to be questioned by the Americans, which wasn’t ideal, but he had every confidence he would be back in the fold soon. It was best, though, if he and she didn’t see each other for a few days.

Leila didn’t pursue what he meant by ‘questioned’, for fear of betraying Paul Myers, but there was also something about Fielding’s manner that discouraged further discussion of Marchant. Instead, he wanted her to focus on Hassan, and to find out whatever he knew about the marathon attack. His intelligence had been accurate in the past.

‘Squeeze the pips,’ Fielding had said, in a way that made her doubt his reportedly celibate status. They both knew that she had never filled in a request form for Hassan to be paid, and the matter had never been discussed. Leila thought about that now as she tied Hassan’s hands to the posters of her brass bed. It had shocked her how quickly she had got used to sleeping with a man she didn’t love, and struggled to fancy. She had told Marchant after the first time, but he didn’t want to know. It was her job: they would both have to sleep with other people occasionally, so they should just get on with it. The only reason for them to confide in each other, he said, would be if it meant anything more than sex.

Leila didn’t find it so simple, and was annoyed that Marchant could be so matter-of-fact. She remembered when, towards the end of their six months at the Fort, a female instructor had taken her and the three other women in that year’s intake for a drink one night, to pass on a few personal tips. She expected them all to deal with the health risks themselves. Her advice was solely about the emotional damage that professional sexual liaisons could result in. The key, she had said, was to think of themselves as actors playing out a scene in a film.

Leila tried to imagine the camera crew now, as she looked around her dimly lit flat. Hassan had hinted at less orthodox sex on their last meeting, in Doha, but she had kept their encounter firmly on the straight and narrow. Tonight would be different, something to trouble the censors.

‘Leila, this is wonderful,’ he said, lying face-up on the sheets. He was naked, his wrists and ankles tied securely with scarves to all four bedposts.

‘It’s what they call home advantage,’ she said, picking up two large lit candles she’d been given by Marchant. She walked over to the bed with them. They were both brimming with beeswax, which burned hotter than ordinary candle wax. Still in her underwear, she placed them carefully by the bedside, then went over to her CD player and turned up Natacha Atlas. Outside, the lights of Canary Wharf Tower burned brightly as bankers worked late into the night. For a moment, she longed for a normal job. She drew the souk-bought curtains, sent by her mother, took another scarf from a drawer, and tied it over Hassan’s eyes. He sighed with approval, mouthing a kiss at her. ‘Darling Leila,’ he whispered, but she put her finger to his lips.

‘Ssshh,’ she said, passing him the mouthpiece of the ghalyun, an Iranian hookah that she kept in the flat. Her father had brought it back from Tehran in 1979. As Hassan drew heavily on the mix of tobacco and hashish, she moved up onto the bed, straddling his chest, her back to him. Somehow it was more bearable if she couldn’t see his face. Taking him in one hand, she reached across with the other to the candles on the bedside table.

‘Are you ready?’ she said quietly, working him firmly. She turned and removed the hookah pipe from his mouth.

‘I’ve never been more ready in my life,’ he said.

Hassan, Leila suspected, was a coward at heart, despite the bravado. Too much pain and he would cry for his mother. ‘How brave are you feeling?’ she asked, holding a candle six inches above him, then lowering it to three so the beeswax had less time to cool.

He screamed, as she knew he would, writhing for a few seconds as the near-boiling wax dripped onto his sensitive skin. But his smile returned as the wax hardened. Hassan, she realised, was weirder than she had thought. She caught the smell of his sweet cologne as she dripped more boiling wax onto him. Suddenly his presence in her home was overwhelming. She resented him, her job, the compromising position she found herself in; but then she thought of what they were doing to Marchant, wherever he was, and moved the candle even lower.

Half an hour later, Leila was running out of tricks, and Hassan still hadn’t told her anything. Earlier, in the taxi from Park Lane to Docklands, he had insisted that his information was so potentially compromising, for him and for his country, that he would need something special to round off their home fixture. Only then would he talk.

She placed the hookah back in Hassan’s mouth and told him to inhale deeply. For a moment she feared she had misjudged him, that he might pass out before telling her anything. But Hassan did as he was told, as he had done all evening, and gave her a stoned smile as she went over to her fridge and opened the fast-freeze compartment.

An air steward on a late-night flight back from Abu Dhabi had once told her how to make a man sob with pleasure. He was gay, but he reckoned ‘the Narcissus’ worked for most men. It tapped into their fundamental egos, he said, particularly if they liked blowing hot and cold. Which was why, after Hassan’s initial cries of pain, Leila had moulded the solidifying wax around him. Once it had hardened, she had carefully slid it off and filled it with water. That water had now frozen, and was sitting upright next to a bag of peas. She peeled away the wax, looked at what she had in her hand with some satisfaction, and returned to Hassan in the bedroom.

‘Turn over,’ she said, unfastening his hand ties. It was time to find out what he knew about the marathon.