Dead Spy Running

27

‘It was a precaution, Marcus, nothing more,’ Sir David Chadwick said, watching Fielding carefully as he poured them both a gin. ‘She was never working for them as such. Ultimately she answered to you, to us.’

Fielding remained silent, looking out through French windows at a posse of female statues in the garden. There were three of them, their crude curves lit up by spotlights sunk around an ornamental pond. Chislehurst seemed to be full of naked garden statues, Fielding thought, at least on the private road where Chadwick lived. Statues and speed bumps and video-linked doorbells. Even Fielding’s driver, parked outside in his official Range Rover, had been taken aback by the ostentation.

‘The Americans insisted on it,’ Chadwick continued, filling the silence. Fielding made him nervous when he was in this sort of mood, his reticence impossible to read. ‘Unfortunately, we weren’t in a very strong position to argue. You know as well as I do how things were. We were in turmoil. No leads on the bombing campaign, the Chief of MI6 under suspicion.’

Fielding still said nothing as he turned to take his drink. He had asked to meet outside London, and Chadwick had thought that inviting him to dinner at home would be the perfect solution, particularly as his wife was out at choir practice for the evening. The informal setting would allow them to talk properly about the future of the Service, how it might start to rebuild itself after the damage inflicted by the Stephen Marchant affair, and what the hell he had done with Daniel Marchant. Did he also want to show off the Edwardian-style orangery that had been added since he took over as Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee? Perhaps. But now he was regretting it, because Fielding somehow knew about Leila.

‘I need reassurances that there’s no one else,’ Fielding eventually said.

‘She was the only one,’ Chadwick replied, joining him at the window. ‘No one was happy about it, Marcus.’

‘Except Spiro. And Armstrong.’

‘We needed to know if it ran in the family.’

‘Which is why I suspended Daniel Marchant.’

‘And that was the right and proper thing to do. But it wasn’t enough, I’m afraid. Daniel began to go a little off-message when Stephen died, started to show all the signs of a renegade.’

‘He knew the rules, that we’d go after him if he became another Tomlinson.’

‘The Americans wanted more assurances — not a bad call in the light of the marathon attack.’

Fielding laughed dryly. ‘Which Daniel Marchant thwarted.’

‘Leila’s account of the incident is a little more ambiguous.’

‘Not in the debrief I read. No doubt she told others what they wanted to hear.’

‘You’ve approved her three-month attachment?’

‘Of course. With a proviso that she never returns.’

‘How did you know, by the way?’

‘How do any of us know anything in this business? We join the dots, squint a little, turn things on their side and try, with a lot of luck, to see the bigger picture.’ He paused. ‘She didn’t debrief properly, after meeting one of her best Gulf contacts. I knew the CX had gone elsewhere. She knew I knew. Then she asked for a transfer.’

Chadwick said nothing, matching Fielding’s silences with one of his own.

‘There’s something else you should know,’ he said. ‘MI5’s had a breakthrough on the running belt. As we suspected, there was a remote-detonation option from a mobile phone. But it was configured to work only on the TETRA network.’

Chadwick sensed that, for the first time that evening, he had unsettled Fielding. TETRA was only used by the emergency services and the intelligence agencies. Terrorists would love to have access to TETRA — it would allow them to detonate a bomb even if the main mobile networks had been knocked out — but its use was tightly restricted (although not tightly enough for Fielding’s liking).

‘And?’

Chadwick went over to the mahogany sideboard, where a brown A4 envelope lay next to the silver drinks tray. He pulled out a photo, glanced at it and walked back over to Fielding by the window.

‘Take a look at this,’ he said, handing it over. The photo was a grainy image of the London Marathon, a screen-grab from the BBC’s helicopter camera. In the middle of the picture was Daniel Marchant, surrounded by other runners, and holding a mobile phone in his right hand. The unit had been circled in yellow marker.

‘You can just make out the short aerial,’ Chadwick said. ‘MI5’s certain it’s a TETRA handset. Motorola.’

‘Of course it bloody is,’ Fielding said. ‘How do you think we were able to talk to him out on the course? I understood he borrowed Leila’s.’

‘Apparently not. He brought his old one along, according to her. The one he should have handed in when he was suspended. We’ve checked the phone records at Thames House, and she’s right. She rang him on his old encrypted number.’

Fielding wasn’t convinced. He knew Marchant’s suspension hadn’t been as thorough as it might have been, partly because of his own reluctance to withdraw one of his best agents from the field; but failure to return an office phone, particularly an encrypted one, would not have been missed by even the most routine of Legoland’s security checks. He needed to make his own enquiries.

‘Has it ever occurred to you that someone might be setting Daniel Marchant up here?’ Fielding asked, looking at the photo for a few seconds before passing it back. ‘Knowing what a weak case there was against his father?’

‘Setting him up? Why?’

‘Oh, come on, David. You know as well as I do that there are plenty of people who would rather the Service didn’t dine at top table any more.’

‘I’m not sure even the Americans would risk the life of one of their own ambassadors to frame an MI6 officer.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is that why you’re protecting Daniel? You still believe he’s innocent?’

‘We’re not protecting him, not now.’

‘Prentice gave Spiro the runaround in Warsaw. You know Langley’s recalled him?’

‘The man’s a fool.’

‘Where is Daniel, Marcus?’

‘I’ve no idea. Clearing his father’s name, I assume.’ Fielding finished his drink. ‘And if you really want to see the Service’s reputation restored, I suggest we let him.’