Dead Spy Running

30

Leila took it as a very public expression of gratitude that the CIA had assigned her to its team in Delhi who were liaising with the Secret Service in advance of the US President’s visit to the city. One of the agents had heard first-hand from a colleague at the London embassy about her role during the London Marathon, an event that seemed to have sealed her reputation as a player. ‘Though Turner Munroe never did get his fancy running watch back,’ he had joked on her arrival in Delhi that morning. ‘Good to have you on board.’

Neither side was calling it a defection, but relations had sunk so low between Britain’s and America’s intelligence communities that Leila had been told to treat officers from MI6’s Delhi station with the same caution as she would those from more traditionally hostile countries such as Iran and Russia. The paperwork called it a three-month exchange, but she knew there was no chance of her ever working — or living — in Britain again. She told herself that she had always preferred life abroad, and it was true that the sense of not being rooted anywhere was not a new one.

As she looked out of her room in the American Embassy, taking in the yellow of the laburnum trees lining the roads of Chanakyapuri, she forced herself not to think about Daniel, whether they would ever see each other again. For the past two years she had known that the day would come when she would have to confront the choices she had made in her life. Those choices had become much harder in recent months, but that day had not arrived. Not yet. For the time being she was able to keep his photo face-downwards on the table, to consign their life together to another place, where it could be guarded by the traditional sentinels of the spy’s conscience: if you live the lie, expect to be deceived, just as he had warned.

In those rare moments when her guard did drop, she could console herself that honesty of a kind had played its part, despite the deceptions. Her mother’s welfare had always been paramount in her life. She just wished she had been asked to get close to someone else, rather than a man she was struggling not to fall in love with.

Earlier that day, after an introductory meeting with her new colleagues, she had slipped out of the embassy compound and walked through the 40-degree heat of the May morning to a taxi rank. She had seen a public phone booth there when her car from the airport had driven past at dawn. As she dialled the number in Tehran, she glanced across at the taxi drivers, lying on string charpoys in the shade of a large canvas canopy, limbs hung listlessly as they listened to All India Radio blaring out from a nearby car, its doors flung open.

‘Mama,’ she began. The line was faint. ‘It’s Leila. Things will be better soon.’

But it wasn’t her mother’s voice that replied. ‘Your mother’s in hospital,’ a man said in Farsi. Leila’s stomach tightened. For the past year her mother had been in and out of the Mehr, a private hospital in Tehran, her treatment paid for by the Americans. Each time the doctors had prepared her for the worst. Normally, though, her neighbour had sent a text to tell her that she had been admitted to hospital.

‘Who is this?’ she asked. His voice sounded familiar.

‘A friend of the family,’ the man said. She could hear other male voices in the background. ‘She’s fine and, inshallah, will have the best treatment dollars can buy.’ The mocking tone was thinly disguised, his words addressed to the others in the room with him.

‘I want her looked after, that was always the deal,’ Leila said, trying not to raise her voice. A man outside the telephone booth glanced up at her. She knew she should be at her mother’s bedside, but that was impossible.

‘I will tell her you called,’ the voice said, then paused. ‘And that her health rests in your hands.’

The sun was at its highest as she walked back towards the embassy. In the distance, an unseen nutseller was rattling his spoon rhythmically against a frying pan. Otherwise there was a stillness in the midday air. Even the traffic police at the junction near the embassy had retreated to the shade, where they snoozed on flimsy wooden chairs. She had never minded dry heat. It somehow made her feel closer to her mother, who she knew needed her now more than ever.

She had just turned nine when she first sensed that all was not well between her parents. They were living in the expat community in Dubai, where her father was working, and he had come home late, as he often did. But this time she was awake. There had been a problem with the electricity in their apartment block — there was not enough power to run the air conditioning, and the sudden warmth had woken her. One of the staff had placed an old fan in the room and she lay there mesmerised by the way it turned as far as it could one way, before sweeping back in the other direction. But above its hum she gradually became aware of shouting downstairs, and then screaming, followed by slammed doors and silence.

She had found her mother curled up in a corner of the kitchen, their Indian maid holding a bloodied cloth to her forehead. Her mother smiled weakly when she saw Leila, but the maid gestured crossly for her to go back upstairs.

‘It’s OK,’ her mother had said, beckoning Leila towards her. She walked tentatively across the kitchen and sat down beside her mother, watched anxiously by the maid. ‘It’s OK,’ her mother repeated, putting a shaking arm around Leila as the maid retreated.

They must have stayed like that for most of the night, hunched together on the marble floor in the heat of a Dubai night, the weak yellow lights flickering. Her mother explained how her father was under a lot of stress at work and sometimes drank too much whisky, hoping that it would make him feel better. But it just made him angry, and when he was angry he wasn’t himself, and did silly things.

In the years that followed, Leila and her mother learnt to be out of the way when he was not himself, but Leila knew that he continued to vent his whisky-fuelled fury on his wife. Not even a burqa could disguise the black eyes. Her father’s long hours and frequent trips abroad meant that she had always been closer to her mother than to him, but his violence bonded them further, uniting them in a mixture of shame and solidarity. She had never forgotten that night, the sight of her mother crying, and could never forgive her father, whose light in her life went out.

All she could do now, slumped on the floor of her bare embassy room, was to fulfil her side of the deal and hope that the voices at the end of the phone in Tehran would honour theirs. But before she could think what that deal might bring, the evening stillness was split by a sound that she knew at once was not thunder.