Dead Spy Running

31

Marchant felt the weight of a body lying on top of him, but he didn’t realise it was Uncle K until he tried to move out from under his heavy frame. Other people were stirring on the bar floor all around him. For a moment, in the dark silence, Marchant was back at the marketplace in Mogadishu. But then the moaning started, guttural cries of primitive pain, and he remembered the quicksilver shards dicing the air, the compression, the chilling cacophony of disintegrating glass.

‘Uncle K, are you OK?’ Marchant asked, trying to shut out the sweet smell of cauterised flesh. It was a smell he hated more than any other, one that had never left him. Now, five years later, the same nagging thoughts were suddenly back once again: could he have done more about the man at the bar?

He was kneeling beside Uncle K now, checklisting his own body as he spoke. He put a hand briefly to his face, touching warm blood as he bent over the colonel. The old man’s features were still intact, the plump, putty-faced cheeks and pursed, rosebud mouth, but the angle of his lower body was too jack-knifed for a seventy-year-old.

Marchant looked at the debris all around him, the lights torn from the ceiling, the upturned tables, shredded curtains. He saw a plastic bottle of mineral water on the floor, a few feet away from him. Reaching over, he dribbled some onto the colonel’s dusty lips, spitting grit out of his own mouth. Slowly, the colonel’s lips began to move. Marchant leant closer, cupping one hand behind his head.

‘You must go,’ the colonel whispered. ‘They will try to blame you for this.’

‘Who will?’

But the colonel had lost consciousness again. Marchant put the bottle to his mouth, spilling water over his lips and chin. Blood was seeping now from the corner of his mouth. The colonel opened his eyes, coughing feebly.

‘You must go,’ he urged. ‘Om Beach, near Gokarna. Ask for…’ The next word was lost in the blood and saliva. ‘…brother Salim at the Namaste Café.’

‘Leila, I want you to get down to the club and slip inside the cordon, assuming the Delhi police have put one up. It’s usually a free-for-all at these things. They might do Golden Temples, but crime-scene golden hours? Give me a break.’

A ripple of polite laughter moved around the room as Monk Johnson, head of the Presidential Protective Detail, addressed a room of ten officers, a mix of Secret Service and CIA. Behind him, a large TV screen was showing library footage from NDTV of the Gymkhana Club before the blast. Cameras had yet to reach the scene. Leila had been tempted to head out into the Delhi evening as soon as she heard the explosion, but she had been summoned to the meeting within minutes. The station was already on a state of high alert: in seventy-two hours the new President of the United States would be flying in to Palam military airbase, five miles from Delhi, as part of his four-country tour of South Asia.

‘I’ve just come off the phone to the Director of the Secret Service,’ Johnson continued. ‘He says POTUS is adamant the tour is still on. The best we can do is buy ourselves a little time: the Islamabad leg could be brought forward, but the Indians won’t like it — they’ve insisted all along that they go first. They tested their nukes before Pakistan, and they want to make damn sure they’re the first to shake the new President’s hand.’

‘You’re assuming this is a Pak thing, right?’ asked David Baldwin, head of the CIA’s Delhi station. He was sitting behind Leila.

‘You tell us. It’s got to be an option. The Gymkhana Club is a colonial hangover, full of army brass.’

‘First up is Salim Dhar. General Casey was due to go there tonight, but cancelled.’

‘Thank God,’ Johnson said.

‘Vivek?’ Baldwin said, ignoring Johnson.

‘Dhar’s exact location on the grid is still to be confirmed, sir,’ Vivek Kumar said, ‘but it has all his hallmarks, particularly if Casey was the target.’

Leila had already been introduced to Kumar as a fellow newcomer. One of the Agency’s brightest analysts, he had been flown in from Langley earlier in the week, and knew more than anyone about Salim Dhar. He knew all about Daniel Marchant, too. Marchant, he said, had left Poland and was already somewhere in India.

‘Widespread military collateral, high-profile US target,’ Kumar continued. ‘We can’t rule out Daniel Marchant either. Right now, that whole situation’s a little complicated. He’s just become the subject of an ongoing level-five covert run by Clandestine, Europe.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Baldwin said, glancing at Leila. ‘I’m speaking to Alan Carter in ten.’

‘OK, let’s re-meet in two hours,’ Johnson said. ‘Unless another bomb goes off. What’s wrong with Texas? Why can’t POTUS go there and shake a few hands?’

Marchant didn’t know who he was fleeing from as he picked his way through the wreckage of the bar and climbed out of a large broken window. It went against every instinct to leave Colonel K, but there had been an urgency to his voice that persuaded Marchant to leave.

He stumbled across the lawn, still dazed, glancing back at the wounded building, curtains lolling from its windows like lacerated tongues. No one could blame him. The Gymkhana Club reception would confirm that a respected Indian colonel had signed him in. But Uncle K was an old friend of his father. He was also travelling as David Marlowe, not Daniel Marchant. Uncle K was right. Daniel was on the run, and once his presence at the club had been discovered, his name would be in the frame. If he could be blamed for the marathon, they would try to pin this one on him too. He thought of the look the man at the bar had given him, purposefully catching his eye. Who was he? Who had sent him?

Marchant had walked through an unmanned side gate and was now on a main road, but the traffic was not as noisy as it should have been. He could barely hear a passing goods lorry, its horn eerily muted. It was then that he realised his ears were resonating with a high-pitched tone that didn’t stop when he shook his head. He looked back towards the club building again, black smoke threading up into the Delhi sky. A rickshaw slowed, its driver eyeing him with a mixture of hope and wariness. Marchant slumped into the back seat and asked for Gokarna.

‘Gokarna?’ the driver asked, smiling in the rear mirror as he throttled the tiny two-stroke engine. ‘Too far, sir, even for Shiva. Airport?’

‘Railway station.’

‘Gymkhana, firework problem?’

Marchant nodded, gripping the side bar of the rickshaw to stop his hand shaking. ‘Big problem,’ he said. On the opposite side of the road, a diplomatic car drove past at speed. Marchant turned back to look at the blue number-plate. It was American. For a moment he thought he recognised the female figure in the back of the car.