Dead Spy Running

4

Daniel Marchant looked out across the shallow valley and watched as a flock of Canada geese flew along the canal, rising from its surface to turn right towards the village. A faint mist hung above the water, streaked with blue smoke from the early-morning stoves of canal boats moored along the far bank. Beside the canal was the railway to London, and a small, three-carriage train was waiting in the station for the first commuters of the day. In the woods on the hillside beyond, a woodpecker was hammering in short bursts. Otherwise, there was stillness.

Marchant had slept only intermittently, despite his exhaustion, and he knew that another day of questioning lay ahead. At least he was now out of London, in a safe house somewhere in Wiltshire. After the marathon, an unmarked car had taken him from Tower Bridge to Thames House, where he had showered and changed into clothes brought over from his flat by Leila. He saw her briefly, gave back the mobile phone, but their conversation was stilted. The look on her face came as a surprise. He had been keen to meet, to thank her for helping him through the race, but he was grateful for her withdrawn manner; it had put him on guard.

It wasn’t that he had expected to be fêted as a hero, but neither had he thought he would be led down into the basement of MI5’s headquarters for hours of questioning in a small, airless room. A debrief in Legoland would have been more appropriate, given he was still on MI6’s payroll. But it was clear, from the moment he had arrived at Thames House, that another agenda was being followed. He just wasn’t sure exactly what it was.

His role in the marathon bomb plot was problematic for the intelligence community, he accepted that. It troubled him, too: why he had been there, why no one else had been suspicious of the belt. A have-a-go hero had saved the day, except that he wasn’t an ordinary member of the public, he was a suspended MI6 officer; an officer whose late father had been suspected of treason; a son who wanted to clear the family name.

He knew MI5 was behind the decision to suspend him, just as it had been the driving force behind his father’s removal as Chief of MI6, which had added an extra degree of tension to his interrogation in the basement.

‘You can see how it looks from our point of view,’ his interrogator was saying, as he walked around Marchant in the plain, whitewashed room, chewing gum. Marchant, sitting on the only chair, didn’t recognise the man, who called himself Wylie. Shortly after his father’s forced retirement, Marchant had been interviewed at Thames House by a panel of officers, but it hadn’t included this man. Wylie was in his late forties, flat-footed with thinning red hair, his skin pale and too dry. If he passed you in the street, Marchant thought, you would guess he was an overworked police officer, or an inner-city school-teacher, someone who saw more paperwork than daylight, knew his colleagues better than his wife.

‘Two men, running together, desperate to reach Tower Bridge for maximum publicity. One of them fresh from the subcontinent, strapped up with explosives. The other — ’ Wylie paused, as if his disdain for Marchant had suddenly overwhelmed him — ‘the other, a former member of the intelligence services with “issues”, making sure he reaches his target.’

‘Suspended, not former,’ Marchant said calmly. ‘His target was Turner Munroe, the American Ambassador.’ Wylie, Marchant knew, was employing a standard interrogation strategy: push the less plausible of your two main theories (ex-MI6 man with a grudge) as far as you can, and see how much of your more plausible theory (ex-MI6 man saves MI5’s skin) is validated by the interviewee’s answers. He’d learnt it at the Fort, with Leila.

‘When the order was given to slow down, you both kept on running at the same pace in order to reach your target, which was Tower Bridge,’ Wylie continued, getting into his own stride, chewing faster on his gum. He spoke with an enthusiasm that drew Marchant in, until his ear became tuned to the underlying sarcasm. ‘In fact, you helped to keep this man going, at one point holding his arm to support him.’

Wylie tossed a black-and-white surveillance photo onto the table. It was of Marchant and Pradeep approaching the bridge, taken with a zoom lens. Marchant was shocked at how exhausted he looked: Pradeep seemed to be propping him up. His limbs felt weak again as he shifted his legs under the table.

‘Why didn’t you slow down, as ordered?’ Wylie asked, standing behind Marchant now.

Marchant picked up the photo and took his time to answer, trying to get a measure of the person behind him as he ordered his thoughts. The exact events of the endgame were still not clear in his mind. Had they fired at Pradeep because he wasn’t slowing down? He had thought the shots rang out afterwards, once they were walking.

‘Pradeep was an unwilling suicide bomber,’ Marchant said, talking over his shoulder. ‘My own feeling is that he was coerced into the operation. When I first approached him, he was happy to be helped. It was a primitive response: “How can I stop myself from being killed?” Once his initial survival instincts had been addressed, he started to think of others, in this case his son, who would be killed if he didn’t see his mission through. As we approached the bridge, this concern became paramount in his mind. He didn’t slow down when I asked him to, and as you can see, I had to intervene to reduce his pace.’

Marchant dropped the photo back on the table. Both of them watched in silence as it spun around and came to a halt. Marchant wished there was a fan in the room.

‘Did it ever cross your mind that you had no authority to take the actions you did?’ Wylie asked, still behind him. ‘You were suspended, after all.’

Marchant noted his interrogator’s change of tack. ‘I was behaving like a responsible member of the public.’

‘Responsible?’ Wylie laughed. ‘Everyone knows you’ve gone to seed, Marchant.’

Marchant stared ahead, his tone even. ‘I saw something suspicious, and in this instance, ringing the terrorist hotline wasn’t really an option.’

‘Why not?’ Wylie barked, walking around in front of Marchant. His voice had an odd habit of cracking and rising in pitch when he was angry. The effect should have been funny, but it was unsettling.

‘Why not?’ Marchant echoed, louder now that he could see Wylie again. ‘Because I didn’t have a bloody phone with me.’

Marchant struggled to control his urge to shout. There was no reason to bring Leila into this. She would tell them about her TETRA phone in a separate debrief. He spoke slowly and clearly, emphasising the words as if speaking to a child. ‘I chose to stay with Pradeep. I’m not sure it would have been that easy to identify him again. There were 35,000 runners out there.’

‘Including some of our officers,’ Wylie said.

Flat-footing it along at the back with the fifteen-minute milers, Marchant thought.

‘This attack didn’t come as a complete surprise,’ Wylie added.

‘I’m sure it didn’t.’ And if Marchant was writing the incident up, his report would have made that abundantly clear: MI5 saw it coming, and still screwed up.

‘You knew about it in advance, then?’ Wylie asked, his voice cracking again. This time he pulled out an asthma inhaler and sucked once on it, hard.

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘But your former colleagues knew. They just don’t like sharing information much, do they?’

Then Marchant thought he understood. Wylie was suggesting that his involvement was pre-planned: part of a conspiracy by MI6 to expose MI5’s failings, to get his job back.

‘I can’t answer for MI6,’ he said.

‘No, you’re right, you can’t. But you’d like to. Working for Six kept you sober. We’re seeing the real Marchant now, though, aren’t we? Oh, come on, you were tipped off. One of your old “mates”’ — he exaggerated the word derisively — ‘chose to tell you rather than us. You went out there this morning looking for a man with a belt. You didn’t just stumble across him, the one runner out of 35,000 who wanted to blow himself up.’

Marchant thought of Leila, what she’d said about Paul Myers picking up some chatter just before the marathon, and felt his palms moisten. Had someone logged the call from Myers to her? His chance encounter could begin to look anything but: Cheltenham tells MI6; MI6 informs suspended officer, who thwarts bomb attack under MI5’s nose. Wylie, though, had no idea of the fear he was sowing in Marchant’s mind.

‘So what did this rag-head tell you about himself?’ Wylie asked, changing tack again.

Rag-head? Marchant marvelled at how unreconstructed MI5 still was. He thought it had become more ethnically diverse. ‘He said his name was Pradeep. He was originally from Cochin in Kerala. He called it Kochi, the local name, suggesting he was Indian.’ Marchant had always liked data. Hard facts, unquestionable stats — they were reassuring in his shifting world.

‘South India,’ Wylie said. ‘We all hoped that little terror campaign had gone away.’

Don’t bring my father into this, Marchant thought. Last year’s bombings, believed to have been run from South India, had stopped when his father stood down as Chief at Christmas, a point not lost on his enemies in MI5. ‘Pradeep also had a good knowledge of New Delhi,’ Marchant said, determined to remain calm. ‘He was living there with his wife and son. He seemed to know Chanakyapuri, the diplomatic enclave in the south of the city.’

‘An unusual part of town to know, where all the foreign embassies are.’

‘Possibly. It’s hard to tell. He revealed very little information about himself: spoke good English, with a heavy Indian accent. His child was four, maybe five, wearing a maroon school sweatshirt in a photo he showed me. If you hadn’t shot him, he might have been able to tell you a bit more about himself.’

Marchant saw the punch coming — it had been coming ever since MI6 first looked down its public-school nose at MI5 — and raised his left forearm quick enough to deflect it upwards. His instinct, honed at the Fort, was to strike back at the same moment with his right hand, but he resisted, grabbing Wylie’s upper arm instead. Their faces were close before Marchant let him go.

‘Next time we’ll take you both down,’ Wylie said, sucking deeply on his inhaler.