Dead Spy Running

47

Marchant heard the mobile phone begin to ring moments before the Sikorsky Seahawk came in low over the treetops. He rushed to pick it up just as the guard outside fell to the ground, a single sniper shot to his chest.

‘Get out of there now,’ a familiar female voice urged. As he tried to place it, a loud explosion ripped the roof off the hut, knocking him to the ground. He started to crawl, but his eyes were filling with warm blood from a cut to his forehead. Wiping his face, he rolled across the dusty ground to the back of the hut, where he slid out through a hole that had been torn in the palm-woven panelling. The air was thick with the sound of gunfire, urgent shouts — American, Indian, Middle Eastern — and the cry of crows.

Marchant kept thinking of the crows, what they were doing in the middle of a firefight, as a group of Black Cats moved down the hillside towards him. They must have walked, taken the long route, he thought. If it hadn’t been for them, he would have escaped. Two of them lifted him up and dragged him semi-conscious towards the winch rope of the Seahawk, now hovering above the clearing.

‘No Dhar,’ Marchant heard one of the Black Cats say into his helmet mike, as he rose above the coconut canopy into a cerulean sky.

* * *

Leila looked up to the very top of the temple ceiling, where a lotus-flower pattern blossomed at its apex. Early-morning sunlight was streaming in through the windows, bathing the interior in an ethereal glow. Pews had been arranged in neat rows across the large open space, and Leila sat down at the end of one of them. The temple was almost deserted, except for a few cleaners polishing the floors and a group of Indian police officers who stood at the main door. The temple complex had been swept four times in the last twenty-four hours by the Secret Service, and would be checked twice more before the President’s visit in the evening.

Leila glanced around, then pulled out a piece of paper and began to read from it quietly, tears filling her eyes. ‘O thou forgiver of sins, open thou the way for this awakened soul to enter thy kingdom, and enable this bird, trained by thy hand, to soar in the eternal rose garden. She is afire with longing to draw nigh unto thee: enable her to attain thy presence.’

She had heard the news about her mother two hours earlier. Something had made her want to ring Tehran from the moment she had woken. Already her mind was playing tricks, rearranging the sequence of events so that she somehow knew her mother was dead before the woman on the phone had confirmed it. The woman, a neighbour, had been sitting with her mother all night, comforting her as she slipped away. She shouldn’t have told Leila, but clearly she needed to speak to someone.

‘She is afire with longing to draw nigh unto thee,’ Leila continued, the words blurring in front of her. ‘Enable her to attain thy presence. She is distraught and distressed in separation from thee. Cause her to be admitted into thy Heavenly mansion.’

The past twelve hours had been the worst of her life. She had stayed up late reading about Fariborz Sahba, the Iranian architect behind the temple. Her mother had spoken often of him and his wonderful house of worship, which she had visited soon after its completion in the 1980s. Sahba had chosen the metaphor of a blossoming lotus flower in the hope that a new era of peace and religious tolerance would emerge out of the ‘murky waters’ of mankind’s history of ignorance and violence.

Spiro was ignorant of many things, but last night was the first time he had been violent towards her. She had tried to resist, to talk him out of it, but he had threatened to tell Monk Johnson that she was behaving erratically. Nothing could jeopardise the presidential pageant, or the leading part she had been asked to play in it, so she had followed him out of the restaurant and back to his hotel room.

Afterwards, in her own room, she had taken a shower, sobbing as she scrubbed herself with sandalwood soap. Then the tears had cleared and she had set to work, researching the Bahá’í faith online with the zeal of a dying patient desperate for a cure: the simple process of religious conversion that required a ‘declaration card’ to be filled out; how the rural masses had been targeted by Bahá’í missionaries in post-Gandhi India, many of them signing up to its appealing message of a united mankind with a single thumbprint. And the British weapons inspector David Kelly, who had converted to Bahá’ísm four years before his mysterious death.

By the time dawn broke, her research had better prepared her for the news of her mother’s death, which only seemed to confirm in her tired mind the belief that she had known about it already. She felt closer to her mother, understood her life better, and knew how to pray for her in death. Her understanding of the Bahá’í faith was still nothing compared to her mother’s, but it had grown in recent months, preparing her for this day.

Now she was here, in the Lotus Temple, waiting for her Security Service colleagues to arrive, and she must try to put her grieving on hold. As an intelligence officer she was used to protecting her emotions, partitioning off her inner life in order to play a part, but she knew that the next few hours would test her skills to the limit.

‘With tearful eyes she fixed her gaze on the Kingdom of Mysteries. Many a night she spent in deep communion with thee, and many a day she lived in intimate remembrance of thee.’

She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue and looked around the temple, drawing strength from its beauty. Monk Johnson would want to walk through the President’s journey one more time, down the avenue, up the five flights of steps and into the protection of Sahba’s petals. Leila felt protected too, with her own declaration card in one hand, a page of prayers in the other, about to convert to the religion of her mother and hoping to be forgiven for the choices she had made and the actions she was about to take.