Dead Spy Running

51

Straker took the call in one of the small private booths in the White House’s refurbished Situation Room complex. Moments before, he had stepped out of the Telecommunications Room next door, where the Vice President, the Director of National Intelligence, the White House Chief of Staff and a raft of other security advisers who wanted his job had been waiting for him to assess the threat matrix in India. It was a meeting he had been postponing ever since word had reached him that Salim Dhar had not been captured in Karnataka.

‘Harriet, I hope you have some decent CX for me. Otherwise I’m going to have to dunk our friend Marchant’s head in the Arabian Sea. Tell me he knows where Dhar is.’

‘Marchant was meant to be my prisoner.’

‘He was alive, wasn’t he? That’s all your PM wanted.’

‘Barely. Dhar left two hours before you reached the hideout, heading north.’

‘Great. Marchant told you nothing else?’

‘Dhar was shooting at Texans before Daniel reached him.’

‘Texans?’

‘A target in the shape of your previous President.’

‘Jesus, we need to take this guy down.’

‘Leila too. She might be working with Dhar.’

It was at moments like this, when he needed to punch someone, that Straker wished he brought a basketball into the office, as other DCIAs had been known to do, but it wasn’t his style to bounce balls down the corridors of power.

‘I’m touched by your interest in an Agency employee, Harriet,’ he said, failing to conceal his anger. ‘Really, I am. But we’ve run the rule over Leila many times. Monk Johnson is the most paranoid man I know, and he’s happy to have her meet his President. She saved the Secret Service’s butt in London, remember? Spiro’s looked into her case. Every goddamn analyst in Langley has taken a look. It doesn’t stack up. She’s clean, she did us a favour, she saved one of our ambassador’s lives. She’s a fucking hero, for God’s sake.’

‘Daniel Marchant thinks she was working for the Iranians.’

‘Marchant? We’ve just airlifted the kid out of a terrorist’s hideout in the Indian jungle. Give me a break here, Harriet. He tried to kill Munroe. He’s an enemy combatant, like his father, another one of Dhar’s British buddies.’

Armstrong looked around the room she had been given in the American Embassy. It had started with Straker’s crass attempt to destroy Chadwick’s reputation, but now her disillusionment with America had grown into something more general, a weariness with its ways that she had once so revered.

‘Give me a little longer with him,’ she said.

‘Do what you have to, Harriet. We need to neutralise Dhar. I’ve told the embassy that Marchant’s yours, but we don’t have much time.’

Armstrong hung up and dialled through to the guardroom in the basement, where Marchant was being kept. Then she made an encrypted call on her mobile to the MI6 station chief in Delhi, one of Fielding’s old friends. If the Chief was in town, he would know.