Games Traitors Play

104

‘Are you telling me that Daniel Marchant should be regarded as a hero?’ Jim Spiro said incredulously, looking around the table. The Joint Intelligence Committee was at full strength, with senior intelligence officials from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain and America in attendance.

‘Salim Dhar was on a mission to Britain to destroy three targets,’ Fielding began. ‘The F-22 Raptor because it was a symbol of American military might; the delegation of Georgian and US military personnel as a thank-you to the Russians for protecting him; and GCHQ as part of his own personal crusade.’

‘And he achieved two of the three,’ said Spiro. ‘Remind me why exactly we should be thanking Marchant?’ He nodded towards the director of GCHQ on his left. ‘I’m not sure Cheltenham will be putting a photo of him in their hall of fame. If any halls are still standing.’

Fielding had hoped he could let Spiro down gently, as relations with America had to continue, but it was hard to resist giving him a bumpy landing.

‘We believe Dhar was carrying two air-to-air missiles, and two thousand-pound laser-guided bombs. One of them was packed with radioactive caesium-137. I don’t need to remind anyone here of the devastation that would have been caused by a dirty bomb dropped either on the crowd at Fairford or on a town the size of Cheltenham. I’ve just come back from a debriefing with Marchant, and he confirmed that it was always Dhar’s intention to drop the dirty bomb on GCHQ — a personal bête noire of his. As we all know, the thousand-pound bomb that struck the building was, thankfully, a conventional one, and there was only minimal structural damage and one life lost.’

‘How can we be sure the bomb he didn’t drop was dirty?’ Spiro asked.

‘Royal Navy divers have found wreckage of the SU-25 in the Bristol Channel, and are in the process of stabilising the unexploded ordnance. They’ve confirmed the presence of caesium-137. We’re lucky it wasn’t detonated by the impact of the crash.’

‘So why did Dhar bother to drop anything?’ the director of GCHQ asked. ‘He’d clearly had a change of heart.’

‘Marchant talked him out of the dirty option, but failed to persuade him to abandon the whole idea,’ Fielding replied. He had to be careful what he said at this point. It was fair to say that Marchant might have been able to prevent the conventional attack too, but had been mindful of Dhar’s jihadi credentials. A discredited Dhar would have been of no use to anyone. Nobody in the room, not even Harriet Armstrong, knew that Dhar had finally been turned, and had the potential to be the biggest asset MI6 had ever run.

‘So what you’re saying is that Dhar only achieved one of his original three targets,’ Armstrong said, seemingly supportive.

‘Correct. And for that we must thank Daniel Marchant.’

‘It’s all very well you guys patting each other on the back,’ Spiro said. ‘I’ve got to explain to Washington why the most advanced jet fighter ever built was taken out by a lousy lump of old Russian hardware, flown by the world’s most-wanted jihadi and a rogue MI6 agent.’

‘You can tell them that if it hadn’t been for the presence of an MI6 agent in the cockpit — and, for the record, Daniel Marchant is no rogue — the damage would have been incalculably worse.’

‘There’s only one thing that’s going to make my President happy, and that’s the scalp of Salim Dhar. Are we any closer to knowing how he disappeared?’

‘The helicopter that found Marchant reported nobody else in the water. The entire area continues to be searched as we speak, but so far it’s as if Dhar never existed.’

Fielding was lying, of course. He had no choice. According to Marchant’s debrief, the SVR had arranged for a trawler to be in the area. It had taken it a few minutes to find Dhar, as the plane had fallen short of the agreed ejection zone, but by the time the search-and-rescue helicopter had arrived, Dhar was on the trawler and heading out towards the Irish Sea.