Games Traitors Play

11

Marcus Fielding, Chief of MI6, looked out of his fourth-floor window at the commuters walking home across Vauxhall Bridge beneath him. Two of them had stopped, jackets slung over their shoulders, to take in the evening sun as it set over a hot summer London. The Thames was out, the muddy shores busy with sand-pipers. On the far bank, below the Morpeth Arms, a woman weighed down with plastic bags was searching through the flotsam and jetsam.

Beside Legoland, one of the Yellow Duck amphibious vehicles that took tourists around London was parked up on the slipway, waiting while its captain briefed passengers on what to do if it sank. Sometimes, Fielding wished it would. Its proximity to Legoland had long made him uneasy, the guided tours attracting too much publicity, too many fingers pointing up in his direction. Still, Fielding couldn’t deny that he had enjoyed the time he had taken the Duck with Daniel Marchant. They were happier days then, full of hope. Marchant had received a text while they were on board together, and the Morocco plan had been born. But that was over now.

Fielding was supposed to be going to the opera tonight, but he needed to wait for Marchant to ring in again from Marrakech. The call had come through earlier on Marchant’s mobile, but the line had dropped, the encryption software unhappy with the integrity of the local network. He knew Marchant wouldn’t make contact unless it was urgent, but it all seemed irrelevant now. He wondered how best to break the news about Salim Dhar to Marchant.

There was a chance, of course, that James Spiro was mistaken. He had been wrong before, most famously about Marchant’s late father, Stephen, Fielding’s predecessor as Chief of MI6. According to Spiro, Stephen and Daniel Marchant were both infidels, worshiping at the altar of a very different god to the rest of the West. Spiro had tried to bring down the entire house of Marchant, and MI6 by implication, until the son had cleared the father’s name.

But the evidence coming out of North Waziristan suggested that this time Spiro was right. The CIA had finally nailed their man. Two intercepted phone calls, a red-hot handset last used in south India: it was hard to disagree with them. GCHQ was running its own tests on the voice, but the match was perfect, as Spiro had repeatedly told him a few minutes earlier on the video link.

There were few people Fielding despised more than Spiro. He should have been cleared out with the old guard when the new President was sworn in, hung out to dry with the attorneys who had sanctioned torture, but somehow he had survived, thanks to the President himself, of all people. The White House’s attitude to the Agency had changed overnight after the assassination attempt in Delhi. Briefly a champion of noble values, it was now an admirer of muscle, and in particular of Spiro, who had taken all the credit for protecting his leader. The clenched fist had replaced the hand of friendship. Now, God help them all, there was no stopping him. Spiro’s star was in the ascendant again. Not only were his enhanced methods back in fashion, but the CIA had been given permission to resume playing hardball with its allies.

Salim Dhar’s elimination was a particularly sweet victory for Spiro. The Agency had never seen Dhar in the same way as the British, struggling to countenance the possibility that he might one day represent an opportunity rather than a threat. For them, Dhar was the problem, not a potential solution, a man who had come close to heaping the ultimate shame on them. From where Fielding stood, it was all deeply frustrating: the President had promised an era of more nuanced attitudes to intelligence, but it appeared to be over before it had begun.

Fielding turned away from the reinforced window and walked across to the cabinet behind his desk. The collection of books reflected his Arabist tastes, charting his career through the Gulf and North Africa. He envied Marchant his time in Morocco, operating on his own, without the bureaucracy of Legoland. It was how he had worked best when he was Marchant’s age, drifting through the medinas, talking to the traders, listening, watching.

He took out a volume of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, presented to him years ago by Muammar al-Gadaffi after he had helped to persuade the Libyan leader to abandon his nuclear ambitions. It was Sir Richard Francis Burton’s ten-volume 1885 limited edition, for subscribers only, and he had never enquired too closely about its provenance. Fielding had been obliged to declare the gift to Whitehall, but it was his counter-intelligence colleagues across the Thames who were most interested, subjecting the volumes to weeks of unnecessary analysis.

The rivalry between the Services had bordered on war in those days, and Fielding had assumed that MI5 would do all it could to embarrass the Vicar, as he knew they called him. Gifts from foreign governments were a favourite cover for listening devices. No one had forgotten the electric samovar presented to the Queen at Balmoral by the Russian Knights aerobatics team, later suspected of being a mantelpiece transmitter, or the infinity bug hidden inside a wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States, given by Russian schoolchildren to the US ambassador to Moscow at the end of the Second World War.

But the sweepers at Thames House found nothing, and resisted the temptation to insert something of their own. The volumes were reluctantly passed back over the river to Legoland. There was talk of donating them to the British Library, but the Vicar was eventually allowed to keep his unholy gift.

As he began to read about Shahryar and Scheherazade, there was a knock on the door and Ann Norman, his formidable personal assistant, appeared. She was wearing her usual red tights and intimidating frown, both of which had protected four Chiefs from Whitehall’s meddling mandarins for more than twenty years.

‘It’s Daniel Marchant. Shall I put him through?’

‘Line three.’

Fielding went over to his desk and sat down, placing the open book in front of him, next to the comms console that linked him to colleagues around the world as well as to his political masters. The book’s presence made him feel more connected, less detached from Marchant’s world. He let him talk for a while, about a halaka, and his trip out into the High Atlas. Fielding stopped him as he began to talk of helicopters.

‘Daniel, I think you should know we’ve just had a call from Langley. NSA picked up a mobile intercept late this afternoon, from Salim Dhar in North Waziristan. One hundred per cent voice match.’

Marchant fell quiet, the hum of a Marrakech medina suddenly audible in the background.

‘Have they killed him?’

‘They think so. A UAV was in the area, eliminated the target within fifteen minutes of the intercept. I’m sorry.’

‘Without even checking? Without talking to us?’

‘The Americans aren’t really in the mood right now for cooperating on Dhar. You know that.’

‘But Dhar was here, I’m sure of it. In Morocco. Barely an hour ago, up near the Tizi’n’Test pass. The halaka spoke of a Roc bird.’

Fielding absently turned the pages of The Arabian Nights, hearing a younger version of himself in Marchant’s voice. Fielding had been less hot-headed, but he rated Marchant more highly than anyone of his generation. A part of him wondered again if Spiro had made a mistake, but it was hard to dispute the CIA’s evidence, at least those elements of it that they had pooled with Britain. The Joint Intelligence Committee was convening first thing in the morning, by which time Britain’s own voice analysis from Cheltenham would be in. GCHQ was running tests through the night, but Fielding didn’t expect a different result.

‘And how do I present your evidence to the JIC tomorrow?’ Fielding said, knowing it was an unfair question. Unlike police work, intelligence-gathering was seldom just about evidence, as he had explained to MI6’s latest intake of IONEC graduates earlier that day. Agents had to be thorough but also counter-intuitive; ‘Cutting the red wire when the manual said blue,’ as one over-excited graduate had put it.

‘Someone took him away. Whoever owns the helicopter has Dhar.’

‘And who does own it?’

‘It was white, UN, but no markings.’

‘White?’ Fielding’s interest was pricked. He knew that the Mi-8 was used by the UN, knew too that the government in Sudan wasn’t averse to flying unmarked white military aircraft to attack villages in Darfur.

‘I was about to tell you that when you interrupted me.’

Fielding could hear Marchant’s anger mounting. He had always preferred field agents who were passionate about the CX they filed to London. It made for better product.

‘Suppose it was just an exercise,’ he said, testing him.

‘An exercise? They shot someone, the man I’d been following from Marrakech, the same man who’d been listening to the storyteller.’ Marchant fell silent again. ‘Remember when Dhar sent me the text, after Delhi?’ he continued, trying to restore his Chief’s belief.

Fielding stood up, his lower spine beginning to ache. It always played up when he was tired, and he suddenly felt world-weary, as if he had been asked to live his entire life over again, fight all his old Whitehall battles, relive the fears of raised threat levels, the waking moments in the middle of the night.

‘Daniel, we’ve been over this many times,’ he said, thinking back to their journey down the river. They had both thought the text was from Dhar. GCHQ was less sure.

‘The words were taken from a song. Leysh Nat’arak.’

‘And that text was one of the reasons I gave you time in Morocco. I would have let you go earlier if I could. You were no good to anyone in London. Langley thought otherwise. We all hoped that you’d find Dhar, that he’d make contact. But that’s not going to happen now. I’m sorry. It’s time to come home.’

‘You really believe the Americans have killed him, don’t you?’

Fielding hesitated, one hand on the small of his back. ‘I’m not sure. But whatever happened in Morocco, I want you away from it. For your own sake. If someone was killed, and you saw it, we have a problem, and that wasn’t part of the deal. I also sent you to Morocco to keep out of trouble.’

‘Yalla natsaalh ehna akhwaan. That was the lyric. Let’s make good for we are brothers.’ Marchant paused. ‘Dhar was out there, up in the mountains. I’m sure of it. And he wanted to come in. But someone took him, before he could.’

‘Someone? Who, exactly?’

Marchant tried to ignore the scepticism that had returned to Fielding’s voice. He had thought about this question on the way back to his apartment, wrestled with the possibilities, the implications, knowing how it would sound. But it was quite clear in his own mind, as clear as the Russian words he had heard on the mountainside: Nye strelai. Don’t shoot.

‘Moscow.’