Games Traitors Play

22

‘There’s something else,’ Myers said, after Spiro had sat down. It was more of a slump, but Spiro somehow managed to make it look controlled. For a moment, Fielding wished he felt sorry for Spiro, a pang of pity. But there was nothing but cold contempt, the sort he normally reserved for Russians. ‘Work for the Foreign Office if you want to be liked,’ he had been told by the don who had tapped him up at Oxford. What Fielding didn’t know was that another blow to Spiro’s self-esteem, his career, his whole raison d’être, was about to come from Myers, who was still standing in front of the audio.

This time, Myers didn’t look to Fielding for guidance. He was on his own now, score abandoned, improvising. ‘Actually, I agree with the American analysis that Dhar would not risk being with the captured US Marines.’

Spiro seemed to take heart from this, and sat up to listen.

‘I didn’t at first, but I do now. Using this assumption as my starting point, I went back to the audio this morning and asked myself, in the light of the American scream, how it was possible for Salim Dhar and Lieutenant Oaks to be in the same place.’

‘And?’ Chadwick said, glancing at Spiro. Like Fielding, he was intrigued to see what this awkward analyst from Cheltenham was going to say next. Spiro was staring out of the window, lost in his own thoughts. The head of GCHQ didn’t know where to look.

Myers picked nervously at the back of a front tooth and then stopped himself, as if being chided by a parent. ‘The only explanation is that Dhar’s voice was recorded.’

Spiro looked from the window to Myers, suddenly encouraged.

‘Don’t you think that scenario might just have been checked out by the NSA?’

‘Of course. And I’ve looked into it, too. But the quality of the intercept is too poor to be able to establish if Dhar’s voice is a recording. There’s also no audio trace of a recorder activating before or after Dhar speaks.’

‘So?’

‘For once, the answer doesn’t lie in technology.’

Fielding was enjoying this, watching Myers grow in confidence, trying to guess where it would lead. This was what intelligence work was all about: intuition.

‘You’re an analyst, right?’ Spiro heckled. ‘Stick to IT and leave the couch work to others.’

Myers ignored him, more out of dysfunctional shyness than defiance.

‘Why did Lieutenant Oaks scream?’ Myers asked, addressing the whole room now.

‘Why?’ Spiro echoed. ‘He was about to be incinerated by a Hellfire missile, that’s why.’

‘About to be. Exactly. It’s not my area, of course — ’

‘Too right.’

‘- but my understanding of munitions is that such things are pretty instant. Like, no time to scream. Oaks had worked out what was going on. It was the second time Dhar had spoken. He wouldn’t have known what was happening the first time he heard his voice. But when he spoke again, Oaks would have realised that there was nobody else in that hut apart from the six Marines. He was trying to give Fort Meade a message, tell them it was a mistake, that there was a tape recorder strapped to Dhar’s phone. Just like this one.’

With uncharacteristic panache, Myers reached into his fleece pocket and pulled out a small mobile phone strapped with masking tape to an equally thin tape recorder. Myers was turning out to be a natural showman, Fielding thought, despite the phone catching awkwardly on his pocket. Next up, he’d be pulling rabbits from a hat, sawing Harriet Armstrong in half, performing the Indian rope trick. Armstrong would like that. She wasn’t afraid to play to the gallery. At Cambridge, she had played the fairy godmother in a university production of Cinderella.

The two units were linked by a small audio lead, which might have looked like a detonator to an inexperienced eye. The room didn’t exactly gasp — those present were too versed in the modern tools of terror to be surprised — but there was a shuffling of papers that Fielding had come to recognise over the years as civil servants’ applause.

‘As soon as Lieutenant Oaks heard the voice a second time,’ Myers said, brandishing the phone, ‘the penny dropped and he screamed, but it was too late. The phone had already disconnected. Except that it wasn’t too late. We heard him, and we know Dhar’s still alive.’

Spiro knew as soon as Myers had spoken that he was right. He thought back to the UAV trailer at Creech, to the sensor operator who had cast doubt on the target. For a moment, Spiro had imagined he had seen what looked like a crucifix, but the image was blurred and he had shut it out of his mind. Just as he had removed the operator’s suspicions from his official report afterwards.

It took almost a minute for someone to speak after Myers had shuffled back to his seat. Chadwick was the one who broke the silence, and his comments were addressed to Spiro.

‘I think I speak for all of the British agencies when I say that we offer you our unconditional sympathy. It’s at times like this that allies must pull together and help one other.’

Whitehall shorthand for Thank Christ the mistake wasn’t ours, Fielding thought.

‘That’s good of you,’ Spiro said quietly. America wasn’t used to needing its allies. ‘I must make some calls.’

Fielding thought that Spiro looked a genuinely broken man as he stood up to leave. But again there was no sympathy, just the thought of what could be leveraged from the situation.

‘Before you go,’ Chadwick said, ‘I want you to know that there’s no reason why our official position should change: Dhar is thought to have been killed, but it is believed, with great regret, that six US Marines whom he had taken were killed too. Adopting such a line carries a political risk, and the Prime Minister will make no official statement on the incident, but our experience of Dhar is that he’s not the sort of jihadi who will turn up on a website telling the world he’s alive and well. It suits him better that the world thinks he’s dead. Clearly, we need to qualify any statement we make to give us sufficient slack if he does show up, but for the time being, Dhar is dead.’