Games Traitors Play

26

Spiro was in no rush to call off the dogs, but he phoned Meena as he crossed Horse Guards Road and walked into St James’s Park. He needed to take some air after the meeting.

‘What do you mean you can’t contact him?’ he said, drawing hard on a cigarette as a gaggle of Japanese tourists cycled past him on hired bikes.

‘He’s with Aziz, as you ordered.’

‘And where’s Aziz?’

‘Twenty-five thousand feet above the Mediterranean.’

‘Christ, can’t you get ATC to contact the pilot?’

There was a pause. Spiro knew it would take time. Meena had refused to contact Aziz earlier, but he guessed she would be more cooperative now that he was calling time on the dentist.

‘Has something happened, sir?’

Spiro drew hard on his cigarette again, watching the flamingos. His hand was shaking.

‘Dhar’s not dead. He set us up, fooled Fort Meade, fooled fucking all of us, including six dead US Marines.’

He had been looking forward to disciplining Meena for her insubordination, but that would have to wait now. He was no longer in a position of strength. All he could ask of her was to clean up the mess.

‘And you think Marchant knows where Dhar is?’ she asked.

‘Don’t go dumb on me, Lakshmi. Of course not. But the British are holding all the cards right now, and if they find out Aziz is pulling Marchant’s molars, we’ll all have toothache. Get him off the plane, away from Aziz. And dump him somewhere nice, where he can recover. We might need him.’

He hung up just as Ian Denton appeared out of nowhere next to him. Spiro didn’t know where to place Denton. The Vicar was easy: he was an upper-class, suspiciously unmarried academic with a bad back and too much sympathy for Arabia. Denton was more complicated. In theory, he should have been an ally: a grammar-school kid from Hull who had risen through the ranks because of hard graft and dirty tricks in the SovBloc, rather than old-school favours and fair play in London. But Spiro remained wary of him. There was something reptilian about Denton’s body, lean and sinewy like a long-distance runner’s. He also had an unnerving ability to be present in a room without appearing to have entered it. And that quiet voice.

‘Daniel Marchant’s missing,’ Denton said, cutting straight to the chase.

‘It’s OK. He’s fine. A little misunderstanding with our station in Rabat.’

‘We had an agreement,’ Denton said, surprising Spiro with the suddenness of his attack. Denton usually stayed in the long grass.

‘Did we?’

‘We go public about Dhar if anything happens to Marchant, is that clear?’

Spiro paused, looking at Denton, listening to his accent, its roughness softened by the quiet delivery. Denton’s eyes were soulless, unblinking behind small oval glasses. It had been a smart move by Fielding to make him his deputy. Every Chief needed a troubleshooter, a hard man to sort out the messy stuff. Fielding liked to refer to Denton as his gallowglass. Spiro had played a similar role himself for the previous DCIA. But Denton was different, less muscular, more serpentine. Apparently, he had once saved Fielding’s life in a tight spot in Yemen. Now it was payback time.

‘Congratulations on your promotion, by the way. I never got the chance to say.’

Denton refused to rise to the bait. Instead, he just looked at him with his lifeless eyes.

‘Marchant’s doing fine, Ian,’ Spiro continued, turning to head off into the park. ‘The tooth fairy’s watching over him.’