Games Traitors Play

27

Lakshmi Meena took a deep breath before the member of the ground-crew staff opened the plane’s heavy door. Her life seemed to be punctuated by deep-breath moments, she thought: informing her father that she wasn’t going to pursue a career in medicine; telling Spiro that she wasn’t prepared to sleep with him or with anyone else at Langley to further her career.

Now her lungs were full again, her chest tight. Did other people have to summon composure in the same way, make such a conscious choice to square up to the world each day? Her father, a structural engineer, had always stressed the importance of blending in, but when she looked at him now, designing bridges in Reston, West Virginia, she sometimes struggled to see anyone at all.

She bunched her right hand tightly around a silk handkerchief and nodded at the two ground crew. The three of them were standing at the top of a set of steps, bringing them even closer to the hot Moroccan sun. There was no shade on the runway, but at least the twin-turboprop had taxied to a quiet corner of Agadir airport, away from the restless tourists queuing to return home to Britain. Beyond the plane, a military ambulance stood waiting, two medics idling by its open doors, smoking and talking to an armed policeman and a couple of Aziz’s intelligence colleagues.

One of the men put a hand up unnecessarily to keep the door open as Meena stepped into the plane. She had learned to command authority since joining the Agency, but it still felt like an act, not something that came naturally. She hoped Marchant hadn’t suffered too much. Despite their differences, she liked him, envied his equanimity. He seemed to possess an inner calmness that she would never know. And although she had refused to help Spiro set Marchant up with Aziz, she knew she could have done more, protested formally to Langley.

It had also taken too long for her to be patched through to the pilot. As she had suspected, he had been given orders to circle for two hours and then return to Agadir. He had had no contact with Aziz during the flight. The cockpit door was locked, and Meena sensed that the pilot preferred it that way. It clearly wasn’t the first time Aziz had taken a passenger on a tour of the Med.

Meena saw Aziz first, head back and to one side, his mouth wide open, as if he was singing grotesquely in his sleep. But there was no sound, and for a second she thought he was dead. She moved forward, trying to process the scene: the clamp in Aziz’s mouth, the dark, congealed stain on his cheek, the faint rise and fall of his chest, the tools littered across the floor. Her orders were to get Marchant away from Aziz, but where the hell was he?

She glanced around at the two rows of seats in business class. Aziz was in an aisle seat, its upholstery stained and torn. The seats around were also flecked with blood, the crisp paper headrests ripped or missing. Then Meena saw him, slumped on the floor, his back against the open door of the lavatory, hands by his side. Marchant’s eyes were open, but he was barely conscious. The bottom half of his face was badly bruised, his lips bloodied and swollen like slices of overripe peach.

‘Daniel,’ she said, putting the handkerchief to her mouth, as much to reassure herself about her own lips as to cut out the stale smell of burnt flesh, which was suddenly overpowering. She rushed over, but by the time she was kneeling down beside him, Marchant’s eyes had closed.