Games Traitors Play

40

Marchant walked through arrivals, instinctively checking for cameras, scanning the Heathrow crowds. Prentice was a few yards behind. He had insisted on staying with him after he had picked him up from the far end of the beach, three miles from the resort. He had driven him to Cagliari airport, sat next to him on the plane, made sure no one was offering upgrades. Fielding’s orders. Prentice wasn’t to leave him on his own until he was safely in his Pimlico flat. Marchant couldn’t complain. He’d messed up in Morocco, failed to leave the country under snap cover.

Marchant spotted Monika a moment before she began waving in his direction. There was little that gave her away as the Polish intelligence officer who had helped him to flee Warsaw more than a year ago, sharing joints and her bed with him, all in the line of duty. The gipsy skirt had been replaced by a jacket and jeans, the braided hair disciplined by a tight bun, but she still had the same carefree gait. Marchant had been travelling under the name of David Marlowe at the time, and he knew that she wasn’t really called Monika, but he would always remember her as that, the woman in the hippy hostel with a flower in her hair.

He was about to wave back, surprised by the sudden quickening of his pulse, but then he realised that she wasn’t looking at him.

‘Recognise her?’ Prentice asked, coming up on Marchant’s shoulder with a grin. The next moment, Prentice and Monika were kissing each other across the barrier. Marchant couldn’t believe it was jealousy that made him turn away. He and Monika had both been operating under cover stories when they had met in Poland. He had been on the run from the CIA, she was helping him escape: each living a lie, doing their job.

‘Hello, Daniel,’ Monika said, breaking away from Prentice to give him a kiss on both cheeks. He remembered her smell as their skin brushed, and he wondered for a second if it had been more than duty in Warsaw. ‘I’m sorry about Leila,’ she added more quietly.

‘Do I still call you Monika?’

‘Hey, why not?’

Because that’s not your name, Marchant thought, but he kept silent. Her English was almost perfect, better than when they had met in Poland. And her smile was still too big, her full lips out of proportion with her petite body. She was no more than twenty-five, young enough to be Prentice’s daughter. Marchant should have been pleased for him, an old family friend. But he wasn’t. Something wasn’t right.

‘Did I tell you?’ Prentice asked him when they were a few yards from the main exit. Monika had fallen behind a crowd of arrivals and was out of earshot.

‘What’s there to tell?’ Marchant said, trying to play things down.

‘That I’m sleeping with the enemy.’

‘Were you in Warsaw?’

‘You know me better than that.’

Marchant didn’t miss the sarcasm. Relationships within MI6 weren’t unusual, but they weren’t encouraged, and they seldom ended happily. ‘Don’t poke the payroll’ — it had been one of Prentice’s first bits of advice to Marchant when he had arrived at Legoland. Seeing someone from another intelligence agency was more complicated, but clearly not impossible, particularly for an agent as experienced as Prentice.

‘Last time I checked, Poland was an ally,’ Marchant said.

‘Let’s just say it’s easier now I’m back in London. Listen, sorry to be neckie, but can you get yourself to Pimlico on your own? It will buy me some time with the office. You know how it is. She’s only over here for a few days.’

Monika was standing beside Prentice now, an arm through his, tugging him away. She was playing the sexually outgoing coquette, just as she had with him.

‘Of course I bloody can.’ Marchant had had enough of being chaperoned. And he needed a drink.

‘Is everything OK?’ Monika asked him. He searched her eyes, but he no longer knew what he was looking for, or why he even cared. Was this the real Monika? Screwing an old rake like Prentice? She had never once been herself with him in Poland, not even at the airport, when he hoped their masks might have finally slipped. For a moment, Marchant wondered if he would ever know anyone properly.

‘Everything’s fine,’ he said. ‘I never got the chance to thank you.’

And with that he lost himself in the crowds. He was happy to have left Prentice behind, but by the time he reached the escalator down to the Underground ticket hall he was aware that someone else was following him. When he reached the bottom, he looked at his watch and took the elevator back up again, scanning the faces of the people coming down. Most were looking ahead, but a tall man in a beaten leather jacket had his face turned away, taking too much interest in the electronic advertising posters. If it wasn’t Valentin from Sardinia, he had a twin in London. Hit back hard, Prentice had said.

The thought of Valentin following him to Britain was irritating. Marchant had expected him to have been arrested at the resort in Sardinia and flown back to Russia in disgrace for exposing his leader’s sexual preferences to the world, but here he was, about to follow him home to Pimlico.

Marchant turned and took the elevator back down again. The Russian was now at platform level, peeling off left to the westbound platform. Marchant just had time to clock his shoes: fashionably long with narrowed, flat toes. ‘Look at the footwear,’ his father had always told him. It was something he had never forgotten, whether it was colleagues in Legoland or targets in the field. Often it was the one thing that they failed to change when outfits were swapped, snap covers adopted in a hurry.

By the time Marchant had reached the bottom of the escalator, there was no sign of the Russian. He tried to turn left, but the crowds were almost spilling onto the tracks. He had lost him. He pushed his way to the platform edge. First, he looked left down the long line of people waiting for a train, then to the right. Twenty yards away, a pair of shoes was sticking out beyond everyone else’s. He had found his man.

Marchant moved as quickly as he could through the crowds, feeling the warm wind of an approaching train on his face. Thirty seconds later, he was positioned behind the Russian. It was definitely Valentin. He must have decided to drop off his tail, suspecting that he had been spotted, and was now standing with his legs apart on the platform edge, trying to steady himself against the crush of people swarming in different directions.

A member of the station staff asked over the Tannoy for people to move to the far end of the platform. He was unable to disguise his concern. The station was overcrowding. Marchant glanced at the tourists around him, holding anxiously to their suitcases, and then looked again at Valentin, who was only inches away. His hairline was edged with a thin strip of pale skin, suggesting that he had had his hair cut between leaving Sardinia and arriving in London.

It would be very easy to make it look like an accident, Marchant thought as the train approached, sounding its horn. For a moment, he pictured Valentin rolling onto the live rail, looking back up at him. His father had seen a jumper once, said it was the rancid smoke that had shocked him the most. The image of Valentin’s burnt body wasn’t as unsettling as it should have been. Which friend of his father’s did they want him to meet? And why did they talk about him in that familiar way? He realised now how angry he was, how humiliated he felt by the events in Sardinia. Uncle Hugo had been sent to rescue him. Christ, he wasn’t a new recruit any more. He was thirty, with five years’ experience under his belt, a promising career ahead of him.

A couple of seconds before the train reached the point where they were standing, Marchant looked over his shoulder. ‘Hey, stop pushing,’ he shouted, and grabbed Valentin’s arms as if to steady himself. Then he shoved the Russian forward as hard as he could.