Games Traitors Play

47

‘…you can trust him as if he was a member of our family.’

Salim Dhar rested the letter on his lap, tears stinging his eyes, and looked out of the cockpit at the slanting rain. It was only his second flight in the two-seater SU-25UB, but already he felt at home in the confined titanium-alloy space. It would take longer to adjust to the colossal G-forces that blurred his vision as the aircraft banked and climbed into the sky, but he was determined not to show any weakness.

Sergei, his Russian instructor, also known as the Bird, was sitting behind him, putting the plane through another roll, the Archangel countryside spinning around to settle above his head. There was something about Sergei that Dhar liked. He became a different person in the air, less lugubrious, as if all his worries had been left on the ground. And Sergei had plenty to worry about. According to Primakov, he had been one of Russia’s best pilots until he had crashed a MiG-29 into the crowd at an air show, killing twenty-three people and ending his career. The crash still haunted him day and night.

‘I don’t trust him,’ Sergei said over the intercom, spinning the jet back over and pulling into a steep climb.

‘Who?’ Dhar managed to say, his jaw heavy with G-force. He could feel himself being pressed down into his seat, the blood rushing to his legs and feet. In training, Sergei had taught him how to squeeze his abdominal muscles to prevent blood flowing to the lower body. He tried to squeeze, but his vision was already greying at the edges.

‘Primakov,’ Sergei said calmly.

‘Why not?’ Dhar harboured similar suspicions, but he was struggling to speak, unable to see anything now except blackness. He was close to losing consciousness as Sergei banked hard left.

‘Just a feeling. Are you ready to fly?’ According to the dials swimming in front of Dhar, the plane was levelling out at 15,000 feet.

‘I’m ready,’ Dhar said, his vision returning. Euphoria swept through him as he looked around, blood flowing freely to his brain. He had waited a long time for this moment. Inshallah, his new life was coming together. He could do this. What lay ahead suddenly seemed possible. More importantly, his past had shifted too, on a tectonic scale, giant plates of data slipping into place beneath the surface.

Primakov had left him twenty-four hours earlier, and in that time Dhar had read and reread the letter the Russian had given him, thinking back to the only time he had met his father, when he was being held prisoner at a black site facility in Kerala. To Salim, the son I never knew. South Indian jihadis were suspected of being behind a series of bomb attacks in Britain at the time, and Stephen Marchant, then Britain’s head of MI6, had travelled all the way to Kerala to ask Dhar if he knew anything about the campaign. Dhar couldn’t help him.

It was then, as the monsoon rain beat down outside, that Marchant had detonated a bomb of his own: Dhar was his own son.

‘If it’s any consolation, I loved your mother,’ Marchant had continued, walking around Dhar’s dank cell. A solitary lightbulb hung from the ceiling. ‘I still do.’

Dhar had been too tired, tortured too many times, to feel anything at first. Instead, he just stared at the betel-nut juice stains that streaked down his cell walls. There was blood mixed in with the red marks; his own blood. Eventually, he looked up from the threadbare charpoy on which he was lying. Any anger he felt towards Marchant was tempered by relief that the man he had thought for so long was his father, a man he despised above all others, was no such thing. After a long pause, during which the rain outside increased to a deafening downpour, Dhar sat up with difficulty, and spoke.

‘How did you meet her?’ he asked, rubbing his bruised and swollen wrists together. They were shackled and chained to a steel ring on the wall.

‘She worked as an ayah at the British High Commission when I was stationed in Delhi. 1980. She was there for a year, I think. Before she switched to the American Embassy.’

Dhar had cast his eyes down at the mention of America.

‘She asked me never to make contact with her or with you again. I agreed, with reluctance, but I always provided for you both, sending money once a month.’

Dhar wondered why the British spymaster had broken his promise. He could have sent a colleague to interrogate him. The south Indian rendezvous was a risk in itself, but the news Marchant had brought was far more dangerous, more compromising — for both of them. Western spy chief fathers jihadi. Then, as Marchant had talked on into the monsoon night, peppering his conversation with anti-American asides, Dhar had begun to understand. His world, far from being fractured by the revelation, had in some way become more complete.

‘The West is not as simple as your people sometimes like to think,’ Marchant had said — the last words Dhar was ever to hear his father speak.

Now, here in his hands, 15,000 feet above the Archangel countryside, was written confirmation of what Dhar had barely dared to hope: a father who had the same enemies as him. If Primakov was to be believed, Stephen Marchant, Chief of MI6, had spent more than twenty years spying for the Russians, inspired by a mutual distrust of America.

‘Your father was a true hero of Russia,’ Primakov had said. ‘It was an honour to work with him.’

Dhar knew it wasn’t important, that, inshallah, he would answer to a higher calling, but it mattered. He was being asked to follow in his father’s footsteps. And for a son who had never known paternal love, never been shown the way, the feeling of comfort was almost overwhelming.

He took one last look at the letter, then folded it into one of the clear plastic pockets of his flying suit. I will not try to guess at what path led you to him, only to offer reassurance that I have trodden a similar one before you.

‘The Grach is yours,’ Dhar heard Sergei say over the intercom. And for a brief moment, as his hands tightened on the stick and endless pine forests passed in a blur far beneath him, it felt as if life had a coherence that had so far evaded him.