Dirty Little Secret Read online

  JON STOCK

  Dirty Little Secret

  For Stewart and Dinah

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  By the same author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Salim Dhar looked over the limestone cliff and tried to imagine where he would fall. For a moment, he saw himself laid out on the flat rocks eighty feet below, the incoming sea lapping at his broken body. He stepped back, recoiling, as if he had caught the stench of his own death on the breeze blowing up from the foreshore.

  He glanced around him and then out to sea. The moon was full, illuminating the fluorescence in the crests of the waves. Far to the west, the lights of reconnaissance planes winked as they criss-crossed the night sky, searching in vain for him. Somewhere out there a solitary trawler was drifting on the tide, crewed by men who would never see the dawn.

  Dhar limped along the cliff edge to the point where he had climbed up. His flying suit was waterlogged, his left leg searing with pain. He knew he shouldn’t be here, standing on Britain’s Jurassic coastline, but the pull had proved too much. And he knew it was his only chance. After what had happened, the West would be hunting him down with renewed intensity. The American kuffar would increase their reward for him. $30 million? How about $155 million – the price of the US jet he had shot down a few hours earlier?

  But would anyone think to search for him so close to home? In another life, Britain could have been his home. He pressed a foot against the rocky ground. Tonight was the first time he had stepped on British soil, and he was surprised by how good it felt: ancient, reassuring. The air was pure, too, caressing his tired limbs with its gentle sea gusts.

  He looked down at the foreshore again, rocks latticed like paving stones, and imagined his body somersaulting towards it. Would he survive? His descent might be broken by one of the ledges – if he was lucky. In the training camps of Kashmir and Kandahar, luck had been a forbidden fruit, on a par with alcohol. You who believe, intoxicants and games of chance are repugnant acts – Satan’s doing. Instead, Dhar had been instilled with the discipline of planning. ‘Trust in Allah, but tie your camel to a tree,’ as his explosives instructor had joked (he was mixing hair bleach with chapatti flour at the time).

  Now Dhar was rolling the dice. His plan was uncharacteristically reckless, possibly suicidal, but there was no choice. At least, that’s how it felt. He needed to see where his late father, Stephen Marchant, had lived, where his half-brother, Daniel, had grown up. Tarlton, the family home, was not so far from here. He had seen it on the aeronautical charts. If he was to follow in his father’s footsteps, he had to be sure, root himself deep within the English turf.

  Dhar stumbled as he picked his way down the steep path, pain shooting through his leg. His knee had been cut when he had ejected. Instinctively he checked for the mobile phone in his pocket. It was still there, sealed in a watertight bag with the handgun. He had taken both from the trawler that had rescued him earlier in the Bristol Channel. If everything had gone to plan, he would now be being debriefed by jubilant Russians back in the Archangel Oblansk. But everything hadn’t gone to plan. Dhar had blinked, and listened to the other man in his cockpit: Daniel Marchant.

  He thought again about the trawler. First the captain’s phone had rung, then he had drawn his gun, but Dhar had been ready. Thinking quickly, he had disarmed him before turning on the remaining crew members. It was after nightfall when he had finally abandoned the trawler, making his way ashore in its tender with the captain. He was below him now, propped up against a rock beside the tender, hands tied, drunk on vodka.

  After reaching the bottom of the path, Dhar checked on the Russian. It was important that he was sober enough to speak. He dragged the tender further up into the shadows of the cliff and tore at some long grass to use as crude camouflage. The blades cut into his soft hands and a thin line of blood blossomed across his finger joints. He cursed, sucking at a hand, and went back to the Russian. He couldn’t afford to be careless.

  ‘Walk,’ Dhar said. After the captain had risen unsteadily to his feet, Dhar pushed him in the direction of the cliffs. He meandered across the flat, stratified rocks, head bowed like a man approaching the gallows. There was no need for Dhar to threaten him with the gun. He had seen what had happened to his c
rew.

  Dhar looked up at the cliffs ahead: layer upon layer of limestone and shale, crushed over millions of years. The compressed stripes reminded him of the creamy millefeuille his Indian mother used to smuggle out of the French Embassy in Delhi when she was working there as an ayah. She was here somewhere, too, he hoped. In Britain, the land of the man she had once loved. Daniel Marchant had promised he would look after her.

  When they reached the foot of the cliff, Dhar signalled for the Russian to sit. He circled like an exhausted dog before slumping onto the rocks, trying in vain to break his fall with his tied hands. Dhar stood over him and pulled out a bottle of Stolichnaya, his actions tracked by the man’s aqueous, frightened eyes. Squatting down beside him, he unscrewed the lid and poured vodka into the Russian’s mouth, watching it trickle in rivulets through the stubble of his unshaven chin. His swollen lips were dry and cracked. Small flecks of white, sea salt perhaps, had collected in the corners of his mouth.

  Dhar had thought about what lay ahead many times in the last few hours, trying to banish the notion that he had nothing to lose. He could have stayed on the trawler, made his way south to France and on past Portugal to Africa, Morocco and the Atlas Mountains, where he had hidden once before. But he knew he was deluding himself. Without Russia’s protection he would have been caught by now, picked up by one of the search planes. So here he was, in Britain, a country he had never quite been able to wage jihad against.

  ‘You’ve been to the pub, a nice English pub,’ Dhar said, his face close to the Russian’s. He could smell the vodka on his breath, mixed with what might have been stale fish. ‘And you fell down the cliffs on your walk home. Too much to drink.’

  He waved the Stolichnaya in front of the man’s eyes like a censorious parent.

  ‘Are you going to kill me?’ the man asked. Dhar had chosen him because his English was good, better than his crew’s. He had heard him talk to the coastguard on the ship-to-shore radio.

  ‘Not if you do as I say,’ Dhar lied. He was certain that the man was an officer with the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service. It would make his killing more straightforward, despite the company he had provided during the long row ashore, the talk of his young family, twin sons.

  Dhar tucked the bottle in his flying suit and pulled out the sealed bag containing the mobile phone and the gun. Don’t rush, he told himself. There was no hurry. According to a map he had found on the trawler, the stretch of shoreline they were on was near a place called East Quantoxhead. The signpost at the top of the cliff, on the West Somerset Coastal Path, had said they were one mile from Kilve, where there was a public house. They would find him easily enough. The Quantocks were not exactly the Waziristan hills.

  Taking the phone out of the bag, Dhar dialled 999 and held the receiver up to the Russian’s mouth. With his other hand, he pressed the barrel of the gun hard against the man’s temple. Afterwards, he would drag his body back to the boat and hide it in the shadows.

  ‘Talk,’ he ordered, cocking the gun. Dhar’s head was clear, purged of twins. ‘You’ve had a fall, hurt your left leg.’ He pointed the gun at the man’s thigh and fired. ‘And now you need help.’

  2

  Daniel Marchant sat on the rock, throwing stones into Southampton Water. It was past midnight, and he still didn’t have a strategy. Lakshmi Meena was asleep in the room behind him. To his left and right, a high green steel fence, topped with barbed wire, marked the perimeter of Fort Monckton, MI6’s training centre at the tip of the Gosport peninsula.

  Marchant was on a small private beach in front of the Fort’s accommodation block. Two old cannon and a row of dark inlets in the sea-facing wall were a reminder of the Fort’s role in the Napoleonic Wars, while an MoD sign saying NO LANDING ON THE FORESHORE hinted at its current purpose. The accommodation was usually occupied by MI6’s most recent recruits, fresh-faced graduates on the Intelligence Officers’ New Entry Course, but the latest batch had left for a two-week stint in Helmand station, and the rooms were empty.

  He glanced up at the row of white sash windows, checking that there wasn’t a light on in his room. It was a warm night, and he had tried to sleep with the window open, but sleep had never come. How could it, after what he’d just been through? A few hours earlier he had nearly died in a plane with Salim Dhar, and he knew he wouldn’t be thanked for it. Never mind that he had thwarted one of the most audacious terrorist attacks ever mounted against mainland Britain.

  And now this. He had already woken Lakshmi once to talk to her about the letter in his hands, but he hadn’t been able to share its contents. Perhaps it was training. A genuine trust had built up between them over the past few weeks, a rapport that was edging towards something stronger, but she was still a CIA officer, although he suspected not for much longer. She was too honest, too nuanced for Langley. And she had become too closely associated with him.

  But he knew it was more than training. As long as the contents of the letter remained known only to him, he could discount them, imagine they weren’t real. He read them again, holding the paper up in the moonlight.

  … Moscow Centre has an MI6 asset who helped the SVR expose and eliminate a network of agents in Poland. His codename was Argo, a nostalgic name in the SVR, as it was once used for Ernest Hemingway.

  The Polish thought that Argo was Hugo Prentice, a very good friend of your father, and I believe a close confidant of yours. He was shot dead on the orders of the AW, or at least of one of its agents. Hugo Prentice was not Argo.

  That mistake was a tragedy, destroying his reputation and damaging your father’s. The real Argo is Ian Denton, deputy Chief of MI6.

  An hour earlier, while Lakshmi was sleeping, he had tried to call his Chief, Marcus Fielding, but the line was busy. He never liked leaving messages. He would call again when he had gathered his thoughts. Not for the first time, Marchant was struck by the solitude of his trade. He threw another stone towards the sea, harder this time. It missed the water and ricocheted between rocks like a maverick pinball.

  Ian Denton had been good to him over the years, shared his distrust of America. And he was different from the smooth set at MI6, an outsider: a quiet northerner from Hull. But his awkward stabs at camaraderie at the terrace bar, the whispered words of encouragement in the corridor – they had all been a pack of lies.

  ‘Are you OK down there?’ It was Lakshmi, who had appeared at the bottom of the stone steps down to the beach, wearing an oversized dressing gown. Her left wrist was in plaster. Marchant knew as soon as he saw her that this time he would reveal what was in the letter. He understood that look in her eyes, the weariness of isolation. The CIA was about to throw the book at her for failing to bring him in. She had crossed the divide, reached out to a fellow traveller. Fielding had promised Marchant that his own job was safe, but the Americans were after Lakshmi’s head, too. And they would get what they wanted, sooner or later. They always did.

  He held Lakshmi’s gaze and then looked at the stone in his hands, rubbing it between finger and thumb. If only he could break free, leave the distrust behind.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said.

  ‘You were going to share something earlier,’ Lakshmi said, walking over to him. Her feet were bare except for ankle chains, which tinkled like tiny bells as she crossed the stony beach. The sound brought back childhood memories of India, Marchant’s ayah approaching across the marble floor with sweet jalebi from Chandni Chowk.

  ‘Maybe if you told me, you might get some rest,’ she continued, standing beside him now, tightening the cord on her dressing gown as she shivered in a gust of wind. She rested her hand on Marchant’s neck and began to work the tight muscles.

  Marchant breathed in deeply. There was no point being enigmatic. If he was going to tell her, he would be blunt about it. ‘The Russians have got an asset high up in MI6,’ he began, raising a hand up to hers. ‘Very high.’ He needed to feel her warmth. Or was it to stop her slipping him thirty pieces of silver? It was the firs
t time he had told tales out of school.

  ‘I thought he’d been killed.’ Lakshmi’s tone sounded casual, which annoyed Marchant, even though he knew it was unintentional. She was referring to Hugo Prentice, his close friend, fellow field officer and mentor in MI6. Prentice had been accused by the Poles of working for Moscow, and was gunned down in front of Marchant on the streets of London. The Americans had been only too ready to believe that he was a traitor. For Fielding and Marchant, it had been harder to dismiss him so quickly.