Dirty Little Secret Read online

  Five minutes later, Marchant was back on the jetty, having returned the car to its original slot in the car park. The small brass ignition key was in his hand as he approached the boat for the second time.

  ‘Just thought I’d come and say thanks for picking me up last night,’ he said. ‘And apologise for delaying you after such a long journey.’

  ‘Not at all,’ the older man said. ‘Nice of you to come back. I would have been too embarrassed.’

  ‘Can I help with your bags?’ Marchant asked.

  ‘You could if we knew where our car key was. We’ve looked everywhere for the damn thing, but it seems to have vanished. My son-in-law’s walked into town to find a garage.’

  ‘Let me have a look. I’m good at finding things.’

  Marchant climbed aboard and went below decks. He soon found the key he was looking for, hanging from a hook by the ship-to-shore radio. But it wasn’t for the Traveller, it was for the boat’s diesel engine. He had remembered seeing it hanging from the fob when it was in the ignition the night before. Checking that the man wasn’t looking, he slid it off and put it in his pocket, then pushed the car key down a slot beside the steps, where it could have fallen from the hook above.

  ‘I think I’ve got it!’ Marchant called up to the man.

  ‘Have you really?’

  ‘It’s just a matter of retrieving it.’

  The old man proved adept with a carving knife, and soon managed to slide the key out from the slot.

  ‘I think we’re quits now, don’t you?’ he said, a hand on Marchant’s shoulder as they climbed back up into the cockpit.

  ‘Are you off, then?’ Marchant asked, trying not to sound as if he was hurrying him along.

  ‘We’ve just got to take down the ensign, lock up and we’re done. I’ll call my son-in-law now. Tell him the good news.’

  Marchant left him to it and retreated to the shower block, where he washed. He was confident that no one had followed him from Kemble to Cheltenham, or from Cheltenham to Portsmouth. As he splashed water on his unshaven face, he thought how tired he looked. It was twenty-four hours since he had slept. He would try to get some rest once he was on their boat and heading across the English Channel on autopilot.

  First, though, he needed to find Lakshmi.

  43

  The two brothers didn’t speak as they drove through the Pembrokeshire countryside. There was nothing more to say. They had sat together to watch the BBC news about Salim Dhar’s capture, and before the bulletin had ended they were halfway to the lock-up where they kept the truck. It was also where they kept two hundred kilos of carefully dried ammonium nitrate, made from fertiliser bought at separate locations; one forty-litre barrel of liquid nitromethane, sourced from a drag-racing track; and ten kilos of Tovex Blastrite gel sausages used for avalanche clearing. To ensure a stronger blast, they had also stolen ten kilos of zinc dust.

  It had taken five sweaty hours to mix the ingredients, which were divided between three barrels strapped to the floor of the van, and it was a relief when they were finally on the road out of Easton in Bristol and heading across the Severn Bridge to Wales. Like many others in Britain, the brothers had become followers of Dhar after he had come so close to assassinating the American President in India. His widespread appeal wasn’t hard to explain, particularly now, after his spectacular attack on the Fairford Air Show.

  They told themselves that Dhar wasn’t like other jihadis. His targets were strategic, focused on halting American imperialism. Politicians and the armed forces were fair game, instruments of Empire. Civilians were off limits. 7/7 had left both brothers uncomfortable. Britain had been craven in its support for the war in Iraq, but why kill commuters?

  Up until Haverfordwest, they had stayed on the M4 and A roads. Now they were heading down a narrow lane, tensing every time the van drove over a bump in the uneven surface. An indigo sky spanned above them, a high summer sun beating down on the surrounding fields, but the world around them was no longer important.

  ‘We should have got out of Bristol more,’ the older brother said, looking ahead. ‘It’s beautiful here.’

  ‘Beautiful,’ his younger brother replied, his head turned away.

  After passing through a hamlet called Tiers Cross, they knew they were only minutes from their target: an American-owned oil refinery in Milford Haven. They had staked it out in recent weeks, posing as trainspotters. Railway tracks ran along the eastern boundary, and some unusual shunting engines had proved a useful draw for enthusiasts. Their plan, though, had not required much reconnaissance. It relied more on God’s will and the element of surprise.

  They would approach the northern entrance to the refinery at speed, passing the staff car park on their right, and break through the temporary security barrier. An adjacent, more sophisticated carlock was currently under construction. If it had been finished, they had a problem. A row of eighteen oil storage tanks would be immediately ahead of them once they were through. It was just a matter of how far up the road they could get before being stopped. Ideally, they would be able to park up in a gap beyond the first twelve tanks, as there was a group of four bigger tanks on the opposite side of the road. Then, Inshallah, they would detonate their incendiary cargo.

  As they passed through Robertson Cross, glancing nervously at the refinery now visible up ahead, they both said quiet prayers. The younger of the two, barely eighteen, noticed his brother’s hands tighten on the steering wheel and felt sick. Without warning, he wound down the window and retched. Salim Dhar would approve of the target, he reminded himself, wiping the vomit from his mouth with the back of his hand. His upper body had begun to shake.

  Oil went to the heart of the US’s relations with its allies. And few innocent people would be killed. There was a small chance that the subsequent toxic aerosol cloud of hydrofluoric acid might inflict burns on the surrounding population, but that couldn’t be helped. Inshallah, the attack, the first of many, would be a reminder to Britain that there was a price to pay if it continued to cooperate with America.

  ‘It’s OK,’ the older brother said, pulling the van up beside a gate. They sat in silence for a few minutes, engine off. Cows grazed in the field next to them. ‘Bro, take a look at the video again. It will remind you why we’re doing this.’

  After loading a video file, he passed his phone to his younger brother. They watched the footage for a few moments, occasionally checking the mirrors for traffic. The lane was deserted, the countryside hushed. The images were from a video that had been released by WikiLeaks three months earlier and widely circulated among jihadis. It showed two US Apache helicopters gunning down a group of people, including two Reuters journalists, in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad in July 2007. The footage included dialogue from the crews of both helicopters, each of which was armed with 30mm cannon.

  The brothers watched, shaking their heads in disbelief as the helicopters circled the men in the street below, then started firing on them.

  ‘Light ’em all up.’

  ‘Come on, fire!’

  ‘Keep shootn’.’

  The helicopters continued to circle the scene. After eight men had been gunned down, the American crews made idle chatter.

  ‘Hotel two six, Crazy Horse one eight.’

  ‘Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Two six: Crazy Horse one eight.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Good shootn’.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Now you understand why we are doing this,’ the older brother said, putting the phone back in his pocket and turning the key in the ignition. ‘Come, we must go.’

  44

  After filling up with diesel at the marina, Marchant steered the Seadog out past the MoD fuel jetty and into Portsmouth harbour’s small boat channel. A yacht was approaching from the opposite direction. He was worried that someone might recognise him, but he made himself wave at the passing crew, who appeared to be in training
. They waved back.

  It was important to appear normal, just another boat out for a sail on a July afternoon in the Solent. In an attempt to disguise himself, he had put on a woolly bobble hat that was lying behind the wheel, pulling it down to just above his eyes. Although the sun was out, it was still cold on the water and a hat didn’t look out of place.

  On the far side of the harbour, warships old and new were moored up in the Royal Navy dockyard. The aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious was the biggest, overshadowing HMS Cattistock, a mine counter-measures vessel that was moored nearby. Marchant had been on board Cattistock once, when he was based at Fort Monckton. Its hull was made out of glassfibre-reinforced plastic to avoid setting off mines. Behind Illustrious, the sleek, angled lines of HMS Daring, a Type-45 destroyer, brought back less happy memories of the Indian coast, off Maharashtra, where he had been picked up by an American Littoral Combat Ship.

  He told himself the Royal Navy wouldn’t be searching for him, but the sight of an MoD Marine Police launch made his stomach tighten. It seemed to be patrolling the waters in front of Illustrious, a policeman standing in the stern with a Heckler & Koch MP7 submachine gun slung across his body.

  Marchant tried to ignore the launch and focus on what lay ahead. He never liked attempting the same trick twice, but there was no other way of getting Lakshmi out of the Fort. She would have to swim, as he had. According to his watch, she should already have entered the water. By the time he was off the Fort’s foreshore she would be at the yellow buoy, where he would lift her aboard.

  The decision to take her with him had not been an easy one. His guard dropped in her presence, just as it had with Leila. But he wanted to trust her. Besides, he would need her help if Dhar was ever to escape. He would finally have to reveal that Dhar had agreed to work for MI6, but he could live with that. Her loyalty no longer lay with the CIA or Spiro, who wanted her behind bars. And her mind was open enough to understand the logic of turning Dhar rather than killing him. We can’t win by force alone. There are other ways of waging war on terror.

  He also missed her.

  He went to the stern of the boat, leant over and checked that cooling water was coming out of the engine. Crossing the Channel in a 1970s yacht wasn’t the quickest exit he would ever make, but it was the best option in the circumstances. He just hoped that his old friend Jean-Baptiste was enjoying his usual summer break from Paris on the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy. He would ring him once he was clear of the Isle of Wight.

  Earlier he had called Lakshmi at the Fort. She had sounded pleased to hear from him. Almost too pleased. He guessed she was demob happy. No one had come looking for them, she had said, which was encouraging. Perhaps Fielding was still in play, and able to protect them. Either way, they couldn’t afford to hang around. Spiro would be keen to tie off the whole operation, now Dhar had been caught. He wouldn’t rest until they were both in the custody of the CIA.

  As the boat motored up towards the rendezvous, Marchant’s mood dipped. He glanced astern and saw a cross-Channel ferry bearing down on him, rising out of the water like a leviathan. It had been years since he had sailed on his own. He checked his watch again, pulled out one of the £10 phones and plugged in the hands-free that Myers had given him. After the phone had booted up he rang the guardhouse at the Fort, adopting what he hoped was a golf-club secretary’s reedy tones.

  ‘It’s Stokes Bay Golf Club here. Thought you should know you’ve got some possible intruders trying to climb your perimeter fence down by the 9th hole. Unwashed peace protestors by the look of it.’

  The public golf course was adjacent to the Fort’s far perimeter fence, which had always struck Marchant as odd. A few yards from the fairway, young IONEC officers were being instructed in a very different kind of driving: how to negotiate roadblocks at speed. Slipping the phone overboard, he hoped his call might create enough of a diversion for Lakshmi’s afternoon swim to go unnoticed.

  45

  ‘I think you should come over and read it for yourself,’ Denton said, sitting at the desk that had been so recently vacated by Fielding. He had rung Spiro at the American Embassy, hoping to catch him before he left for Bagram.

  ‘I’m kinda busy, Ian. Flying out in a couple of hours. Can’t it wait till I get back?’

  ‘I’m not sure if it can.’

  There was a pause while Denton heard Spiro talking to someone in his office at the US Embassy. Denton sat forward and looked again at the sheet of A4 paper, which he had found in the safe as soon as Fielding had gone. He knew he must share it at once with the Americans. It would shore up his own position and weaken Fielding’s.

  ‘OK, I’ll come around now. But I don’t want to find myself locked out of Legoland again. Fielding’s gone, I presume?’

  ‘He’s left. But you might want to talk to him when you’ve read this.’

  Denton hung up, walked over to the door and asked Anne Norman if she could ring down for some tea.

  ‘A mug, if possible. Tetley. Two bags, dash of milk.’ Insipid Moroccan teas weren’t for him. And if she was asking, he preferred the canteen’s sausage sandwiches to halloumi. He knew Anne was upset about Fielding’s departure, but the sooner she got over it, the better. He had work to do.

  Back at his desk, Denton tried to clear some papers from his in-tray. Top of the pile was a memo from the station head in South Africa. According to reliable sources in Durban, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was attempting to ship a high-performance powerboat back to Bandar-Abbas under a Hong Kong-flagged merchant vessel called the Amplify. The DTI in London and the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security were trying to block the export, suspecting the boat might be intended for military use.

  Denton tried to focus on the memo, but Stephen Marchant’s copperplate kept drawing his attention. What Marchant had written was shocking, rewriting a part of his life he had thought was immutable history. As a junior field officer in the SovBloc Controllerate, Denton had worked closely with Marchant on Primakov. He had never liked the Russian, who had made it clear he preferred dealing with the more cultured Marchant. When they did talk, he was always asking for a new life in the West, ‘somewhere civilised like Oxford’. Denton was tempted to exfiltrate him to Marfleet, the deprived ward in Hull where he had been born, but his brief was to fob him off with MI6’s grubby money. Eventually he was moved to another job.

  It had never once occurred to him that Stephen Marchant was handing over American product in return for Primakov’s. Why would it? Marchant had been more dedicated to the Service than anyone he’d ever met, a Chief-in-waiting from the moment he had joined.

  He sat back and looked around Fielding’s office, now his own, taking in the view of the Thames. A solitary maroon canal boat was heading down towards Westminster. It reminded him that he hadn’t been on his own boat, moored near Oxford, since Easter. He would get down there even less now, but it was a small price to pay for a job he had never thought would be his. Those who said modern Britain was classless had never worked for MI6. Despite endless protests to the contrary, the Service had always been the preserve of the privileged, a public-school club without the tie.

  He was beginning to flick through some images of alleged torture in Bagram, the subject of an internal investigation he was overseeing, when an MI5 alert flashed up on his main computer terminal. A terrorist attack had just taken place at Milford Haven oil refinery. Moments later, his comms console lit up and Anne put her head around the door.

  ‘Harriet Armstrong on priority line one,’ she said.

  ‘Put her through.’ Denton had little time for the Director General of MI5. She had been too close to Fielding, head girl to his head boy.

  ‘I’ll keep this quick, as I’m about to brief the PM,’ Armstrong began. Denton could hear the tension in her educated voice.

  ‘Are we sure it’s hostile?’ he asked, already thinking through the implications for his own Service. He hoped the perpetrators were homegrown, her problem. ‘Wasn’t th
ere a fire at Milford Haven last year?’

  ‘This was a five-hundred-pound truck bomb, Ian. Look, I’ve got to go, but clearly I’m going to need all the help you can give me on this one. I hope things won’t change just because Marcus has gone.’

  ‘I know he was very supportive, as I will be,’ Denton said, looking at the images of Bagram again. He turned one photograph on its side and peered closer at the shackled victim. His arms had been tied behind his back to his ankles, and he was hanging from a beam like a trussed-up fly.

  ‘Thank you,’ Armstrong said. ‘By the way, it’s an American-owned refinery. You might want to keep out of Spiro’s way.’

  46

  Marchant stared out into the thick fog, wondering if his boat was about to be mown down by a supertanker. The brutal sound of a ship’s horn had woken him from a restless sleep in the corner of the cockpit. Lakshmi was below. She was in a bad way, still recovering from her cold swim out to the buoy.

  He couldn’t see anything on either bow, but he thought he could hear the sound of distant propellers above his boat’s diesel engine. Perhaps he was imagining it. But just as he began to relax, a deafening foghorn sounded again, closer this time. Christ, where was it? He must be crossing the shipping lanes. All he needed was a supertanker on autopilot, steaming through the Channel at 15 knots, crew asleep, bridge deserted.

  He went down to the cabin, glancing at Lakshmi, who was shivering feverishly, barely conscious. She would need medical attention when they reached France, which would complicate matters. He had rung Jean-Baptiste, who was expecting him, but hadn’t had time to explain about Lakshmi. He turned on the VHF radio, tuning in to Channel 16 in case the tanker was trying to communicate. Silence. Beside him, Lakshmi moaned, her eyes still shut. They hadn’t looked right, the pupils dilated, when he had pulled her into the boat. He knew she was on medication for her arm. Had she accidentally overdosed? Had someone drugged her?