Games Traitors Play Read online

  Marchant strolled around the village square. The ground was covered in a confetti of paper and cardboard, the remains of exploded firecrackers. He could hear a wedding party in the distance, and wondered if one of Meena’s cousins really was getting married. He had seen the celebrations from a distance on the way out to the airfield. It didn’t matter either way, but he wanted to know. The world of lies and legends had lost its appeal after the scene with Spiro, and he needed to be reassured by something tangible, real.

  He thought again about what had happened with Dhar’s mother. It was clearer now, painfully clear. Fielding hadn’t trusted him to betray, didn’t think he had it in him to persuade the Russians of his treachery. So he had given Marchant a helping hand, asked Spiro to humiliate him in front of Primakov. The American wouldn’t have needed much persuading.

  ‘Are you angry enough to meet your brother?’ Primakov had asked as he stepped out of the car. Did the Russian suspect what game Fielding was playing? That Marchant’s rage had been conceived five thousand miles away in Legoland?

  ‘I’d like to see him, yes,’ Marchant had said.

  ‘And he’d like to see you. But first I want you to do something for me. For Russia. Then we will get you out of Britain.’

  Marchant walked around the corner towards the mansion where the wedding was taking place. A crowd had spilled out onto the road beneath loops of bunting that had been strung between tangled telegraph poles. Two women were walking towards him, arm in arm, their bright carmine saris illuminating the dusk. The one on the left reminded him of Meena, the same lambent eyes, the subtle sashay of hips. A stray pie dog lingered in the shadows.

  ‘Can you help me?’ Marchant asked her, ignoring the field agent’s normal caveats. He was drawing attention to himself in a place where he was already a curiosity.

  ‘We’ll try,’ she said, masking a giggle with her hand.

  ‘I had a friend who was meant to be here today.’ He nodded at the house behind them. ‘Over from the States. Lakshmi Meena. You don’t happen to know her, do you?’

  ‘Sure. She’s my friend’s cousin. It’s such a shame. Lakshmi was meant to be here, but she got held up in Madurai.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Marchant said. He felt stronger already, as if the world had been veering off its axis and was now spinning true again. He realised, as he walked on, how much he wanted to believe in Meena, believe that she wasn’t another Leila. He was no longer sure he could face a life of trusting no one. Meena was beautiful, there was no point denying it, but it was his sympathy rather than his love that she kept asking of him. She had claimed that she had tried to stop Aziz in Morocco, then admitted that she could have done more. The appearance of Spiro at the airfield appeared to have pained her, but she had still boarded the flight.

  He stopped, and turned back to the square, where he had seen a taxi waiting, and thought about Primakov’s request. He was certain it was a test. If he was caught, the consequences would be serious. Should he run it past Fielding? Or was he now expected to play the traitor’s game alone?

  68

  Monika had always thought she would be able to do it herself, that she owed it to her brother, but she couldn’t. She hoped he would understand. She had the money in cash, £20,000 withdrawn from an emergency AW fund in London that was meant to be used for bribing disillusioned SVR agents.

  As she stood outside a snooker hall in Haringey, north London, waiting for her contact to arrive, she wondered if she had any energy left to hide her tracks, to invent a cover story for the money. To begin with, she had resigned herself to being caught. She had imagined standing over him, waiting calmly for the police to arrive, but she couldn’t do that either. Her survival instincts, honed in the field, were too strong. So she had contracted out her revenge instead.

  She was spoilt for choice in London, but had settled on a Turkish gang with a proven record and an obsession with forensics. They had never been caught, and they asked for more when she told them the West End venue.

  ‘It’s very public.’

  ‘Good. I want everyone to know.’

  General Borowski would certainly know, but at least this way there was a chance of protecting herself afterwards, providing the political will was there. She was in his hands now.

  69

  Dhar listened in silence as Primakov told him about his mother’s rendition. He knew that anger was a weakness, but it took all of his strength to remain calm and listen. The only outward sign of distress was a twitch in his lower left eyelid.

  ‘This Spiro is the bane of many brothers’ lives,’ Dhar said. He was sitting upright, his hands flat on the table in front of him, on either side of a glass of water. They were talking in the hangar at Kotlas. Outside, it was raining again, rattling the metal roof.

  ‘He was the one who waterboarded Daniel Marchant.’

  Dhar tried not to think where the Americans would take his mother, how she would cope.

  Reaching for the glass of water, he watched Primakov walk over to the window and look outside. Sergei was right. There was something about the Russian – other than the mix of cologne and garlic – that made Dhar wary. But he had no option but to work with him. He had come straight from seeing Marchant in India.

  ‘If it’s any consolation, your British half-brother is distraught,’ Primakov said, turning back to face him. ‘He gave your mother his personal word that she would be taken to London. If Spiro hadn’t been armed, Marchant would have killed him.’

  ‘He is ready to help us, then?’ Dhar asked, happy to move the conversation away from his mother.

  ‘Marchant could forgive the West once. But now, following your mother’s rendition, he is struggling to call Britain his home.’

  Dhar flinched again at the mention of his mother. He closed his eyes, trying to calm the twitch, control the body with the mind.

  ‘We need to be sure,’ he said, raising a reluctant hand to steady his eyelid. It was too much. ‘Rendition’ and ‘mother’ were words he never wanted to hear together again. ‘After all that happened to Marchant before, he still went back to work for the infidel.’

  ‘He wants to meet you. I have told him everything about your father, how I recruited him in Delhi, his twenty years of service to Moscow.’

  ‘How did he react?’

  ‘Like you, I think he suspected already. There was relief in his eyes. Let us see. He must pass one final test before he joins us.’

  70

  ‘I thought I should drive to Heathrow, pick Daniel up,’ Ian Denton said, standing in front of Marcus Fielding’s desk. Fielding was lying on the floor behind it, partly out of sight, trying to relax after another back spasm. ‘He must be pretty cut up after what happened in Madurai.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Fielding said. ‘I’ve just sent Prentice. With orders to get Marchant drunk. Look out for him when he’s back in the office, though. He’ll have no desire to talk to me.’

  Fielding was touched by Denton’s concern. Despite his cold-blooded demeanour, he had a warm heart. And he had always taken an interest in Marchant’s welfare.

  ‘Of course.’ Denton paused. ‘Is everything all right with Daniel?’

  ‘As much as it ever is with him,’ Fielding said. He wanted to confide more in his deputy, but he couldn’t. Denton’s own deep suspicion of the Americans had brought him close to Marchant in recent months, but Fielding knew that the plan to help Marchant defect must remain known only to himself.

  ‘I’ll leave it to Prentice, then,’ Denton said. ‘And look forward to signing off his exorbitant expenses.’

  Fielding sometimes wished his deputy would unbutton a little, let things go, but he could never remember an occasion when Denton had got drunk. After he had left, Fielding unzipped the second encrypted audio file from GCHQ and listened, reading the covering note from his opposite number at Cheltenham. Grushko again, this time talking to an unnamed colleague in Moscow Centre. It had been recorded a few hours earlier.

  ‘I still have my
doubts.’

  ‘About Marchant?’

  ‘About everyone. Marchant, Comrade Primakov.’

  ‘The Muslim is keen to see his brother.’

  ‘I just think we should use him.’

  ‘Argo?’

  ‘That’s what he’s there for, isn’t it? Moments like these.’

  ‘It’s a risk. Warsaw is on to him.’

  ‘They get on well. Marchant will confide in Argo if he’s genuinely upset. He should try to meet him at the airport when he arrives back in Britain.’

  The recording ended suddenly. ‘Argo’ was an unusual choice, nostalgic. It was the codename the KGB had assigned to Ernest Hemingway in the 1940s. Fielding tried to linger on the historical detail, delay the realisation, the rising nausea, but it was impossible. In one awful moment, he had traced the line of succession, identified the inheritor. He reached for the phone, too heavy in his hand, and dialled General Borowski, head of Agencja Wywiadu, Poland’s foreign intelligence agency, at his home on the outskirts of Warsaw.

  71

  ‘Come on, Daniel. That’s what we do. We use people.’

  Marchant hadn’t been pleased to see Prentice waiting for him at arrivals. It was a sight that was starting to annoy him, particularly as this time Prentice explained that he had been sent as a peace envoy by Fielding. But he was an old family friend, someone he had always found it easy to confide in. His offer of alcohol was welcome, too. Marchant had been drinking on the plane, and was happy to keep going. A bender loomed. Prentice had driven him into central London, and they were now sitting at an outside table at Bentley’s Oyster Bar in Swallow Street, off Piccadilly. It was one of Prentice’s favourite restaurants.

  ‘Are you using Monika?’ Marchant asked, a smile softening the question’s harsh undercurrent. Something about their relationship was still bugging him, and he was sure it wasn’t jealousy.

  ‘You’ve got a thing for her, haven’t you?’ Prentice washed an oyster down with a deep draft of Guinness. ‘I can see why. She’s a great lay.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Marcus, we should have informed you of our suspicions.’

  Usually, Fielding’s conversations with General Borowski were upbeat. He was an old-school spy who liked to be taken to the Traveller’s Club for a sharpener whenever he came to London. Now, as they talked, Fielding felt only numbness. There was always the chance in his line of work that the man sitting at the next desk was praying to a different god, but it had still come as an almighty shock. Was this how the happily married felt when they discovered their partner had been cheating all along?

  ‘How long have you known?’ Fielding asked, trying not to think back, recalibrate the past, reassess the future.

  ‘We never knew exactly, but the worry has been there for several months. At first, we thought it was someone else.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Come on, Marcus. You know there’s little point in our game of causing offence unnecessarily. We have the right man now. That’s all that matters.’

  ‘And you’re confident the codename matches?’

  ‘We picked up “Argo” in an intercept last month.’

  Fielding closed his eyes. For the first time in years, he felt he wanted to weep. ‘You really should have pooled it. The damage could be irreducible. Ongoing operations jeopardised, entire networks blown.’

  ‘I’m sorry, truly.’ Borowski paused. ‘There’s something else. We put someone onto him as soon as he became our main suspect. Monika is one of our best agents – you may remember she helped Daniel Marchant earlier last year – but I’m worried. Argo has not only betrayed our country, he has caused the death of several colleagues, most recently her brother. She’s taken it very personally.’

  Marchant ordered another Guinness, his smile now slack with alcohol. Prentice liked to provoke him, and the only response was to join battle.

  ‘I’m surprised you can still eat seafood, after what happened with the sushi at the gallery,’ Marchant said.

  ‘It wasn’t the food, it was the wine,’ Prentice replied.

  ‘And there was I thinking you had a strong head. One glass of red and you were arse over tit.’ Marchant paused, thinking back to the evening at the Cork Street gallery. He hadn’t seen Prentice since he had collapsed in the corner. It had been unlike him. ‘Monika was good to me in Poland, that’s all. I wouldn’t want her to get hurt.’

  ‘She’s a big girl, Dan.’

  ‘Maybe she’s using you.’

  Prentice looked at Marchant for a moment, his gaze cutting through their drunken banter. Marchant was in no doubt that one of them was using the other. He just wasn’t sure why.

  ‘I’m a father figure. She lost hers when she was young. We’re in the same business, we lie and cheat for the same noble causes.’ Prentice shucked another oyster open with a knife. ‘Where’s the harm?’

  CCTV cameras never pointed exactly where you wanted them, but Fielding could see enough from the intercepted live relay in his office to know that both men were drunk, relaxed, laughing. It couldn’t be worse. The reason he had sent Prentice was to reassure Marchant, give him an opportunity to whinge about MI6 and its methods. And that was exactly what the two of them appeared to be doing. He could only blame himself. They were good friends, even closer after Prentice had rescued Marchant from the CIA’s waterboarders in Poland.

  Fielding had to move fast. Moscow would be listening to their man, live-streaming every word. It was essential that Marchant played the right music, said nothing that undermined the genuine anger he had displayed in Madurai. If he revealed that it had been fabricated in order to convince the Russians, they would never go near him again. As far as Moscow was concerned, Marchant was ready to defect, not comparing drunken notes with a colleague about an unscrupulous boss. Fielding reached for his mobile phone.

  ‘Talking of lying,’ Marchant continued, ‘you’ve known Fielding a lot longer than me. Has he ever double-crossed you?’

  ‘First, he’s using you, now it’s double-crossing,’ Prentice said. ‘What mortal sin did our Vicar actually commit?’

  Marchant knew Prentice had been told the basics about his trip to India, that he was there to bring back Salim Dhar’s mother, but it was still an unusual question to ask another officer. Both of them were steeped in MI6’s strict culture of compartmentalisation, Prentice more than anyone. He was one of MI6’s longest serving field men, an old friend of his father’s and one of Fielding’s allies. He should have known better. Marchant decided to keep things general.

  ‘Fielding told me I was to bring the target home, but that was never the plan. She was always heading further west.’

  ‘And our cousins couldn’t have renditioned her without your help?’

  ‘That’s about it.’

  ‘A premier-league stitch-up. But it’s unlike Fielding. Lakshmi Meena?’

  ‘Way over her head.’ Marchant suddenly felt protective. He was sure it hadn’t been her plan. ‘Spiro.’

  ‘What an arsehole. You don’t seem too cut up about it all. Fielding said you’d be out the door.’

  ‘Did he?’

  Marchant tried to gauge where the conversation was heading, what he could reveal. He wanted to confide in Prentice, confess to him that he had failed to play the traitor. But he knew he couldn’t. Prentice had been told nothing of Primakov’s past, or of Marchant’s efforts to be recruited by him. There was something else bothering him too, a distant nagging that he had learned not to ignore.

  ‘Let’s face it,’ Prentice continued. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time you were on the outside.’

  But Marchant wasn’t listening any more. His phone had buzzed in his pocket, and he glanced at the text. It was from Fielding, and it consisted of only one word: ‘Resign.’

  He put the phone away and looked at Prentice, smirking. ‘Lakshmi Meena. She wants to buy me a peace drink too.’

  ‘Will you accept?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ Marchant sat back, trying to look relaxed as h
e glanced around the bar. Resign. He assumed Moscow must be listening. ‘You know, perhaps Fielding’s right. I’m finished with all this. I’ve had enough. I hear what you say, but I’m not prepared to be a part of what happened in India. I gave Dhar’s mother my word, for what it’s worth. Now Spiro will kill her.’

  A moment later, an Italian motorbike was beside their table on the pavement. Marchant had heard its accelerating engine, but assumed it was heading up Piccadilly, not coming down Swallow Street behind him. The next few seconds seemed to slow down, but he knew afterwards that they had passed with the speed of a professional job. There were two people on the bike, both wearing black leathers and helmets with tinted glass. The one on the pillion raised a silenced, long-barrelled revolver and fired twice at Prentice before the bike roared away, narrowly missing a group of pedestrians walking up from Piccadilly.

  Marchant had instinctively turned his back as the shots were fired, lifting his legs and arms to protect himself. When he looked up, he saw a woman standing ten feet away, a hand to her mouth. After what seemed an eternity, she began to scream, a terrible, almost inhuman cry. He turned to look at Prentice, slumped in the metal chair opposite him, his eyes more startled than pained. He had been shot twice in the forehead, two neat entrance wounds beginning to weep thick red tears.

  72

  ‘It’s a bloody mess,’ Fielding said, walking through the graveyard of the small Norman church at Coombe Manor. ‘Officially, we’re mourning the passing of one of the Service’s finest officers. Unofficially, we’re burying a traitor.’

  Marchant looked out on the idyllic English setting, down the valley across fields dusted with poppies. It was the sort of pastoral scene his father had loved: rolling hills dotted with small pubs where eighteenth-century cartoons hung on deep red walls and cool slate floors offered respite from the somnolent heat of summer. At the far end of the valley the land rose steeply to Coombe Gibbet, where a group of cyclists was silhouetted against the blue skyline.