Dirty Little Secret Read online

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jean-Baptiste had said. ‘I know what she did to Clémence and my mother, but I’m still sorry.’

  ‘She’d switched sides and was working for Spiro,’ Marchant had replied. ‘She needed to be stopped.’

  ‘Would you have shot her if the Russians hadn’t?’

  Marchant didn’t know the answer. He looked at him for a moment and then turned away.

  ‘There’s a gun in the bag,’ he said, handing a holdall to Jean-Baptiste.

  The Frenchman took it, glancing around him. They were standing near the crowded check-in desk for his Royal Air Maroc flight to Essaouira. ‘Have you used it?’

  Marchant nodded. ‘Dhar’s fingerprints are on it too.’

  Jean-Baptiste raised his eyebrows. Marchant would have understood if he had handed it back. The gun of the world’s most wanted terrorist was as incriminating as evidence could get.

  ‘Check-in and passport control are expecting you. Keep to the far left desks. When you get to Essaouira, you’re on your own.’

  Marchant felt on his own now as he followed the narrow lane back to Lunetoile, a discreet riad on rue Sidi Mohamed ben Abdullah. Watched by several cats, he let himself in with the key the Zimbabwean landlady had given him and walked up three flights of wooden stairs that looked down onto a tiled central area. His room was on the top floor. He had asked to see it before paying a deposit. It was chic and clean, with a view of the sea, but what sold it to him was that it would be possible to leave in an emergency via the surrounding rooftops.

  His plan was a simple one. Everything had seemed simpler after he had taken the phone call outside the hospital in Caen. Fielding, his voice distorted by a less sophisticated modulator than the one Myers had given Marchant, had been calling from Poland. Between them, they now had enough evidence to remove Denton from office. It just had to be revealed at the right time and to the right people. Marchant was still shocked by what Fielding had managed to uncover, but not entirely surprised. There had always been something suppressed about Denton; he just hadn’t thought it was anything quite as extreme as this.

  Before going down to the fish market, Marchant had stopped off at an internet café, sat at an inconspicuous terminal and logged into a Hotmail account, where he found five photos attached to an email in the draft folder. Mischievously, Fielding had entitled the email: ‘Man is born free …’ Marchant wasn’t bothered what pain Denton chose to inflict on himself. More troubling was the thought of him savouring the pain he might have inflicted on others. The allegations about MI6 complicity in torture suddenly took on a different hue, particularly as Denton was overseeing the internal investigation.

  Marchant walked out onto the terrace of his rooftop room and looked around at the medina’s other world, the one high above the bustling streets and squares below. On the roof opposite, a woman was hanging washing, occasionally stopping to look out to sea. To his right, a cat prowled along the edge of a building, seemingly unaware of the hundred-foot drop to the street below. And in the distance, in a medley of competitive roof extensions, two tourists were sunning themselves in a precariously perched conservatory.

  Fielding had given Marchant the personal mobile number of Harriet Armstrong, Director General of MI5, and he dialled it now on one of several pay-as-you-go phones he had bought in the medina. It was a private number, and he hoped no one was listening in. Armstrong’s relationship with Fielding had not always been warm, particularly when she had briefly flirted with the Americans, but they had become close allies in recent months. She had also shown a strange loyalty to him when they were in India, and had never had much time for Denton. What Marchant was about to tell her now would lift her spirits.

  ‘It’s your favourite runaway. Can you talk?’ he asked into the hands-free as Armstrong picked up.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘It’s about Denton.’

  ‘Wait a moment,’ Armstrong replied. Marchant could hear her say something, perhaps to her PA, then a door closed. He hoped she was clearing her office. ‘OK, I’m the only one listening. I won’t ask where you are or what you’re doing. Or why your voice sounds different.’

  Marchant couldn’t blame her for being terse. The terrorist attacks would have put her under enormous pressure, made worse by Dhar being free again.

  ‘I’ve been in touch with Fielding. We’ve both been working on information that there’s a Russian mole high up inside MI6.’

  ‘You sound just like the Americans.’

  ‘It wasn’t Hugo Prentice, and you know it’s not Fielding.’

  ‘Surprise me.’

  ‘Ian Denton. And we’ve got the evidence to prove it.’

  Marchant didn’t have long, but he was happy to let Armstrong remain silent for a few seconds while she digested the news. It was a lot to take on board.

  ‘What sort of evidence?’ she asked quietly. Her bullish, headmistressy manner had disappeared.

  ‘Seems like Denton’s into B&D. The Russians caught him trussed up in chains a few years ago, took photos, threatened to go public unless he agreed to work for them.’

  ‘No wonder his wife left him.’

  ‘Fielding’s got the photos.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You can ask him when he gets his job back. I’ve also got pictures of Denton meeting a Russian contact in London.’

  ‘London?’ Armstrong paused. He wondered if she was pouring herself a drink.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last week.’

  ‘Christ. When D4 was meant to be babysitting him. At his request – he thought he was being followed. But they didn’t see any Russians, just an irritating Frenchman from DGSE.’

  Jean-Baptiste, Marchant assumed. His friend wasn’t so good at covert surveillance after all.

  ‘I’ve run some checks on the Russian Denton met,’ Marchant continued. ‘I don’t know who he is, but he’s not working under diplomatic cover.’

  ‘Another bloody illegal. Are you sure he’s Russian?’

  Marchant thought about the evidence. One man seen buying blinis in Waitrose – it wasn’t exactly belts and braces. Jean-Baptiste’s evidence was no better. Ordinary looking, except his eyes. Definitely made in Moscow. For a moment, Marchant wondered if he had made a terrible error, but then he reminded himself about Primakov’s letter.

  … 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.

  For a while, everyone had thought the mole was Hugo Prentice, a mistake that had led to Prentice’s tragic death. But Primakov had known otherwise. The real Argo was Ian Denton.

  Marchant’s confidence was returning. Denton’s obsession with barcodes was not normal behaviour. It was clandestine, and had evaded Armstrong’s watchers in D4, whose job it was to counter Russian operations in Britain. And why would the Russians have compromising photos of Denton if it wasn’t to blackmail him?

  ‘I’m sure he’s Russian,’ Marchant said. ‘He was using supermarket barcode scanners to exchange data. Maybe you’ll recognise him when I send the pictures over.’

  ‘And when are you planning to do that?’

  ‘When’s the next COBRA meeting?’

  88

  ‘It really doesn’t have to be like this,’ Denton said, taking his jacket off as he walked around Myers. He had toyed with various possibilities, but decided that strappado, or reverse hanging, would yield the quickest results with the overweight analyst from GCHQ.

  First, he had stood him on a chair and bound both hands behind his back. Myers seemed to be in shock, and hadn’t protested. Then Denton had tied his wrists to a rope attached to the hangar roof and asked him again about the intercept. When he refused to answer, Denton kicked away the chair. Myers’s arms had dislocated instantly under the considerable weight of his body – popping like snapped carrots – and he was now swaying naked in front of him.

  ‘All I
need to know is what you told Marchant about the intercept, and what he said to you. Tell me that and we’ll take you to a good hospital, where they can click your shoulders back into their sockets and send you home.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Myers repeated.

  Denton was impressed by the loyalty Marchant inspired in his friends. He had never subjected himself to strappado, but he knew the pain was excruciating. Yet Myers had not once deviated from his story. He had screamed and cried, and relieved himself twice, but showed no signs of telling Denton what he wanted to hear. Perhaps he was rushing him. In the past, in Morocco and Pakistan, he had taken longer, but he didn’t have the luxury of time today. He needed to be back in London, prepare for tomorrow’s COBRA meeting, do his weekly shop in Waitrose.

  ‘Please take me down,’ Myers said quietly. ‘I didn’t know how important the intercept was at the time. The exchanges were coded. I went back and deciphered them when I heard about Dhar’s escape. It was a mistake.’

  ‘Quite a big one. I don’t want you to feel bad, but the world was a much safer place with Dhar behind bars. You can make amends by telling me what you told Marchant.’

  Denton walked slowly around the drafty hangar, waiting for a reply he knew would never come. They had the place to themselves after Spiro had given him the keys for the afternoon. The hangar was in a remote corner of RAF Fairford, and Denton knew this wasn’t the first time an interrogation had taken place here. Pairs of steel rings had been fixed in a row along the far wall at shoulder height. Below each pair the ground was stained. The sliding door at the other end of the hangar was bolted and chained. It looked as if it hadn’t been opened for years.

  ‘Do you believe in circumcision, Paul?’ Denton asked from across the hangar. The scene had more appeal from a distance. There was a greater sense of incongruity, a sharper contrast between Myers’s flabby white body and the industrial setting.

  It became even more interesting as Myers started to breathe harder, blowing in and out as if he was impersonating a steam engine.

  ‘It’s just that it’s hard to tell,’ Denton continued, walking back towards Myers. ‘Everything’s gone a bit small down there.’ An opposite reaction to his own.

  ‘I’ve got nothing else to say to you!’ Myers shouted, raising his head, squinting at where he thought Denton was standing. Normally he wore glasses, thick ones, but Denton had removed them. His blind defiance was impressive. Denton had read little in Myers’s files about bravery in the field. Quite the opposite. His line manager had expressly recommended that he should never venture outside GCHQ.

  ‘Muslims do; people like Salim Dhar.’ Denton was standing directly in front of him now. He pulled a small knife from his pocket and flicked open the blade, holding it inches from his face. ‘I don’t think we’ll need anything bigger, do you?’

  89

  Spiro had mixed feelings about being back in London as he waited outside the office of the US Ambassador. His influence over Britain’s intelligence services relied on support from Washington, and he wasn’t sure how much longer he could count on that. Dhar’s escape from Bagram hadn’t exactly played well in Langley. Short of shooting the President, Spiro couldn’t imagine anything more damaging to his career. It made his worries about an AWOL wife pale into insignificance. She still wasn’t answering his calls, and Denton hadn’t seemed keen to help when he had rung him from the airport.

  ‘We’re not an offshoot of Relate,’ Denton had said, after Spiro had raised the possibility of MI6 lifting his wife from Ramallah.

  The fact that he had now been kept waiting for almost twenty minutes to see the Ambassador only added to his growing sense of insecurity. In the past, Turner Munroe would come to see him in his CIA offices at the other end of the embassy building. Spiro knew it wasn’t just his own power that was waning, it was the Agency’s.

  ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Jim,’ Munroe lied a few minutes later, closing the door behind them. ‘Just taking a call from Fort Meade.’ Of course you were, Spiro thought. The NSA now had more people working in London than the CIA. ‘Are you OK?’ he continued, glancing at Spiro.

  ‘Never felt better,’ he said, taking a seat. A bead of sweat gathered at his temple as he unnecessarily smoothed the bandages on his hands. Spiro always felt unhealthy in Munroe’s presence. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on the Ambassador’s tanned body as he sat down behind a large desk. Spiro looked away, glancing at the spacious surrounds. If the size of a man’s office was a reflection of his ambition, he thought, Munroe was aiming for the White House. What did he do in here? Use it as a running track?

  ‘We’re contingency planning for Dhar’s escape leaking to the media,’ Munroe said. ‘Diplomatically, we’re going to feel the heat.’

  ‘Right now I don’t give a dime about diplomacy.’

  Munroe didn’t respond. He took his time, always a sign that he was keeping something back. Spiro hated it when someone else held all the cards.

  ‘The Ambassador in Paris called this morning. An American woman was shot in Normandy, brought into a hospital in Caen. I think she’s one of yours. Lakshmi Meena?’

  ‘Badly injured?’ Spiro asked, struggling to keep his voice neutral.

  ‘Dead on arrival. I’m sorry.’

  Spiro gazed out of the window, where the grey streets of London offered little comfort. A light drizzle was falling on office workers hurrying to overpriced sandwich bars. Daniel Marchant had always got under his skin. It was why he had once ordered him to be waterboarded. He was slowly taking Spiro down. First, it was Dhar’s escape, now it seemed he had shot one of his agents.

  ‘She was on an operation in France,’ Spiro said. ‘Staying close to Daniel Marchant.’

  ‘I thought he was on the run, whereabouts unknown.’

  ‘He was. Like I said, Lakshmi was on an operation. Covert. That’s what we do. Risk our lives in the field rather than staring at a bunch of computer screens all day long in Maryland.’

  Munroe ignored the jibe at the NSA. ‘Was it successful?’

  ‘She did her job, like all my officers do.’ Spiro wasn’t going to tell him that Marchant might have helped Dhar to escape. Munroe would pass on the intel to the NSA, and the matter would be taken out of his hands. This was his mess, and he would sort it.

  ‘Then at least she didn’t die in vain. Do you know who might have killed her?’

  ‘That’s fairly obvious, isn’t it?’

  Munroe stood up and set off on a walk around his office. For the first time, Spiro noticed he was wearing running shoes, brand new ones. Perhaps he was breaking them in.

  ‘You’ve never liked Daniel Marchant, have you?’ the Ambassador said.

  ‘And you’ve always stuck up for him. Ever since he tried to kill you at the London Marathon.’

  ‘He didn’t try to kill me, Jim. He saved my goddamn life. If it wasn’t for his courage, I would have been blown into a thousand pieces on Tower Bridge. And it looks as if he tried to save Lakshmi Meena too. Paris sent over some CCTV photos. Lifted from hospital security.’

  Munroe went back to his desk and handed Spiro a black-and-white photo. It was of Marchant with Meena in his arms, entering the hospital.

  ‘I’m not sure he would have brought her in if he had shot her,’ Munroe said.

  ‘Do we know where he went afterwards?’

  ‘Unfortunately, CCTV outside the hospital wasn’t working.’

  ‘There’s a surprise. What do you expect from the French?’

  ‘Someone else came to ask about Miss Meena an hour later.’

  Munroe passed over another photo. It was of a well-built man talking to a duty nurse.

  ‘Who is he?’ Spiro asked.

  ‘DGSE, apparently. According to Harriet Armstrong, her officers followed the same man around London earlier this week. He was tailing Ian Denton.’

  ‘Denton?’

  ‘New intelligence chiefs always attract a bit of attention, even from so-called friendly
nations.’

  ‘France isn’t friendly. And the DGSE are fucktards. Before Meena died, she rang me. Said Marchant was lying low with a DGSE officer.’

  ‘Could it have been this man?’ Munroe asked, nodding at the photo in Spiro’s hand.

  Spiro didn’t answer. If it was, what the hell was he doing in London following Denton?

  ‘Can I give you some advice, Jim? We haven’t always seen eye to eye, but I don’t like watching anyone go down, particularly a fellow American. Don’t get too close to Denton.’

  ‘Is there something I should know?’

  But before Munroe could answer, Spiro’s mobile phone rang. It was his wife.

  90

  Salim Dhar was feeling stronger by the hour. A combination of heavy steroids and antihistamines had reduced the swelling on his body to a faint rash. His face still felt bloated, but every time he checked in the mirror of his medical room he was surprised to see that his cheeks were no more than a little puffy. His only concern was the moments of dizziness, when he felt unsteady on his feet.

  Ali Mousavi was talking on his phone outside in the corridor. For someone normally so calm and measured, he was unusually agitated. Iran had been goading the West all year with its nuclear programme, he had explained, and now Israel and America were on the point of losing patience. Earlier in the day, a second US Carrier Strike Group had entered the Strait of Hormuz, off the coast of Iran, a development that seemed to have lit a fire in Mousavi’s eyes.

  ‘I am so sorry, Salim,’ he said now, as he stepped back inside the hospital room. ‘Inshallah, the day is drawing closer when we will give America more than a punch in the mouth.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘You. With more than a little help from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. I must show you something.’