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  She gestured at a chair, but Fielding remained standing.

  ‘Is that what you told Spiro?’ he asked.

  ‘It took a while for him to accept that they weren’t your people.’

  ‘We haven’t had to resort to kidnapping our own officers on the streets of London. Not yet.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what Dan’s up to.’

  He hesitated. ‘All I can say is that you were right to trust him. I’m sorry about your arm.’

  ‘You’re asking a lot of him. To stop Salim Dhar on his own.’

  Fielding glanced towards the door at the mention of Dhar’s name. Through the frosted glass panel, he could see the profile of an armed policeman standing guard outside. He wanted to tell Meena that Marchant’s orders weren’t just to stop Dhar, but to turn him as well, but he couldn’t. The stakes were too high. If Marchant could persuade Dhar to work for the West, it was not something Britain would ever be able to share with any of its allies, least of all America, whose President Dhar had come so close to killing.

  ‘No one else can,’ Fielding said, moving towards the door. ‘It’s family business.’

  91

  ‘Please place a flower on my daughter’s grave,’ Primakov whispered, leaning forward, his whole body shaking now. ‘And may your father forgive you.’

  Marchant wanted to look away as he fired. It took all his strength to pull the trigger, leaving him with no will to watch. But he knew Dhar was scrutinising his every move. Primakov’s head lurched forward as if in a final drunken bow, and then he fell to the floor.

  As the sound of the single shot faded in the echoing spaces of the hangar, Marchant prayed for the first time in years. He tried to tell himself that Primakov would have been executed by Grushko or Dhar if it hadn’t been by him, but it didn’t make it any easier. He had never killed anyone in cold blood before. Primakov deserved better. He had been one of his father’s oldest friends, a courageous man who had carried out his wishes to the last. He hoped to God his death was worth it.

  Dhar looked on impassively, then took the gun from Marchant without a word and walked over to his living area.

  ‘Our father told us to trust him as if he was family,’ Marchant called after him, feeling the need to explain himself as he tried not to stare at Primakov’s slumped figure. A pool of blood had formed around his disfigured head, dust floating on its surface like a fine skein of flotsam.

  ‘He made an error of judgement,’ Dhar said. ‘Primakov had other interests.’

  ‘Like stopping the global jihad?’ Marchant asked, regaining some of his composure. He needed to reassure himself that Dhar had moved on, no longer suspected him. ‘He must have known you wouldn’t like what he said.’

  ‘Primakov was working to his own agenda. There are many within the SVR who are at war with Islam. He was trying to turn you against me, suggesting that our father had somehow sent you here from beyond the grave to halt my work.’

  ‘Was he anti-Russian, too?’ Marchant asked, thinking that was exactly what their father had done. His question was a risk, but he needed to know what Dhar thought.

  Dhar fixed Marchant with his eyes, now shining blacker than ever. ‘No. I do not believe Primakov was a British agent, if that’s what you are asking. Grushko was simply trying to frame him. As Primakov said, there were people in Moscow Centre who were jealous of him when he recruited our father. His signing was quite a coup.’

  Marchant couldn’t ask for more. Dhar not only still believed that Primakov was working for Moscow, he was also sure that their father had been too. Primakov had chosen his words carefully. Thanks to him, Marchant was now safe, free from suspicion. He looked again at Primakov’s body, remembering his final wish.

  It was the first time Marchant had heard that Primakov had a daughter. He would make enquiries when all of this was over, find out where she was buried and put flowers on her grave. It was the least he could do. And may your father forgive you.

  ‘Now I must prepare to fly,’ Dhar said.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Marchant asked as casually as he could, glancing at the aircraft at the end of the hangar. From the moment Primakov had requested him to help with the MiG-35s’ incursion, Marchant had assumed that Dhar’s plans involved an airborne attack of some sort. All he had to do now was persuade him to take him along.

  ‘To the land of our father,’ Dhar said, patting him on his shoulder.

  ‘Then let me come with you,’ Marchant said instinctively. It was the only chance he had of stopping Dhar. ‘We still have so much to discuss. And I know the country well.’ He managed a light laugh. ‘I could show you the sights.’

  Dhar paused for a moment, smiling to himself as he seemed to consider Marchant’s offer. There was something Dhar wasn’t telling him that made Marchant think that he had a chance. ‘That is true. And it is a long flight. Have you flown in a jet before?’

  ‘Only a Provost. But I have a strong stomach.’ Marchant was thinking fast now, improvising. The last time they had met, Dhar had abandoned him on a hillside in south India when he left to shoot the US President. Marchant wasn’t going to let him get away again. He had to be in the cockpit with him, find out what the target was, get a message to Fielding.

  ‘You know they won’t allow another Russian jet to enter UK airspace,’ Marchant continued. ‘I might be able to help, talk to traffic control. It could buy us a crucial few minutes before we’re shot down.’

  ‘Grushko has already taken care of that. He’s with your friend Myers in Cheltenham now.’

  92

  ‘As far as we know, the facts are these,’ Harriet Armstrong said, addressing a meeting of COBRA in the government’s underground Crisis Management Centre. MI5, MI6, GCHQ, the Joint Intelligence Group, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, the Defence Intelligence Staff and Special Branch were all represented by their heads, a measure of the gathering’s importance (number twos or threes were usually sent). The Prime Minister was chairing the meeting, flanked by the Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary. The Chief of Defence Staff was also in attendance, along with the Chief of the Air Staff.

  ‘There are a number of possible domestic targets over the coming forty-eight hours, which we’ll come to in a moment. In the meantime, Cheltenham’ — a nod to GCHQ’s director, sitting on Armstrong’s left — ‘has picked up a raised level of chatter, but I think Marcus will be able to enlighten us further on Dhar’s possible intentions.’

  The handover was brusque rather than warm. At an earlier meeting in Armstrong’s office, Fielding had persuaded her not to go into any details about Marchant’s attempt to recruit Nikolai Primakov. She had agreed, but it was clear she still resented Fielding for excluding her from other operational details.

  ‘Thank you, Harriet,’ Fielding said. ‘I’ll keep this short. We believe Dhar was taken from Morocco last month by the Russians, who have offered him protection in return for a shared stake in a state-sponsored act of proxy terrorism. What that act is, we’re not sure, but it appears that Dhar has put aside a previous reluctance to strike against UK targets.’

  ‘What about Daniel Marchant’s kidnapping by the SVR?’ asked the head of JTAC, looking across at Armstrong for support. ‘I assume there’s a connection.’

  ‘We’re not certain it was the SVR,’ Fielding interjected.

  All eyes turned to Armstrong, who paused before answering, keeping her own eyes down as she shuffled some papers. A Russian operation on the streets of London was her beat. ‘Preliminary reports have established that the kidnappers were Russian, but we can’t be sure they were SVR. D Branch is still working on it.’

  Surprised by her support, Fielding tried to acknowledge Armstrong, but she didn’t look up. He had expected her to confirm the SVR’s involvement, make life more difficult for him.

  ‘In answer to your question,’ Fielding said, ‘Marchant, one of our most gifted field officers, has been on Salim Dhar’s trail for a number of months. After the ter
rorist attack on the London Marathon, he wanted to travel to Morocco, where he had good reason to believe that Dhar was in hiding, possibly being shielded by the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group in the Atlas Mountains. Unfortunately, the Americans insisted that he stayed in Britain. It was a deeply frustrating time for all of us. After a year, we got our way and dispatched him to Marrakech. He was closing in on Dhar when he was exfiltrated by the Russians in an unmarked Mi-8 helicopter. He returned to London and was establishing Dhar’s location through an SVR contact when he himself was seized.’

  ‘What are the Russians saying?’ the director of GCHQ asked.

  ‘They’re denying everything,’ the Foreign Secretary replied, glancing at the Prime Minister. ‘But it seems that Dhar had become too hot for Tehran, and Moscow took him on. We’ve protested formally about Marchant’s disappearance and enquired through back channels about Dhar.’

  ‘Just as the Russians denied that two of their MiG-35s were over Scotland,’ the Prime Minister said. The incursion had made his coalition and its armed forces the laughing stock of NATO, giving him no option but to accept his Defence Secretary’s resignation. The MiGs had turned around and were halfway across the North Sea before the Typhoons were even airborne.

  ‘We’re working on the assumption that the violation of UK airspace is in some way connected with Dhar,’ Fielding continued. He knew it for a fact, of course, but he could never reveal that Marchant, one of his own agents, had facilitated the incursion in order to meet Dhar. Or that Paul Myers at GCHQ had also been involved. The breach had been put down to a cyber attack by Moscow, one of many in recent months.

  ‘Which is why this weekend’s RIAT, the Royal International Air Tattoo at Fairford, is top of our list,’ Armstrong said. ‘We’ve also got a Test match at Lord’s against Pakistan, which could be a target, given Dhar’s connections, and WOMAD, the world music festival in Wiltshire, which is less of a security worry, although I gather there was a bit of a disturbance in the Qawwali tent last year.’

  The faint murmur of laughter released some of the tension in the room. Armstrong enjoyed being centre stage, Fielding thought. Not everyone appreciated her stabs at humour, or her Johnsonian memos on poor grammar. In another life, she would have been headmistress of a public school. The subcontinent had knocked some of the pomposity out of her manner, but not quite enough.

  ‘The good news is that Fairford is already a secure site,’ she continued, ‘with a perimeter fence protected by the Americans.’

  ‘The bad news?’ the Prime Minister asked. Armstrong looked across at the director of the Defence Intelligence Staff.

  ‘Washington is using the air show to showboat a big arms deal with Tbilisi,’ he said, taking over from Armstrong. ‘They’re currently equipping the Georgian air force with C130 cargo planes to replace their ageing fleet of Antonovs. The US has also agreed to lease them F-16 fighter jets to replace their SU-25s, most of which were shot down by the Russians in the 2008 South Ossetia war.’

  ‘An arms deal that Moscow is obviously far from happy about,’ the Foreign Secretary said.

  ‘Given the MiG débâcle, shouldn’t we have our Typhoons and Tornados airborne all weekend?’ the Prime Minister asked. ‘Over Lord’s, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire?’

  ‘If only that were possible,’ the Chief of the Defence Staff said.

  ‘How long’s the show?’ the PM continued, ignoring the jibe. The RAF was locked in acrimonious discussions with the coalition about cuts to Britain’s fighter-jet capability.

  ‘Seven and a half hours of flying time.’

  ‘Do what you can,’ the PM said, looking at his watch.

  ‘The US base commander at Fairford is an old friend,’ the Chief of the Defence Staff said. ‘I’ll speak to him. Personally, I think it’s highly unlikely the Russians would try anything, particularly on a weekend when there’s so much hardware on the runway. The F-22 Raptor will be in town. The violation of our airspace, while deeply regrettable, was a one-off, a distraction. A Test match against Pakistan at the home of cricket is a far more probable target.’

  ‘I agree,’ Ian Denton said. There was a newfound confidence in his voice that surprised Fielding, who was sitting next to him. ‘RIAT’s the largest military air show in Europe. It’s an American-run base, and security is always very tight. The Test at Lord’s strikes me as a more likely target.’

  Denton might be right — perhaps the MiGs were just a distraction — but Fielding doubted it. He’d been weighing up the possible options ever since Armstrong had alerted him to the air show. Marchant had been asked to help with the MiGs, an involvement that nobody else around the COBRA table knew about. Now he had been taken to join Dhar, wherever he was. In Fairford, with its American hosts and Georgian guests, Dhar and the Russians had found a mutual target.

  93

  ‘You are only carrying two Vympel and two LGBs, so we’ve loaded you up with four 1,500-litre drop tanks, two under each wing,’ Sergei said over the r/t to Dhar, who was in the rear cockpit of the SU-25, where the instructor normally sat. It was raised a little, giving him a good view of Marchant, who was strapped into the seat ahead, listening in on the conversation. The avionics and weapons suites were identical in both cockpits — full dual control — but Sergei had disabled them in the front.

  Marchant had met Sergei only briefly. Dhar spoke warmly of him, but the Russian had shunned eye contact as he had inspected the plane’s undercarriage in the hangar. Afterwards, when he handed Marchant an ill-fitting flying suit and helmet, he had again avoided his gaze. There was a haunted look about him, Marchant had thought.

  ‘Distance to target is 2,875 kilometres,’ Dhar said, reading from a sheet of waypoints in the clear-panel leg pocket of his flying suit. ‘And the Grach has a ferry range of approximately 2,500 kilometres. “Do the math,” as our American idiots like to say.’

  ‘The extra fuel and a good tailwind should get you there,’ said Sergei.

  Should? Marchant could have done without the mordant banter. He closed his eyes and tried to picture what lay ahead. Dhar had finally agreed to let him fly with him. Marchant wasn’t sure if it was a reflection of how much he trusted or distrusted him. Either way, it had bought him precious time in which to work out what to do.

  ‘We can be martyrs together,’ Dhar had joked, making no mention of a return journey.

  Earlier, Dhar had revealed their route — north into the Barents Sea, south-west down the coast of Norway into the North Sea, and then west into UK airspace — but there had been no talk of the target. Whatever it was, timing was evidently crucial. Dhar had checked and double-checked windspeeds on the journey, going through the waypoint ETAs several times with Sergei.

  Marchant had already clocked the two missiles on the wings’ hard points. Air-to-air suggested that Dhar expected airborne company, but why not a full complement? And now Sergei had mentioned two laser-guided bombs for a ground target. It was a tailor-made suite of weapons. But for what?

  Marchant glanced around the cramped cockpit at the array of dials. The Jet Provost he had once flown in had been privately owned by an ex-RAF friend of his father. Taking off from Kemble airfield, near the family home in Tarlton in the Cotswolds, had felt like rising into the sky on rails: surprisingly smooth and steady. He suspected the SU-25 would be a rougher ride.

  As the plane began to roll forward, Marchant peered through the mist at the godforsaken scenery. Dhar had taxied to the far end of the main runway. A light drizzle was falling. All Marchant could see was pine trees. The control tower was a long way off, barely visible in the murky distance. Halfway down the runway on the right were two MiG-29s. He guessed that they must be on permanent standby, like the Typhoons at RAF Leuchars and Coningsby that would be scrambled if Dhar showed up on the radar. Then he noticed the armed guards, dotted about on the periphery of the trees, out of sight of any US reconnaissance satellites. He had only spotted the two guards outside the hangar door before. Security had been ramped up for their
departure.

  Marchant thought again about Primakov, the sharp intake of breath just before he fired, as if the Russian was bracing himself. After the shooting, Dhar had not wanted to talk, preferring instead to spend time on his own behind the curtain. Marchant assumed that he was praying, not for the Russian’s soul but for a successful jihad. As far as Marchant could tell, no one else seemed to be running the show or telling Dhar what to do. He was very much his own man, ignoring the guards and talking only with Sergei before climbing into the cockpit. There was a quiet confidence about Dhar, a self-assurance that gave him an air of authority.

  ‘Comrade Marchant?’ It was Sergei’s voice on the r/t.

  ‘Yes?’ Marchant said, taken by surprise.

  ‘Talk to comrade Dhar about collateral. He will understand.’

  Marchant was about to ask for an explanation, but Sergei had already signed off.

  ‘Did you get any of that?’ he asked Dhar over the intercom.

  ‘We can talk more later. Our flying time is more than three hours. Now we must prepare for take-off.’

  94

  Paul Myers had given up trying to make conversation with the Russians. They had sat motionless in his room throughout the night, waking him with a prod at first light. He had stumbled out of bed, forgetting that his hands were still tied, and they had accompanied him to the bathroom, where he managed his ablutions with difficulty.

  It was only when they sat him down in front of the computers that he persuaded them to untie his wrists. If it had been a working day, he would have been missed by now, as he liked to work the early shifts at GCHQ in the summer, getting in at 7 a.m., sometimes earlier. It gave him longer in the park afterwards to fly his model planes. But today was a Saturday, and no one would miss him. He had made a loose arrangement to meet a couple of colleagues in the pub in the evening, but otherwise his diary was free, as it was most of the time.

  The Russians wanted him to do exactly what he had done for Marchant: delay High Wycombe’s real-time Recognised Air Picture feed. He had already told them that it would be hard to repeat the trick, but the Ministry of Defence’s IT experts, many of whom he knew, had yet to trace the source or cause of the Link 1 breach.