‘Too busy, officially,’ Marchant said, thinking back to the people spilling out of the small village church. He didn’t recall seeing Prentice there, but staff had flown in from all over the world. There was, however, a noticeable absence of Establishment figures, a reluctance to honour a possible traitor.
‘The bastard.’
‘Are you sending me back to Britain?’ Marchant appreciated Prentice’s solidarity, but wanted to know where the conversation was heading.
‘Not exactly, no,’ Prentice said, his voice quieter, as if he had suddenly recalled a piece of bad news. Marchant picked up on the change of tone and shifted in his seat. The metal table had chafed his lower back. ‘London sent you this,’ Prentice said, pulling out a brown A5 envelope from his jacket pocket and handing it to Marchant. Marchant glanced inside: dollars, an Irish passport, airline ticket, some visa paperwork. ‘We can’t help you any more. You’re too hot.’
‘Meaning?’
‘You tell me. You’re the first serving MI6 officer I’ve ever come across who’s wanted by the CIA and MI5. Watch your back. Give it a couple of hours and Warsaw will be crawling with Yanks looking for you. The WSI might like a little chat, too.’
‘Any message from Fielding?’ Marchant asked.
Prentice leant forward. ‘Go get Salim Dhar.’
‘Where is he?’ Harriet Armstrong asked. Fielding sat back in his chair and looked down the river in the direction of her office at Thames House.
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ he replied, talking on the speakerphone.
‘I’ve just had Spiro on the line,’ Armstrong said, ‘threatening to go public about Dhar and your predecessor.’
‘That could be embarrassing, but not as awkward as a member of the British intelligence services being renditioned by the CIA to Poland. Particularly if the PM nodded it through. I’d hate that to get out.’
‘Where is he, Marcus? He’s a threat to national security.’
‘I’d question that,’ he said. ‘You saw my memo about Dhar? Seems like he had nothing to do with the marathon attack after all. But in answer to your question, I have no idea where he is. You had him last, no?’
Armstrong had already hung up. Fielding swivelled around in his chair, killed the speaker and read through the memo in front of him. The Polish economy would take a hit when the Americans started to pull business contracts. The confidential commercial information he was about to release to Brigadier Borowski, head of the AW, his opposite number in Warsaw, was the least he could do for a friend. The AW was involved in a fierce turf war with the old communist guard at the WSI. Borowski and others seemed to be winning, despite the best efforts of the CIA, whose dollars and High Value Detainees had done much to prolong the careers of its former Cold War enemies in Poland.
The information should give one of Poland’s biggest IT companies the edge when it made its bid next month for a multi-million-euro e-government contract in Brussels. MI6’s intelligence reports were still known as ‘CX’, after its first Chief, Mansfield Cumming (‘Cumming Exclusively’). Fielding reached for the pen and signed in green ink, another Cumming touch. Borowski would like that.
17
Marchant knew that the best legend for a spy was the one that most closely mirrored his or her own life. After endless hours of interrogation, standing and sleep deprivation, even the mind of the toughest officer became confused and reverted to its default setting. The less that differed from the cover story, the better. Former girlfriends’ names, sexual preferences, gap-year itineraries, favourite music, even the number of sugars in a mug of tea: all should be the same as the spy’s own. As Marchant lay on his hostel bed in Warsaw and read through his new legend, he smiled to himself: he was heading back to India.
Prentice had dropped Marchant off around the corner from the Oki Doki hostel on Plac Dabrowskiego, in the centre of the capital. It was a popular haunt for backpackers, and a crowd of them–English, French, Italians–were in the bar when Marchant had checked in at the reception as David Marlowe, the name on his Irish passport. The hostel had a chic, hippy atmosphere, reminding Marchant of a place he’d once stayed in Haight-Ashbury. Each room or dormitory was designed by a different local artist. Prentice had booked Marchant into Dom Browskiego, the only single room, painted in the colours of spring. For a moment he wished Leila was here with him, but he pushed the thought away as fast as it had arrived, and swung his rucksack onto the foot of his bed. David Marlowe didn’t know anyone called Leila.
He looked around the room and saw a basin in the corner. As he washed his face and glanced at himself in the mirror, drips of water falling off his unshaven chin, he was back at Stare Kiejkuty. He forced himself to think of something else. Clearly, he was the subject of a struggle between MI6 and MI5, who had handed him over to the CIA at the safe house. The arrival of Prentice at the black site meant that Fielding had not washed his hands of him altogether, which was encouraging. But Prentice had made it clear to him that MI6’s help was limited. The passport, the money (a thousand US dollars), the ticket to Delhi, his legend: that was all Fielding could do. The rest was up to him.
He lay down on the bed, feet propped up on the rucksack, and looked again at his new life: David Marlowe (same initials as his own) was taking a year out to travel around the world, starting with Europe, after graduating with a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Cambridge, just as he himself had done. MI6, Marchant knew, had arrangements with various Oxbridge colleges and redbrick universities for phone enquiries and mail. If anyone rang Trinity to ask whether a David Marlowe had studied there, the porters would find the name on a list; if anyone wrote, the post would be forwarded to Legoland via its PO box address.
He had only briefly visited Poland on his own year out, and he needed to decide on where Marlowe had gone (the legend didn’t go into detail): a week’s stay in Krakow enjoying the jazz bars, followed by a few days in Warsaw. He had planned to travel further (the Rough Guide to Poland was noticeably well thumbed), but chose to head for India, fed up with the cold weather–the talk at the hostel bar had been of little else.
He sat up and looked at the rucksack, increasingly aware of the smell rising from it. Prentice had given it to him an hour earlier at the embassy. It was bulging and well-worn, with a bright orange sleeping bag sticking out from under the top.
‘The thing’s been knocking around here for months, you might as well take it,’ Prentice had said casually.
‘Whose is it?’ Marchant asked, looking at the various badges that had been sewn on it: Paris, Prague, Munich.
‘Student, on his gap year, travelling around Europe. Died six months ago.’
‘Really?’
‘Drug overdose. We flew his body back but the rucksack never made it. Held back as evidence. The police here thought he was a mule, part of a ring. Their dogs sniffed it, found nothing. You’d better check.’
‘How old was he?’
‘Bit younger than you, same height, not as handsome, but then I only saw him on the slab.’
‘Any family?’
‘Middle-class parents, Hampshire. They’d apparently disowned him. Never asked for any personal possessions to be returned.’
Marchant started to unpack the rucksack with the caution of a customs officer. As he suspected, the clothes were rancid, revealing little about the owner except that his year of travel hadn’t taken in a visit to a launderette. He would ditch most of the fleeces and sweaters–he would only need thin clothes in India–but he would run the collarless shirts and cotton trousers through the hostel washing machine. The Rough Guide to Poland had to go, too. But the surfing bracelets would be useful once he was in India, although they weren’t half as stylish, he thought, as the ones he had once worn himself.
He looked again at his passport, hardly recognising