‘No. Can we talk about our mutual friend?’ Marchant asked, turning back to Uncle K. ‘We might not have much time.’
‘Tell me what you want to know.’
‘Why did my father visit him?’
Uncle K paused, glancing around the bar. ‘I tried to recruit him once, a couple of years back. I was called out of retirement especially, told the whole thing was deniable. There was some sympathy there, but his hatred of America? It was too much. We had to drop him.’
‘Was my father trying to recruit him too?’
Uncle K lost his smile. ‘There’s something else you should know about Salim Dhar, but I’m not the person to tell you. It can only come from him.’
Marchant glanced again at the man at the bar, who was looking back at them. He was still holding his briefcase, gripping the handle too tightly.
‘Can you show me around this place?’ Marchant asked the colonel, interrupting him.
‘What, now?’
‘I need a bit of fresh air.’ He gestured at the table next to him, where a brigadier was drawing on a large cigar.
‘Of course,’ Malhotra said, picking up on Marchant’s anxiety. ‘It’s safe to talk here, I know them all,’ he joked, nodding at the brigadier as he rose from his chair. ‘They’re all far too busy discussing today’s hodgepodge with the cricket to listen to us. But why not? Let me show you round.’
Marchant knew they were too late when the man at the bar looked at them again. All he had time to do was duck.
29
It was Alan Carter’s first visit to Legoland, but after the events in Poland, he knew it wouldn’t be his last. Spiro had been recalled to Langley after he lost Daniel Marchant. The DCIA was furious. Carter had taken over, fast-tracked to the head of the National Clandestine Service, Europe. It was a personal success for him, but he also knew it was a victory for the new thinking that was sweeping through the Company as it tried to refocus on its core business of espionage, following the intelligence disasters of 9/11 and Iraq.
Carter had been present at the interrogation of KSM, and also of Zayn Abu Zubaida, the first of the big-name AQ detainees to be dunked. But waterboarding wasn’t his style. Nor were the freelance deniables who made up the rendition teams. Carter had joined the Agency with a vulpine belief in espionage, that the best way to beat the enemy was to infiltrate its leadership, rather than drown a few hoods. Spiro used to tell him not to worry, that renditions should be judged not by whether they were right or wrong, but by what the President thought. And their former President had preferred not to know.
So when the backlash came, as Carter knew it would, he didn’t feel so bad about having leaked details of Stare Kiejkuty to a few handpicked Washington journalists. And now, with a new President in office, he had no regrets at all about hastening Spiro’s demise. Langley might have spared him if Carter had stopped Marchant’s departure on an international flight out of Frederic Chopin airport. But Carter had said nothing, and Spiro sank.
Instead, he rang the CIA’s station head in Delhi, then put in a call to Langley, recommending that Marchant was followed rather than pulled in when he reached India. Langley told him to talk to the Vicar. It was Carter’s belief that the renegade MI6 officer would try to make contact with Salim Dhar, a far bigger prize for the CIA than Marchant. Then they could both be brought in; but he wouldn’t tell Fielding that, not yet.
‘We’re not interested in Daniel Marchant,’ Carter said, sipping a Bourbon. He was sitting opposite an upright Marcus Fielding in the dining room that adjoined the Vicar’s spacious office. The place had style, he thought, more than he would have guessed from its unpromising location on a busy traffic junction. And he began to understand why they called Fielding the Vicar. Music was playing quietly in the background somewhere: Bach, maybe his second Brandenburg concerto. He even had his own butler, which struck him as very English (even if the butler wasn’t), not to mention a fifty-something PA who wore red pantyhose.
‘Spiro wanted Daniel Marchant’s balls,’ Fielding said. ‘Is he suspended, or just taking a long holiday?’
‘Let’s call it a blood substitution.’
‘It’s never easy when one of your players is withdrawn from the field.’
Carter looked at him for a moment. ‘Marchant was good, I know that. It wouldn’t have been my call.’
‘Nor mine. What about Leila? Was that Spiro too? Did he recruit her personally?’
‘Of course. And I have similar regrets about her.’
‘Don’t we all. Where is she now?’
‘New Delhi station.’
‘I thought she was Spiro’s asset. The Agency’s planning on keeping her, then?’
‘She may prove useful if Marchant forgets the script.’
‘I’m assuming Spiro asked her to set Marchant up,’ Fielding said. ‘Handing him his old TETRA phone during the race.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know the exact details of her recruitment or her role within the Agency, Marcus. Let’s just say her debrief with Spiro after the marathon included some very leading questions.’
‘She told him what he wanted to hear, in other words. That Daniel was as guilty as his father.’ Fielding paused. ‘For the record, who made the first move? Spiro or Leila?’
Carter had been told to take the rap for the Leila operation, but he hadn’t expected someone so apparently cerebral as Fielding to come over all emotional. He was starting to ask questions a husband would put to his cheating wife.
‘Spiro was on the lookout for someone close to Daniel Marchant,’ he said, hoping to move on.
‘Moscow rules?’
‘Money. Her mother wasn’t in the best of health, needed expensive medication. And we’re very keen to support people like Leila’s mother. She’s a Bahá’í, one of the persecuted good guys in Iran.’
‘And you trust Leila?’
‘You obviously did. I’ve read the reports. Copper-bottomed. Only problem was, your vetters never figured her mother had moved back to Iran. Of course Leila should have told you, but she feared for her job. Spiro found out, used it as leverage when he recruited her.’
Carter didn’t want to fall out with Fielding. That wasn’t why he had come. He’d been keen to meet a man who enjoyed something approaching the status of a legend at Langley. Fielding was a very different kind of spy from Stephen Marchant. A fellow believer in espionage, he had the intellectual arrogance shared by all the MI6 officers Carter had ever met, but he had unquestionable form, too: Fielding had helped them to talk Muammar Gaddafi out of his nuclear ambitions, drawing on his enviable knowledge of the Arab world to defuse a delicate situation. If only their previous President had deployed the same tactics with Saddam Hussein.
‘Does our profession ever surprise you, Alan?’ Fielding asked. He had stood up from the table, and was now looking out of the buttressed bay window, his back to Carter. A couple of staff were taking a cigarette break on the open terrace below, the Union flag billowing above them.
‘Every day.’
‘It often appalled Stephen. He despised the people he turned, the people who made his reputation. Loyalty was something he valued higher than anything, which made traitors the lowest of the low, even if they were betraying the enemy.’
Carter stood up to join Fielding at the window. Outside, in the dark London night, the lights of a passing party boat sparkled on the Thames. It was nearly midnight. Legoland, like Langley, never slept. Up on the roof, the array of aerials and satellite dishes Carter had seen from Vauxhall Bridge linked the building with every