‘To be honest, I think he just wanted a name–the name of the mole in MI6 who had been making his life a misery.’
‘Come on, Marcus, he wanted much more, you know that. He wanted his own man high up in AQ.’
Carter had read all the files on Stephen Marchant, and knew that one of his biggest regrets was that MI6 had never infiltrated Al Qaeda on his watch. He was a Chief, after all, who had built a brilliant career on penetrating Dzerzhinsky Square, in the days when intelligence officers didn’t dunk the enemy, they blackmailed them with sordid photographs taken in seedy motel rooms. Far more civilised.
‘It became an obsession for him, didn’t it?’ Carter continued. ‘Someone on the inside. Particularly after 9/11. But we were going the other way. Round them all up rather than recruit them. It’s why the Company grew so suspicious of MI6. We thought you’d fallen asleep at the switch. What were you all doing, for God’s sake?’
‘Finding the intelligence to justify your wars,’ Fielding said.
‘But you weren’t beating up the bullies. Americans are a very simple people at heart. Somebody hurts us, we want to hurt them back. Publicly. It’s not subtle. And we sometimes hurt back the wrong people. It also puts those of us who believe in more covert methods out of a job.’
‘Salim Dhar would never work for the Agency.’
‘I realise that.’
‘So why do you think you might be able to turn him?’
‘I don’t. But he might respond to a British approach.’
‘Why?’
‘You tell me. Stephen Marchant knew something.’ Fielding walked away from the window, one hand on the small of his back.
‘Do you mind if I lie down?’ he asked.
‘Go ahead,’ Carter said. He had heard about the Vicar’s back problems. ‘Lower lumbar?’
‘All over.’
Carter watched as the Chief of MI6 calmly lay down on the floor of his dining-room suite, seemingly unaware of the figure he cut. Or perhaps he just didn’t care.
‘Do go on,’ Fielding said from the floor, but the wind had been taken from Carter’s sails. Had Fielding known what he was about to say?
‘Salim Dhar’s father worked in the American Embassy compound in the early 1980s,’ Carter continued, not sure where to address his comments. Looking down didn’t feel appropriate. ‘After he’d been sacked by your high commission. We’ve run some checks. It seems that someone was conduiting him a little bit of extra pocket money every month.’
Carter became aware of some activity outside the dining room, where his lady in red was working late.
‘The money came via one State Bank of Travancore in South India,’ Carter continued. ‘At least, it was meant to look that way. Seems like the rupees might have started life as greenbacks in the Cayman Islands. Or maybe even sterling in London.’ He paused. ‘I’ve got only one question, Marcus. Why were the Brits paying a salary to Dhar’s father?’
‘The payments stopped in 2001,’ Fielding said calmly, his eyes closed.
‘Twenty-one years after he’d quit working for your high commission.’
It should have been a bombshell, enough to make the British hand over Daniel Marchant, but the Vicar couldn’t have seemed less troubled.
‘We only discovered the payments ourselves a few days ago.’
‘Let’s hope it’s just you and me who know, then.’ Carter was suddenly annoyed that Fielding had managed to defuse his story by the simple ploy of lying on the floor. It had the effect of belittling everything he said. ‘I hate to think what Lord Bancroft would make of one of the world’s most wanted terrorists drawing down an MI6 salary.’
‘While you were funding a generation of mujahideen in Afghanistan.’
‘That was Spiro too, as it happens.’
‘We really don’t know where Daniel Marchant is,’ Fielding said. Outside the dining room, voices were getting more agitated.
‘We do.’
‘He needs to be left to find Salim Dhar. And with the greatest respect for your people’s tradecraft, he’s not going to do that with a ten-strong surveillance team on his case.’
‘I’m offering you a deal, Marcus. We keep quiet about the Cayman trust fund and let Marchant find Dhar, but when he does, we share the debrief.’
‘You’re assuming that Dhar will talk to him?’
‘Aren’t you?’
Carter knew that he was. MI6 must be staking everything on it. The discovery of the payments would have changed everything. Salim Dhar really might be one of theirs, one of Stephen Marchant’s most breathtakingly prescient signings. More likely he just got lucky. No one had seen Islamic terrorism coming in the 1980s. Dhar must have been a punt, one of the many people signed up by intelligence agencies around the world on the off-chance of coming good later. But in Dhar, Marchant had come up trumps, one of those breaks that happened once in a career. Would he have risked running him, though? Dhar’s track record of violence against the Americans would have made him a high-risk asset, particularly when the CIA was leading calls for Marchant to stand down as Chief.
Carter paced around the room, finding it easier to look at Fielding’s long, supine figure from different angles. ‘You don’t have to tell me if it was Stephen Marchant who personally authorised those payments, but I’m working on a wild guess here that it was. I’m also jumping to the crazy conclusion that you don’t know if all that money was well invested or not, which god Dhar prays to at night. From a ringside seat, it doesn’t look too good.’
Fielding’s eyes remained shut.
‘He has, however, only ever targeted Americans, which must give you people hope that he has the good manners not to bite the hand that fed him for the first twenty-one years of his life. And if that’s the case, there’s only one person he might possibly trust to run him: Stephen Marchant’s son, Daniel. We want some of that, Marcus. Salim Dhar could be the best penetration of AQ the West has ever had.’
There was a pause, Carter’s words hanging in the air, followed by a knock on the dining-room door.
‘Come,’ Fielding called out.
‘I’m sorry,’ Anne Norman began, glancing at Carter, then back to her boss on the floor. ‘We’ve just had Delhi station on the line. There’s been a bomb at the Gymkhana Club.’
30
Leila took it as a very public expression of gratitude that the CIA had assigned her to its team in Delhi who were liaising with the Secret Service in advance of the US President’s visit to the city. One of the agents had heard first-hand from a colleague at the London embassy about her role during the London Marathon, an event that seemed to have sealed her reputation as a player. ‘Though Turner Munroe never did get his fancy running watch back,’ he had joked on her arrival in Delhi that morning. ‘Good to have you on board.’
Neither side was calling it a defection, but relations had sunk so low between Britain’s and America’s intelligence communities that Leila had been told to treat officers from MI6’s Delhi station with the same caution as she would those from more traditionally hostile countries such as Iran and Russia. The paperwork called it a three-month exchange, but she knew there was no chance of her ever working–or living–in Britain again. She told herself that she had always preferred