The Daniel Marchant Spy Trilogy: Dead Spy Running, Games Traitors Play, Dirty Little Secret. Jon Stock

Khan. Marchant glanced at the faded postcards that had been stuck to the central wooden post holding up the roof: London, Sydney, Cape Town.

      It was a reasonable effort at cover, Marchant thought.

      ‘Welcome to the Shanti Beach Café,’ the man said, putting away his phone. He looked Marchant up and down. ‘Just our sort of guest.’

      ‘I’ve come to see brother Salim,’ Marchant said, tensing his stomach muscles. A part of him expected to be punched, bound and hooded at any moment.

      ‘He’s been waiting for you. It’s a long walk from here. I don’t know who you are, where you’ve come from, but these two will kill you if you try anything. Salim’s orders.’

      Four hours later, Marchant reached the crest of the hill and looked back down over the tops of the dense vegetation towards Shanti Beach. It had been a hot, hard climb, and he was out of breath, dripping with sweat. The two fishermen pushed him on. ‘Chalo,’ the taller one urged. Neither had said anything else to him for the whole journey, ignoring his attempts to speak Hindi.

      Marchant walked on from the crest, enjoying the first stretch of downhill since they had set off from the beach. He wondered whether he would ever leave this beautiful place alive. A pair of Brahmani kites soared high above him, enjoying the thermals. Why had Dhar agreed to see him? And would he have any answers about his father? The Namaste Café must have been used by Uncle K as a contact point when he was trying to run Dhar. Word would have reached him that a white man had asked for ‘brother Salim’.

      The sound of a gunshot made Marchant drop to the ground and look around desperately for cover. For the first time since they had left the Namasté Café, the taller fisherman, who had kept walking as if he had heard nothing, smiled at Marchant, lying in the red dust. It was an awful smile, teeth stained with blood-coloured betelnut juice. Another shot rang out. Marchant listened carefully to it this time, calculating that it was from a high-powered rifle, fired from as close as twenty yards away. He had excelled in his fire-arms training at the Fort. Looking along the path ahead, he saw a figure approaching, a .315 sporting rifle slung over one shoulder. He knew at once that it was Salim Dhar.

      42

      Leila listened as Monk Johnson finished running through the itinerary of his new president’s forty-eight-hour visit to Delhi. There were more than two hundred people in the hall, about as many as it could hold. They were almost all Secret Service personnel, who had been in India for the past month as part of the Presidential Advance Team, trying in vain to impose their fixed manual of security demands on a very fluid country. There were a few CIA officers present, too, including Spiro, who was sitting on the stage next to Johnson, sweating in the heat. The US Embassy air conditioning was struggling to keep a lid on the temperature.