‘Why’s it beeping?’ Marchant asked, recalculating the risk to himself, to others. His lungs tightened, making words difficult. ‘Does it do that when you slow down, when your pace drops?’ he asked, trying to remember how Leila had explained it, cursing himself for not showing more interest at the time.
The man nodded. He had been coerced into this, Marchant repeated to himself, which meant that he could be talked out of it.
‘Then what?’ Marchant glanced down at the belt again.
‘Can you help me?’ They looked at each other for a moment, gauging the fear in each other’s eyes.
‘I can try. What’s your name?’
‘Pradeep.’
‘Keep it going, Pradeep. You’re doing fine. Just fine. Don’t go anywhere. I’m coming straight back.’
Pradeep glanced over his shoulder, stumbling again, as Marchant dropped back down the field to search for Leila, but he couldn’t see her in the crowd. How much faster than her had he been running? He slowed up some more, looking at everyone who overtook him. He shouldn’t have left her, he knew that now. There were too many people, too much noise.
Above him the helicopters circled low again, drowning out the jazz band playing on the roof of a pub. Children by the roadside cheered, holding out bags of sweets. Stout women from St John’s Ambulance were offering outstretched hands of Vaseline. And then he spotted her, over on the far side of the road, hidden behind a small group of club runners. He cut across the flow of people to join her, almost tripping on the heels of another runner. His legs were tiring, more than they should have been at this stage of the race. He was desperate for more water, too.
‘Leila, we’ve got a problem,’ he said, short of breath. ‘A big problem.’
‘Where have you been? I couldn’t see you anywhere.’
In between swigs from her drinking bottle, he told her about the GPS, and how he thought it was linked in some way to the pouches around Pradeep’s waist, which he was now convinced contained explosives–enough to kill dozens of people if he was in a tightly bunched group. He knew how he sounded: a has-been desperate to prove himself in the field.
‘My guess is, if he drops below a certain pace, the isotonics will blow,’ he added.
‘Daniel…’
Leila’s face told him she was struggling to comprehend the situation, trying to decide whether his reading of it was deluded or credible. She was momentarily tearful.
‘You’ve got to leave this to others,’ she pleaded. ‘You must. You’re no longer…I need to make a call,’ she said, removing her mobile phone from a pocket at the back of her running shorts.
‘You won’t get a signal,’ Marchant said, glancing at the phone. With its stubby, inch-long aerial, the unit looked very familiar.
She held the phone in front of her, tripping and grabbing at Marchant’s arm for support.
‘Who are you ringing? MI5? The networks will be congested,’ he said. ‘Too many people.’
She looked at him again, her face suddenly professional, drained of all emotion, and then she dialled.
‘It’s a TETRA handset,’ she said coldly. The secure encrypted digital network used by the emergency and security services was one of the perks Marchant missed. ‘They’re not answering. Daniel, please. This is not your responsibility, not mine. If what you say is true, it’s one for MI5, Anti-Terrorism Command. We must leave it to them.’
Marchant looked at the road ahead, and reckoned he knew where the runner was, give or take a few hundred people. ‘I’ve got him talking. He doesn’t want to go through with it.’
Leila hesitated, weighing up the options. Had she conceded he might have a role to play? She looked at him again, swallowing hard.
‘OK. If you take my phone, I’ll drop out, find a phonebox and tell Five about the situation. Once the networks have been knocked out, I’ll give you a call on TETRA.’
Marchant was thinking fast now, like he used to in the field. The head of station in Nairobi had once predicted that a glittering career stretched ahead of him; he might even follow his father to the top if he quit the whisky and womanising. Next time they met, Marchant was suspended and burying his father.
‘Alert MI5. I’ll stay with him,’ he said, trying not to think about the funeral in the Cotswold frost, how they had treated his father. ‘My guess is we can’t pull him off the course, even if he keeps running. Deviating from waypoints could trigger the belt too.’
‘Daniel, you shouldn’t be doing this.’
‘I know.’ He also knew there weren’t many alternatives. If they both stopped, it would be almost impossible to find the bomber again. ‘I could tell the Americans. The Ambassador’s got company, and I think they’re wired.’ Leila glanced at him for a moment. They were both reluctant to involve the Secret Service, who didn’t always play by the same rules as everyone else. ‘The Ambassador is the target here?’ he asked.
‘He must be.’
Marchant had missed the adrenalin, but it was draining his energy, too. Lactic acid was building in his legs, weighing them down like lead.
‘Here,’ Leila said, holding out the phone. Their eyes met.
‘No blues and twos, nothing to alert him, OK?’ he said, taking the handset. He was increasingly short of breath. ‘Someone else might have their finger on the button. It’s happened to me once before.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Keep your distance from him.’
‘Who gave you this?’ he asked, looking at the handset again. It was a Motorola MTH800. ‘Just like my old one.’
‘Services. Mine was knackered. If you don’t hear from me in fifteen minutes, try calling the office.’ She paused. ‘Speed-dial 1. They’ll find me.’
Marchant glanced back at Leila as she pulled up on the side of the road, feigning a hamstring injury. She looked up at him, and for a moment he wondered if she might never make the call, leaving him to run on in his imaginary world of bombers and belts.
He knew she had tried to walk away from what they had together–God, how they had both tried–but each time one of them had relented. It wasn’t like him at all. For the first time in his life, a woman had got under his skin. Now they might be at the heart of a major security incident, and his involvement wouldn’t do her career any favours. Suspicion still hung over the Marchant family like a poisoned fog.
She gave a small wave and disappeared in the sea of runners.
2
It took ten minutes for Marchant to find Pradeep again. His head was bowed, his feet scuffing the road, running like a drunken tramp. The American Ambassador was in the group immediately ahead of him, still with company. He was moving strongly, chest out, no signs of tiredness. Worryingly, the field seemed to be tightly bunched around Pradeep, not as spread out as it was further back. And then Marchant saw the reason why: up ahead, just beyond the Ambassador, was an official pacemaker, running with a sign above him: eight minutes a mile. Stick with him and the marathon was yours for three hours thirty minutes. Marchant looked at Pradeep again, and feared that he didn’t have long, maybe ten minutes at most.
‘Pradeep? It’s me. You’re doing great.’
‘It’s too late.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m so tired, too weak.’
‘Do you want to stop, take a rest?’ Marchant said, bluffing. One final check, just to reassure himself about the GPS.
Pradeep’s glance