The mood was worse than Denton could ever remember at a COBRA meeting. ‘I’ve checked with security at the Fort,’ he said, hoping to inject some optimism. ‘They’ve got strict orders to keep Marchant on site. Extra security has been put on his door.’
‘Did you sense any shift in Washington?’ the Foreign Secretary asked.
‘None,’ the PM said. ‘We remain an irrelevance. And we must be prepared for the Americans to act unilaterally. The President’s words, not mine.’
‘Any progress on where Dhar was calling from?’ Harriet Armstrong, Director General of MI5, didn’t look up, but her question was intended for the Director of GCHQ.
‘An MI6 facility, that’s all we know,’ he said, shifting awkwardly in his seat. ‘Although we were obviously involved with setting up Six’s comms network, it’s a private-key encryption. Nobody else can access it. That’s how these things work. And I’d be lying if I said we were enjoying the full support of the NSA on this one.’
‘I may have something,’ Armstrong continued. ‘An incident in Gloucestershire was red-flagging on the grid as I arrived. A SAR helicopter made an emergency landing earlier tonight at Kemble in Gloucestershire. All three crew are missing. Local police are liaising with RAF Valley in Anglesey.’
Denton looked up. He had taken a train to Kemble once, a few years ago. What had been the occasion? A private lunch, to mark Stephen Marchant’s appointment as Chief of MI6. Tables covered with white linen in the apple orchard, a jazz band, competitive croquet. He had never felt so out of place. The journey from Kemble station to the Chief’s house had taken less than five minutes.
19
Salim Dhar moved around the bedroom, looking for something that would link the place to his mother. The air was stale, the mood one of finality rather than grief. There were no sheets on the double bed, just a pile of folded blankets at one end and some pillows without their covers. The bookcases were empty, the cupboards bare.
He limped over to the bedside table, where there was a small bronze statue of Nataraja: Shiva as lord of the dance. The figure was familiar to him, a distant memory from the days when he had been a Hindu, like his parents, who had called him Jaishanka Menon. He had converted to Islam partly to spite the man he thought was his father. The statue’s weight surprised him, and he wondered at its significance. It was the only trace of India in the room.
He picked up a leaflet from the dressing table. It was the order of service for the funeral of Stephen Marchant, the man who had turned out to be his real father. There were Christian readings, but Hindu ones too, and a passage by Kahlil Gibran, an Arab described in a footnote as a Maronite Christian influenced by Islam and Sufism.
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
As he put the service sheet down, something caught his eye. A photo had slipped to one side in a silver frame on the dusty windowsill. It showed a middle-aged Western woman, standing in front of Qtab Minar. She didn’t strike Dhar as a picture of happiness: a wry, confused face squinting into the Delhi sun. But it wasn’t this photo that interested him. There was another one behind it, a corner of which was visible.
Dhar turned the frame over and removed the back. An image of his mother fell onto the table. She was wearing a turquoise sari and standing in front of the British High Commission, where she had once worked. Her smile was radiant, beaming out at him across the years and the continents. He smiled back at her and slid the photo into his pocket. She was here now, somewhere in Britain. Inshallah, one day they would be together again.
20
Lakshmi sat on the edge of the bed at the Fort, holding a sterilised syringe in one hand, her phone in the other. Marchant had only been gone ten minutes, but she couldn’t wait any longer. As requested, she had flirted with the guard in the gatehouse, distracting him without having to flash her breasts. By the time she had returned to the room, the guard at the bottom of the stairs had gone too, dragged into one of the empty rooms by Marchant. The alarm would be raised shortly, either when the guard regained consciousness or his absence was noticed, but by then she would be immune to the storm raging around her.
She looked at the needle’s point, turning it in the light of the bedside lamp. Her damaged left wrist was sore in its cast, the most painful it had been since she had left hospital. But it wasn’t hurting enough for what she was about to do.
Everything had been going so well before she was sent to Morocco to spy on Daniel Marchant. For two clean, healthy years she had worked for the Agency, signing up amid the optimism of a new presidency. Life as a field officer hadn’t always been what she had hoped. At times it had been hell. In her first year at Langley, Spiro had constantly reminded her that she was a woman in a man’s world. He had also tried to sleep with her, but she had dealt with that. The career change was working: her bad habits had been left behind at medical school.
Her father would have been happier if she had continued with her studies at Georgetown University, but he hadn’t known her secret – which was ironic, given that it was an act of rebellion against him. She would ring him now, explain the real reason why she had dropped out, prepare him for the shame it would bring on the family. He would be at home, checking emails at the kitchen table, worrying about the call from the IRS.
She brought his number up on the phone’s screen and looked at the image of him: never smiling, always formal, as if he was holding his breath. Then she held the phone to her ear, listening to the distant ring.
‘Dad? It’s me. I need to tell you something.’
‘Ennamma Kannu? I’m so glad you called.’ She could hear him place a muffled hand over the phone, letting her mother know it was their only daughter. ‘I’ve just had another call from the IRS. The whole thing was a hotchpotch, a terrible mix-up. They’re not investigating me any more.’
‘That’s good,’ Lakshmi said. Spiro must have moved quickly. ‘That’s so good.’
‘I’m just glad we didn’t waste time worrying unnecessarily. I always knew the charges were false.’
Lakshmi had to smile. Who was he kidding? He had nearly worried himself to death. Just as he had constantly worried about her over the years. And she had always done his bidding, forgoing alcohol, unsuitable men, meat, even caffeine. Her rebellion, when it finally came, had been extreme.
‘I wanted to say,’ she began, ‘that I know you were mad at me for dropping out of Georgetown –’
‘Baba, you know that’s not the case. And we’re so proud of you now, the important government work you’re doing.’
‘I know, but –’ she paused, holding the syringe. ‘It was a difficult time. I wasn’t well. I needed a change of direction.’
She thought back to the first and only meeting she had attended, when her habit was becoming hard to hide. Twenty strangers – hobos, storekeepers, journalists, a librarian – sat on plastic chairs in a circle, united by narcotics. Up until that anonymous gathering, her addiction had been private. Nobody knew about the stolen hospital supplies of diamorphine hydrochloride, better known as heroin. Shame had made her cunning, and she had concealed her secret life with the ingenuity of a spy. Certainly the vetters at Langley never found out when they later questioned her fellow students and tutors.
As she had sat there, listening to other people’s stories, the futility of her own rebellion had become all too apparent. No one she cared about had noticed anything. To her friends and family she was still the same clean-living, hard-working Indian girl from Reston, Virginia. Only a group of strangers