Tell me, are you still committed to pursuing your own inquiries into your fathers case?
Marchant didnt like his tone. In a quiet moment at his fathers funeral, two months earlier, Fielding had told him to let his office know if he turned up anything. All he had asked was that he went about his inquiries quietly. Become another whistleblower like Tomlinson or Shayler and he would throw the book at him. His father would have said the same: he despised renegades too. Only once had Marchant lost it, at a pub near Victoria, when an evening had ended in a brawl. A junior desk officer had been dispatched to the police station to release him and smooth things over.
Wouldnt you want to know what happened? Marchant replied.
I have a pretty good idea already. Tony Bancroft has almost finished his report.
But hes not going to clear my father, is he?
None of us wanted him to go, you know that? He was a much-loved Chief.
So why did we let MI5 get one over us? There was never any evidence, no proof against him.
I know youre still angry, Daniel, but the quickest way to get you working again is for you to keep your head down and let Tony finish his job. MI5 dont want you back, but I do. Once Bancroft is on record saying you pose no threat, theres nothing anyone can do about it.
But Bancroft wont clear my fathers name, will he? Marchant repeated.
They walked on, Fielding a few yards ahead of him. Marchant had met with Lord Bancroft and his team, answered their questions, and knew that he had no case to answer. He knew his father was innocent, too, but the Prime Minister had needed someone to blame. Mainland Britain had been subjected to an unprecedented wave of terrorist attacks during the past year. Nothing spectacular, but there was enough public fear to keep MI5 on a critical state of alert: electricity sub-stations, railway depots, multi-storey car parks. The evidence soon pointed to a terrorist cell based in South India, drawn from workers who had taken poorly-paid jobs in the Gulf.
The pressure to nullify the threat had grown, but the terrorists always seemed to be one step ahead. Soon the talk was of a mole, high up in MI6, helping the hunted. Daniels father had become obsessed with the theory, but he had never managed to prove it, or to halt the bombings. Suspicion had finally fallen on him. When his position as Chief became untenable, the Joint Intelligence Committee, guided by Harriet Armstrong, MI5s Director General, recommended that he be retired early. The attacks had stopped.
Fielding paused at the point where their path met another. As Marchant joined him, they instinctively looked both ways before crossing, even though the forest was empty. A muntjac deer barked in the distance.
Are you still drinking? Fielding asked.
When I can, Marchant said.
Im not sure we can bail you out a second time.
How long will I be kept at the safe house?
Its for your own security. Someone out theres not happy you thwarted their attack.
They walked on together, both at ease with the forests noisy dampness. There are no surprises in what Ive read of Bancrofts report, no moles uncovered, Fielding said, as they began on a loop back towards the car. Its not Tonys style, not why he was appointed. Just a summing up of what happened on your fathers watch and a measured assessment of whether anything more could have been done. There were too many attacks, we all know that.
And someone had to take the bullet.
The PMs a former Home Secretary. He was always going to favour MI5 over us.
Marchant had heard all this before, but he knew from Fieldings manner that he was holding something back.
Unfortunately, the Americans have been pushing for more, day and night, trying to establish that it was conspiracy rather than complacency on your fathers part. Weve resisted, of course, but the PM is indulging them. And now it seems theyve persuaded him to hold back on the reports publication, saying the CIA have something specific.
On my father? What?
How much do you know about Salim Dhar?
Dhar? Marchant hesitated, trying to think clearly. On the shortlist for masterminding last years UK bombings, but no evidence to link him directly. Always been more anti-American than British. Its a while since I read his file.
Educated in Delhi, the American school, then disappeared, Fielding said. The Indians arrested him two years later in Kashmir, and banged him up in a detention site in Kerala, where he should be now. Only he isnt.
No?
He was one of the prisoners released in the Bhuj hijack exchange at the end of last year.
It wasnt his region, but Marchant knew the incident had been an almost exact copy of the Indian Airlines hijacking at Kandahar in 1999. Then, Omar Sheikh had been released, amid much international condemnation. It was never made public who was freed at Bhuj.
AQ must have rated him, Marchant said, wondering where his father fitted in.
We had Dhar down as a small-time terrorist until Bhuj. They wanted something spectacular in return for his freedom. Within a month, Dhar was launching RPGs into the US compound in Delhi.
Marchant had read about the attack, in the blur of grief. It had taken place just after his father had died, before the funeral. Nine US Marines had been killed.
Whats this got to do with my father?
Fielding paused before answering, as if in two minds whether to proceed. The Americans would very much like to find Salim Dhar. After Delhi, he went on to attack their compound in Islamabad, killing six more US Marines And now the CIA has established that a senior-ranking officer from MI6 visited Dhar in Kerala shortly before he was released in the hostage exchange.
Marchant looked up. And they think it was my father?
Theyre working on a theory that it was, yes. Im sorry. Theres no official record of any visits. Ive checked all the logbooks, many times.
Marchant didnt know what to think. It wouldnt be unusual for the local station head from Chennai, say, to bluff his way into seeing someone like Dhar, but it would be extremely unorthodox for the Chief of MI6 to make an undeclared visit from London.
In the context of MI5s own inquiries, Im afraid it doesnt look good, Fielding added. There are those who are convinced that Dhar masterminded the British bombings, despite his preference for killing Americans.
What do you think? Marchant asked. You knew my dad better than most.
Fielding stopped and turned to Marchant. He was under a lot of pressure last year to clean up MI6s act. The talk at the time, remember, was all about an inside job, infiltration at the highest level by terrorists with some sort of South Indian connection. Even so, why talk to Dhar personally?
Because he couldnt trust anyone else? Marchant offered. For whatever reason, he knew that it must have been an act of desperation on his fathers part.
The good news is that details of this visit havent crossed Bancrofts desk yet, and they might never, Fielding said. His job was to draw a line under your fathers departure, not to open the whole affair up again. Hell need to be sure of the evidence before presenting it to the JIC, and there isnt a lot at the moment.
Is there any?
Dhars jailer, the local police chief in Kerala. Someone blackmailed him to gain access to Dhar. It had all the hallmarks of an old-school sting.
Is there any?
Dhars jailer, the local police chief in Kerala. Someone blackmailed him to gain access to Dhar. It had all the hallmarks of an old-school sting.
Moscow rules?
Textbook. Indian intelligence found the compromising photos hidden in the policemans desk drawer. They were taken with one of our cameras. An old Leica. He paused. The last time it was checked out was in Berlin, early 1980s. Your father never returned it.
7
Marchant knew that someone was in his room as he walked up the worn wooden stairs of the safe house. It was one of those intuitive things they couldnt teach at the Fort. After Fielding had dropped him off on his way back to London, Marchant had checked in with his two babysitters, who were watching porn in the small sitting room. They had hardly acknowledged his return, so he wasnt overly concerned as he turned the handle on the bedroom door. Besides, he could already smell Leilas perfume.
Dan, she said, getting up from the corner of the bed, where a newspaper was spread out across the covers: two pages on the attempted marathon terrorist attack. I was beginning to wonder what you were doing with the Vicar in the woods.
They made love slowly, their limbs still tender after their morning on the streets of London.
A proper debrief, he smiled, as she slid his boxers off and eased on top of him.
Neither of them was ready to discuss what had happened at the marathon. When he had still been working they would meet up for snatched weekends whenever they could, in Berne, Seville, Dubrovnik, but never on their own patch. And they always had a rule of not talking about work, which meant they spent a lot of time making love, as they had little life beyond their jobs, only opening up to each other at the airport, minutes before they flew their separate ways. Today, though, would be different, they both knew that.
But first Marchant fell into a deep sleep, something he had rarely been able to do in recent months. His brain must have concluded that lying in a protected safe house in the depths of Wiltshire, with Leila by his side, was as secure an environment as he could hope for. Fielding had authorised her visit, she said, which added to the sense of sanctuary.
When he awoke, he felt less rested than he had hoped. No nightmares, but a nagging memory of Leilas hot tears, felt faintly through the layers of tiredness that had enveloped his aching limbs. He sat up, troubled that he had been unable to respond. Leila was taking a shower. The bathroom door was open, and from where he was lying he could see the brown haze of her breasts, a fuzz of pubic hair, blurred by the steamy glass of the shower cubicle.
As she tilted her head back, smoothing her long hair in the jet of water, he remembered the first time he saw her, when they were both waiting to be interviewed at Carlton Gardens in London. There had been a mix-up over times, and he had sat next to her in the reception, suspecting she was there for the same reason as him, but unable to ask. Instead they had spoken with agonising formality about the weather, the architecture, anything but the one subject that was occupying both their minds.
When they had met again, on their first day of training at the Fort in Gosport, there had been a palpable frisson between them. The freedom to talk about whatever they liked was intoxicating. An instructor asked all of them to stand up and introduce themselves in turn. (MI6 was no different from the rest when it came to toe-curling corporate practices.) Leila spoke first in English, and then briefly in fluent Farsi, explaining that her father was an Englishman who worked as an engineer in the oil and natural gas industry. He had met and married her mother, a Baháí Iranian and university lecturer, while posted to Tehran. After the Revolution in 1979, they had fled to Britain, along with many other Baháís, hounded out by the Revolutionary Guard, who had no time for unrecognised religious minorities.
Leila was born and brought up in Hertfordshire by her mother, while her father worked in various jobs around the Gulf, sometimes joined by his family. Her earliest childhood memories were of the fifty-degree heat in Doha. When she was eight, they all went to live in Houston for two years. For as long as the Ayatollahs ruled, however, there was never a chance of returning to Tehran, because the Baháís remained enemies of an Islamic state that continued to persecute them.
She told the room, in English, how she had applied to the Service in her last year at Oxford, after the master of her college, a former Chief (Stephen Marchants predecessor), had invited her for dinner. She feared the worst, not convinced she wanted to join an organisation that still seemed to recruit over a glass of Oxbridge Amontillado, but was surprised by his lack of pomposity, and by the vibrant mix of the four other young people who had been asked along to the same dinner. Only one of them was white, a demographic that was reflected in the room of aspiring spies that day at the Fort. It reminded her of the time she had visited the BBCs World Service at Bush House.
Naturally suspicious, I went back to my room after dinner and sat up all night reading the website, about how people from ethnically diverse backgrounds would be welcome at MI6. I knew MI5 was recruiting multi-racially, but I thought the Service was the last bastion of the white, middle-class, safari-suit-wearing male. People like Daniel here. Laughter filled the room. There was a catch, though, as we all know: you had to have at least one British parent. Luckily, my mother always had a thing about English men. More laughter. The vetting takes an age, though, didnt you find? They interviewed my mother for weeks. It must have been the shisha pipe she kept offering round.
Have you ever been back to Iran? the instructor asked. He was the only one not laughing.
Back? I never lived there.
It must have sometimes felt like home, though, the instructor continued. The rooms relaxed atmosphere tensed.
I went there once, in my year off, she said, fixing the instructors eye. I assume everyone here was asked the same question in their first interview, whether they had ever persuaded someone to do something illegal. Well, I told them about my trip to Iran, how I talked a guard on the Turkmenistan border into letting me across to visit the rose harvest in Ghamsar for my PhD on perfume. The gardens were beautiful. Ill never forgetwhole families picking roses in the dawn mist, the dew still wet on the scented petals.
Marchant had spoken next, knowing that he could never match Leila for presence. Her sassy smile, the sexual poise, that worldly, cosmopolitan voice: sorted rather than arrogant. He explained that he had grown up abroad, moving from one embassy to another around the world until he had been packed off aged thirteen to a boarding school in Wiltshire. He had been told to be upfront about his father, who had recently taken over as Chief, so he joked about keeping it in the family. Spies are like undertakers, they run in families, he continued. And Im in good company, I guess. Kim Philbys father, St John Philby, had been a senior member of the Service. It was a quip he later regretted.
After Cambridge, I worked for a couple of years as a hard-up foreign correspondent, stringing from Africa for various British broadsheets and drinking too much cheap Scotch. I landed some of my best stories, including a splash about Gaddafi, thanks to a contact at the High Commission in Nairobi. It was only later that I discovered he worked for I/OPS in Legoland. I was young and naïve at the time, and didnt realise that it was his job to present the media with stories that helped the national cause. It was on his advice that I eventually returned to London to apply.