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

21

Marchant lay on the bed, watching Monika as she undressed and slipped onto the sheets next to him, at ease with her nakedness. Earlier she had offered to take his ticket to her friend, who could postpone his flight by a day. He had been more than happy to let her, falling into a surprisingly deep sleep while she was away. The less time he spent on the streets of Warsaw, the better, and they would be watching all the airports. Changing his flight departure might buy him a little time. The alarm would have been raised by now, and Prentice had made it clear that the Service’s help was over.

Monika’s kindnesses continued, but Marchant was far from certain that they were unconditional, particularly when she announced that she would be coming with him to the airport.

‘India is calling you, I can tell,’ she said. ‘But first…’

She hooked a leg over his, but just as she started to kiss Marchant, he stopped her, noticing for the first time his rucksack in the corner of the room.

‘Something wrong?’ she asked.

‘Did you bring my rucksack over?’ he asked, propping himself up on one elbow.

‘Of course. You’re staying over, remember?’

‘Did anyone see you, carrying it?’

‘No, why? Is there a problem?’

He said nothing, and sank back on the bed. So far, he had avoided telling Monika anything that might arouse her suspicion, sticking as close as possible to his legend: he had been bumming around Europe, checked into the Oki Doki before flying out to India, but had been delayed by the bohemian charms of a beautiful receptionist. Par for the course for David Marlowe. But he knew he would soon have to say something more: their journey to the airport would need to be discreet. He decided to opt for the truth, give or take a few dollars.

‘The Americans are looking for me,’ he began, taking a pack of her cigarettes from the bedside table and lighting up. He had forgotten how it felt to embark on a lie, that exquisite moment when you step off from ordinary life into the shadows of deceit, where anything is suddenly possible. For a moment the thrill was intoxicating.

‘Why?’ She seemed genuinely surprised, resting her chin on both hands to listen.

‘I needed dollars for India, the new bank at the US Embassy was offering the best rate, so I went along. But they wouldn’t let me in without searching my rucksack.’ He paused, relishing the options, wondering which way to take his story. ‘I had a row.’

‘You should have left your rucksack somewhere, like at the station. It’s the same everywhere.’

‘I know. But I’d only just arrived in Warsaw. OK, I also had a bit of puff on board. I didn’t want a scene.’

‘Was it just a row?’ Monika asked, putting one hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh.

‘What’s so funny?’ he asked.

‘Nothing. I just can’t imagine you angry. Did you get very cross? Like really crazy?’

Her manner was coquettish, playful, and he wondered again whether she was playing a game too. ‘There was a bit of mutual pushing. Your police were called, but they weren’t interested.’

‘But the Americans are?’

‘Maybe I’m being paranoid. I had that rucksack with me, that’s all. And they started to ask what was in it when I wouldn’t show them.’

‘No one saw me, Mr Angry-man. And you’re with me now. I checked you out.’ He stared at her through his smoke. ‘From the hostel,’ she added, kissing him.

22

Leila had met Jago, a tousle-haired six-year-old, once before, but this was her first time on the London Eye. Fielding had emailed her earlier in the day with the unusual time and place, explaining that he would have a godson in tow. Everyone in the Service knew the Vicar had an inordinate number of godchildren (fourteen at the last count). Less well known was how he found time to see them all. They were a lucky bunch, she thought, as Fielding led them through the shadows to an empty capsule, bypassing the long queue. He ushered Leila and Jago before him, nodding at an attendant as the doors closed. It evidently wasn’t Fielding’s first visit.

As Jago swung on the metal handrail, looking fearlessly at the Thames below him, Leila took in London from a new perspective. All around her, as they rose almost imperceptibly into the night sky, buildings coyly revealed parts that had seldom been seen by the public before: pointed skylights, roof gullies, curved domes.

‘We always try to get a sunset flight,’ Fielding said, looking west, where the high clouds were tinged with red. ‘Don’t we Jago?’

But Jago was too preoccupied by a passenger boat making its way up the river, its wake spreading like spilt salt behind it.

‘He’s grown up a lot since I last saw him,’ Leila offered, doubting whether Fielding’s effort to include his godson in their conversation was genuine.

‘They do, you know,’ he said, still looking out west. ‘Sorry to bring you up here.’

‘It’s great. I’ve never been.’

‘We just can’t be sure about Legoland at the moment.’

‘No?’

She presumed he meant MI5, but Fielding didn’t elaborate. ‘Stay away from the doors and these pods are almost impenetrable,’ he continued. ‘At least at the top. Curved glass, you see. Sometimes I reckon there are more of the world’s intelligence services flying the London Eye than tourists. Word’s got out.’

‘Uncle Marcus?’ Jago asked, not waiting for an answer. ‘Are we moving faster than a clock?’

‘A clock? Well, faster than the long hand, slower than the second hand.’

‘What’s the time now, then?’

‘The time?’ Marcus repeated, barely missing a beat. It was why he always accepted invitations to be a godfather: children’s random thought patterns kept his brain nimble. ‘Almost 12 o’clock,’ he said, winking at Leila. ‘When we reach the top it will be exactly midnight.’

‘And then we’ll all turn into pumpkins on the way down?’

‘Every one of us.’

‘Hassan was a disappointment, in many ways,’ Leila said, checking that Jago was distracted again. The boy seemed to be deep in thought, contemplating his imminent transformation.

‘Really?’

‘I think he was just lonely.’

‘Did you…?’

‘Squeeze the pips? Yes.’

‘And?’

‘When pushed…squeezed…he mentioned the Russians, said how they had liked the instability of last year, of seeing the Service wobble.’

‘I’m sure they did. It wasn’t the Russians.’

‘No’. She paused, squatting down next to Jago. She had forgotten how brusque Fielding could be in his dismissals.

‘What’s that?’ the boy asked, pointing almost directly beneath them.

‘That’s called a carousel,’ she said, looking at a circular disc of colours far below them. They were almost at the top of the wheel now. Midnight was approaching. ‘Horses and music and…’

‘Oh yes, we saw it down there,’ he said, already looking elsewhere, across the river towards Big Ben.

‘There’s something else I need to talk to you about,’ Leila said. She stood up and walked over to Fielding, who was still looking upriver.

‘Of course.’

‘I need a break. From Britain, from everything that’s happened.’

‘As far as I’m concerned, you can have as long off as you want. Travel, see the world as a tourist for a bit. I thought HR had talked to you about this?’

‘I don’t want a holiday. I need to keep myself busy while he’s away. But not here.’

‘Your next foreign tour is, when, next year?’

‘July.’

‘I’m sure we could bring it forward.’

‘I had something else in mind. The CIA’s exchange programme. They’ve just advertised another position.’

He looked at her for a moment, studying her face. She was strikingly beautiful, he thought, particularly in the soft light of the setting sun. ‘Is that what you really want? I’m surprised. Genuinely. Langley’s no fun at all, you know that.’

‘It’s not in America. A three-month tour on the subcontinent. India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka. I’d start in the Delhi station.’

A thought crossed Fielding’s mind with the fleeting transience of one of Jago’s random musings; but it left a trace that was to linger much longer than he would have liked.

23

Spiro looked again at the grainy image of a two-tonne, dark-blue military truck, standing in heavy traffic on the northern edge of Warsaw.

‘Grom. Polish special forces. When was this taken?’ he asked, pulling hard on his cigarette.

‘20.30 hours,’ Carter said.

The room had gone quiet as everyone stared at the truck.

‘Bring us in closer,’ Spiro said, walking up to the wall as the image grew bigger and more blurred. ‘This part here, the windscreen.’

The truck’s windscreen was highlighted with an animated dotted line, before it expanded to fill the entire wall. The driver could clearly be seen on the right-hand side of the cabin, and the outline of another figure was visible in the passenger seat. But it was the profile of a third person between them that had interested Spiro.

‘Can we rebuild this?’ he asked.

The atmosphere grew tense as Carter and his team exchanged glances with each other, realising that Spiro was about to show them up. They had been more interested in establishing where the truck had gone next, and whether any of the city’s other unreliable cameras had captured its progress.

In a few moments the image had been enhanced enough to reveal the blurred features of a familiar figure. Spiro turned to address the room, one side of the projected figure dappling his own. ‘Hugo Prentice, employee of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Warsaw station. I guess his mother loved him. Langley wants him fried.’

Hugo Prentice wandered through Kolo Bazaar, aware of at least one set of watchers on his tail. He had already counted three of them, and spotted a fourth in the antique mirror on the stall in front of him. They had picked him up after he had left the embassy by car after lunch, following at a safe distance. He knew what their presence meant: they had spotted his image on the traffic CCTV. On the journey down from Stare Kiejkuty he had leant forward in the Grom truck at almost every set of lights, hoping that at least one of the ancient police traffic cameras had been working.

He walked down to the end of the market, stopping occasionally to look at items that genuinely caught his eye: Russian samovars, iron crosses, old leather sofas. It was important for his followers to believe that they had not been spotted. When he made his move, he must do it with the purpose of an intelligence officer who was taking the usual precautions before meeting his agent, rather than someone who was panicking under surveillance.

Spiro was agitated, watching Prentice on the main screen as he moved through the market in the fragmented images of the city centre’s CCTV network.

‘He’s about to dry-clean,’ he said. ‘Moscow rules, British style. They should put this guy in a museum.’

Spiro knew what Prentice was up to. Marchant was too hot to be kept at the British Embassy–they needed to deny all involvement–so he had been secreted somewhere in the city. Prentice was now on his way to meet him. Spiro had asked old friends in the WSI for assistance, but he wasn’t sure if they would be in a position to help after the Stare Kiejkuty fiasco.

‘Eyes on the tram, unit three,’ he said, as Prentice quickened his pace.

The number 12 pulled in just as Prentice reached the stop. He stepped aboard, glancing casually at his watch as he did so. The tram was crowded with afternoon commuters, and there were no seats available, but he wasn’t going far. At the next stop he would get off, descend into the nearby underpass by a subway, and then leave from exit four, one of six possible exits, which was at street level. The street was one-way–the wrong way for any vehicle that might have been following the number 12 tram.

‘Somebody better be following him,’ Spiro said as Prentice disappeared down the underpass. ‘He’s in dead ground.’

‘Unit four?’ the junior officer said.

‘The busker’s playing our song,’ a relaxed voice said on the intercom.

An image of a guitarist, sitting on the floor of the underpass, flashed up on the main screen. Carter allowed himself a nervous smile, pleased that his men were performing well on Spiro’s watch. But Spiro wasn’t impressed.

‘Something’s not right here,’ he said. ‘It’s all too predictable, even for the British.’

‘Exit four,’ said the junior officer.

Spiro watched as Prentice sauntered up onto the street.

‘We have a problem. It’s one-way.’

‘That’s better,’ Spiro said. ‘The old soldier’s warming up.’

Prentice slowed down to look in the window of a shoe shop, checking for trams as he did so. Number 23 was coming down the road, but was still fifty yards from the stop. If he increased his pace now, he just might make it. But he needed his tail to catch the tram too, and he was still packing up his guitar in the underpass.

The lights ahead changed, delaying the traffic enough for Prentice to walk slowly towards the stop. He didn’t need to check that the busker was behind him. Prentice climbed on board at the front of the tram and worked his way down, searching for a seat. The busker was good, Marchant thought. He never once looked up to see where Prentice had sat, which made him think he was wired. He would know in a few seconds. Just as the front and rear doors were about to close, Prentice slipped back out onto the street, synchronising his exit with the moment when the busker had a ticket in his hand.

The doors closed with the busker still inside.

‘Textbook,’ Spiro said.

‘Unit 3’s approaching now,’ Carter said, watching the screen.

‘Reminds me of my first surveillance op in London,’ said Spiro. ‘The Russian was sitting in the last carriage of the subway train, front end. When the train pulled into Charing Cross, Northern Line, he walked off just before the train left. I tried to follow, but the last set of doors don’t open at Charing Cross. I must have been the only spook in London who didn’t know. I swear the guy waved as the train pulled out.’

‘Sir, target’s on the move again,’ one of the junior officers said. ‘Boarding a 24, heading uptown.’

‘Stay with him,’ Carter said. ‘These guys can take all day to clean up.’

Prentice, it was true, had been known to spend twenty-four hours establishing that he wasn’t being followed, but he didn’t have that luxury today. Instead, he took the tram towards the central railway station, getting off on the corner of Jerozolimskie and Jana Pawla II. The next ten minutes would be critical. He walked past the station’s entrance and headed towards Zlote Tarasy, the latest in a series of huge shopping malls to have opened in the capital in recent years. Prentice knew the Varsarians loved to shop, but even he was surprised by Zlote Tarasy’s opulence and range of familiar Western names. He could have been in Bluewater.

He headed for the escalator that would take him down to the lower ground floor. At the bottom, he moved confidently around to the base of the up escalator and rode back to the ground floor, glancing across at the escalator he had just come down on. He knew the Americans wouldn’t fall for it, but today was about maintaining appearances. The CIA’s watchers had never rated the Service’s counter-surveillance skills, and he was more than happy to play down to their expectations.

He glanced at his watch and then headed for a café on the ground floor, where he ordered a black coffee, sat down at a small corner table, and started to read a copy of the International Herald Tribune that he had picked up from the counter. His table was discreet, with an empty seat opposite him.

For a few minutes he looked through the paper, concentrating on stories rather than just pretending to read them. He was always reminding his officers that the best counter-surveillance watchers were trained to spot eye movements. The vibration of his mobile phone interrupted a story on Belgium beer prices. Prentice reached inside his jacket pocket and read the text.

‘This is it,’ Spiro said. ‘All units, I want Daniel Marchant brought in the moment he shows. Alive.’

24

Six miles south-west of the shopping mall, Daniel Marchant sat sipping a black coffee too. Monika was next to him, drinking mint tea in a tall glass and wearing a faded purple salwar khameez. A large rucksack covered in stickers was propped up beside her. The Terminal One departure hall at Frederic Chopin airport was crowded, and they had been lucky to get a table in the bustling café, but Monika seemed to know everyone, and after a brief chat with one of the baristas a reserved sign on the corner table had been removed.

If Marchant had had to select a spot that afforded views of the entire departure hall, and also offered the observer cover and protection, their table would have been his first choice. Their backs were to the wall, denying anyone the chance to approach them unsighted, the seating area was raised above the main concourse, and the entrance and exit onto the road outside was almost beside them. Anyone who entered the departure hall would have to pass beneath them, where they could be easily observed.

All of which made him genuinely drawn to Monika, because it confirmed what he had suspected: she was an intelligence officer, most probably with AW. The text she had discreetly sent while fetching the sugar had also smacked of the covert, but he had already begun to realise at her flat: her bringing his rucksack over from the hostel, his extreme sleepiness, the way she had confined him indoors, changed his flight. And then, finally, her announcement that she had managed to buy a ticket on the same flight and was coming to India with him.

He knew she wasn’t, but he couldn’t confront her, in case it jeopardised her operational cover: the Americans might have had them under surveillance for days. A part of him also wanted to believe that it was true. He was flattered that she trusted him to play the game, and he admired her thoroughness: he hadn’t had such good sex since his own year off.

So he was still David Marlowe and she remained Monika, and together they talked about their shared love for the human drama of arrivals and departures, and whether India’s airports would be any different.

‘The queue for the check-in is short. We should go now,’ she said, resting her hand on his.

‘OK,’ Marchant said, glancing across at the row of desks. He made a cursory sweep of the hall, but by now he was confident that his departure from Poland for India, via the Gulf, was in the safe hands of AW.

‘Is there something wrong?’ she asked.

‘Nothing.’ He paused. ‘It’s just the end of my European adventure, that’s all. I’ve grown quite fond of Poland.’

‘Really?’ she said. ‘Even after your experience with the Americans?’

For a moment, their separate masks slipped. As he looked at her, he wondered what her real name was, whether she had a boyfriend, if she made love differently when she wasn’t in character.

‘It’s amazing how quickly you get over these things,’ he said, thinking back to Stare Kiejkuty. ‘Water off a duck’s back.’

Spiro watched Prentice read his newspaper on the big screen, wondering from which direction Marchant would join him. He knew a part of him envied Prentice’s reputation as a maverick; he could never have the confidence to disobey orders, to do his own thing in the way Prentice had done on numerous occasions over the years. The CIA didn’t allow for freewheeling field agents, not any more. Gone were those glory days in Afghanistan, when he and others were dropped into Kabul with suitcases stuffed full of hundred-dollar bills and instructions to win the war on terror. Everyone now had to be accountable in a way that would have been unthinkable ten years ago. Did Prentice wilfully disregard his briefs from London, Spiro wondered, or had London learnt not to brief him too specifically, knowing that it would be futile?

Either way, Spiro knew Prentice had the better hand, which made what happened next all the more galling. Prentice folded his newspaper, glanced at his watch and finished his coffee.

‘This could be it,’ Spiro said to no one in particular, but Carter concentrated even harder on the panel of visual feeds in front of him.

Everyone in the room watched as Prentice pulled a phone out of his jacket pocket and dialled a number.

‘Did we get a shot of that?’ Spiro asked.

The main screen changed to a close-up of Prentice, focusing on the phone in his hand. The images then played back in slow motion. Carter called out the digits as Prentice’s fingers moved from one number to the next. But his voice started to trail off as the sound of Spiro’s own ringtone filled the room.

25

Prentice sent the pre-written text while his hand was still in his jacket pocket, but neither Spiro nor Carter, or any of his team, suspected him of doing anything other than making a phone call. The only person who knew was Monika, whose phone buzzed in the back pocket of her jeans as they approached the check-in desk for their flight to Dubai.

Spiro didn’t take the call immediately, letting the phone ring five times while his brain linked the image on the screen with the sound of his own phone.

‘Prentice. What a pleasure,’ he said at last, refusing to catch the eye of anyone in the room, although all of them were hanging on his every word. Prentice had humiliated him once before, in Prague a few years earlier, and he knew he was about to do the same again.

Prentice looked around the mall, as if trying to spot Spiro.

‘I can offer you a deal,’ Prentice said, not revealing that he knew he was being filmed. He had noted all the CCTV cameras as he came into the mall, and was tempted to face the one nearest to him, like a newsreader, but he didn’t want to give an impression of being in control. Not yet.

‘And there was I thinking we were on the same side,’ Spiro said.

‘It’s a good deal.’ Prentice paused, looking around the café again.

‘Are all units in place?’ Spiro asked briskly, muting his phone. Carter nodded. ‘Try me,’ Spiro continued to Prentice.

‘You can talk to Marchant, but I need to be present,’ Prentice said.

‘He’s a proven threat to America,’ Spiro said.

‘Who isn’t these days?’

‘The deal was that we could talk to him.’

‘I know. And you can. Just without the watersports. Your new President banned torture, remember?’

‘Where is he?’

‘I’m at a café, ground floor, Zlote Tarasy.’ Prentice knew he didn’t have to tell Spiro, but he still wanted his old rival to feel empowered. ‘When Marchant sees we’re on our own–don’t piss about, he’s good–he’ll come and join us for a latte.’

Marchant and Monika handed their passports over the airline counter. The luck of the Irish, he thought, as the check-in woman took his green passport and studied it. He presumed Monika’s passport had been cleared already. How far was she going to take this pretence? All the way to the plane?

He wasn’t sure if she was on her own or had back-up. He still hadn’t noticed anyone who might be AW, but they both clocked the man pushing a luggage trolley past them while their passports were being checked. Neither of them reacted when he looked in their direction for a moment longer than a stranger would, or when he reached for his phone, talked briefly as he glanced at Marchant again, and then quickened his walk to the main exit.