JON STOCK
Games Traitors Play

Dedication

In memory of my father Peter Stock

Epigraph

‘For while the treason I detest, the traitor still I love’

John Hoole

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Chapter 94

Chapter 95

Chapter 96

Chapter 97

Chapter 98

Chapter 99

Chapter 100

Chapter 101

Chapter 102

Chapter 103

Chapter 104

Chapter 105

Chapter 106

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

A hot afternoon in Marrakech, and the square was already full of people and promise. If the storyteller was aware of the crowd around him, he didn’t show it. The old man sipped at his sweet mint tea and sat down on a plastic chair, first brushing something off it with his empty hand. Had he looked up, he would have seen men and women surge across the square like iron filings, drawn by the magnetism of his act. But he never raised his head, not until he was ready to begin his tale.

Daniel Marchant wondered if he prayed in these moments, or was just running a mental finger over the bookshelves, choosing his narrative. He had been watching this particular storyteller – or halaka – for a week now, convinced that he held the answer to a question that had occupied every waking hour and all of his dreams since he had arrived in Morocco three months earlier.

From his vantage point on the rooftop terrace of the Café Argana, Marchant was able to watch the half-dozen halakas who worked the northern end of Djemaâ el Fna square. None of the others drew a crowd like this one, with his cobalt-blue turban, untidy teeth and cheap pebble glasses that magnified his eyes. Locals came for the stories, tourists for the photos, unable to understand a word but swept along by the drama.

This halaka could tell a thousand and one different tales of dervishes and djinns, each one recounted as if, like Queen Scheherazade, his own life depended on it. Marchant had learned that storytelling had been in his Berber family for centuries, passed down from father to son. In his hands, the tradition was safe, despite the rival temptations of Egyptian television soap operas. And he knew just when to pause, leaving his story on a knife edge. Only when the money bowl had been passed around would he continue.

On a good day, he was even more of a draw than the Gnaoua musicians from the Sahara who somersaulted and swirled their way through the crowds down by the smoky food stalls. When he was talking, the square’s snake charmers rested their cobras, fire-eaters paused for breath, even the travelling dentists put down their dentures and tools.

Marchant sat up in his chair, sensing that the time had almost come. He wasn’t sure how the halaka judged when the crowd had reached critical mass. The man was a natural showman, milking the moment every afternoon when he finally lifted his sunbeaten face and surveyed his audience with a defiant stare. Marchant reached for his camera, focusing the lens on the top of the man’s turban. The storyteller’s head was still bent forward, concealing his face.

The lens was not the sort that could be bought in a camera shop, but anyone watching Marchant would not have suspected that it was many times more powerful than its innocuous length suggested. He appeared like just another tourist as he slid it through the ornate metal latticework of the restaurant railing and observed the scene below him. Except that a tourist might have taken a few photos, particularly when the halaka finally looked up to address his expectant crowd. But Marchant forgot he was watching through a camera, forgot his cover. He could see that the man in his lens was frightened.

Marchant had come to know the halaka’s assured mannerisms, the tricks of his trade. The street wisdom of yesterday had vanished, his stage presence replaced by fear. He should have been staring ahead, hypnotising his audience with a narrator’s spell, but instead the man’s eyes flitted to the back of the crowd, as if he were searching for someone. Pulling on the hem of his grey djellaba, the local head-to-toe garment, he rocked on his battered baboush slippers, shifting his weight from heel to toe. For perhaps the first time in his life, the storyteller appeared lost for words.

Marchant checked with his own eyes, as if the camera might be lying, and then looked again through the lens. He took some photos, cursing himself for his slackness, and scanned the back of the crowd. The man was here somewhere, he was sure of it, waiting to hear the halaka’s coded phrases that would send him off into the snow-tipped Atlas Mountains to the south of the city. And Marchant would follow, wherever the man went, however remote, knowing who the message was for.

For several weeks, Marchant had been convinced that someone was planning to make contact with Salim Dhar through the storytellers of Marrakech. He had overheard something in the souks, a fleeting remark in amongst the chatter. Using the halakas was a primitive form of communication for the world’s most wanted terrorist, but that was the point. Echelon, the West’s intelligence-analysis network, was in meltdown, monitoring every email, phone call, text and Twitter for the faintest trace of Dhar. It had been ever since he had tried to assassinate the US President in Delhi the previous year. Every time the analysts at Fort Meade in Maryland thought they had found him, the information was relayed to the CIA’s headquarters in Langley. Its drone strikes in Af-Pak, where most of the sightings were reported, were now running at thirty a month.

But Dhar was still free, on the run. And Marchant was certain that no amount of software would ever find him. Dhar was shunning technology, keeping one step ahead of the modern world by retreating into the old. Ancient oral traditions, such as the halakas, were beyond the range of the spy planes and stealth satellites that orbited the globe in ever more desperate circles.

It had worked for fugitives before. During the 1970s, when General Oufkir was Morocco’s hardline interior minister, the halakas used code words to refer to him and alert the public to planned raids by his secret police. Snakes were more than serpents sliding through the narrative: they were warnings of time and place. It was a way of communicating without suspicion. Information could be passed anonymously, without one-to-one meetings: textbook tradecraft. And now the halaka was about to issue another message.

Marchant pushed his tea away, folded some dirhams under the silver pot, and went to the stairwell. He knew he didn’t have long.

Down in the square, a man approached him from a narrow alley to one side of the café.

‘Hashish? You want some hashish?’

Marchant managed a smile. His student cover must have been convincing. Officially, he was in Morocco for a PhD on Berber culture, and took his studies very seriously. His dirt-blond hair was cut short, and he was wearing a woollen djellaba.

‘Thanks, no,’ he said, walking on towards the crowd.

‘Souk tour? Leather? Instruments? I show you Led Zeppelin photos. Mr Robert, he came to my friend’s shop.’

Marchant ignored him and walked on. He could do without the attention. The tout was not giving up, though, trotting along beside him, pouring out a list of random words that he must have gleaned over the years, like a magpie, from visiting tourists.

‘Which place are you from, Berber man? London? I know UK. Yorkshire pudding, 73 bus, Sheffield steel.’

But the tout was losing interest. He peeled away, calling half-heartedly after Marchant, ‘M&S? A303?’

Marchant had almost joined the crowd now. He didn’t want any trouble in future from this man, so he raised a hand in a friendly farewell, his back to him.

‘Terrorist,’ the tout said, loud enough for one or two people at the edge of the crowd to turn around. Marchant had been called a few things in Marrakech, but this was a first. The choice of that term of abuse was nothing more than an unfortunate coincidence, he told himself, but he scanned the square again. Most of the sellers had got to know him in the past few months, letting the diligent British student practise his Berber on them. This tout was new to the area. Marchant threw him another glance. He was now leading two female tourists into the medina, looking at their map. Was it a CIA cover? Did someone else share his suspicions of the halaka?

The Americans had kept an eye on Marchant when he had first arrived in Marrakech, but they had soon lost interest, believing that the British agent was barking up the wrong tree. Langley was sure that Salim Dhar wasn’t in North Africa, but had headed north after attempting to assassinate the President, smuggling himself across the Kashmir border in a goods lorry. The trail had gone cold in Pakistan, as it so often did, and they assumed he was now in hiding on the north-west border with Afghanistan, along with many of America’s other most wanteds.

Marchant joined the back of the crowd and listened, watching the people around him. They had already fallen under the spell of the halaka, who had regained his composure. As he listened to the story of Sindbad the sailor, Marchant wished his Berber was better. He was back lying on the floor of his childhood home in the Cotswolds. A recording of Sindbad was the first vinyl album his father had ever bought him. For weeks after playing it on the big old wooden-cased HMV player, Marchant had had nightmares about the Roc bird, terrified that the skies would darken with its enormous wings.

The halaka had paused. Marchant watched him closely, the droplets of sweat beading his brow. He had caught the eye of someone near the back of the crowd, holding his gaze for barely a second. Marchant had clocked the man earlier, a Berber, early twenties, calico skullcap. Marchant waited for the halaka to begin speaking again – of giant serpents and the Roc bird – and then glanced back at the man. But he was already gone, walking briskly across the square, trying not to break into a run.

2

The six US Marines had been travelling all night and most of the day, bound, gagged and blindfolded. But now the 4x4 had come to a stop, giving their bruised bodies a brief respite. The vehicle’s suspension was shot through, and they had been driven over poor mountainous tracks. No one, though, was under any illusion about what lay ahead: if they had reached the end of their journey, they were close to the end of their lives.

They had expected to die the night before, when a group of Taleban insurgents had ambushed their radio reconnaissance unit on a notorious stretch of road near Gayan in Paktika, eastern Afghanistan. They should have been in Helmand with the rest of their Marine Expeditionary Force, but had been seconded to Paktika in a push to hunt down the local Pashtun warlord, Sirajuddin Haqqani. After a stand-off, waiting in vain for the air support they had called in, the Marines had stepped out from behind their disabled Hummer with their arms up, exhausted, expecting to be shot. But the Taleban had taken them prisoner. It was a high-risk strategy: the US response would be on an overwhelming scale. The AC-130 gunships, though, never showed, and the Taleban moved out quickly with their captives.

The rear and side doors of the 4x4 opened and two Taleban began to pull the Marines from the vehicle, grabbing the collars of their sweat-soaked fatigues. As their platoon commander, Lieutenant Randall Oaks knew he had to be strong, set an example for the others, but in truth he wished he had been shot the previous night. He thought of the videos of beheadings he had told himself not to watch before coming out to Afghanistan, the stories that had circulated in the camp when they had first flown in from North Carolina. It wasn’t good to be a prisoner of the Taleban.

Oaks could tell through his blindfold that the daylight was dying. It was cooler, too, compared to Gayan, where they had been ambushed, and he had been aware of gaining height during the long drive. If they were being taken to the mountains, maybe they could hope to live for a few more days. They would become bargaining chips, a way to buy some advantage in a war that neither side was ever going to win. But now he sensed another agenda.

None of their Taleban captors said anything as they pushed the Marines along a track. Oaks could hear the others stumbling, like him, on the rocky terrain, but there was one noise that was different. The Taleban were dragging someone along, a Marine who was too weak to walk. Oaks knew it was Lance Corporal Troy Murray. They were a tight-knit unit, had been ever since they had arrived five months earlier, but Murray had stood out for all the wrong reasons from the start. It wasn’t just the word ‘INFIDEL’ that he had had tattooed in big letters across his chest. He was physically the weakest and mentally a mess, unable to go out on patrol unless he had taken too many psychological meds. This was his fourth tour, and he should never have been sent.

One more month and they were due to return to Camp Lejeune. Their families’ banners would soon be up on the fencing that ran along Route 24 outside the base, joining the mile upon mile of ‘Missed you’ and ‘Welcome home’ messages that had become a part of the North Carolina landscape. It was a public patchwork of loss, each banner telling a private story, of missed births, heart-ache, lonely nights, enforced chastity.

Oaks remembered the first time he saw them, returning from his inaugural tour of Iraq. Envious cheers had gone up on the bus when Murray, in happier days, had seen his: ‘Get ready for a long de-briefing, stud muffin.’ And then he had seen his own, written in bright purple felt-tip on a big bedsheet, near the main gate: ‘Welcome Home Lieutenant Daddy. Just in time for the terrible twos.’ He was a family man now.

In recent days, the platoon had begun to brag about what they would do when they got home. Visit the clubs in Wilmington: The Whiskey, The Rox; shoot the breeze on Onslow Beach, listen out for the bell of the man selling snowballs. But there was only one thing now on Oaks’s list: to become a more loving husband, a less absent father. He would attend church every Sunday, every day if necessary. As an adult, he had never been religious, but in the past twenty-four hours he had prayed with a desperate intensity, trying in vain to remember the brief period in his childhood when he had fallen asleep in prayer, risen early to read the Bible at the kitchen table. Within the last hour, as his own elusive faith had slipped through his hands like desert sand, he had even attempted to address other people’s gods, too, explaining, apologising, beseeching.

The group was being herded into what felt like a small farm outbuilding. The few outdoor sounds – faint wind, distant birdsong – were partly muffled, but not entirely. It was as if they were surrounded by walls, but were still outside. Above their heads, Oaks thought he could hear the sound of a canopy flapping. Before he could think any more about their location, he was pushed down to the dry floor, his back up against an uneven wall. The gag in his mouth was peeled up and a bottle of water put to his chafed lips. He drank deeply until the bottle was pulled away, his gag replaced. It was not as tight as it had been, though, and Oaks began at once to work his jaw, keeping it moving.

The removal of his sight had heightened his other senses. He knew there were two Taleban with them. One was administering the water, but what was the other doing? He listened above the delirious moaning of Murray, who sounded barely conscious. There was the click of a case and the sound of something metallic being placed high up on a wall, on a windowsill perhaps. Was it an Improvised Explosive Device, set to be triggered by their movement? There was silence again. The two Taleban were leaving them. There were more muffled moans from the men, sounds of primitive despair as they dug their boot heels deep into the mud.

Oaks heard the 4x4 start up outside. He was expecting some wheelspin, a triumphant circling of the prisoners before it roared off. But the vehicle just drove back down the track, as casually as his father’s station wagon when he used to leave for work, until the sound of its engine was lost in the stillness of the night. That slowness terrified him. It was too calm, too rehearsed, indicative of a bigger plan.

Ten, maybe fifteen minutes later, his thoughts were interrupted by the sound of someone speaking Urdu, coming from close by. Oaks’s tired brain struggled to work out what was happening, whether he was hallucinating. He tried to focus on the name the man had given when he first spoke. It hung in the air above them like a paper kite, nagging at Oaks’s mind as it bobbed in the evening breeze: Salim.

3

This was the moment Omar Rashid had been trained for, but he had never actually expected it to happen, not to him. But there it was, an unambiguous flashing light on his console. He knew his life would never be the same again. He was just a junior analyst on the SIGINT graveyard shift, always had been, ever since he’d signed up to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade in Maryland. And that was exactly how he liked it. Success happened to the ambitious, to the hungry. Rashid was more than happy to draw his modest salary and listen through the night to the regional traffic, before heading home to his basement apartment in Baltimore. He enjoyed his work, but it wasn’t loyalty to the NSA that drove him.

A few hours earlier, he had tuned in to a pro-Western Pakistani politician and his wife arguing on a phone in Lahore. Later, when the husband had returned to his home in a wealthy suburb, he had listened to them making love, too, thanks to a wire installed in the bedroom by the ISI, Pakistan’s main intelligence agency. The ISI was unaware that its heavily encrypted surveillance frequencies had been breached, but Rashid didn’t concern himself about that. Just as he tried not to dwell on the pleasure he derived from such interceptions, known as ‘vinegar strokes’ among the nightshift analysts. He had feigned indifference when he handed in his transcript to the line manager, but it was a gift, and he hoped she would enjoy it later. Didn’t everyone at SIGINT City?

This, though, was different. The flashing light was an Echelon Level Five alert, triggered by a keyword integral to one of Fort Meade’s biggest-ever manhunts. Rashid’s able mind worked fast. Despite Echelon’s best efforts, it was impossible for the West to monitor more than a fraction of the world’s phone calls and emails in real time. Most of the daily ‘take’ was recorded and crunched later by NSA’s data miners, who drilled down through the traffic, searching for suspicious patterns. They worked out in Utah, where a vast data silo had been built in the desert. Rashid was one of a handful of Urdu analysts who worked in the now. He cast his net each day on the Af-Pak waters and waited.

Real-time analysts knew where to listen, but the odds of catching anyone were still stacked against them. As a result, Rashid was left alone. Anything he could bring to the table was a bonus. But if this latest intercept was what the flashing light suggested it was, he would be fêted, hailed as a hero. His work would suddenly be the centre of attention. A manager would study his previous reports, discover a pattern, the unnaturally high number of bedroom intercepts. Someone would sniff the vinegar.

The keyword and a set of coordinates in North Waziristan were triggering alarms all over the system. Rashid adjusted his headphones. He was listening to one half of a mobile-phone conversation in Urdu: the other person must have been speaking on an encrypted handset. COMINT would track it down later, unpick its rudimentary ciphers. The voiceprint-recognition software had already kicked in, analysing the speaker’s vocal cavities and articulator patterns: the interplay of lips, teeth, tongue. Rashid didn’t need a computer to tell him whose voice it was. The whole of Fort Meade knew it. It had been played over the building’s intercom in the months after the attempt on the President’s life. Photos of the would-be assassin were on every noticeboard, along with details of the bonus for any employee who helped bring about his capture.

In a few seconds, Rashid would have details of the mobile number’s provenance and history. Occasionally, this yielded something, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred it was a clean pay-as-you-go phone, bought over the counter in a backstreet booth in Karachi. Rashid’s supervisor arrived at his shoulder just as the screen started to blink.

‘You got something for me, Omar?’ she said, more in hope than expectation.

Rashid nodded at his computer, feeling his mouth go dry. Two lights were now flashing. The number had been used once before, in south India, days before the assassination attempt on the President in Delhi. It was the last time Salim Dhar had made a call on a mobile phone.

‘Sweet holy mother of Jesus, you’ve been fishing,’ the supervisor whispered, one hand on his shoulder. With the other, she picked up Rashid’s phone, still staring at his screen. ‘Get me James Spiro at Langley. Tell him it’s a real-time Level Five.’

4

Marchant had nearly lost the man several times in the network of narrow lanes off Djemaâ el Fna. He appeared to be heading south, walking fast down the rue de Bab Agnaou, occasionally looking behind him, but only at junctions, where he could pass off the glances as normal behaviour. The man knew what he was doing. Marchant kept as much distance as he dared between them, but he was on his own. In normal circumstances, a surveillance team of six would be moving through the streets with him, ahead of and behind the target like an invisible cocoon, covering every possibility. Marchant had no such luxury.

He kept one eye out for a taxi as the street widened. It was a less popular part of town for foreigners, and he needed to work harder to blend in. Instead of shoe shops selling yellow baboush and stalls piled high with pyramids of dates and almonds, there were noisy industrial units, larger and less welcoming than the tourist-friendly workshops in the medina. Marchant would follow the man like-for-like. It helped the pursuer to think like his target, to try to anticipate his choices. If he had a car parked somewhere, Marchant would find a car. If he got onto a bicycle, Marchant would find a bicycle.

The man had stopped outside what seemed to be a small carpet factory. Marchant hung back in the shadow of an empty doorway, fifty yards down the street. He could hear the sound of looms weaving, shuttles shooting. Bundles of wool hung from an upstairs window, the rich cupreous dyes drying in the low sun. A woman came to the factory entrance. She chatted briefly with the man, looking up and down the street as she spoke, and pressed a key into his hand.

Without hesitating, the man walked around the corner, started up an old motorised bike and drove off slowly, blue smoke belching from the two-stroke engine. For a moment, Marchant wondered if it would be easier to pursue him on foot, but he checked himself: like-for-like. Despite being in a hurry, the man had specifically chosen low-key transport. He was trying not to draw attention to himself, which suggested he was worried about being followed or watched.

Marchant crossed the road to a row of parked mopeds. Marrakech was overrun with Mobylettes and other Parisian-style motorised bikes, a legacy of when Morocco was a French protectorate. They weaved in and out of the tourists and shoppers in the souks, taking priority like the cows in the markets of old Delhi, which he used to visit on his ayah’s shoulders as a child.

He glanced at the selection. There was an old blue Motobecane 50V Mobylette, top speed 30 mph, and a couple of more modern Peugeot Vogues. The Mobylette was slower, but it would be easier to start, and the man was already out of sight, the noise of his engine fading fast. It also held a certain appeal for Marchant. For years, the Mobylette was made under licence in India. A few months before his father finished his second posting in Delhi, the family had presented Chandar, their cook, with one, to replace his old Hero bicycle. Chandar used to maintain it lovingly, showing Marchant, then eight years old, how to start it, both of them laughing as Chandar pedalled furiously in his chef’s whites until the engine coughed into life.

Marchant checked that the Mobylette’s wheel forks weren’t locked. Nothing he had done since his arrival in Marrakech had aroused any attention from the authorities. That was part of the deal, one of the conditions he had agreed with MI6 in return for being sent to Morocco and allowed to operate on his own. He hadn’t wanted back-up or support. It was, after all, a very personal quest: family business, as his father would have called it. Marcus Fielding, the professorial Chief of MI6, had agreed, knowing that if anyone could find Salim Dhar, it was Marchant. But Fielding had warned him: no drinking, no brawls, no break-ins, nothing illegal. He had caused enough trouble already in his short career.

Marchant had kept his side of the bargain. For three months, he had stayed off the sauce, savouring life outside Legoland, MI6’s headquarters in Vauxhall. The CIA had prevented him from leaving Britain in the aftermath of the assassination attempt, but after a frustrating year, Fielding had finally prevailed, much to Marchant’s relief. London was no place for a field agent.

He had studied hard in Marrakech’s libraries, researching the history of the Berbers and taking the opportunity to reread the Koran. It had been required reading during his time at Fort Monckton, MI6’s training base on the end of the Gosport peninsula. But he read it now with renewed interest, searching for anything that might help him to understand Salim Dhar’s world.

In the cool of the early mornings, he had gone running through the deserted medina. The first run had been the hardest, not because his body was out of shape, but because of the memories it brought back: the London Marathon, Leila, their time together. He had returned after two miles, in need of a stiff drink, but he managed to keep his promise to Fielding. After two weeks, he no longer missed the Scotch. In a Muslim country, abstinence was easier than he had feared it would be. And he realised that he no longer missed Leila. It felt as if life was starting anew.

In the year following Leila’s death, he had been unable to go running. He had missed her every day, seen her face wherever he went in London. The coldness that had encased his heart since he arrived in Morocco had shocked him at first, but he knew it had to be if he was to survive in the Service. His trained eye had spotted one suicide bomber amongst 35,000 participants, but he had failed to identify the traitor running at his own side, the woman he had loved.

Now, though, he was about to cross a line, and for a moment he felt the buzz he’d been missing. It was hardly a big breach, but if someone reported a foreigner stealing a Mobylette, there was a small chance that the local police would become involved. A report might be filed. He would show up on the grid, however faintly, and he couldn’t afford to do that. London would recall him. He would be back behind a desk in Legoland, analysing embellished CX reports from ambitious field agents, drinking too much at the Morpeth Arms after work. But he couldn’t afford to lose his man.

He glanced up and down the street. No one was around. He sat on the Mobylette, which was still on its stand. He checked the fuel switch, then began pedalling, thinking of Chandar as he worked the choke and the compressor with his thumbs. The engine started up, and he rocked the bike forward, throttled back and set off down the road. It wasn’t exactly a wheelspin start.

As the Mobylette struggled to reach 25 mph, the only thing on Marchant’s mind was where the man could be heading on a motorised pedal bike. Marchant had assumed all along that if he was right about the halaka, the contact would carry his message south into the High Atlas mountains, to Asni and beyond to the Tizi’n’Test pass, where the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (GICM) was known to run remote training camps (it had others in the Rif mountains, too).

The GICM had its roots in the war against the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and had forged close ties with al Q’aeda, providing logistical support to operatives passing through Morocco. After 9/11, it had become more proactive, and a number of sleeper cells were activated. The synchronised bombings in Casablanca in 2003, which had killed forty-four people, bore all the hallmarks of GICM, and the leadership had helped with the recruitment of jihadis for the war in Iraq. Marchant was convinced, after three months in Marrakech, that the organisation was now shielding Salim Dhar in the mountains. But the smoking bike ahead of him would struggle to reach the edge of town, let alone make it up the steep climb to Asni.

5

Lieutenant Oaks had worked the wet gag loose enough to speak. It was still in his mouth, but the tension had gone and he was able to make himself heard.

‘Everyone OK?’ he asked, breathing heavily. He could tell from the grunted responses that the others had been propped against the wall on either side of him, two to the left, two to the right. Only one of them hadn’t replied.

‘Where’s Murray?’ Oaks asked. There was a faint reply from across the room. At least he was still alive. Outside, the noises of an Afghanistan night offered little comfort: the distant cries of a pack of wild dogs. The Urdu had stopped a few minutes earlier, and Oaks was now certain whose voice it had been.

‘We don’t have long,’ he said, edging himself across the floor to what he hoped was the centre of the hut. Movement was difficult, painful. His legs were bound tight at the ankles, and his wrists had been shackled together high up behind his back, his arms bent awkwardly. No one moved, and he wondered if any of them had understood his distorted words.

‘We’ve got to get into the centre, right here,’ he continued, falling on his side. He lay there for a few seconds, his cheek on the mud floor. It smelt vaguely of animals, of the stables he had visited in West Virginia for a childhood birthday. They had minutes to live, and he only had one shot at saving them. ‘Get your asses over here!’ he shouted, his voice choking with the effort of trying to right himself. ‘Jesus, guys, don’t you get it?’

He heard the shuffle of fatigues across the floor. ‘Is that you, Jimmy? Leroy? Bunch up tight, all of you.’ Slowly, the Marines dragged themselves into the centre of the room, even Murray, who was the last to arrive, rolling himself over on the dry mud. He lay at Oaks’s feet, listening to his leader, breathing irregularly.

‘That voice,’ Oaks said, composing himself, frustrated by his distorted words. He was sounding like the deaf boy in his class at high school. ‘It was Salim Dhar’s.’ He worked his jaw again, trying to shake off the sodden gag. No one said anything. They still hadn’t realised the implications. ‘A UAV will be on its way, you understand that? A drone. The fucking Reaper’s coming.’

Murray let out a louder moan. Oaks tried not to think about the two Hellfire missiles he had once seen being loaded under an MQ-1 Predator at Balad airbase in Iraq. The kill chain had been shortened since then. There was no longer the same delay. And the MQ-1 Predator had become the MQ-9 Reaper, a purpose-built hunter/killer with five-hundred-pound bombs as well as Hellfires.

America had learned its lessons after it had once seen Mullah Omar, the one-eyed leader of the Taleban, in the crosswires of an armed Predator. It was in October 2001, a few weeks after 9/11, and the CIA had wanted to fire at Omar’s convoy of 4x4s, but the decision was referred upwards to top brass in the Pentagon, who consulted lawyers and withheld the order while Omar stopped to pray at a mosque. The moment passed, and the story, true or false, entered military folklore. Americans had been trying to make amends ever since, taking out hundreds of Taleban and al Q’aeda targets with pilotless drones, or UAVs, but Oaks knew that the military had never quite got over the Omar incident. Now the Taleban was taunting them again.

‘We’ll show up on the UAV’s thermal imaging,’ Oaks said. ‘This lousy cowshed’s just got a sheet for a roof.’ He had little confidence in his plan, but he had to try something. He owed it to his daughter. ‘Do exactly as I say, and pray to your God.’

6

Marchant knew as soon as the man pulled into the petrol station that he was going in for an upgrade. The bike had made it five miles out of Marrakech on the R203, across the dry plains south of the city, but it was now starting to struggle. His own Mobylette was suffering too, and the frosted mountains were looming, floating on the horizon in the evening light. But it wasn’t the scenery that interested Marchant: it was the group of touring motorbikes that had stopped to refuel at the station. His mind was beginning to think like a thief’s. He pulled up two hundred yards short of the garage, bought a bottle of mineral water from a roadside stall, and drank deeply, watching the dusty forecourt.

There were at least ten bikes, powerful tourers laden down with carriers covered in ferry stickers and English flags. Marchant knew from his three months in Marrakech that Morocco was a popular ‘raid’ for British bikers. He had seen them rumbling into town on their way to the Atlas Mountains, where the roads were good and the passes were among the highest in Africa.

The riders, bulked out in their padded leathers, had crowded around one bike. It was set apart from the others, next to a support Land Rover Defender. A man was lying on the ground beside the back wheel. The bike seemed to have a mechanical problem of some sort, and the group was deep in discussion, talking animatedly with two local guides. The other bikes were unattended. If the keys were in the ignition, it would be easy for the man to set off on one of them. But he drove past the bikes, past the petrol pumps, and parked his moped on the far side of the forecourt shop. He then walked around the back of the building, out of sight.

What was he doing? Marchant kept watching as he slipped the lid back onto the plastic bottle of water. Moments later, the man reappeared, helmeted and riding a powerful touring bike. As if making a token check for traffic, he looked back down the dusty road in Marchant’s direction – was he taunting him? – and was gone, roaring off towards Asni and the mountains.

Marchant felt sick. He was about to lose his man. He also knew that he was right, that Salim Dhar was up there somewhere in the High Atlas. And that made his stomach tighten so much that he wanted to throw up. The only good thing was that none of the bikers had clocked the man as he had driven off. In Marchant’s experience, bikers usually checked out each other’s hardware, but they were too preoccupied with their own broken machine.

Marchant remounted his Mobylette and rode up to the garage. He switched the engine off before he turned into the forecourt, and freewheeled silently for the last twenty yards. He passed the first two bikes, checking the ignitions. Neither had a key. But the third, a BMW GS Adventure, did. Marchant parked up beyond it and glanced once in the direction of the group. It was then that he realised that the man on the ground was not trying to mend the bike. He was the focus of the group’s attention, and he was lying very still. The bikers were too far away for Marchant to hear what they were saying, but he thought he heard someone mention a doctor.

Ignoring an instinctive urge to go over and help, Marchant switched quickly from his moped to the tourer, turned the ignition and felt the 1150cc engine rumble into life beneath him. Without looking up, he moved off the forecourt, joined the main road, and accelerated slowly away from the garage, heading for Mount Toubkal, the highest peak on the horizon.

7

James Spiro had not enjoyed his job with the CIA since he had been moved to Head of Clandestine, Europe. It was a promotion, and should have been rewarding, a few comfortable years in London before he returned to Virginia for greater things. But he hadn’t counted on Salim Dhar proving so elusive. Ever since he had slipped through the net in India, Dhar had been Spiro’s biggest headache. He would wake at night, sheets drenched in sweat, seeing his President take the bullet that had somehow missed him in Delhi. His in-tray was full of daily requests from the Pentagon, the White House, the media, all wanting to know where Dhar was and why he hadn’t been eliminated. And in his darkest moments, he couldn’t stop thinking of Leila, the woman who had died instead of the President, the woman he had slept with only hours before.

Spiro knew his career hung in the balance, which was why he was now back on home soil, coordinating the Agency’s biggest manhunt since the search for Osama bin Laden after 9/11. There had been dozens of credible sightings of Dhar around the world, each one proving false, each one ratcheting up the pressure on Spiro to find him. The collateral damage from drone strikes hadn’t helped his cause. The last one, in Pakistan, based on an ISI tip-off, had killed thirty civilians, mostly women and children.

And what were America’s greatest allies doing to help? Diddly shit. London’s relationship with Dhar was ‘delicate’, according to Marcus Fielding. Dubious, more like. Daniel Marchant, the one person who might be able to find Dhar, was on vacation in North Africa, if such a thing was possible, eating too much couscous in Marrakech. If it had been up to Spiro, Marchant would have been strapped back onto the waterboard, telling them all he knew about Dhar, rather than being allowed to wander around Morocco’s souks as if nothing had happened.

Now, though, the end seemed finally in sight. It was always going to be only a matter of time until Dhar made a mistake.

‘Run me those coordinates again,’ he said to the operator next to him. He was standing in the ‘cockpit’, a hot and crowded trailer, also known as a mobile Ground Control Station, in a quiet corner of Creech US Air Force Base, Nevada. In front of him, two operatives were seated in high-backed chairs, each monitoring a bank of screens. One was a pilot with 42 Attack Squadron, a seasoned officer in his forties who used to fly F-16 fighter jets but was now directing MQ-9 Reapers, the most advanced hunter/killer drones in the world. The other was his sensor operator, a woman no older than twenty-five who controlled the Reaper’s multi-spectral targeting suite.

Spiro had spent a lot of his time at Creech in recent weeks, too much for his liking. And he had eaten too many Taco Bells in Las Vegas, thirty-five miles south-east. Creech used to be a bare-bones facility, a rocky outpost in the desert, but now it resembled a building site. New hangars were going up all the time around the main airstrip, which had once been used for landing practice by pilots from the nearby Nellis Air Force Base. Spiro found it hard to believe that such a bleak, uninhabited place represented the future of aerial combat. But he guessed that was the point: the USAF’s first squadron of Reapers was unmanned.

The pilot in front of him read out the coordinates. Dhar’s voice had been traced to a remote location in North Waziristan, on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Fort Meade had done a good job for once. Someone had been listening in real time, and not just to Pakistani generals having sex. This was the big one, and there was a palpable sense of excitement in the cockpit, even from the base commander. He had stepped into the trailer when news spread across the base that Salim Dhar might be about to be taken down. It would be a big moment for the commander. His unit, 432 Air Expeditionary Wing, had stood up at Creech in 2007 to spearhead the global war on terror, and he needed a result. Spiro knew the commander blamed the CIA for the recent spate of bad publicity. The last strike in Pakistan had brought relations between the Agency and the USAF to a new low.

‘I think we have our man,’ Spiro said, turning to the commander.

‘We need to do this by the book,’ he replied. ‘You know that.’

‘Of course. And the book says we take Dhar out. We have an 80 per cent confidence threshold.’

‘Are there any legals?’ the commander asked, turning to an officer next to him.

‘Negative, sir. Potential for civilian collateral is zero. The building is remote, nearest population cluster five miles south. And this is a Level Five.’

‘Colonel, we’re locked onto the target,’ the pilot said, turning to the sensor operator. ‘Can you put thermal up on screen one?’

Spiro watched as blotches of bright colour appeared on the screen between the two seated operators. The surrounding screens were relaying live video streams from electro-optical and image-intensified night cameras mounted under the nose of the Reaper, and stills from a synthetic aperture radar. Spiro still hadn’t quite got his head round the fact that these images were streaming live, give or take a one-to-two-second delay, from 30,000 feet above Afghanistan, 7,500 miles away.

‘Fuse thermal with intensified,’ the pilot said. The image on the main screen sharpened a little, but it was still no more than a series of yellow, red and purple shapes.

It was at this point that the young female analyst first began to worry about their target. She wasn’t meant to be on duty now. The 24/7 rota they worked to had lost its shape in the previous few hours, and she should have been back in her room, getting some sleep and reading the bible before her next shift. (A lot of the analysts headed off to Vegas after work, but she found the contrast too great: one moment looking at magnified images of a destroyed Taleban target, the next shooting craps.) But the next analyst on duty had phoned in sick, and she had agreed to work on until cover showed up. That was two hours ago. She didn’t like bending the rules. She tried to lead a quiet, disciplined life. All she could hope for was that the base commander didn’t glance at the rota sheet on the wall behind them.

‘Sir, we have multiple personnel in the target zone,’ she said, looking closely at the screen. ‘And what looks like a pack of wild dogs forty yards to the east.’

Night-time image analysis was a skill that not everyone on the base appreciated. The pilots did, but she resented the disdain with which the CIA officers appeared to view her profession. Spiro was the worst, but that was also because he kept trying to look down her blouse. He hadn’t the first idea about the subtleties of either women or her job.

During the day, with clear visibility, it was easy enough to distinguish man from woman, cat from dog, even from 30,000 feet. The images were pin sharp. But at night you had to rely on the digitally enhanced imagery of the infra-red spectrum. Interpreting the ghostly monochrome of the mid-IR wavelengths required intuition and training to flesh out the shapes. You had to impose upon them known patterns of human behaviour. Two years earlier, she had averted a friendly-fire attack when she realised that the four targets on an Afghanistan hillside, thought to be insurgents, were doing press-ups. She had never seen the Taleban working out, and assumed, rightly, that they were US soldiers.

The shapes in front of her now, clustered together inside a hut on a mountainside in North Waziristan, were not normal, even allowing for the local atmospheric conditions, which were making the images less clear than she would have liked. She isolated the feed from the thermal infra-red camera, which detected heat emitted from objects, and then fused it again with the image-intensified images. She had seen Taleban leaders talking many times before, and they never stood so close. When they sat, they formed circles. These people had created something else: a glowing crucifix to warn off the Reaper.

8

Marchant pulled off the dusty track and parked the BMW behind a cluster of coarse bushes, out of sight. It was almost dark and he could see the headlights of a lorry coming down over the Tizi’n’Test pass in the far distance. He wished he had been able to steal a scrambler rather than a tourer, as the BMW had struggled with the rough terrain. They had left the main road, and followed an increasingly remote and bumpy track for the past half-hour, Marchant keeping at least a mile between them. The man he was pursuing had stopped here a few minutes earlier and parked his bike on the other side of the track, without bothering to hide it. He was in a hurry, and had already disappeared on foot, following a steep path that zigzagged up through windblown juniper-berry trees that clung to the hillside.

Marchant set off up the path, confident that he had left enough time between them not to be seen. He thought he was fit from his running and his abstemious life in Marrakech, but the mountains were soon sucking the thin air from his lungs. Occasionally, as he crested another false ridge, he saw his man in front of him, at least five hundred yards ahead, covering the ground with the ease of a mountain goat. Whenever he turned, Marchant pressed himself flat against the dry earth, feeling his chest rise and fall as he tried to keep his breathing quiet.

It was after forty minutes of climbing that he heard the first cries on the wind. The mountains around here were farmed by Berber goatherds, who called out to each other across the valleys as they followed their animals. Sometimes they sang bitter songs about arrogant Berbers who had travelled abroad and returned with enough money to build ugly modern houses on the hillside. But tonight they seemed to be singing of something else. Marchant struggled with the dialect, but he could pick up enough to detect the agitation and fear in their voices. Had his man come up here to give his coded message to the goatherds, who would pass it on from man to man across the mountains, until eventually it reached Dhar? It would be in keeping with the primitive means of communication used so far.

Marchant listened again to the Berbers’ agitated calls as a goat stumbled out of the gloaming next to him and moved off down the hillside. Something had disturbed the peace of the mountains. The man he had been following had stopped now. His hands were cupped around his mouth and he was calling out into the dying light. The wind was in the wrong direction for Marchant to hear, but the man’s body language said enough. He had sunk to his knees with exhaustion. Had he come with a warning? Was it that he was too late? Then he heard him cry out again. The swirling wind carried the sound down the hillside to Marchant. There was panic in his voice, and they weren’t Berber words this time.

‘Nye strelai!’ he shouted. ‘Nye strelai!’

Moments later, a short burst of automatic gunfire rang out, echoing through the mountains, and the man slumped over. Marchant pressed himself closer to the earth, breathing hard, searching around for better cover, calculating where the shots had come from. He slid across to a bush, keeping his eyes on the horizon. And then he saw it, hovering up over the crest of the hill. The Roc bird rose into the sky.

He knew at once that it was Russian-built, an Mi-8, its distinctive profile silhouetted in the dusk light. It was white, but there were no UN markings. The shots had come from the machine-gun mounted beneath the cockpit. Marchant was dead if the pilot had seen him, but the helicopter turned, nose down, and rose into the star-studded sky, heading towards the Algerian border.

9

The doubt that had been sown in the young sensor operator’s mind grew stronger with each passing second. She had tried to tell herself that she was just seeing things, that she was suffering from exhaustion, too many late nights reading God’s word, but there was no escaping the yellow shape that the heat of the bodies had formed. Although the hut only had a canvas roof of some kind, it was impossible to tell precisely how many people there were inside, as the bodies were bunched so closely together – too close for Taleban.

‘Sir, there’s something abnormal about the target imagery,’ she said, turning to her pilot.

‘Would you care to elaborate?’ Spiro said, before the pilot had time to reply.

The analyst paused, struggling to conceal her dislike of Spiro. ‘They’re too close together.’

‘Perhaps they’re praying. What’s the local time anyhow? I’ll put money on it being the Mecca hour. If we have no other objections, I say we shoot.’

Spiro directed his last comment at the base commander, who was on the phone to the Pentagon. Spiro knew the commander needed the break just as much as he did.

‘We’re green-lit,’ the commander said, replacing the phone. Spiro could tell he was concealing his excitement. He just had to make sure the USAF didn’t get to take any credit.

‘Then let’s engage, people,’ Spiro said, putting a hand on the pilot’s shoulder. The pilot flinched, and Spiro withdrew it. He knew at once that it had been an inappropriate gesture. These pilots were under pressure, too. There was talk on the base of combat stress, despite their distance from the battlefield. Unlike a fighter pilot, who pulled away from the target after dropping his payload, the Reaper pilots stayed on site, watching the bloody aftermath in high magnification.

‘Sir, given the subject is static, I’d appreciate a second opinion,’ the pilot said, catching his colleague’s eye. ‘If she’s not happy, neither am I.’

‘Are you not happy?’ Spiro asked the analyst. No one in the room missed his sarcasm. ‘The Pentagon’s happy, I’m happy, your commander here is goddamn cock-a-hoop. Salim Dhar, the world’s most wanted terrorist, just spoke on a cell from the target zone, and you’re not happy. As far as we know, nobody has gone in or out of that lousy shack apart from a pack of crazy Afghani dogs. This is paytime, honey. And we’ll all get a share, don’t you worry your tight little ass. I’ll see to it personally.’

As Spiro’s words hung in the air, a phone began to ring. The commander picked it up and listened for a few moments, nodding at the pilot. ‘Could you stream it through now? I’d appreciate that. Channel nine.’

The pilot leaned forward and flicked a switch. Moments later, Salim Dhar’s voice filled the stuffy room. It was only a few words, a short burst from someone who seemed to know the risk he was running by speaking on a cell phone, but no one was in any doubt. They had all heard his voice too many times in the last year, seen his face on too many posters.

‘Fort Meade picked it up a few seconds ago,’ the commander said. ‘Same coordinates, same cell, 100 per cent voiceprint match, confidence threshold now at 95 per cent. Gentlemen, ladies, I hope 432 Air Expeditionary Wing will be remembered for many things, but as of this moment, we’ll be known for ever as the people who took down Salim Dhar. Engage the target.’

Lieutenant Oaks spent the last minutes of his life in frustration as much as fear. He had managed to corral everyone into the middle of the hut, including Murray, and persuaded them of the merits of his plan. The cross was as good as he could make it in the circumstances: four men lying in a line, hands still tied behind their backs, heads below the next man’s shackled ankles, and then two lying perpendicular to them, one either side of Oaks, who was second in the upright. Even if it didn’t show up as a cross, Oaks figured it would look pretty damn weird on a thermal-imaging screen.

But then, as they lay there, each praying to his own God, Salim Dhar was suddenly amongst them for a second time. It was only a few words, spoken on his cell phone, but it was enough to make Oaks realise what was happening. When he heard him, he screamed, hoping that his voice would be picked up by someone at Fort Meade, but he was too late. Dhar had stopped talking by the time he was railing at the sky.

He started to sob now, lying in the mud on his imaginary cross, the smell of urine filling the air. There was nothing left to do. For a moment he stopped, trying to hear the sound of the drone above the murmurings of his colleagues. A Reaper’s turboprop engine at altitude purred like a buzzing insect – that’s what they said, wasn’t it? – but he heard nothing. Just the noise of the dogs, which whined and ran in all directions when the first Hellfire exploded deep in the Afghan mud beside him.

10

Marchant had to call London, tell them what he’d seen, but his mobile phone had no signal. Satisfied that the helicopter had been operating on its own, he broke cover and ran back down the path to the motorbike, stumbling and falling as he went. The mountains were quiet now, the Berber goatherds stunned into silence by whatever had just happened. He started up the engine and headed back down the track to the main road and on towards Marrakech.

He couldn’t decide if it was safer to dump the bike and get back to his apartment before he called Fielding, or to ring as soon as he was in range. His mobile phone was encrypted, but the events he had just witnessed made him nervous of talking in the open. The sight of the man being shot had heightened his senses, stirred a primitive survival instinct.

He also felt an irrational sense of loss. He had never met the man, but they had been joined in some way, had listened to the same story in the square, ridden the same route out of town, first on Mobylettes then on more powerful machines. It could have been him in the line of fire. All he wanted to do now was get as far away as possible from the mountains, and the haunting Berber goatherds’ calls that had warned of danger.

It was as he throttled back the engine that he began to rethink his plans. A line of single headlights had appeared a thousand yards ahead, coming up the straight road towards him, fanned across both lanes. He knew at once that it was the group of British bikers, one of whose machines he had stolen. Should he stop, try to explain? They had clearly seen him at the petrol station, and would immediately identify the bike as theirs. It was out of the question. He could never play his employer’s card. It was a last resort, reserved for tight spots with foreign governments. He would have been allowed to tell his immediate family who he worked for, too, except that he didn’t have any. Not any more. Not unless he counted Dhar.

His priority was to get a message to Fielding, tell him he had been right, that someone had taken Dhar away by helicopter. He was convinced that the halaka had relayed a message to Dhar, tried to warn him of a Roc bird rising into the sky. It would explain the recent increased level of chatter about Dhar in the souks. But had time run out? Had the warning come too late?

There was only one option. It had been a few years since he had ridden a motorbike at speed, but he had felt comfortable on the journey out of Marrakech. In his first months at Legoland in Vauxhall, working as a junior reports officer, a few of the new recruits used to take bikes out for test rides at lunchtime. There was a motorcycle dealer opposite the main entrance to Legoland, and the staff there were always obliging – one eye on a government contract, perhaps – without ever acknowledging which building Marchant and his colleagues left and entered each day. Marchant would sometimes play it up, hinting that he lived life in the international fast lane, when the truth of his head-office existence was much more mundane. That was one of the reasons he wanted to stay in Morocco.

He watched the needle move across the dial and adjusted his position in the saddle, wishing he was wearing a helmet. If he approached the bikers fast enough, he reckoned they wouldn’t hold the line. Five hundred yards from them, he turned off his headlight and took the machine up to 90 mph, riding in darkness, his face cooling in the night wind. Not for the first time in his life, he felt liberated rather than scared as death drew near, sensing as he had done before in such moments that he was closer to those he had lost: his father, his brother.

Still the bikers were fanned across the road, no gaps between them. An image of the London Marathon came and went: the police roadblock, trying to find a way through. Then, as the needle nudged passed a hundred, a gap started to appear at one end of the line, in the opposite lane. He headed for it, feeling the surface change beneath him as he crossed the middle of the road. For a moment he thought he had lost control, but the BMW handled well and he accelerated again, touching 110 mph. Fifty yards from the line, all the bikes began to peel away, and then he was through them, the sound of their anger fading in his ears.

He liked the bike, but he didn’t want to steal it. Turning the headlight back on, he glanced in the mirror and saw that no one had decided to give chase. A madman had clearly stolen their bike, and he would be dead quicker than they could catch him. When he looked ahead again, he saw the oncoming lorry’s headlights, but there was no time to think. Instinctively, he swerved inside the vehicle and was almost thrown by the draught as it passed him, horn blaring in the darkness.

He moved back onto the correct side of the road. The petrol station where he had picked up the bike was shut, but he parked it there, flashing the headlight on and off once. A mile back up the road, one of the bikers broke away from the group and started to ride towards him. But Marchant was long gone by the time he had arrived, heading into the heart of Marrakech across rough ground, talking on his mobile to London.

11

Marcus Fielding, Chief of MI6, looked out of his fourth-floor window at the commuters walking home across Vauxhall Bridge beneath him. Two of them had stopped, jackets slung over their shoulders, to take in the evening sun as it set over a hot summer London. The Thames was out, the muddy shores busy with sandpipers. On the far bank, below the Morpeth Arms, a woman weighed down with plastic bags was searching through the flotsam and jetsam.

Beside Legoland, one of the Yellow Duck amphibious vehicles that took tourists around London was parked up on the slipway, waiting while its captain briefed passengers on what to do if it sank. Sometimes, Fielding wished it would. Its proximity to Legoland had long made him uneasy, the guided tours attracting too much publicity, too many fingers pointing up in his direction. Still, Fielding couldn’t deny that he had enjoyed the time he had taken the Duck with Daniel Marchant. They were happier days then, full of hope. Marchant had received a text while they were on board together, and the Morocco plan had been born. But that was over now.

Fielding was supposed to be going to the opera tonight, but he needed to wait for Marchant to ring in again from Marrakech. The call had come through earlier on Marchant’s mobile, but the line had dropped, the encryption software unhappy with the integrity of the local network. He knew Marchant wouldn’t make contact unless it was urgent, but it all seemed irrelevant now. He wondered how best to break the news about Salim Dhar to Marchant.

There was a chance, of course, that James Spiro was mistaken. He had been wrong before, most famously about Marchant’s late father, Stephen, Fielding’s predecessor as Chief of MI6. According to Spiro, Stephen and Daniel Marchant were both infidels, worshiping at the altar of a very different god to the rest of the West. Spiro had tried to bring down the entire house of Marchant, and MI6 by implication, until the son had cleared the father’s name.

But the evidence coming out of North Waziristan suggested that this time Spiro was right. The CIA had finally nailed their man. Two intercepted phone calls, a red-hot handset last used in south India: it was hard to disagree with them. GCHQ was running its own tests on the voice, but the match was perfect, as Spiro had repeatedly told him a few minutes earlier on the video link.

There were few people Fielding despised more than Spiro. He should have been cleared out with the old guard when the new President was sworn in, hung out to dry with the attorneys who had sanctioned torture, but somehow he had survived, thanks to the President himself, of all people. The White House’s attitude to the Agency had changed overnight after the assassination attempt in Delhi. Briefly a champion of noble values, it was now an admirer of muscle, and in particular of Spiro, who had taken all the credit for protecting his leader. The clenched fist had replaced the hand of friendship. Now, God help them all, there was no stopping him. Spiro’s star was in the ascendant again. Not only were his enhanced methods back in fashion, but the CIA had been given permission to resume playing hardball with its allies.

Salim Dhar’s elimination was a particularly sweet victory for Spiro. The Agency had never seen Dhar in the same way as the British, struggling to countenance the possibility that he might one day represent an opportunity rather than a threat. For them, Dhar was the problem, not a potential solution, a man who had come close to heaping the ultimate shame on them. From where Fielding stood, it was all deeply frustrating: the President had promised an era of more nuanced attitudes to intelligence, but it appeared to be over before it had begun.

Fielding turned away from the reinforced window and walked across to the cabinet behind his desk. The collection of books reflected his Arabist tastes, charting his career through the Gulf and North Africa. He envied Marchant his time in Morocco, operating on his own, without the bureaucracy of Legoland. It was how he had worked best when he was Marchant’s age, drifting through the medinas, talking to the traders, listening, watching.

He took out a volume of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, presented to him years ago by Muammar al-Gadaffi after he had helped to persuade the Libyan leader to abandon his nuclear ambitions. It was Sir Richard Francis Burton’s ten-volume 1885 limited edition, for subscribers only, and he had never enquired too closely about its provenance. Fielding had been obliged to declare the gift to Whitehall, but it was his counter-intelligence colleagues across the Thames who were most interested, subjecting the volumes to weeks of unnecessary analysis.

The rivalry between the Services had bordered on war in those days, and Fielding had assumed that MI5 would do all it could to embarrass the Vicar, as he knew they called him. Gifts from foreign governments were a favourite cover for listening devices. No one had forgotten the electric samovar presented to the Queen at Balmoral by the Russian Knights aerobatics team, later suspected of being a mantelpiece transmitter, or the infinity bug hidden inside a wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States, given by Russian schoolchildren to the US ambassador to Moscow at the end of the Second World War.

But the sweepers at Thames House found nothing, and resisted the temptation to insert something of their own. The volumes were reluctantly passed back over the river to Legoland. There was talk of donating them to the British Library, but the Vicar was eventually allowed to keep his unholy gift.

As he began to read about Shahryar and Scheherazade, there was a knock on the door and Ann Norman, his formidable personal assistant, appeared. She was wearing her usual red tights and intimidating frown, both of which had protected four Chiefs from Whitehall’s meddling mandarins for more than twenty years.

‘It’s Daniel Marchant. Shall I put him through?’

‘Line three.’

Fielding went over to his desk and sat down, placing the open book in front of him, next to the comms console that linked him to colleagues around the world as well as to his political masters. The book’s presence made him feel more connected, less detached from Marchant’s world. He let him talk for a while, about a halaka, and his trip out into the High Atlas. Fielding stopped him as he began to talk of helicopters.

‘Daniel, I think you should know we’ve just had a call from Langley. NSA picked up a mobile intercept late this afternoon, from Salim Dhar in North Waziristan. One hundred per cent voice match.’

Marchant fell quiet, the hum of a Marrakech medina suddenly audible in the background.

‘Have they killed him?’

‘They think so. A UAV was in the area, eliminated the target within fifteen minutes of the intercept. I’m sorry.’

‘Without even checking? Without talking to us?’

‘The Americans aren’t really in the mood right now for cooperating on Dhar. You know that.’

‘But Dhar was here, I’m sure of it. In Morocco. Barely an hour ago, up near the Tizi’n’Test pass. The halaka spoke of a Roc bird.’

Fielding absently turned the pages of The Arabian Nights, hearing a younger version of himself in Marchant’s voice. Fielding had been less hot-headed, but he rated Marchant more highly than anyone of his generation. A part of him wondered again if Spiro had made a mistake, but it was hard to dispute the CIA’s evidence, at least those elements of it that they had pooled with Britain. The Joint Intelligence Committee was convening first thing in the morning, by which time Britain’s own voice analysis from Cheltenham would be in. GCHQ was running tests through the night, but Fielding didn’t expect a different result.

‘And how do I present your evidence to the JIC tomorrow?’ Fielding said, knowing it was an unfair question. Unlike police work, intelligence-gathering was seldom just about evidence, as he had explained to MI6’s latest intake of IONEC graduates earlier that day. Agents had to be thorough but also counter-intuitive; ‘Cutting the red wire when the manual said blue,’ as one over-excited graduate had put it.

‘Someone took him away. Whoever owns the helicopter has Dhar.’

‘And who does own it?’

‘It was white, UN, but no markings.’

‘White?’ Fielding’s interest was pricked. He knew that the Mi-8 was used by the UN, knew too that the government in Sudan wasn’t averse to flying unmarked white military aircraft to attack villages in Darfur.

‘I was about to tell you that when you interrupted me.’

Fielding could hear Marchant’s anger mounting. He had always preferred field agents who were passionate about the CX they filed to London. It made for better product.

‘Suppose it was just an exercise,’ he said, testing him.

‘An exercise? They shot someone, the man I’d been following from Marrakech, the same man who’d been listening to the storyteller.’ Marchant fell silent again. ‘Remember when Dhar sent me the text, after Delhi?’ he continued, trying to restore his Chief’s belief.

Fielding stood up, his lower spine beginning to ache. It always played up when he was tired, and he suddenly felt world-weary, as if he had been asked to live his entire life over again, fight all his old Whitehall battles, relive the fears of raised threat levels, the waking moments in the middle of the night.

‘Daniel, we’ve been over this many times,’ he said, thinking back to their journey down the river. They had both thought the text was from Dhar. GCHQ was less sure.

‘The words were taken from a song. Leysh Nat’arak.’

‘And that text was one of the reasons I gave you time in Morocco. I would have let you go earlier if I could. You were no good to anyone in London. Langley thought otherwise. We all hoped that you’d find Dhar, that he’d make contact. But that’s not going to happen now. I’m sorry. It’s time to come home.’

‘You really believe the Americans have killed him, don’t you?’

Fielding hesitated, one hand on the small of his back. ‘I’m not sure. But whatever happened in Morocco, I want you away from it. For your own sake. If someone was killed, and you saw it, we have a problem, and that wasn’t part of the deal. I also sent you to Morocco to keep out of trouble.’

‘Yalla natsaalh ehna akhwaan. That was the lyric. Let’s make good for we are brothers.’ Marchant paused. ‘Dhar was out there, up in the mountains. I’m sure of it. And he wanted to come in. But someone took him, before he could.’

‘Someone? Who, exactly?’

Marchant tried to ignore the scepticism that had returned to Fielding’s voice. He had thought about this question on the way back to his apartment, wrestled with the possibilities, the implications, knowing how it would sound. But it was quite clear in his own mind, as clear as the Russian words he had heard on the mountainside: Nye strelai. Don’t shoot.

‘Moscow.’

12

Marchant swilled the Scotch around his mouth for a few seconds before swallowing it. He had hoped the alcohol would taste toxic, that his body would reject it in some violent way, but it was sweeter than he had ever remembered.

He was sitting under a palm tree in the courtyard of the Chesterfield Pub, a bar anglais at the Hotel Nassil on avenue Mohammed V. It was not a place he was particularly proud to be, but there was a limited choice of public venues serving alcohol in Marrakech. The Scotch was decent enough, though, and there were fewer tourists than he had feared. His only worry was if the group of British bikers had decided to turn back to Marrakech for the night and came here for a drink.

He had learned to trust his gut instinct since signing up with MI6, and at the moment it didn’t feel as if Salim Dhar was dead. The Americans had claimed to have killed a number of terrorists with UAVs in recent years and later proved to have been wrong. Only time would tell if they were right about Dhar. It would be too risky to send in anyone on the ground to collect DNA. Later perhaps. For now, the CIA would look for other evidence, listen to the chatter, assess jihadi morale.

Marchant knew, though, that Fielding was right: his Morocco days were over. He had already booked himself onto the early-morning flight back to London. In India, when he was a child, his father had once told him to live in each country as if for ever, but always to be ready to leave at dawn. At the time, his father was a middle-ranking MI6 officer who had served in Moscow before Delhi. He was used to the threat of his diplomatic cover being blown, of tit-for-tat expulsions.

Marchant wasn’t being expelled, but there had been an incident of some sort in the mountains and he had witnessed it. Whether anyone had seen him, he wasn’t sure, but he knew MI6 couldn’t afford for him to be caught up in another controversy, not after the events in India. And if he was right about Moscow’s involvement, an international row might be imminent.

After finishing his Scotch he ordered another. He had swapped his djellaba for jeans and a collarless shirt before coming to the pub, and guessed the waiter had marked him down as just another drunken Western tourist, tanking up before a night at the clubs. So be it. He needed to cut a different figure from the one who had ridden out to Tizi a few hours earlier.

It was after an hour and too much Scotch that Marchant saw the dark-haired woman walk up to the bar. He recognised her at once as Lakshmi Meena, the local Operations Officer the CIA had sent to keep an eye on him when he had first arrived in Marrakech. London had briefed him about her. She was a beneficiary of the CIA’s ongoing programme to recruit more people from what it called America’s ‘heritage communities’, particularly those who spoke ‘mission critical’ languages. MI6 had always recruited linguists, unlike the CIA, which had been found wanting after 9/11. Even in its National Clandestine Service, only 30 per cent of CIA staff were fluent in a second language. Meena spoke Hindi, some Urdu and, most importantly, the Dravidian languages of southern India, which had been upgraded to critical in the ongoing hunt for Salim Dhar, whose parents were originally from Kerala.

Marchant had also been told that she was a breath of fresh air, one of the recent intake who had joined the Agency on the back of the new President’s promises of change. He had yet to see any difference, at least in the CIA’s attitude to him.

Meena was young, late twenties, dressed in jeans and a maroon Indian top with mirrorwork that caught the light around her neckline. Officially, she was in Morocco teaching English as a foreign language, working at the American Language Center up in Rabat. Marchant had to admit that she looked the part, one up from his own student cover. He wished he’d thought of it for himself.

Meena walked over to Marchant’s table in the courtyard, checking her mobile phone before putting it away in her shoulder-bag. Marchant was momentarily wrongfooted by the direct approach. They had met face to face only once before, shortly after Marchant had arrived: a cold exchange in the foyer of a hotel.

‘Do what you have to do,’ Marchant had said, trying not to see Leila in Meena’s limpid eyes, her dark olive skin. ‘Just don’t expect any answers from me.’

‘You flatter yourself,’ she had replied. ‘We ask questions later, remember?’

It hadn’t been the beginning of a beautiful friendship. He knew afterwards that he had played it too cool, that she was only doing her job, but he wasn’t in the mood to mix with female field agents, particularly ones who reminded him of a woman who had betrayed him. Meena was taller, her manner more hardened, but there was unquestionably something of Leila in her: an attitude, sexual poise. And Marchant knew that any likeness was no coincidence, that it was a cruel joke by Spiro. Frustrated that he wasn’t allowed to lock Marchant up and torture him again, Spiro had sent someone to remind him of his past. But Marchant ignored the ploy, ignored Meena. For the following few weeks, they had played cat and mouse on the streets of Marrakech, before Meena had finally backed off to Rabat.

‘Mind if I join you?’ she asked, taking a seat.

‘Go ahead,’ Marchant said, concealing his surprise. A waiter was standing beside them. For a moment, he was back in a pub in Portsmouth, chatting up strangers as part of a training exercise. All new recruits at the Fort, MI6’s training base in Gosport, were dispatched to the city’s bars and pubs to chat up unsuspecting locals and solicit private information: bank-card details, National Insurance and passport numbers.

‘Bourbon and Coke, thanks. Daniel?’

Marchant knew Meena was taking in the scene, measuring the milligrams of alcohol in Marchant’s blood, whether his defences were down. The only consolation was that she wasn’t the sort to flirt. He didn’t think he could handle that right now. Leila had used her sexual charms shamelessly, in the office and in the field, but he sensed that Meena did things differently.

‘A Scotch, thanks,’ Marchant replied, nodding at the waiter.

‘I thought you’d given all that up,’ she said, fingering her Indian necklace. ‘Gone native.’

‘Celebrating. I didn’t think you drank either.’ He had read her files: vegetarian, non-drinker, decaffeinated coffee, herbal tea.

‘Celebrating, too.’

Marchant thought her necklace was from south India, similar to one his mother had once worn. He raised his glass, trying to run his own check on himself, calculate the damage. A drinking session after three months’ abstinence wasn’t a good idea, but he was sober enough to extract some leverage from the situation, fool Meena into thinking he was drunker than he was. At least, that was the plan. His dulled brain could think of two reasons why she had stepped out of the shadows tonight. To say goodbye, having heard that Dhar was dead; or to find out if he knew anything about the helicopter in the mountains. He had a problem if it was the latter.

‘You heard the news then,’ she said, glancing around the bar before looking at Marchant, his already empty glass.

‘I heard,’ he said, thinking it could still be either.

‘Mixed feelings, I guess.’

He sat back, relieved that she had come to talk about Dhar.

‘To be honest, I don’t really know what to say,’ she continued, brushing some crumbs off the table. ‘Langley’s kind of over the moon, as you’d expect. But it’s a little more complicated for you guys.’

‘Is it? He tried to kill your President. Now you’ve killed him. End of story.’

‘But, you know, the whole half-brother thing.’ Meena leaned in towards Marchant. ‘I realise you didn’t exactly grow up together, but that could have been new territory, for all of us –’

‘Why did you come here tonight?’ Marchant was suddenly irritated by Meena’s appearance on his last evening in Morocco, riled by how much she knew, her after-work pub manner. He had been about to leave, take one last walk around Djemaâ el Fna. Now he was in an English bar, having a drink with someone he had avoided for the past three months.

‘I figured you’d be pulling out of town,’ Meena said. ‘Thought it would be civil to tie this whole thing off, say goodbye.’

Marchant allowed the awkwardness to linger for a few seconds, in case there was anything else to flush out. But there was nothing. The Americans thought they had killed Dhar, and he was happy to let them. Marchant wasn’t sure if it was the alcohol or sudden empathy for a fellow field officer, but something made him change tack and end the awkwardness, drop his guard.

‘Thanks,’ he said, watching the waiter place their order on the table. ‘You know, for coming. We should have had this drink three months ago.’

She wasn’t so bad, he told himself. He was the one who had been stubborn, too angry with the way he had been treated by the Americans. Meena was younger than him, still believed that she was making a difference. And she could have made his life a lot more difficult.

‘I wasn’t really getting the right vibes,’ she said, smiling, putting her hands up in mock defence. ‘Hey, look, I don’t blame you for not trusting us. Not at all.’

‘I gave up trusting people when I signed up.’

‘We’re not all like Spiro,’ Meena said, sitting back.

‘I wasn’t thinking of Spiro.’ For a moment, Marchant wondered if she would take the bait, begin to talk of Leila, but she didn’t, and he was shocked by his own disappointment.

‘I don’t know about you, but I joined the Agency in search of some light and shade. It’s why I’m here in Morocco and not in some sweaty UAV trailer in Nevada. I can’t pretend I’m sorry Dhar’s dead, but I was open to other ways of winning this war.’

‘I’m sure you were,’ said Marchant. He looked again at Meena, wondering whether he could confide in her, open up, reveal what he had seen in the mountains. But he knew he couldn’t. Despite the unexpected entente, they were working to different agendas.

‘What made you choose the Agency anyway?’ Marchant asked. ‘You don’t strike me as –’

‘– the right colour?’ She laughed.

‘Christ no, I wasn’t going to say that.’

‘The right sex?’ She laughed again, and then they both paused, her words hanging between them. Marchant thought he saw a sadness in her eyes, or maybe he was confused by his own nostalgia.

‘My father wanted me to train as a doctor. Failing that, he wanted me to marry one. I was studying medicine at Georgetown University, but then, after 9/11, everything changed.’

‘Did you lose someone?’

‘Not directly. Friends of friends, you know.’

‘But it felt personal.’

‘Yeah. And the CIA had always been a part of my life.’

‘Really?’

‘We grew up in Reston, Virginia, not far from Langley. My father used to talk so proudly of the Agency, said it was there to protect all Americans, including ones who had come from India. To prove it, we drove up there one day to take a look, when I was seventeen, maybe eighteen. There’s a public sign on the main highway, next right for the George Bush Center for Intelligence. So we took the exit and drove up through the woods, Mom and Dad in the front, my younger brother and me in the back. We were nearly shot by the guards. I think they thought we were a family of suicide bombers.’

‘What did they do?’

‘Waved their machine-guns at us and shouted at us to leave. I thought they were going to shoot the tyres out.’

‘And your father?’

‘He was mortified. He couldn’t understand why we hadn’t been welcomed with open arms. He’d been naïve to go there, but I hated seeing him so upset.’

‘And that’s why you joined?’

‘One reason. I wanted to prove to him – to me – that we’re welcome in America. That the Agency is there to defend my family as much as anyone else’s. When the Towers came down, they were suddenly looking to recruit from the subcontinent.’

‘Why did it take you so long to sign up?’

‘It took a new President.’

‘And is it everything you hoped?’

‘I’m seeing the world.’

‘But not changing it.’

‘I’m not sure tailing a renegade British agent on compassionate leave through the streets of Marrakech is quite what I had in mind.’

‘You weren’t very committed.’ Marchant matched her smile, thinking back to the first time he had seen her, watching her from across Djemaâ el Fna before giving her the runaround.

‘OK, so you lost me a couple of times in the medina. I salute your superior British tradecraft. But come on, Daniel’ – she was leaning forward now, voice lowered – ‘you didn’t really think Dhar would show up in this place, did you? Maybe I missed him. Maybe he was that guy selling dentures in the main square, the one being photographed day and night by thousands of American tourists.’

‘No, that wasn’t him.’

Marchant thought back to the halaka. Again he wanted to confide in Meena, ask her opinion, but he knew he was drunk. He hadn’t discussed Salim Dhar with anyone since he had arrived in Marrakech. The text he had received on the Thames had haunted him for the first few weeks. He had checked his phone repeatedly, in case Dhar made contact again, but he never had.

Marchant had begged Fielding to let him go to Morocco, but the Americans had insisted he stay in London. After a year of frustration and too much alcohol, he had finally arrived in Marrakech, expecting the trail to have gone cold. But as he settled into his sober new life, working the souks, listening to the storytellers, he had begun to pick up chatter here and there that gave him hope he was still on the right track.

‘Did you listen to any of those guys, the halakas?’ Meena asked.

‘One or two.’ Meena’s interest in the storyteller triggered a distant alarm, like a police siren a few streets away.

‘Terrific tales, although some of the Berber street talk threw me.’

The alarm faded. Marchant was impressed by Meena’s local knowledge. He hadn’t given her enough credit, and chided himself for judging her too swiftly. Again, he wondered whether she had been a missed opportunity, someone he should have nurtured rather than avoided. But he knew why he had kept his distance.

‘Where next for you, then? When I’m gone?’ he asked.

Meena paused. Marchant thought that she too seemed to be weighing up how much to confide, thrown perhaps by how well they were getting on. Up until now, she had hidden behind her words, preferring to spar rather than open up. She sat back, glancing half-heartedly around the bar.

‘I want out, if I’m honest. I thought I’d joined a different Agency, a new one working for a new President.’

‘But you haven’t.’

‘No. I haven’t.’

‘Spiro?’

She paused again. ‘For the record, he wanted me to make your life here not worth living.’

‘But you chose not to.’

‘What did you do to him?’

‘We go back a bit. He thought my father was a traitor. Then he accused me.’

Meena stood up with his empty glass, ready to head to the bar. ‘Must have been that terrorist brother of yours.’

The remark annoyed Marchant, cut through the fog of Scotch. It was a reminder of their differences, confirmation that a junior CIA officer had seen his file. He had hoped that his kinship would remain known only to a few people in Langley and Legoland, but he realised that was wishful thinking. Meena would have been fully briefed before arriving in Morocco, given the full, shocking picture.

He thought again about the text. Let’s make good for we are brothers. The lyrics were by an Arabic singer, Natacha Atlas. Had Dhar known that she was one of Leila’s favourite artists? Marchant was getting sentimental. He couldn’t afford to dwell on Leila, not in his present state. And he couldn’t afford to talk any more with Meena.

By the time she returned to the table with another Scotch, Marchant had gone.

13

Paul Myers wouldn’t have bothered to listen to the audio one more time if it hadn’t been for Daniel Marchant. He knew his old friend had spent the past three months in Marrakech largely because of him. His line manager at GCHQ had dismissed the theory that Dhar had texted Marchant from Morocco, but Myers had thought otherwise. Like Marchant, he didn’t believe Dhar would hang around the Af-Pak region after the assassination attempt. It was too obvious, despite the mountainous terrain and the volatile political climate, both of which made it difficult for the West to search. He could never prove that Marchant’s text had been sent by Dhar, but he had run his own checks on some dodgy proxy networks, and would gladly bet his (unused) gym membership that it had originated in Morocco. And if it was a coincidence that the lyric in the text was by a singer who shared her surname with a North African mountain range, he found it a reassuring one.

So it was guilt more than anything that made him put his headphones back on, adjust the fluorescent band at the base of his ponytail and play the US audio file again. He owed it to Marchant to prove that the Americans were wrong about Dhar. He sat back and yawned, scratching at his slack stomach through his fleece jacket as he looked around the empty office.

His desk, littered with chocolate-bar wrappers and filled-in sudokus from various broadsheet newspapers, was in the inner ring of the GCHQ complex, dubbed the Doughnut because of its circular shape. The Street, a glass-roofed circular corridor, ran around the entire building, separating the inner from the outer circles. Its purpose was to encourage separate departments to share their data. No one on the building’s three floors was more than five minutes’ walk from anyone else, and face-to-face meetings in softly furnished break-out areas were the way forward.

At least, that was the idea. In truth, people kept to themselves. Myers used the Street solely for walking to the Ritazza cafés and deli bars that dotted its orbital route. The workforce at GCHQ, with its mathematicians, cryptanalysts, linguists, librarians and IT engineers, was the most intelligent in the Civil Service, but it was also the most socially dysfunctional, steeped in a long tradition of strictly-need-to-know that dated back to Bletchley Park and its campus of separate huts. Myers wouldn’t have had it any other way.

He looked out onto the secure landscaped gardens in the middle of the building, hidden below which was GCHQ’s vast computer hall. It was down there, in the depths of the basement, that the mathematicians worked, and that the ‘Cheltenham express’, an electric train, shuttled back and forth day and night, carrying files along a track beneath the Street. To the right of Myers’ window was a decked area, where people could walk out from the canteen. Beyond it was a large expanse of lawn that had been nicknamed ‘the grassy knoll’ and was meant for blue-sky meetings. Myers liked to sit there in the summer and take his lunch.

The garden was dark and empty now, its edges bathed in a pale, energy-efficient light spilling out from the offices around it. Myers used to work as an intelligence analyst in the Gulf Region, on the opposite side of the Doughnut, his desk looking out at one of the two pagodas that had been built in the garden for smokers, but he had asked for a transfer to the subcontinent after Leila had died. He had carried a hopeless torch for her, and still hadn’t come to terms with her betrayal, let alone her death. Listening to intercepts in Farsi had proved too painful.

The voice in the headphones was definitely Dhar’s. His American colleagues had run every test there was, subjecting it to a level of spectrographic analysis that had even met with Myers’ jaundiced approval. But what had caught his attention was the lack of data about the background noise. All ears had been tuned to the voice.

Myers listened to the Urdu, noting instinctively that it was a second, possibly third, language, but his eyes were on the computer screen in front of him and the digital sound waves that were rolling across it to the rhythm of Dhar’s speech. When the Urdu stopped, Myers eased forward in his seat and scrutinised the data, watching the waves moving along the bottom of his screen until the segment ended. He moved the cursor back to where the Urdu had stopped and played the final part again, his tired eyes blinking. This time he magnified the wave imagery, boosting the background noise. At the end of the clip, he did the same again, except that he only replayed the final eighth of a second, slowing it down to a deep, haunting drawl.

After repeating the process several more times, he was listening to fragments of sound, microseconds inaudible to the human ear. And then he found it. Moving more quickly now, he copied and pasted the clip and dragged it across to an adjacent screen, where he had loaded his own spectrographic software, much to his IT supervisor’s annoyance. He played the clip and sat back, taking off his headphones, cracking the joints of his sweaty fingers. The ‘spectral waterfall’ on the screen in front of him was beautiful, a series of rippling columns of colour; but the acoustic structure was one of intense pain. At the very end of the second call made by Salim Dhar, there was a sound that Myers had not expected to hear: the opening notes of a human scream.

14

Lakshmi Meena didn’t know what to expect as her car pulled up short of the police cordon on the side of the mountain. She parked beside two army lorries and a Jeep and stepped out into the cool night, pulling a scarf over her head. The area beyond the cordon was swarming with uniformed men, one of whom Meena recognised as Dr Abdul Aziz, a senior intelligence officer from Rabat who had left a message on her cell phone half an hour earlier. She had been leaving the bar anglais at the time, wondering what she had said to so upset Marchant. She didn’t like Aziz, disapproved of his methods, his unctuous manner, but he had been the first person on her list of people to meet when she had arrived in Morocco.

Two floodlights had been rigged up on stands, illuminating a patch of rugged terrain where a handful of personnel in forensic boilersuits were searching the ground. Meena talked to a policeman on the edge of the cordon, nodding in the direction of Aziz, who saw her and came over.

‘I got your message,’ she said.

‘Lakshmi, our goddess of wealth,’ Aziz said, smiling. ‘Morocco needs your help.’ He lit a local cigarette as he steered her away from the lights, his hand hovering above her shoulders.

Meena was always surprised by Aziz’s displays of warmth and charm, so at odds with his professional reputation. He had run a black site in Morocco in the aftermath of 9/11, interviewing a steady stream of America’s enemy combatants on behalf of James Spiro, who had dubbed him the Dentist. It was before Meena’s time in the Agency, but she knew enough about Aziz to show respect to a man whose interrogation techniques made the tooth-extractors in Djemaâ el Fna look humane. And Meena hated herself for it, the cheap expedience of her chosen profession.

‘What happened here?’ she asked. ‘The Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group? Last I heard, you had them on the back foot.’

Aziz laughed. His teeth were a brilliant white. ‘Since when did they fly Mi-8s?’

‘Who said anything about helicopters?’

‘The Berbers.’ Aziz nodded to a group of goatherds sitting on the ground in a circle, smoking, djellaba hoods up.

‘Oh really?’

‘Our national airspace was violated tonight, and we’d like to know who by.’

‘Forgive me, but isn’t that what your air force is for?’

‘The country’s radar defences were knocked out. It was a sophisticated system. At least that’s what your sales people told us when we bought it from America last year. Our Algerian brothers don’t have the ability to do that.’

‘Not many people do.’

‘The Berbers are saying the helicopter was white.’

‘Any markings?’

‘None.’

Meena had been down in Darfur the previous year, and had seen the same trick pulled with a white Antonov used for a military raid. But the Sudanese government had gone one step further, painting it in UN markings.

She looked at Aziz, who was lost in thought, drawing hard on his cigarette. She remembered the cocktail party in Rabat when he had enquired about her health. A month earlier, she had checked in to hospital for a small operation, something she had kept from even her closest colleagues. Perhaps his question had been a coincidence, but it had disquieted her.

‘Is that why you called me?’

‘There’s something else. An Englishman was seen heading up here this evening.’

Aziz handed Meena a grainy photograph taken from a CCTV camera. It was of the gas-station forecourt on the road out of Marrakech. Someone who could have been Daniel Marchant was in the foreground, arriving on a moped. The date and time was wrong, but otherwise Meena thought the image looked authentic. It was too much of a coincidence, an odd place to be heading on a bike. Marchant had gone off-piste, and Meena should have known about it. No wonder he had left the bar early. He hadn’t been honest with her.

‘Marchant’s booked on the first flight to London tomorrow,’ Aziz said.

‘I know.’ Meena looked at him. Neither of them wanted to say anything, but each knew the other was thinking the same. The only reason Marchant would have gone to the mountains was if it had something to do with Salim Dhar. And Dhar was meant to be dead.

‘What do you think he was up to?’ Aziz asked.

‘I thought you were watching him.’

‘Both our jobs might be on the line, Lakshmi. Please tell me if you want Marchant delayed.’

Aziz smiled, his teeth glinting in the beam of a passing flashlight.

15

Marchant stepped aside as a donkey cart was led past him by an old man, his face hidden by the pointed hood of his djellaba, his cart stacked high with crates of salted sardines. Marchant headed across the square to the food trestles and benches, where a few butane lamps were still burning, but the crowds and the cooks had long gone, the smoke cleared. The only people in the square now were a handful of beggars, some sweepers in front of the mosque and a woman taking dough to a communal oven in one of the souks.

It was not quite dawn and the High Atlas were barely visible, no more than a reddish smudge on the horizon. Marchant had been walking around the medina since he left the bar anglais, taking a last look at his old haunts, drinking strong coffee at his favourite cafés. Now, as he sat down on a bench in a pool of light, he felt ready to return to Britain. He was more confident of his past, clearer about his relationship with Dhar.

For almost all of his thirty years, Marchant had thought that he only had one brother, his twin, Sebastian, who had been killed in a car crash in Delhi when they were eight. Then, fifteen months ago, on the run and trying to clear his family name, he had met Salim Dhar under a hot south Indian sun and asked why his late father, Stephen Marchant, Chief of MI6, had once visited Dhar, a rising jihadi, at a black site outside Cochin. ‘He was my father, too,’ Dhar had said, changing Marchant’s life for ever.

After the initial shock, the grief of a surviving twin had been replaced by the comfort of a stranger. Marchant was no longer alone in the world. He was less troubled by the discovery of a jihadi half-brother than by the thought of what might have been. There had been a bond when they met in India, an unspoken pact that came with kinship. They were both the same age, shared the same father.

Their lives, though, had run in wildly different directions, one graduating from Cambridge, the other from a training camp in Afghanistan. Marchant knew that Dhar would never spy for the US, but he might work for Britain. It was why Marchant had been so keen to travel to Morocco: to establish where his half-brother’s loyalties lay, and then try to turn him. Dhar was not, after all, a regular jihadi. How could he be, with a British father who had risen to become Chief of MI6? Tonight, though, he had accepted that his plan had failed. Dhar had not come forward, as he had hoped, and agreed to work for the land of his father.

The butane lamp above Marchant flickered and died. Dawn was spreading fast across the city from the east, where the mountains were now bathed in warm, newborn sunlight. Marchant stood up, his aching brain holding on to two things: Dhar was still alive, and he could still be turned. But there was something else. Whether Dhar had chosen to leave Morocco without making contact, or someone had taken him, Marchant couldn’t deny that he felt rejected. When it had come to it, Dhar’s family calling hadn’t been strong enough.

Perhaps that was why, as he left the square, he didn’t at first see Lakshmi Meena standing in the doorway of the mosque, watching him with the same intensity as the hawk that had begun to circle high above the waking city. But then he spotted her, turned off into the medina and ran through its narrow alleys as fast as he could.

16

James Spiro took the call 35,000 feet above the Atlantic, sitting near the front of the Gulfstream V. He had a soft spot for the plane, which he had used regularly in the rendition years. The line wasn’t good, but he knew immediately that it was Lakshmi Meena. He made a mental note not to call her babe.

‘Lakshmi. What have you got for me?’

Meena explained about the unmarked white helicopter that had been seen in the mountains, then took a deep breath – another one – and told him about his old friend Dr Abdul Aziz, the Dentist, and what he had said about the GICM and their hideout in the Atlas mountains.

‘Where are we running with this?’ Spiro asked, cutting her short. ‘I’m on the red-eye here.’

Meena sensed that their conversation would be over almost before it had started. Spiro was too full of Dhar’s death to listen to a junior officer phoning in with a hunch. ‘Aziz thinks Daniel Marchant was in the mountains,’ she continued, feeling that she had nothing to lose. ‘Stole a bike, took a ride up there at the same time the helicopter was seen.’

‘Tell me you were with him.’

‘I’d backed off, as instructed. The guy’s done nothing but go jogging and read the Koran for three months.’

Spiro thought for a moment. Reluctantly, Langley had agreed with London to leave Marchant alone after Delhi, but he wasn’t allowed to travel abroad. After a year, Spiro had acceded to Fielding’s demands and let Marchant fly to Morocco. There was no doubt in Spiro’s mind that the kid should have been locked up, just as his father should have been. The subsequent revelation that he was related to Salim Dhar only confirmed his worst fears. Now might be the time to take him out of the equation, particularly if everyone was distracted by news of Dhar’s death. Besides, what the hell was his so-called vacation in Morocco all about? The Vicar had called it a sabbatical. As far as Spiro was concerned, if someone needed some R&R, they headed for Honolulu, not North Africa.

‘Check him in for some root-canal work,’ Spiro said. ‘Aziz could do with the practice.’

‘That would be a breach of existing protocol, sir,’ Meena said.

‘I think you misheard me, Lakshmi.’

‘No, sir, I didn’t.’

There was a pause, a calculation. Spiro knew she was right, but he wasn’t going to let anyone ruin his visit to London, least of all Daniel Marchant. He cut her off.

It had been a good day in Washington, one of the best of his career. He had personally briefed the President about the drone strike on Salim Dhar. Although it was still too early to go public, the signs were good: no collateral for once, just a clean hit on the world’s most wanted. It didn’t get much sweeter. Now he was on his way to Fairford, and would shortly be making Marcus Fielding’s life a misery, something he always enjoyed.

The CIA was already all over MI5, running its own large network of agents and informers in Britain. As Spiro had discussed with the President, a Pakistani entering the US from ‘Londonistan’ on a visa-waiver programme now represented the biggest threat to America. As a result, 25 per cent of the Agency’s resources dedicated to preventing another 9/11 were being directed at Britain. MI5 wasn’t up to the job, and the CIA had recruited half of Yorkshire in the past few years. Immigration security at all major British airports was being coordinated by the Agency, too. Now he was about to rub the Vicar’s nose in it.

His phone rang again. This time he hesitated before answering it. His boss, the DCIA, only called him in the middle of the night if there was a problem.

17

It was two o’clock in the morning, and Marcus Fielding was still in his Legoland office, playing his flute: Telemann’s Suite in A-Minor. It was something of a tradition in MI6. Colin McColl, one of his predecessors, had filled the night air at the old head office in Southwark with his playing. Fielding rarely drank, but tonight was an exception. A bottle of Château Musar from the Bekaa Valley stood on his desk, half empty. He knew Spiro had come to gloat in London and he was determined to deny him the pleasure.

He stood up, arched his stiff back and went over to Oleg, the Service’s newest recruit, a two-year-old border terrier. Fielding had adopted him from Battersea Dogs’ Home the previous month and named him after two great Russian servants of MI6. There had been a few raised eyebrows the first time he brought Oleg into Legoland, but he only accompanied the Chief to work when he had to stay late, like tonight. His driver had brought him across the Thames from his flat in Dolphin Square, Pimlico, walking him along the towpath before handing him over to security at a side gate.

Oleg had undoubtedly made life more tolerable, absorbed some of the stress. His presence broke up the neatness of Fielding’s existence, which he was aware had become an obsession since his return from India. He had almost lost his job helping Daniel Marchant in Delhi. For a few dark days, the Americans had taken over the asylum. Legoland had been raided and he had been on the run, just like Marchant. He was too old for that game, too tired, which was why he had tried to restore some order to his life, a protection against the chaos of the raging world outside.

Tonight, though, that chaos threatened to return, and it had nothing to do with Oleg or the Lebanese wine. His mind had been racing ever since he had spoken with Marchant in Morocco. Normally, he would have dismissed his talk of Moscow as wild speculation from a field agent under pressure. But earlier in the day, a routine memo from MI5 had landed in his in-tray that made Marchant’s words – Nye strelai – hang in the air long after the encrypted line from Marrakech had dropped.

Harriet Armstrong, Fielding’s opposite number at Thames House, had come over the river to talk about it in person. She was no longer on crutches, but she still had a slight limp, the only legacy of her car crash in Delhi. One of her officers in D4, the counter-intelligence branch that monitored the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens, had intercepted a routine diplomatic communication. A man called Nikolai Ivanovich Primakov was about to be posted to London under cultural attaché cover. The young duty officer had run the normal checks, calling up Primakov’s file from the library and cross-referring it with known SVR and GRU agents operating under diplomatic cover.

To the duty officer’s surprise, he found that Primakov had once enjoyed a high-flying intelligence career, but his prospects had suffered when Boris Yeltsin set about disbanding the KGB in 1991. After a three-year stint in the private security business, protecting banks in Moscow, Primakov returned to the SVR, as the KGB’s First Chief Directorate had become, where he continued to rise through the ranks until he suffered a series of sideways moves. His imminent arrival in London was a promotion, prompting the duty officer to conclude in his daily report that it was significant.

At no point did he realise quite how significant it was, but behind the scenes his routine inquiry had triggered a flagged message to drop into Armstrong’s in-box. As Director General of MI5, she was one of only a handful of people who knew that Primakov had once been MI6’s most senior asset in the KGB and later the SVR, on a par with Penkovsky and Gordievsky.

Fielding and Armstrong were allies now, thick as Baghdad thieves, united in their resentment of America’s growing influence in Whitehall. And Fielding sensed the makings of a mutually beneficial plan, a shoring up of defences against Spiro, something that might buy both their Services a little respect again after a torrid year.

He gave Oleg a scratch behind the ears and walked back to his desk. One of Primakov’s restricted MI6 files from the 1980s, known as a ‘no-trace’ because any database search for it would yield nothing, lay in front of the framed photos of Fielding’s favourite godchildren, Maya and Freddie. Beside it was a neat grid of Post-it notes he had been writing all evening.

The file was open on a page that showed a tourist-style photo of Primakov taken in Agra in 1980, standing in front of the Taj Mahal. Beside him was Stephen Marchant, smiling back at the camera. He had good reason to be happy, and not just because his wife had recently given birth to twins, Daniel and Sebastian. It was eight years before disaster would strike, when Sebastian was so cruelly taken from him. Stephen Marchant was already a rising star in MI6, but his recruitment of Primakov, then attached to the Soviet Embassy in Delhi, would propel him all the way to the top of the Service.

Primakov rose swiftly through the KGB, too, on his return to Moscow, specialising in counter-intelligence, much to the satisfaction of Marchant and his MI6 superiors. But his relationship with the West was built on personal friendship. He would only agree to be handled by Stephen Marchant, which created problems for everyone. Not for the first time, Primakov began to arouse the suspicion of Moscow Centre, his career stalled and the RX eventually dried up. Primakov’s posting to London marked a return to the fold. And Fielding sensed that it was in some way linked to whatever had happened in Morocco. Patterns again.

A line from the switchboard was flickering on Fielding’s comms console. He had been about to look at another file on Primakov that not even Armstrong knew about. It told a very different story about his friendship with Marchant, but that would have to wait. He took the call, wondering who would be ringing him so late at night.

‘I have a Paul Myers from GCHQ for you, sir,’ the woman on reception said.

The last time he had spoken to Myers had also been in the middle of the night, when he had rung to talk about Leila. It was partly because of Myers that she had been exposed as a traitor, something that Fielding had never forgotten.

‘I assume this is important,’ Fielding began, sounding harsher than he meant. He liked Myers.

‘Sorry for ringing so late, but I thought you should know,’ Myers began. At least he wasn’t drunk this time.

‘Go on.’

‘I’ve been working on the Salim Dhar intercept, in advance of the JIC meeting tomorrow.’

‘And?’

‘There was someone else in the farm building with him.’

‘Quite a few people, I gather.’ Perhaps Myers had been drinking after all.

‘There’s a voice at the end of the intercept, sort of screaming.’

Fielding instinctively peeled off a fresh Post-it note and began to write, trying to contain any implications within the boundaries of his neat hand.

‘“Sort of” screaming? Either it was screaming or it wasn’t.’

‘I’ve been running it through filter analysis, comparing it with thousands of other screams. It’s an American voice.’

Myers paused. The nib of Fielding’s green-ink fountain pen hovered.

‘There’s something else. I ran a few spectrographic checks. There wasn’t much to go on, but the voiceprint appears to match one of the US Marines who was taken by the Taleban.’

‘Are you sure?’ There had been a news blackout when six US Marines had been seized two days earlier, but the Americans had told a few of their closest allies, which still included Britain.

‘Fort Meade patched over some voice profiles of the Marines to Cheltenham, told our Af-Pak desks to listen out for them. I think Salim Dhar might have been with them, maybe part of the team holding them hostage.’

There was a long silence. Oleg raised his head, as if sensing the missed beat.

‘Sir?’

But Fielding had already hung up.

18

Spiro looked in the mirror and straightened his tie. The Joint Intelligence Committee was already assembling down the corridor, but there was still time. Entering and locking a cubicle behind him, he marshalled two lines of cocaine on the porcelain surface of the cistern, using his Whitehall security card. Then he stopped, held his breath. Someone had come into the room, humming. It sounded like Fielding. Did the Vicar know more than he did? Cheltenham would have picked up the jihadi website before Langley had shut it down.

Spiro waited for him to leave, listening to the crisp discipline of the Vicar’s unhurried ablutions, the way he dispensed the soap with two short stabs, turned the taps, tore the paper towels. A man in control of his life, unhurried. Spiro envied him, but he knew that he too would have that feeling in a few seconds. When the Vicar was gone, he leaned over the powder, a rolled ten-dollar bill shaking in his hand. The next moment he was flushing the cistern, the tumbling water masking his snorts. Steady, he told himself. He had to hold it together.

Spiro unlocked the cubicle door and rinsed his hands, glancing again at himself in the smoked mirror. At moments like this he could take reassurance in his ageing face, find comfort in the lines of experience, each one a reminder of a hardship survived, one of life’s obstacles overcome: brought up in Over-the-Rhine, then a rough quarter in downtown Cincinnati; an abusive father; the first Gulf War; his cheating wife; their disabled son and his desire to make the world a better place for him.

Few people saw him that way. The British had him down as an ex-Marine who had forgotten to leave his battle fatigues at the door, which was fine by him. He hadn’t been hired to be nice. Christ, he hadn’t been born to be nice. One of his first jobs at Langley had been to oversee the freelance deniables the Agency regularly hired to do its heavy lifting. They were all ex-military, like him, and they got along with him fine, respecting his distinguished career in the Marine Corps.

He knew, though, that he had been lucky to hold on to his job. The end of the rendition programme and the fall-out from the so-called ‘torture memos’ had led a number of staff to leave, sapping the morale of those left behind. Spiro had thought about jumping into the private sector before he was pushed, but he had stayed on, never doubting that his approach to intelligence would be in demand again in the future. He just hadn’t figured it would be so soon. Salim Dhar was to thank for that. The jumped-up jihadi’s long-range shot at the President had changed everything, including Spiro’s career prospects.

‘Thank God, I didn’t fire you,’ the new DCIA, a moderate, had joked after promoting Spiro to head of the National Clandestine Service’s European operations. ‘The bad-ass guys are back in town.’

But his job now looked to be in doubt again. Dark clouds were rolling in from Afghanistan. The tone of the DCIA’s voice on the phone in the Gulfstream V had reminded him of the consultant who had broken the news about their disabled child. Mom and baby were doing fine. They just needed to run some tests. Euphoria qualified.

According to the DCIA, a jihadi website was claiming that six kidnapped US Marines had been killed in a drone strike. The website had been flooded immediately by Fort Meade, temporarily shutting it down, but the signs weren’t good, and the news, true or false, would soon come out elsewhere. The thought made Spiro want to throw up. He had served in the Gulf alongside one of the soldiers, Lieutenant Randall Oaks, knew his wife, heard they had a young daughter.

‘Don’t beat our drum too loud in London,’ the DCIA had said. ‘We might need our friends in the days ahead.’ So it was with a deep breath that Spiro splashed water on his weathered face, dried himself with a paper towel and hoped that the Vicar might offer a prayer for the dead.

19

Marchant had a contingency plan for leaving Morocco, the first part of which he had already put in place. The ticket he had booked on the morning flight out of Marrakech was in his own name. But the passport he now held in his hand as he sat in the back of the speeding taxi was in the name of Dirk McLennan, a ‘snap cover’ stitched together by Legoland’s cobblers before he had left. The biography was not as detailed as an operational legend, but it was good enough to get him out of Morocco. And the airport he was heading for was Agadir, not Marrakech.

Marchant didn’t miss his previous cover identity, the backpacking student who had done such an efficient job of getting him to India when the CIA had been on his case in Poland. He had enjoyed winding back the clock, smoking weed and getting laid by Monika, the hostel receptionist, but it had been complicated, raised too many issues. His new identity was far more straightforward: a libidinous snapper who ran residential photography courses in Marrakech, mainly for parties of single British women of a certain age.

And this time there was none of the cobblers’ bitterness that had characterised his last legend, no biographical flaws echoing the tragedies of his own life. Dirk McLennan was a good-time cover, full of joie de vivre: girlfriends aplenty, all-night benders and an interesting sideline in glamour photography. In short, Marchant saw it as a gift, his bonus from Legoland for a difficult year.

He checked the passport, his business card and the Billingham bag of cameras and lenses that he had kept in his flat, then caught a glimpse of himself in the driver’s mirror and adjusted the sunglasses that were perched on the top of his head. McLennan’s hair was slightly darker than his own, which was dirt-blond, but he had had no time to dye it. After spotting Meena, he had collected a small overnight bag from his flat and jumped in a taxi, ordered by a man he could trust in the medina.

Now, as the taxi drove down the highway to Agadir, Marchant thought back three months to when Fielding had called him into his office on the morning he had left for Marrakech. The Vicar had reminded him of his responsibilities, the need to keep his head down. They had both survived a challenging time together in India, and their relationship was close, at times almost like father and son. Fielding had risked his own career to support him, something Marchant would never forget. The ensuing year in London had not been easy for either of them. Confined to Legoland by the Americans, Marchant had drunk too much and caused trouble in the office. Fielding had grown tired of having to bail him out. They both knew that Marchant was the only person who could find Dhar, and he wasn’t going to do it chained to a desk in London.

‘The Americans have retreated, lifted the travel ban, but they insist that you remain a legitimate target for observation,’ the Vicar had said, sipping at a glass of the sweet mint tea he had asked Otto, his Eastern European butler, to prepare for the two of them. ‘We’ve protested, of course, but there’s no movement.’

‘And our rules of engagement, have they changed?’

‘Despite everything that happened, to you, to me, to Harriet Armstrong, America remains our closest ally,’ Fielding said. ‘Remember that. The appalling truth is that we can’t live for long without them or the intel they share with us.’ He paused. ‘Langley is on record as having cleared you and your father of any wrong-doing. That counts for something. Salim Dhar is the enemy combatant here, not you. But we both know that your relationship with Dhar presents the CIA with a problem. If they ever cross the line again, hold you against your will, interrogate –’

‘Waterboard,’ Marchant interrupted.

‘Yes, well – you may have to cross the line, too.’

‘And the real reason for my presence in Marrakech remains deniable,’ Marchant said.

‘Utterly. As far as the Americans are concerned, you are in Morocco on sabbatical. Marrakech is a natural place for you, an Arabist, to sort your life out. HR have signed off on it, citing ill-health and low office morale. Given the disruption you’ve caused in Legoland over the past year, they are only too pleased to see the back of you.’

Marchant reckoned that the circumstances he found himself in now satisfied Fielding’s conditions. Lakshmi Meena had crossed the line. The woman Langley had sent to keep an eye on him was suddenly on his case after weeks of inactivity. He might be wrong, of course, but it was odd that Meena had come back to watch him late in the night after their meeting at the bar anglais. The only explanation was that she must have heard about the helicopter incident and Marchant’s presence in the mountains. But who had seen him? He assumed it was a local informer. The CIA was closer to the Moroccan intelligence services than MI6, particularly after the courts in London had revealed details of torture at a Moroccan black site.

By the time he reached Agadir airport, Marchant was confident that nobody had followed him by road from Marrakech. His worry was that a reception committee might be waiting for him in the departures hall. If Meena meant business, she would be watching all the country’s exits, particularly when Daniel Marchant didn’t show up for his flight from Marrakech. But security at the airport was no more rigorous than usual.

After checking in one piece of luggage, Marchant was about to make his way to passport control when he heard a commotion behind him. He turned to see a man in shades being escorted into the departures hall by three policemen, an air stewardess and a posse of screaming middle-aged women. Behind them were half a dozen paparazzi, cameras flashing as they jostled for position.

‘Who’s the celeb?’ Marchant asked the attractive woman behind the check-in desk.

‘Hussein Farmi,’ she said, a faint blush colouring her face.

Marchant nodded knowingly, but the woman wasn’t convinced.

‘Star of more than a hundred films,’ she explained. ‘Khali Balak Min Zouzou? With Soad Hosny?’

‘Of course.’

‘He’s one of the Middle East’s most popular actors. And he has been married five times.’ She stifled a giggle.

‘I’d better get a few shots of him then,’ Marchant said, nodding at the canvas bag slung over his shoulder. Without thinking, he pulled out a camera, snapped the check-in woman and gave her a wink as he walked off in pursuit of Farmi. Photographers could get away with murder, he thought.

20

Fielding couldn’t remember such a tense meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Even the ones that had been hastily called in the hours after 9/11 and 7/7 had been characterised by unity rather than discord. Everyone had been pulling together then. There were no divisions, no conflicting agendas. The Americans had needed Britain’s help after 9/11, and the British had needed their help after 7/7.

This time the Cabinet Room in Downing Street was crackling with resentment and rivalry as Spiro addressed the London heads of the Canadian, Australian and New Zealand intelligence services, Harriet Armstrong, Director General of MI5, the head of GCHQ, accompanied by an awkward Paul Myers, a raft of faceless Whitehall mandarins, and the clammy-cheeked Sir David Chadwick, still chairman of the JIC despite the Americans’ best efforts to unseat him in a cooked-up child-porn sting.

‘I had hoped to bring better news to you all today,’ Spiro said, studiously avoiding any eye contact with Fielding. ‘As you know, we believe we have eliminated Salim Dhar in a Reaper strike in Afghanistan. We still maintain the target was destroyed, but there are rumours this morning that Dhar might have been with the six US Marines who were taken at the weekend by Taleban forces. In terms of potential collateral, that particular scenario couldn’t be worse.’

Six US Marines struck Fielding as a result, compared to the normal quota of innocent women and children who were destroyed by drone strikes, but he kept his peace, preferring to make his point with a short dry cough. Spiro looked across at him for the first time.

‘They are all fine soldiers. One of them, Lieutenant Randall Oaks, served alongside me in Iraq. As things stand right now, the picture is a little confused. A jihadi website posted images this morning of the strike zone, one of which I can show you now.’

He pressed at a remote in his hand and a grab from a website appeared on a flat screen behind Spiro. It showed a group of local Afghanis waving at the camera. One was holding a damaged Marine’s helmet, its US markings just visible.

‘NSA managed to crash the site by overloading the server, but it’s fair to assume the images will soon appear elsewhere. We happen to believe they’re fake, but clearly it’s an unhelpful story. Right now, the President, whom I personally briefed yesterday, is holding back on an announcement about Dhar. He wants DNA, but that could be tricky, given the hostile location of the strike zone.’

Chadwick cleared his throat loudly enough for Spiro to pause. ‘Just supposing Dhar is still alive, is he likely to address his followers, make a video to prove he’s not dead?’

‘First up, we don’t believe Dhar’s alive. Our position remains that he was killed in the Reaper strike. Personally, I also think the Marines story is a red herring, put out to distract attention from Dhar’s death. No way would Salim Dhar, the world’s most wanted terrorist, risk being with the Marines, knowing our ongoing military efforts to find and retrieve them. But if Dhar is still alive – and that’s a mighty big if – it’s not his style to show himself.’

‘So should we be putting out rumours that he’s dead?’

‘Absolutely. Fort Meade’s already posting to that effect in jihadi chatrooms. We’d be grateful if Cheltenham coordinates the European side of things. I don’t want a repeat of Rashid Rauf. His supporters were claiming he was alive and well within minutes of the Reaper strike. It’s imperative we move quickly.’

Fielding caught Armstrong’s eye. He wondered what she was feeling as she sat there, watching the humiliation of Spiro, a man she had once so foolishly admired. She glanced away and looked at Myers. The three of them had talked earlier about the audio evidence. The head of GCHQ was not happy – Cheltenham had better relations with the Americans than MI5 and MI6 – but Fielding had reassured him that he would take the heat.

Just as Spiro was about to speak again, Fielding began, his languid body language – long legs out to one side, head bent forward like a concert pianist’s – at odds with the devastating intelligence he was about to pool.

‘Some product crossed my desk this morning that I think should be shared.’

‘That’s very good of you,’ Spiro said, managing a thin smile. Fielding savoured his rival’s fluster, the nervousness that everyone in the room would have detected in the American’s voice. ‘Go ahead. After all, sharing product is what this meeting’s all about, isn’t it?’

‘Your position, as I understand it, is that Dhar was not with the Marines at the time of the strike.’

‘No, that’s not my position. The Marines were not with Dhar when we eliminated him.’

Spiro’s voice was wavering more now, a top-end tremolo that was music to Fielding’s ears.

‘Let’s just suppose for a moment that we could prove that the Marines and Dhar were together when the Reaper struck.’

‘I hope that this evidence, whatever it is, came in to your possession after and not before we launched our attack. Because that would frickin’ upset me if you weren’t sharing intel.’

‘I can understand that. For the record’ – a nod at Chadwick, the chairman – ‘we learned about it late last night.’

‘And what exactly is this intel?’

‘Paul?’ Fielding turned to Myers, who was sitting next to him, looking more uncomfortable than usual. ‘Paul Myers has been on attachment with us from Cheltenham’ – a glance at the Chief of GCHQ, who turned away as if Fielding had just thrown up over him – ‘and last night he ran some further tests on the Dhar audio intercept.’

Fielding looked again at Myers, who appeared too nervous to take up the story, biting at what was left of his nails.

‘Some tests,’ Spiro said, not trying to disguise his disdain. ‘In addition to Fort Meade’s thorough spectrographic analysis?’

‘That’s right. And he found a fragment of sound at the end of the second intercept that I think we should all hear.’

Myers stood up and walked over to an audio console beneath the main screen. He had suddenly grown in confidence, evidently more at ease with technology than people. After checking the levels, he half turned towards the room, instinctively crouching down at the height of the console when he saw all the faces.

‘I was looking for something else when I found it,’ he said, to no one in particular. ‘Often the way.’ A nervous laugh, immediately regretted. ‘It’s only a few milliseconds, but I’ve slowed it down so you can hear.’ He pressed a button, and there was silence. Then a deep, distorted, drawn-out call, like a wounded animal’s, filled the room.

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