Dead Spy Running (18 page)

Marchant heard the police before they reached his carriage. He lay there, eyes open, Kirsty by his side, listening to the sounds of sleep all around him. In the background he could detect the faint but urgent voices of authority. He disentangled himself from Kirsty's limp embrace and swung down to the floor of the carriage, making sure his footfall was silent. He knew he had to move quickly. Police were working their way through the train from both ends.

Marchant stepped out of the sleeping area and into a small space at the end of the carriage, where it was joined to the next one. In a cubicle marked ‘Laundry', a junior-looking train official slept on a fold-down bed, pillows and blankets stacked neatly on shelves above him. The door was ajar. Quietly, Marchant pulled it closed. Then he pushed down on the handle of the outside door and swung it open. The night air was warm, the surrounding countryside flat: paddy fields. Marchant estimated that the train was travelling at 30 mph – not quick, but too fast to jump.

Beside him was a small metal cupboard marked ‘Electrics'. He pulled at its dented front panel. The lock had long since broken, and it opened easily. Voices were now getting louder behind him. He looked up and down the train, then flicked all those switches in the cupboard that were in the up position. Two lights above him went out, along with the dim night lights in the main carriage. It would buy him a few seconds. Checking that no emergency lighting had come on, he stretched down onto the step outside the train's open door, holding onto the handle beside it. He then put his left foot up onto the door, and lifted himself upwards, glancing at the printed list of passengers that had been glued to the outside of the train in Delhi: name, sex, age.

For a moment, suspended horizontally above the moving ground, he thought he was going to fall, but with his left hand he managed to grip the top of the door, and pulled himself up further. A second later, the train passed a concrete signal post, which brushed against his billowing shirt. The surge of adrenalin made his legs heavy, and he knew he was losing strength.

Glancing both ways, he grabbed onto the lip of the train's roof, then lifted himself upwards again, pushing with one foot on the small light above the passenger list. The next moment he was lying flat on the roof. He thought of Shah Rukh Khan dancing on the top of a train in
Dil Se
, but he didn't feel like a film star as he pressed himself against the dirty train roof, looking out for bridges.

He knew he wasn't safe yet. Leaning over the side of the train, he grabbed the heavy door and swung it shut. The door clicked closed, but not properly. There was no time to push it flush with the side of the carriage. He started to shuffle back down the roof of the train, towards economy class, keeping his body as flat as he could.

Below him, a posse of policemen entered the carriage from the far end, making their way through the sleeping families, looking for someone. They didn't disturb passengers unless they couldn't see their faces. When they reached Kirsty's and Holly's cubicle, the policeman in charge deferred to a female colleague, who moved forward. Holly's face was clearly visible, but Kirsty's was hidden beneath her blanket.

‘Yes please, wake up madam, we need to see your passport,' the policewoman said, tugging on Kirsty's blanket. She then spoke to Holly, whose eyes had opened. ‘Passport, madam? Police check.'

Holly sat up and fumbled sleepily through her rucksack, which was at the end of her bed. ‘Kirsty, wake up,' she called across to her friend, who was still asleep. ‘Kirsty?'

Kirsty stirred, blinking at the policewoman, whose head was just below the level of her bunk. Instinctively, she turned to where Marchant had been lying, and then looked back at the woman.

‘Lost something?' she said to Kirsty.

‘Just my bag.'

‘Is this it?' the policewoman said, tapping the rucksack at Kirsty's feet.

Kirsty nodded, then pulled out her passport from the money belt around her waist, sweeping back her hair, still half asleep. Where had David gone? She hadn't heard him leave. As the woman inspected both passports, then passed them to her senior colleague, Holly glanced quizzically at Kirsty, who shrugged.

‘Is there something wrong?' Kirsty asked.

‘We're looking for an Irishman, David Marlowe,' the senior officer said, a bamboo
lathi
in one hand. ‘He was seen embarking this train in Delhi with two female foreign tourists. Have you seen anyone of this name?'

Kirsty glanced at Holly.

‘Yes, he's travelling in economy,' Holly said. ‘We only met him on the platform at Nizamuddin. Bit of a loser.'

Kirsty threw her a reproachful, confused look. She knew she should have stayed in Delhi with Anya.

‘Which place was he heading?' the policewoman asked, making notes on a small pad.

‘Why don't you ask her,' Holly said. ‘She knew him better.'

‘He helped us out in a difficult situation on the platform in Delhi,' Kirsty said, addressing Holly as much as the policewoman. ‘I think he said he was going as far as Vasai.'

Whatever David might have done wrong, Kirsty thought, he had still gone out of his way to help them in Delhi. Holly seemed to have forgotten that.

‘Vasai? He wasn't travelling to Goa then?'

‘He didn't have enough money.'

‘Did he say anything else?'

‘No.'

‘And he was travelling alone?'

‘I guess so.'

‘Any luggage?'

‘I don't think so. Why are you asking me so many questions?'

‘Can you recall what was he wearing?'

‘I don't know.' Kirsty suddenly felt very tired. ‘Jeans?'

‘He smelt, that's all I remember,' Holly said. Kirsty didn't even bother to look at her this time. She just wanted to go back to sleep, and wake up in her own bed in Britain.

‘A word of advice, madam,' the policewoman said, handing back both passports to Kirsty. ‘Stay away from ne'er-do-wells like David Marlowe.'

‘What's he done?' Holly asked.

‘You'll read about it soon enough in today's papers. He's dangerous, a slippery fellow.'

Fielding had ordered his driver to turn round and head back to the office after dropping Myers in Trafalgar Square, where he said he would pick up a night bus to a friend's flat in North London. Legoland was reassuringly busy as Fielding took the lift up to his office. It troubled him when the place was quiet. He left a message on Denton's mobile, asking him to get in early the next day, and then settled back down at his desk to read through Leila's Developed Vetting report, which he had called up from the night duty manager. At about 3 a.m. he asked for the latest files on the Bahá'í community in Iran, Ali Mousavi, and the London Marathon attack, which needed to be delivered by trolley.

By the time dawn broke, a vivid orange warming the dark Thames beneath his window, Fielding had a better understanding of the threat posed by Leila, and the implications of her unprecedented triple-agent status for the Service, for Stephen Marchant, and for his own career. The Americans would have to make their own assessment, based on a briefing he would give Straker in a few hours. She was their problem now.

The implications for MI6 were still catastrophic, though, if Leila, one of the Service's star recruits, had been working for VEVAK, Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security, from the day she arrived at Legoland. Developed Vetting, introduced ten years before, was meant to guarantee the highest level of clearance, far superior to routine counter-terrorism and security checks. Such vetting was more important than ever now that the intelligence services were recruiting from such diverse ethnic backgrounds, but in Leila's case it appeared to have suffered an unprecedented failure.

A wide-ranging interview had been carried out with Leila shortly after she first applied to the Service, followed by two further interviews before she began training at the Fort, nine months after her initial application. The last of these had been conducted in the presence of a senior vetting officer, and triggered an ‘aftercare' concern about family ties to Iran.

A more junior vetting officer was dispatched to interview Leila's mother at her home in Hertfordshire. Widowed two years earlier, she had been a resident of the UK for more than twenty-five years, after fleeing her job as a university lecturer in Tehran at the time of the Revolution. She was a devout Bahá'í, and had continued to follow her religion in England, joining a small local group.

The subsequent DV report raised no security objections, describing Leila's mother as a fully integrated member of British society. Along with other Bahá'ís who had left Iran to live in Britain, she was vehemently opposed to the current regime in Tehran, but she was a low-key member of the expatriate Bahá'í community. Significantly, she had not been associated with any of the various political campaigns around the world that called for religious freedom in Iran.

Two months before Leila began her training at the Fort, her mother was interviewed for a second time. She was still at the same address, but there was talk of her moving out to a nursing home in Harpenden. The interview came back clean, and a handwritten note had been added to the file suggesting that further interviews should be avoided if they were not strictly necessary. Much of what she said appeared muddled, and it was concluded that she was presenting signs of early onset Alzheimer's.

What troubled Fielding was the vetters' complete failure to pick up on the mother's move back to Iran, which must have taken place shortly after her last interview. As far as the vetters were concerned, she was still residing in Hertfordshire. It would have been Leila's responsibility to inform MI6 of any change in her family circumstances, particularly given the West's sensitive relationship with Iran, but she had clearly chosen not to tell a soul. Within Whitehall it was acknowledged that Developed Vetting relied too heavily on the responsibility of the individual to report such changes, but the system's fundamental flaws had never been so exposed.

Fielding tried to take the charitable view. If Leila had been aware of her mother's plans in advance, she would have opposed them, knowing that they could potentially expose her to blackmail. But once she was back in Iran, what could Leila do? She was fiercely ambitious, and her promising career in MI6 would have been over before it had started if she had told the authorities what had happened.

Fielding decided she probably had no warning, just a call from her mother explaining what she had done: instead of moving into a nursing home, she had taken a flight back to Iran. Had the mother's muddled manner in her last interview been a bluff? Once she was settled in Iran, Leila's worst fears would have been confirmed. Her mother was soon being targeted because of her faith, and VEVAK came knocking at Leila's door in London, knowing that she was about to embark on a career with MI6.

Two hundred Bahá'ís had been killed in Iran in the early 1980s, and many thousands had been arrested. In recent years, the Islamic government had renewed its campaign to eliminate all Bahá'ís from the country. Leila must have been given a stark choice: work for VEVAK, or her mother dies. She wouldn't be the first or the last Bahá'í to be executed.

For a brief moment, Fielding felt sorry for Leila. The files suggested a touchingly strong bond between mother and daughter, made even stronger by Leila's father's drinking. They had been united against his excesses, which included violence towards Leila's mother, but not towards her, although their relationship was far from close. One entry in her file suggested that there was a complete breakdown of communication between the two after Leila had started at Oxford University. She had told her vetting officer that the tears she shed at her father's funeral, in her final year, were solely for her mother.

Fielding stood up from his desk, stretched and looked out of the window as the first planes into Heathrow stirred London from sleep. There was a knock on the door, and Otto, who had served as a butler for three Chiefs, brought in a pot of Turkish coffee, a small basket of warm flat breads and some
labneh
cream cheese. Fielding's tours of duty had left their mark on his palate.

‘You must take some time off, Otto,' Fielding said. ‘Working late last night, here so early today.'

‘It's no problem, sir. The duty manager called me. He said you had been up all night and so forth.'

‘The difference is that I'm paid enough to work through the night, you're not,' Fielding said, pouring a coffee. He knew that many of MI6's new recruits bridled at the notion of a butler working in Legoland, until the practicalities of the Chief dining with anyone of importance were pointed out to them. On most days of the week, he lunched with politicians, senior civil servants and colleagues from other agencies, but their conversations were too sensitive for even the most trustworthy restaurants (MI6 had a number of small, security-cleared establishments in central London on its books).

Otto was originally from Yugoslavia. He had arrived in London in the 1960s, having learnt his English entirely from reading 1950s spy novels. The dated turns of phrase had gradually disappeared over the years, but he still surprised people with the occasional ‘ruddy' expletive, a ‘chin chin', or even, the office's favourite, ‘We meet again.' Fielding often wondered what the outside world would once have made of the Chief of MI6 employing a butler from Eastern Europe. Now, of course, there was nothing unusual about his nationality, but at the height of the Cold War it must have raised a few eyebrows in Whitehall.

‘Family keeping well?' Fielding asked, as Otto cleared away some cups from the night before and headed for the door.

‘Yes, sir. Thank you. Mr Denton is here. Be seeing you.'

Fielding's brief moment of sympathy for Leila passed as quickly as it had arrived when Ian Denton, unshaven and carrying a coffee from the canteen, reminded him of what her work for the Iranians might have entailed: not only betraying her country by facilitating a wave of terrorist attacks, but personally destroying his predecessor's career.

As Fielding filled Denton in on the night's developments, he became increasingly certain that Leila was the mole who had done so much to destabilise the Service in the past year, leading to Stephen Marchant's early retirement, ill health and death. Britain had made no secret of its opposition to Iran's nuclear programme, and although the government had fallen short of supporting America's calls for a military invasion, Fielding was only too aware of the Treasury funds that were currently being channelled through MI6 to opposition parties, bloggers and students in Iran who supported regime change.

He and Denton both knew, though, that it would take time to prove Leila's role in the wave of bomb attacks that had preceded Marchant's departure. An unknown cell in South India, with links to the Gulf, was thought to be behind the blasts. But the trail had invariably gone cold, the network analysis maps always had holes. The terrorists had been at least two steps ahead of MI5, prompting fears that they had inside help. MI6's role had been to explore the overseas links, and Leila, working for the Gulf Controllerate on the second floor of Legoland, had been a part of the team liaising with MI5. It was all so obvious now.

South India had been in the frame again for the attempted London Marathon attack, although the chatter and network analysis had increasingly pointed to a Gulf connection. That speculative link had since become a reality, thanks to Paul Myers, whose transcripts pointed to Iran's involvement, as well as Leila's.

‘Should we have suspected her earlier?' Fielding asked. He was worried about Denton, who worked too hard and was always ill when he took leave, which was not often enough. (Fielding had to persuade him to use up his annual holiday allowance.) He had never seen him unshaven before, either.

‘It depends on when we think she started to work for VEVAK,' Denton said.

‘From the off, I fear. They must have made their approach soon after her mother returned to Iran, and before Leila started at the Fort.'

‘And the Americans? Did they know from the beginning?'

‘No. It took them the best part of a year to notice her mother was back in Iran.'

‘A year quicker than us.'

‘Quite. Once Spiro had got wind of the mother's whereabouts, he used it to recruit Leila.'

‘And Spiro had no idea she was already working for the Iranians?'

‘None. Leila must have convinced him that she hadn't been compromised by her mother's move. The CIA was looking for someone close to the head of MI6. Who better than the lover of the Chief's son? Leila agreed to work for them. She could hardly believe her luck. It was her insurance policy against any future mole-hunt in Legoland.'

Fielding took a piece of flat bread and spread it with
labneh
. He gestured at Denton, inviting him to share his breakfast, but he declined. Denton preferred a sausage sandwich from the canteen.

‘Leila's been very smart, Ian,' Fielding continued. ‘If the West queries her actions, she knows they're consistent with her undercover role for the Americans. Why did she find herself near the American Ambassador, one runner in 35,000? Because she was working for the CIA, who were worried about an attack. Did she set up Marchant at the marathon, giving him his old phone? Maybe, but if she did, it was on behalf of the CIA, whose distrust of the Marchants was well known.'

Agreeing to spy for America, in other words, had provided Leila with the perfect operational cover for her real job: spying for Iran. A part of Fielding admired her technical prowess. The Service's instructors at the Fort spent weeks insisting on the need for good legends. Leila must have been listening.

But there was one thing that troubled him above all: why had she remained committed to working for VEVAK? If she was so concerned for her mother's safety, couldn't she have asked the Americans to protect her when they discovered that she was living in Iran? They agreed to pay for her mother's private hospital treatment, so why didn't she take them into her confidence, explain that VEVAK was threatening to kill her? Perhaps she was in too deep; but Fielding felt there was something else.

‘We still don't know why she sabotaged the London attack,' Denton said, interrupting Fielding's line of thought.

‘No.' Fielding picked up the transcript of the first conversation between Leila and her mother, on the evening after the marathon, and handed it to Denton. A section of the dialogue had been highlighted in green marker pen:

 

Mother
(Farsi): ‘You told me they wouldn't come. Others here have suffered, too.'

Leila
(Farsi): ‘Never again, Mama. They won't come any more. (English) I promise.'

Mother
(Farsi): ‘Why did they say my family are to blame? What have we ever done to them?'

 

‘You can see that the mother was clearly told that her family – Leila – was to blame,' Fielding said, watching Denton as he read the dialogue. ‘When word reached Tehran that the bomber hadn't detonated his belt, VEVAK turned up and beat her mother's much-loved cook. If there was a deal between VEVAK and Leila, she had clearly broken it by preventing the attack.'

‘And she didn't go through with it because of Marchant?' Denton asked, passing back the transcript. ‘Because she didn't want her lover to die?'

Fielding hoped so. It would prove that Leila had a weakness – and spies lived for human flaws.

‘Maybe her relationship with Marchant counted for something, I don't know. Perhaps she felt, for some reason, that a successful attack would have blown her cover. Either way, the Iranians stuck with Leila because she wasn't just working for MI6, she'd wormed her way into the CIA too. A priceless asset, in other words, who deserved a second chance. And she knows she can't afford to mess up again. We need to get to Delhi.'