Free Dirty Little Secret by Jon Stock Page A

difficult,’ the Chairman replied. ‘The best we can do is put out an MoD release explaining that it’s an exercise.’
    ‘If only it was,’ the PM said. ‘I hope to God Dhar’s not there.’
    ‘He’s not,’ Denton said. ‘And even if he was, the Americans wouldn’t find him. Fielding’s locked down the building.’
    ‘That could be interpreted as the actions of a Chief with something to hide.’
    ‘Just pride.’ Denton paused, looking around the room at his pale, flabby colleagues. Most of them had been up for twenty-four hours. ‘Dhar’s not in London. He’s gone to his father’s house. Stephen Marchant had a big place in the country, in a hamlet called Tarlton, just outside Cirencester.’
    A murmur swept around the room, followed by shuffled papers and disbelieving asides.
    ‘I know it’s been a long night, but are you seriously telling me that Salim Dhar is hiding in the Cotswolds?’ the PM asked. ‘Wouldn’t he want to be as far away from here as possible?’
    ‘It would explain the MI6 number. As Chief, Stephen Marchant’s home was installed with a secure landline. My guess is that it was never downgraded after he died.’ Denton turned to the Chief of Defence staff. ‘How long would it take for the Increment to reach Tarlton?’

24
    Dhar stood by the grave in the half-light, reading the words that had been carved into the stone. ‘Stephen Marchant 1949–2009.
Semper occultus.
’ He didn’t know what the words meant. If Marchant showed up, he would ask him. Time, though, was running out – for both of them. He had left the pilot in the house, tied up and gagged. He still wasn’t sure why he had chosen to keep the man alive. Perhaps it was for his own self-preservation. One kidnapped
kafir
wouldn’t be enough to barter with when they came for him, as he knew they would, but it might stop him being killed.
    He glanced around and knelt awkwardly, trying to ignore the pain in his leg. His father was buried at the back of a small and ancient church, separated from the main house by a gravel drive. It was the first time he had been to a Christian burial site, and he began to recite the last verses of the Surat al-Baqarah, the second chapter of the Holy Qur’an.
    ‘
… Our Lord! Lay not on us what we have no strength to bear. Pardon us, forgive us and have mercy on us. You are our Protector; give us victory over the disbelievers …
’
    Tears pricked his eyes as he prayed in the early-morning stillness. A gossamer mist hung over the surrounding fields, and his knees were wet with dew. He was here to honour his real father, whom he had only met once, at a black site in South India, but images of another man kept rearing out of the shadows.
    Life had been hard when he was growing up on the fringes of Chanakyapuri in New Delhi, where his parents had worked at various foreign embassies. The man who claimed to be his father used to beat him regularly with a wooden baseball bat: back of the legs, arms, soles of his feet when he slept late. His mother had suffered terribly too, hiding when her husband returned from yet another party at the American Embassy, drunk on bourbon and Coke. Dhar couldn’t blame her for turning to another man.
    He leant forward and kissed the top of the gravestone, the sound as his lips touched it exaggerated in the quietness. Silence at dawn felt alien to him. Where was the
muezzin
, calling the faithful to prayer? Where were the mosques in this sterile land they called the Cotswolds? That was the hardest thing for Dhar to accept: that his father had been an unbeliever. It was painful enough that he had worked for an infidel intelligence agency, but he had come to terms with that. Now, though, he had to deal with the
kuffar,
whom he could feel closing in all around him.

25
    Fielding walked briskly along the south side of Grosvenor Road. Oleg was at heel, surprised but happy to be on a night-time walk. They had slipped out of the Dolphin Square flat unnoticed by the