Free Dead Spy Running by Jon Stock Page B

my father.’
    â€˜Your dad never really took to me, did he?’ Leila said, unpeeling herself from Marchant’s arms to apply some mascara.
    â€˜That’s not true.’
    â€˜That time when we went to your home for lunch in the country, he was very ill at ease with me. Almost rude.’
    â€˜He was wary of all my girlfriends, suspicious of women generally. Two boys, you see, no daughters. And a distant wife.’
    â€˜Can’t say it runs in the family.’
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜The Wariness of Women gene. I’m not sure he passed it on.’ She smiled at him and he knew she was right, standing there in the evening light. He had never felt less wary of anyone in his life.

8
    It was a long-held custom that the first half of the Joint Intelligence Committee’s weekly meeting in the Cabinet Room at Downing Street was attended by senior officers from the American, Australian and Canadian intelligence services. The second half was only for the British. Marcus Fielding could barely wait for the foreign contingent to be shown the door, but for the next few minutes he would have to listen to James Spiro, the CIA’s London chief, who had announced, with his usual hard-man hyperbole, that he had some ‘weapons-grade HUMINT to bring to the party’. Fielding had already got the gist of it earlier that morning, thanks to one of several new listening devices installed at the recently opened American Embassy in Vauxhall (near Legoland), but he sat there, ramrod-straight, as if he was hearing it all for the first time.
    â€˜We are now certain that Stephen Marchant travelled to Kerala and met up with Salim Dhar in jail,’ Spiro began, as ever liking the sound of his own voice. ‘I appreciate Dhar’s role in last year’s UK bombings is far from clear, but there is absolutely no doubt that he tried to bomb the hell out of our embassies in New Delhi and Islamabad. Ask the families of the fifteen dead US Marines.’
    So far, nothing new, Fielding thought, looking around the coffin-shaped oak table. The usual mix of Whitehall suspects were in attendance, including the heads of MI5 and Cheltenham, as well as mandarins from various departments, all presided over by the chairman of the JIC, Sir David Chadwick, who was sitting at the far end, in front of the double windows which had buckled when the IRA lobbed a mortar bomb into the Downing Street rosebeds. Everyone had flung themselves on the floor that day, the Cabinet Secretary lying next to the Prime Minister.
    If it happened again this morning, Fielding idly thought, Harriet Armstrong, Director General of MI5, would do her best to prostrate herself next to Spiro. She glanced tersely at Fielding, as if reading his mind. They had never liked each other, their relationship chilling even further when she had enlisted Spiro’s support to remove Stephen Marchant.
    â€˜What we do now know, however, thanks to Harriet here, is that Dhar was behind Sunday’s foiled bombing of the London Marathon, an attack that I don’t need to remind you was targeted at our Ambassador to London.’
    Fielding looked up. This had not been in the transcript he had read in the car coming over from Vauxhall. He glanced across at Armstrong, who was studiously avoiding his eye. It was a stitch-up. Until now, any connection between Dhar and the London Marathon had been purely circumstantial, based on the nature of the target and Dhar’s historical predilection for attacking Americans. If his involvement could now be proved, as Spiro claimed, it would cast Stephen Marchant and his son in a new and far more compromising light.
    â€˜I’ll leave the domestic implications of this to the second half of your meeting, but clearly Dhar has just become a priority one target, and I’d be grateful if, on this occasion, the Service leaves him to us.’
    â€˜Marcus?’ asked Chadwick, sounding as if Spiro had raised a