Dead Spy Running by Jon Stock

Author:Jon Stock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2009-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

27

‘It was a precaution, Marcus, nothing more,’ Sir David Chadwick said, watching Fielding carefully as he poured them both a gin. ‘She was never working for them as such. Ultimately she answered to you, to us.’

Fielding remained silent, looking out through French windows at a posse of female statues in the garden. There were three of them, their crude curves lit up by spotlights sunk around an ornamental pond. Chislehurst seemed to be full of naked garden statues, Fielding thought, at least on the private road where Chadwick lived. Statues and speed bumps and video-linked doorbells. Even Fielding’s driver, parked outside in his official Range Rover, had been taken aback by the ostentation.

‘The Americans insisted on it,’ Chadwick continued, filling the silence. Fielding made him nervous when he was in this sort of mood, his reticence impossible to read. ‘Unfortunately, we weren’t in a very strong position to argue. You know as well as I do how things were. We were in turmoil. No leads on the bombing campaign, the Chief of MI6 under suspicion.’

Fielding still said nothing as he turned to take his drink. He had asked to meet outside London, and Chadwick had thought that inviting him to dinner at home would be the perfect solution, particularly as his wife was out at choir practice for the evening. The informal setting would allow them to talk properly about the future of the Service, how it might start to rebuild itself after the damage inflicted by the Stephen Marchant affair, and what the hell he had done with Daniel Marchant. Did he also want to show off the Edwardian-style orangery that had been added since he took over as Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee? Perhaps. But now he was regretting it, because Fielding somehow knew about Leila.

‘I need reassurances that there’s no one else,’ Fielding eventually said.

‘She was the only one,’ Chadwick replied, joining him at the window. ‘No one was happy about it, Marcus.’

‘Except Spiro. And Armstrong.’

‘We needed to know if it ran in the family.’

‘Which is why I suspended Daniel Marchant.’

‘And that was the right and proper thing to do. But it wasn’t enough, I’m afraid. Daniel began to go a little off-message when Stephen died, started to show all the signs of a renegade.’

‘He knew the rules, that we’d go after him if he became another Tomlinson.’

‘The Americans wanted more assurances – not a bad call in the light of the marathon attack.’

Fielding laughed dryly. ‘Which Daniel Marchant thwarted.’

‘Leila’s account of the incident is a little more ambiguous.’

‘Not in the debrief I read. No doubt she told others what they wanted to hear.’

‘You’ve approved her three-month attachment?’

‘Of course. With a proviso that she never returns.’

‘How did you know, by the way?’

‘How do any of us know anything in this business? We join the dots, squint a little, turn things on their side and try, with a lot of luck, to see the bigger picture.’ He paused. ‘She didn’t debrief properly, after meeting one of her best Gulf contacts.

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