Dirty Little Secret
For fans of Bond and Bourne, the third instalment of the pulse-pounding Daniel Marchant spy series.The special relationship between London and Washington is in tatters. Salim Dhar, the world’s most wanted terrorist, has disappeared after an audacious attack on an American target in the UK. The CIA believes Daniel Marchant, renegade MI6 officer, was involved. But Marchant has a bigger secret: Dhar has agreed to work for MI6, promising to protect the UK from future terrorist atrocities.He has also asked for something in return: Marchant must help him with a final strike against America. Should Britain sign up to this Faustian pact or hunt them both down? Intelligence chiefs are divided – and one of them is working for Moscow.In a high octane thriller set in Britain, France, Russia and Morocco, Marchant wrestles with his conscience and his love for Lakshmi Meena, a beautiful CIA officer with her own secret. Does loyalty to one’s country come above all else, whatever the price? Or are some relationships too special to ignore?
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JON STOCK
Dirty Little Secret
For Stewart and Dinah
Table of Contents
1
Salim Dhar looked over the limestone cliff and tried to imagine where he would fall. For a moment, he saw himself laid out on the flat rocks eighty feet below, the incoming sea lapping at his broken body. He stepped back, recoiling, as if he had caught the stench of his own death on the breeze blowing up from the foreshore.
He glanced around him and then out to sea. The moon was full, illuminating the fluorescence in the crests of the waves. Far to the west, the lights of reconnaissance planes winked as they criss-crossed the night sky, searching in vain for him. Somewhere out there a solitary trawler was drifting on the tide, crewed by men who would never see the dawn.
Dhar limped along the cliff edge to the point where he had climbed up. His flying suit was waterlogged, his left leg searing with pain. He knew he shouldn’t be here, standing on Britain’s Jurassic coastline, but the pull had proved too much. And he knew it was his only chance. After what had happened, the West would be hunting him down with renewed intensity. The American kuffar would increase their reward for him. $30 million? How about $155 million – the price of the US jet he had shot down a few hours earlier?
But would anyone think to search for him so close to home? In another life, Britain could have been his home. He pressed a foot against the rocky ground. Tonight was the first time he had stepped on British soil, and he was surprised by how good it felt: ancient, reassuring. The air was pure, too, caressing his tired limbs with its gentle sea gusts.
He looked down at the foreshore again, rocks latticed like paving stones, and imagined his body somersaulting towards it. Would he survive? His descent might be broken by one of the ledges – if he was lucky. In the training camps of Kashmir and Kandahar, luck had been a forbidden fruit, on a par with alcohol. You who believe, intoxicants and games of chance are repugnant acts – Satan’s doing. Instead, Dhar had been instilled with the discipline of planning. ‘Trust in Allah, but tie your camel to a tree,’ as his explosives instructor had joked (he was mixing hair bleach with chapatti flour at the time).
Now Dhar was rolling the dice. His plan was uncharacteristically reckless, possibly suicidal, but there was no choice. At least, that’s how it felt. He needed to see where his late father, Stephen Marchant, had lived, where his half-brother, Daniel, had grown up. Tarlton, the family home, was not so far from here. He had seen it on the aeronautical charts. If he was to follow in his father’s footsteps, he had to be sure, root himself deep within the English turf.
Dhar stumbled as he picked his way down the steep path, pain shooting through his leg. His knee had been cut when he had ejected. Instinctively he checked for the mobile phone in his pocket. It was still there, sealed in a watertight bag with the handgun. He had taken both from the trawler that had rescued him earlier in the Bristol Channel. If everything had gone to plan, he would now be being debriefed by jubilant Russians back in the Archangel Oblansk. But everything hadn’t gone to plan. Dhar had blinked, and listened to the other man in his cockpit: Daniel Marchant.
He thought again about the trawler. First the captain’s phone had rung, then he had drawn his gun, but Dhar had been ready. Thinking quickly, he had disarmed him before turning on the remaining crew members. It was after nightfall when he had finally abandoned the trawler, making his way ashore in its tender with the captain. He was below him now, propped up against a rock beside the tender, hands tied, drunk on vodka.
