Games Traitors Play by Jon Stock

he get? The boarding gate, if he was lucky.
    Again he ran through the situation in which he found himself: Lakshmi Meena was on his tail, turning up at dawn on the streets of Marrakech. Booking a flight as Daniel Marchant from the city’s airport had given him a head start, but Meena had friends in the Moroccan intelligence service, and someone might have recognised him here at Agadir. No one had stopped him at passport control, but then he was given an upgrade. Perhaps he was over-reacting, and Meena was just making sure he left town. It was too easy to see threats where none existed. But he knew he was right, particularly when another passenger was shown into business class and sat down in the seat beside him.
    â€˜Mind if I join you?’ the man asked. He was Moroccan, and looked faintly familiar.
    â€˜Sure,’ Marchant said, glancing at the empty seats on the other side of the aisle.
    â€˜You’re a photographer?’ he asked, nodding at Marchant’s camera bag.
    â€˜For my sins,’ Marchant said, struggling to stay in character. ‘And you?’
    â€˜Me?’ He paused. ‘I’m a dentist.’

22
    â€˜There’s something else,’ Myers said, after Spiro had sat down. It was more of a slump, but Spiro somehow managed to make it look controlled. For a moment, Fielding wished he felt sorry for Spiro, a pang of pity. But there was nothing but cold contempt, the sort he normally reserved for Russians. ‘Work for the Foreign Office if you want to be liked,’ he had been told by the don who had tapped him up at Oxford. What Fielding didn’t know was that another blow to Spiro’s self-esteem, his career, his whole raison d’être , was about to come from Myers, who was still standing in front of the audio.
    This time, Myers didn’t look to Fielding for guidance. He was on his own now, score abandoned, improvising. ‘Actually, I agree with the American analysis that Dhar would not risk being with the captured US Marines.’
    Spiro seemed to take heart from this, and sat up to listen.
    â€˜I didn’t at first, but I do now. Using this assumption as my starting point, I went back to the audio this morning and asked myself, in the light of the American scream, how it was possible for Salim Dhar and Lieutenant Oaks to be in the same place.’
    â€˜And?’ Chadwick said, glancing at Spiro. Like Fielding, he was intrigued to see what this awkward analyst from Cheltenham was going to say next. Spiro was staring out of the window, lost in his own thoughts. The head of GCHQ didn’t know where to look.
    Myers picked nervously at the back of a front tooth and then stopped himself, as if being chided by a parent. ‘The only explanation is that Dhar’s voice was recorded.’
    Spiro looked from the window to Myers, suddenly encouraged.
    â€˜Don’t you think that scenario might just have been checked out by the NSA?’
    â€˜Of course. And I’ve looked into it, too. But the quality of the intercept is too poor to be able to establish if Dhar’s voice is a recording. There’s also no audio trace of a recorder activating before or after Dhar speaks.’
    â€˜So?’
    â€˜For once, the answer doesn’t lie in technology.’
    Fielding was enjoying this, watching Myers grow in confidence, trying to guess where it would lead. This was what intelligence work was all about: intuition.
    â€˜You’re an analyst, right?’ Spiro heckled. ‘Stick to IT and leave the couch work to others.’
    Myers ignored him, more out of dysfunctional shyness than defiance.
    â€˜Why did Lieutenant Oaks scream?’ Myers asked, addressing the whole room now.
    â€˜Why?’ Spiro echoed. ‘He was about to be incinerated by a Hellfire missile, that’s why.’
    â€˜About to be. Exactly. It’s not my area, of course –’
    â€˜Too right.’
    â€˜â€“ but my understanding of