Ultimatum, page 14
Less than a month had passed since Luke had seen her but already her symptoms were showing. When Helen had greeted him at the front door on Christmas morning and hugged him he had felt her thinness. Her skin was papery and jaundiced, there was a tinge of yellow in her eyes and a curious swelling at her midriff.
‘Turkey’s in the Aga,’ she had announced briskly, leading him into the low-ceilinged kitchen, adding, ‘I hope you’ll do the carving.’
John, Elise’s father, had busied himself with the drinks, opening more bottles than were necessary and making an elaborate ceremony of mixing a simple gin and tonic for his wife. Luke could see that his face was set in a fixed grimace, his attempt at stoicism in the face of the news that had descended on his family. Elise barely left her mother’s side.
When the turkey was ready Luke duly did the carving. In deference to Helen’s condition he gave her a smaller portion than usual, but she barely touched it, just chasing it around her plate with her fork as she kept the conversation going. Twice he saw her wince, and some time after they had all sat down she excused herself and went next door. They all heard it then, the unmistakable sound of retching coming from beyond the thin wooden door of the loo. After lunch they played charades, just as they had last year, but it was a joyless exercise and when it came to Helen she said. ‘You take my turn, Luke. I’ll sit this one out, if you don’t mind.’ By four in the afternoon, she had retired to bed, propped up on pillows with Radio 3 on the little transistor beside her.
Luke spent the next few hours chopping logs outside, happy to be doing something active, wielding the axe even though it was dark. It gave him the space he needed to think. How was he going to juggle the next few weeks? The Iran crisis wasn’t going away – if anything, it looked to be getting worse. MI6 were bound to make some unpredictable demands of him, calling him up at short notice and packing him off to destinations unknown, and all when Elise needed him here with her. So what were his options? Take compassionate leave? So soon into his new career? Just when he was getting started as an agent runner and a live operation was under way? No, that was hardly an option. He lowered the axe, leaning on the handle as he got his breath back. He had to face it. He didn’t have an option. He’d have to tough this one out. He had signed over his soul to the Secret Intelligence Service in a Faustian pact. Luke Carlton had committed himself.
He and Elise stayed that night in the guest bedroom, where the low murmur of her parents’ voices still reached them across the corridor. Luke propped himself up on one elbow and looked at her. He could see the tears welling in her eyes as she stared up at the ceiling, unblinking.
‘She hasn’t got long, Luke,’ Elise said quietly.
‘I’m so sorry, ’Lise. What did they say at the hospital?’
‘Six months at most. She just wants to see her garden in spring.’
Chapter 37
Tehran
FLOWERS. EVERYWHERE. THAT was the first thing Luke noticed in Arrivals. Rows and rows of them, mostly roses, arranged beneath portraits of Iran’s revolutionary leadership, and people clutching bunches, like mascots. Bleary-eyed and sleep-deprived after a six-hour overnight flight from London, he had joined the queue for Immigration at IKIA – Imam Khomeini International Airport. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep, perhaps it was being lulled into a false sense of security by the reassuring inflight service on the BA153 from London, with its apologetic announcement as the bar closed once they crossed into Iranian airspace, but Luke felt remarkably relaxed. And he shouldn’t. Because this was big – no, it was huge. He was going into Iran, on his own, undercover.
The call had come through on Boxing Day, just as they were packing up to head back to London. He had taken it outside, in the rain, standing next to the woodshed. Would he be so good as to come into Vauxhall Cross the next day, the twenty-seventh? No details had been given but Luke had recognized it for what it was: an order couched as a polite request. And there they all were the next morning, in casual, holiday clothes, Graham Leach, Trish Fryer, Angela Scott and some well-built suit from Security Section.
Leach had cut straight to the point. ‘We’re sending you in, Luke. The mission is on. The Chief has signed off on it.’ There had followed a week of preparation, of going over his cover story again and again, under hostile questioning this time by a pair of military interrogators sent from Chicksands, home of the British Army’s Intelligence Corps. What was Brendan Hall, art dealer from Bloomsbury, doing in Tehran? Who did he know? Why was he here at this time? Then the Security people had spent three whole days with him, going over his newly contrived social-media profile, his backstory, making sure it checked out, testing him on why he had posted certain pictures two years ago, where his friends liked to go on holiday, which movies he enjoyed, even which year he had captained his school cricket team. And finally there was his new waterproof Service phone, an ordinary-looking smartphone configured with a virtual private network connection that would route all his calls via Akrotiri, in Cyprus. None of the calls he made while in Iran should show up as emanating from inside that country. They were long days for Luke and those working with him, cocooned in the sandstone-coloured monolith on the banks of the Thames, his head crammed with information, while the rest of London took the week off.
Elise had been less than thrilled. Halfway through his second day away she had rung him to tell him she was heading back to her parents in Buckinghamshire. ‘It’s the Christmas bloody holidays, Luke. At least, it is for normal people. I know this job of yours is important, I get that. But this is taking the piss. I’ll see you back here on New Year’s Eve.’ He had only just made it up to Buckinghamshire in time for that one, too. Drinks in a local pub where everyone seemed to know Elise, and he’d had the definite feeling he was an outsider. It had taken several hours and several drinks before she had given him a proper kiss. And then, ten days later, his Iranian visa had come through and now here he was, standing beneath a large blue sign marked ‘A’ for Arrivals.
‘This your first visit?’ Luke turned round to see who was asking. It was a British businessman behind him as they approached the Immigration booth.
‘It is.’ Luke kept his voice low. The last thing he wanted was to attract anyone’s attention, and he certainly didn’t feel like striking up a conversation.
‘Ah, then you’re in for a pleasant surprise,’ said the man, pressing forward as the queue moved up. ‘The driving’s atrocious but apart from that Iran’s all right. It’s changing fast. I’m sure you won’t have any problems. Here, let me give you my card. I’m staying at the Parsian Azadi if you want to drop by.’
Luke thanked the man, then turned to the sour-looking official in his glass booth. He made a point of giving him his passport with his right hand, keeping his left out of sight in case the man might decide to question why a finger was missing. He seemed too old to Luke to be doing that job, as if he should really have been lecturing in sociology at Tehran University, rather than stamping passports and asking questions of strangers.
‘Burrendin Holl?’ The man peered at him through the glass, his pen poised over a form. Luke forced a smile and nodded. His heart was beating faster now: if anyone had clocked who he really was at that embassy dinner in Abu Dhabi, this was when the walls were going to crash down on top of him. He could almost feel someone watching him right now through that pane of glass behind the official, undoubtedly a two-way mirror, and that someone would be IRGC intelligence, waiting to pick up anyone who flashed up on their database as a Person of Interest. This was a watershed moment and he knew it. In the next thirty seconds Luke was about to find out if his cover had held up or if he was about to spend the next ten years in the solitary wing of Evin Prison.
‘Purpose of visit?’
‘Business.’
The man peered at him, glanced down at his visa for the briefest of moments, then stamped his passport, handed it back to him and waved him on. And that was it. He was in. Relief surged through him, but he kept walking, showing nothing. Landside of the airport, and Luke could see yet more flowers. Everyone waiting in Arrivals seemed to have a bunch in their hand as tearful reunions erupted all around him. He felt conspicuous, an outsider with no one to meet and greet him. Even that British businessman was being escorted out to a waiting car by someone carrying his bags.
Luke pushed his way through the crowd and followed the signs to the plate-glass exit and the taxi rank outside. The cold air hit him the moment he left the terminal, that and the acrid tang of pollution. His breath misting in the early-morning chill, he joined the queue of families, solitary businessmen and the occasional bespectacled cleric in brown cloak and white headdress.
When it was finally his turn he climbed into the back seat of a yellow Toyota Camry, dumped his bag next to him and handed the driver a card with an address. As they pulled away from the terminal Luke tugged instinctively at the seatbelt but it dangled, limp and dysfunctional, from a hook by the door. He gave up trying and instead took out his phone, tapped on the Telegram icon and scrolled down to a contact listed simply as ‘Aesthetica’. He typed in three words: Arrived in Tehran.
Driving along the traffic-choked six-lane highway through the drab southern suburbs of Tehran, Luke gazed out at a wintry scene of bare trees and rows of white, flat-roofed buildings interspersed with giant hoardings, some commercial, some religious. He caught his first sight of the snow-capped Elburz Mountains, and the majestic, conical, 5,600-metre peak of Mount Damavand that towered over the capital.
The Hotel Shahrestan was small and discreet, tucked away in a quiet residential street in a nondescript district, its grey exterior barely marking it out as a hotel. Luke’s reservation had been made for him in the name of a fictional art dealership in London, his room on the first floor taken for a week. Dog-tired now, he paid off the driver, checked in at Reception, carried his bag upstairs, let himself into the room and flopped onto the bed. Setting the alarm on his phone, he closed his eyes and slept. Three hours later, he was woken by electronic beeping and reached over to check for messages. There was only one on his Telegram app and it was from ‘Aesthetica’.
Welcome to my city! it read. Meet me at Café Rameez, 2 p.m.
Chapter 38
Tehran
LOW LIGHTING, TILES on the floor and bare brick walls hung with framed, black-and-white photographs of Iranian musicians, past and present, Café Rameez was understated Tehran chic. It was just a short walk from the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Luke had known about the place before he’d boarded his flight at Heathrow. Using phone and internet intercepts, the GCHQ analysts in Cheltenham had mapped out for him a detailed picture of Tannaz Zamani’s daily movements around the Iranian capital. They knew where she lived, which faculty of Tehran University she studied at, and where she went to socialize. Café Rameez was one of her favourite haunts, a popular meeting place for the university crowd. The Gasht-e-Ershad, the morality police, had largely left it in peace – their last raid had been more than a year ago – but Luke was all too aware they could still have watchers in place and, as a Westerner, he would be noticed the moment he walked through the door. He had to remember everything he had learned during those weeks of counter-surveillance training down at the Base if he was to stay inconspicuous.
Luke got there early. He liked to scope out a place well before the appointed hour – choose a spot where he could sit with his back to a wall and keep an eye on the entrance without needing to look around. Somewhere close to an alternative exit point, in case he needed to bug out in a hurry. He pushed open the door and took in the scene with one glance. The interior was dimly lit and students crowded round the tables, talking, arguing, laughing, while a pall of tobacco smoke coiled towards the ceiling and condensation fogged the inside of the windows. There was a lot of noise, which suited him fine. He found a seat at the back and dumped his purchases on the table: a coffee-table book and a set of postcards. If anyone was watching, they would see from the logo on the plastic bag that he had just been to the Museum of Contemporary Art down the road. And he had. The two hours he had spent inside its walls had been absolutely mind-blowing, a visual banquet of masterpieces ranging from Renoir to Jackson Pollock and even portraits by Andy Warhol of Mick Jagger and Marilyn Monroe. In Iran? Seriously? He hadn’t expected that.
Luke looked at his watch. Nearly one thirty – he had half an hour or so before Tannaz turned up and his growling stomach reminded him that he hadn’t eaten anything in hours. Waving over a young waiter in designer jeans and T-shirt, he ordered a bowl of Ash-e-reshteh, a thick winter soup of Persian noodles and vegetables, with a glass of tea on the side. It was what everyone seemed to be having.
‘Enjoy,’ the waiter told him, with a smile, as he set it down in front of him, speaking in a strong American accent. As Luke ate, he watched the café and his training took over, quartering the room and noting the clientele. To his half-left there was a bulky man in a black leather jacket sitting alone. A watcher? Maybe. He’d need to keep an eye on him. Straight ahead, a table of three young women, headscarves pushed well back over their hair, their exquisitely shaped eyebrows raised in expressions of constant surprise. A little too much Botox. To their right, a large round table, all students, all male, and another similar one behind that. No one was taking any notice of him. His eyes switched back to the man in the leather jacket. He had just been joined by an elderly woman in a tightly wrapped headscarf, probably his mother, and she wasn’t happy. They seemed to be having quite an argument. Luke relaxed just a little.
But then, almost immediately, the fear kicked in. Not so much the fear of discovery, which would always be there, loitering just beneath the surface. No, it was the fear of failure that stalked him now. Try as he might, he could not forget how he’d screwed up in training. The hidden alarm button, those two heavies crashing through the door. He shuddered at the memory. And now here he was, out in the field. In Iran. This was for real. What if his pitch to Tannaz failed? So much seemed to be resting on him succeeding. The Armenia trip had been a disaster, and he knew he could not afford to balls this one up. Yet the people at Vauxhall Cross were asking a hell of a lot of him. Getting to know Tannaz, winning her trust, building up to the moment when he could make the Pitch and try to bring her onside – it should be taking months, years maybe. Instead, with all the tension mounting in the Gulf, he was expected to compress the whole process into just a week. A thought occurred to him: was it because he was so new to the Service that he was in some way expendable? A low-cost commodity to be burned and abandoned if things went south? He dismissed it.
A quarter past two, and the lunchtime crowd was thinning out. Luke had almost finished his bowl of noodle soup when a slightly built student slipped into Café Rameez. She went largely unnoticed, just another modestly dressed woman going about her business in the capital. Luke looked up and his eyes took in a woman in a headscarf and a long green raincoat. She wore dark glasses, despite the dullness of the day outside, and no lipstick. It took him a moment to recognize her. Could this really be the same girl who had shimmied up to him at the Bluebird in a tight, low-cut black dress?
‘Hello, Tannaz,’ he said quietly, pulling out a chair for her. And now she was close to him, he was reminded of just how gorgeous this girl was, her natural beauty all the more pronounced without make-up. Seeing her again, right here, on her home turf in Tehran, made something stir inside him, something that made him feel instantly guilty.
‘Don’t kiss me,’ she said abruptly, casting a precautionary glance to left and right before she sat down.
Luke sat back theatrically in his chair, feigning shock. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ he replied.
‘Sorry,’ she said, adjusting her headscarf and tucking a wisp of hair into place. ‘I just wasn’t sure how much you know about how we do things here. You wouldn’t believe what some people think is okay when it’s not. A German couple was fined and deported only last week for kissing beneath a poster of the Supreme Leader.’ She glanced down at the remains of his soup. ‘It’s good, isn’t it? Hey, don’t stop for me – I’ve already eaten.’
‘Well, let’s get you something to drink, at least?’
She was ahead of him, already signalling to the young man in the T-shirt, who came over to greet her, then returned with her favourite: a glass of watermelon and pomegranate juice. Tannaz took a sip before placing her hands on the table, one resting on the other. She leaned forward slightly and regarded him for a long moment, a smile playing around her lips. ‘So, Mr Art Dealer … I can’t believe you’re actually here, in my city.’
Luke gave a modest shrug of the shoulders.
‘Why not?’ he said, tapping the bag from the Museum of Contemporary Art. ‘I have to say, I’m massively impressed by what I’ve seen so far.’
‘Oh, that,’ she replied dismissively, taking another sip of her juice and glancing briefly around to see if she recognized anyone at the other tables. ‘You should hear what my father has to say about that place. “Decadent imperialist baubles that should be sent straight back to the West!”’
‘And is that what you think too?’ He kept his tone light but his question was serious.
Tannaz put down her drink and gave him a withering look. ‘What the fuck do you think? Do I look like a girl who’d fall for that sort of outdated crap?’
Maybe it was because of where they were, in a Tehran café in the beating heart of the Islamic Republic, but Luke was taken aback at the vehemence of her answer. ‘No, no, obviously not,’ he backtracked. ‘In fact, I really don’t know how you cope with your father’s views.’
