Ultimatum, page 16
‘This isn’t good,’ said Dunne, from the front seat, his hand now inside his jacket. ‘This does not look good at all.’
Chapter 41
Buckinghamshire
EVER SINCE SHE was a child, Elise Mayhew had always found something strangely comforting about the sound of car wheels on gravel. It spoke of a car pulling into the driveway of her parents’ place, of familiarity, of safety – the sound of coming home. Except that now, on this winter afternoon, it wasn’t home and it wasn’t her parents’ driveway she was turning into: it was the swept and tidy forecourt of the North Bucks Hospice, where they had moved her mother just two days earlier.
Just for some rest and professional care, Elise told herself, just for a few days, and then she’ll be coming home. The lie helped her keep the tears at bay, to stay strong for when she walked into her mother’s room, all bright and breezy with a bouquet wrapped in pink tissue paper. Who knew? Maybe there would be some improvement in her condition. But one look at her father’s face, as he sat at the bedside, shoulders hunched, glasses perched on the end of his nose, half-empty box of Kleenex by his side, said otherwise. It was a look of resignation, as if all the lights in his world were going out, one by one.
‘The tumour’s grown too big to operate.’ It was her mother who spoke, telling it how it was, just as she always had. Helen Mayhew had never been one to beat around the bush. But Elise could see the illness was taking its toll. Her mother’s eyes were still clear and blue, but her skin was pale, drawn, almost like parchment. Elise rushed forward and hugged her as she lay propped up on several pillows.
‘Well,’ Helen said, after they had embraced, ‘that’s what the specialists here are telling me and we’ve got to assume they know what they’re talking about, haven’t we?’ She gave a wan smile and reached out to grip her husband’s hand. He had yet to utter a word. ‘Still,’ she continued brightly, ‘the doctors here are lovely and the nurses couldn’t be nicer. There’s a lovely girl from Rwanda. Oh, and I’m not in any pain, in case you’re wondering. They have a team here, the Pally-something-or-other, that takes care of all that.’
‘Palliative Care?’ said Elise.
‘That’s the one.’ She turned to look at her husband and squeezed his hand. ‘Darling, would you be an angel and see if you can rustle up some Rich Tea biscuits? I’ve got a sudden craving for them.’
‘Of course.’ Elise’s father got up, nodded to Elise, kissed his wife’s forehead and shuffled out, closing the door softly behind him.
He looks old, Elise thought, prematurely stooped and old, so very different from the man she had known only a few months ago, before all of this had happened.
‘He’s taken it pretty badly,’ her mother remarked, when they were alone. ‘You’ll have to keep an eye on him, you know.’
Elise nodded as she held her mother’s hands. For a while neither of them spoke. When Helen broke the silence, it was to ask Elise to pass her a book that was just out of reach. ‘I’ve been reading this,’ she said, turning it over in her hand as if seeing it for the first time. Elise inclined her head so she could read the title. It was called A Time of Light by Elizabeth R. Johnson. Elise had never heard of her, but if it was about dying she wasn’t at all keen on her mother reading it. The stark cover depicted a solitary candle flickering in a darkened room. It looked utterly morbid.
‘It’s about a man who knows he hasn’t got much time left,’ said Helen.
‘Mummy, please …’ Even as she spoke, Elise thought how wonderfully strong and clear her mother’s voice was, despite all the medication she must be getting.
‘No. Let me finish.’ She was still very much in command even at this eleventh hour in her life. ‘He has all these things he wants to tell his family. But he just doesn’t know how to. I’ve almost got to the end of the book and I have an awful feeling I know how it’s going to end.’
Elise wasn’t sure but she thought she’d detected a break in her mother’s voice, a chink in the indomitable armour she’d known all her life. ‘It sounds unspeakably grim,’ she remarked.
‘Well, I suppose you could call it that,’ her mother conceded, with a smile. ‘But, darling, it’s got me thinking. There are things I’ve wanted to say to you and your father for some time and now I don’t see any point in holding back. He and I have had quite a chat, these past few days. Got a lot off our chests.’
‘That’s something.’ Elise wasn’t too sure where her mother was going with this.
‘He’s a good man, Elise.’ Helen’s hand was cupped over Elise’s, her grip still warm and firm.
‘Who? Daddy?’
‘No. I was referring to Luke. You’ve been together a while now, haven’t you? What’s it been? Eighteen months? Two years?’
Elise put a hand in front of her face and closed her eyes in exasperation. ‘Mummy, if you’re going to give me the big speech about marriage I—’
Her mother stopped her. ‘No. Not today. That can be for another time. No, I wanted to ask you how you feel about what Luke does. For a living.’
‘Well, I know he’s very happy at the Foreign Office,’ said Elise, defensively.
Her mother turned her laser gaze onto her and mustered a withering look. ‘Darling, I wasn’t born yesterday. I’ve been around the block long enough. I’ve known for some time what he does. He’s an SIS intelligence officer. He works for MI6.’
Elise was shocked. ‘You knew?’ she asked. ‘How?’
Helen took a sip from some nutrition drink that a nurse had placed on her bedside table and grimaced. ‘I stepped out with a spy, long before I met your father,’ she said. ‘It got quite serious, actually.’
Elise leaned forward, fascinated. ‘You mean you dated him? Mummy! You never told me this!’
‘I suppose I kept it to myself. Well, his name was Bernard. At one point I even thought about marrying him.’
Elise clapped her hand over her mouth. ‘You’re kidding!’
‘No, I’m not “kidding”, as you put it. But then something happened. His friends came to see me one evening. I suppose nowadays people would call it an intervention. They told me I needed to know that he was gay – and, of course, in those days that was a complete no-no in government service. It meant the end of your career.’
‘So, hang on, why was he dating you?’ Elise asked, just as the answer occurred to her.
‘As cover.’ She looked sad for a moment, and Elise realized that at the time this discovery had probably hurt her mother more than she cared to admit. ‘Apparently he just wanted to look “respectable” and carry on doing whatever he was doing.’ She waved a hand dismissively, as if consigning the whole episode to history. ‘Of course, it sounds ridiculous in this day and age.’
Why is she telling me all this? Elise wondered.
‘Anyway …’ Her mother shifted her position on the pillows and winced once more ‘… the point I’m trying to make, darling, is that Luke is … Luke is a good man. You should hang on to him.’
‘I intend to,’ said Elise. ‘Is that it?’ She didn’t feel ready for a lecture right now.
‘Not quite. Just remember, spies lie for a living. It’s what they do. So listen, and I’m not saying this will ever be the case, but if you ever think he’s deceiving you, hiding something that you have a right to know, well, you make jolly sure you confront him. There has to be total trust between you two. You can’t have him bringing his double life into the bedroom, if you know what I mean.’
‘Mummy!’ Elise was not at all sure what to make of this conversation.
But Helen had not quite finished. ‘Let’s not fool ourselves here, sweetheart. I haven’t got much time left. I may not be around if that time ever comes, God forbid. Now …’ she cleared her throat, all businesslike again ‘… make sure you look after your father, won’t you? He’s going to need a lot of support.’
As if on cue, the door opened and Elise’s father came in holding a plate of biscuits. ‘Rich Tea. That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?’ He placed them on the bedside table and Elise noticed a slight tremor in his hand.
They talked on for a while, as the light drained away from the grey winter afternoon outside, and the corridor beyond the door echoed to the hushed comings and goings of carers and visitors. Elise had rarely felt so low. Where was Luke when she needed him? Off on another bloody mission. She needed him here, right now, at this awful moment in her life.
‘Can you excuse me for a moment?’ She stepped into the corridor, making way for a man in light green pyjamas clutching a Zimmer frame and trailing an IV drip on a rolling stand. She knew she wasn’t supposed to call Luke when he was on a live op except in emergencies. Well, this bloody well was an emergency, wasn’t it? An emotional emergency. She dialled his number and waited.
And, what a surprise, his phone was switched off again.
Chapter 42
Isfahan
‘THE IMAM MOSQUE is a UNESCO World Heritage Site,’ declared Zahra, proudly, addressing her words to the British delegation as they squinted into the sun. Her words were impressive, the location was impressive, but Geoffrey Chaplin, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, was struggling to pay attention. He had slept badly last night, despite being safe and secure behind the lofty red-brick walls of the British Embassy compound in Tehran. The situation in Lebanon, already perilous, was showing no signs of improvement, and twice in the night he had had to take a call from London. There was even talk of having to evacuate all UK nationals, and now the PM wanted him to stop off in Beirut on his way home. He had had a devil of a time trying to explain that one to Gillian, his wife, on a secure line from Tehran.
A very early morning of delicate talks at the Foreign Ministry, a 200-mile flight south, and now here they were in Isfahan, the British diplomatic delegation all standing in a huddle, dwarfed by the magnificence of the vast courtyard. Chaplin held up his hand to shield his eyes from the sun and took in the vaulted domes, the honeycombed niches, and the walls decorated with countless dazzling blue tiles, inscribed with intricate calligraphy. Yes, it truly was impressive – in fact, it probably outdid what he could remember of the Taj Mahal, but, God, he was tired. A flock of pigeons wheeled in formation above them, sunbeams lancing down between their wings. The shadow of a minaret fell across the pale yellow stone at their feet, and Zahra pressed on with her facts and figures.
‘Built by Shah Abbas in your calendar year of 1611,’ she told them, ‘it is said that this mosque was constructed using eighteen million bricks and four hundred and seventy-five thousand tiles.’ Her blue roosari – her headscarf - was draped just a fraction more loosely around her today and Chaplin couldn’t help noticing she was wearing a hint of lip gloss.
‘You see,’ she continued, ‘our Persian culture goes back thousands of years, not like our Arab neighbours across the Gulf.’ That must have been a dig at the Saudis: Iran’s relations there were at rock bottom. Zahra was about to continue, but Dr Askari interrupted her in Farsi.
‘His Excellency the Minister would like to show you something’, she translated. ‘Please, come this way.’ Dr Erfan Askari gently took the elbow of his British counterpart and guided him towards a black square mark on the ground, in the shadow of a dome. He stopped, held up a finger for silence, then clapped his hands once. The sound bounced off the walls, echoing exactly seven times.
‘It was designed,’ Zahra explained, ‘so that whoever spoke from this spot could be heard by everyone around. Perhaps you would like to try it.’ She was looking directly at Geoffrey Chaplin. ‘You just stamp your foot here, like this. We had the French minister here just two months ago,’ she added pointedly, ‘and he made a big noise!’
‘I’m sure he did,’ murmured Chaplin. Despite the current standoff with the US in the Gulf, a French company had recently won the contract for a major construction project in Tabriz, undercutting its British rival by a considerable margin.
Chaplin was wearing a pair of polished tan brogues from a gentlemen’s outfitter in St James’s, his concession to dressing down for the occasion, and it made an incongruous sight, the shirtsleeved Whitehall warrior bringing his expensively heeled foot crashing down on a 400-year-old Persian tile. ‘By Jove, you’re right,’ he declared. ‘That’s quite some echo.’
At one thirty, ‘lunch’ was announced and it was a feast, held in a converted caravanserai just off the maidan, the main square, Persian food served at its absolute best. First came trays of rose-coloured pistachios, passed round to take the edge off their appetites, then steaming dishes of fesanjoun, a lamb stew infused with walnut and pomegranate, served with must-o-moosir, wild shallot mixed with soft cheese, then assorted salads and mountainous trays of Tajik rice. Glasses of doogh were placed in front of everyone, a yoghurt drink flavoured with dried mint, and followed by bowls of rice pudding sprinkled with slices of almond harvested from the orchards at the foothills of the Elburz. After all his years in Westminster, Geoffrey Chaplin was no stranger to large lunches, but this meal left him fit to burst. And he remembered the old adage: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Here it comes, he thought, as Dr Askari rose from his chair, cleared his throat and began to deliver a prepared speech in Farsi.
‘What you have seen today in this glorious city of Isfahan,’ he began, ‘is only the tiniest fraction of our three-thousand-year-old culture. The tiniest fraction!’ He held up his hand and put his thumb and forefinger together until they almost touched. ‘I will tell you something now,’ he went on, lowering his voice as if about to impart a great secret, then pausing to let Zahra translate. ‘You will not find culture like this on the other side of the Persian Gulf. No, sir!’ His eyes rested briefly on Geoffrey Chaplin, who shifted uncomfortably. Britain had recently delivered the latest batch of British-built Typhoon jets to Saudi Arabia, a deal worth several billion pounds. Was he about to hear a second swipe at the Saudis in under an hour?
‘Will you see beautiful blue tiles like these on a building in Riyadh?’ asked Dr Askari, rhetorically. ‘I don’t think so. Will you see ancient friezes like the ones we have at Takht-e-Jamshid? I think not.’
Chaplin leaned over to the Political Secretary from the embassy. ‘What’s he talking about?’ he whispered.
‘Takht-e-Jamshid,’ replied the diplomat, ‘is Persian for the ruins at Persepolis. It’s true, they are quite something.’
‘Ours is an ancient civilization,’ continued the Iranian Foreign Minister, ‘older than that of the Romans, even. We Persians invented the game of chess. Yes! And what do our neighbours have across the water? Oil. That is all.’ He flipped his palms upwards, like a conjuror waiting for applause. ‘And when that runs out? Nothing. They will go back to tending their camels and their goats in the desert. Their skyscrapers will crumble into dust, their highways will crack in the heat, and their deserts will fill up with the cars they can no longer afford to drive. That, my friends, is what will become of our Arab neighbours.’
Geoffrey Chaplin stifled a yawn and fanned his face with a napkin. He had been told to expect a speech like this, and now the pace of the trip was starting to catch up with him. He excused himself and went in search of the bathroom. When he returned he saw that Dr Askari had, mercifully, sat down. Twenty minutes later the party gathered outside for a proposed tour of Isfahan’s Grand Bazaar.
In the last twenty-four hours it had been hastily agreed that this would be a discreet, low-profile event. No cordons, no flashing lights, no overt security presence. The Iranian protocol people had first suggested, then insisted, that for the visiting British Foreign Secretary to gain a full appreciation of a fully functioning Persian bazaar in action they would move around it as a very small party, like everyday tourists. Their security detail would be reduced to a minimum, just two armed British Close Protection Officers and three more from Iranian government security officials. This way, it was assured, they would attract the minimum of attention.
That morning, there had been a fairly heated debate on the way to the airport between Chaplin and Sara Vallance on the one hand and Craig Dunne on the other. This whole Isfahan excursion, Dunne had advised them, was a breach of normal security protocols. His job, they had to remember, was to keep the Foreign Secretary safe, and without being able to recce the route in advance he couldn’t guarantee to do that.
‘I hear you,’ Chaplin had told him, ‘and I have the utmost respect for how you do your job, Craig. But I have mine to do, too, and if we say no to the Iranians on this one it could bugger up the whole trip, if you’ll excuse my French.’
So now here they were, walking into the great covered bazaar of Isfahan, and Chaplin’s attention had suddenly perked up. Moving from the broad open expanse of the Naqsh-e-Jahan Square into the labyrinthine half-light of the covered market was like passing from day to night. Beneath its massive, vaulted ceilings an Aladdin’s Cave of treasures awaited him, a world of carpets, ceramics, brasswork and ornate lanterns. Everything, he noticed, was infused with a soft glow, as if he were viewing the entire experience through rose-tinted spectacles, which, in a way, he was. This would be something to tell Gillian about when he got home – perhaps he could even bring her back a souvenir.
Dr Askari and Zahra walked alongside him, one on each side, pointing out objects of interest, pausing to pick up the occasional artefact and pass it to their guest. When they came to a stall selling elaborate silverwork Dr Askari stopped and spoke to the owner. It was as if he had read the Foreign Secretary’s mind because a moment later he handed him a heavy silver ornament, a bust of a winged Persian horse. ‘A gift for your wife,’ he announced, in suspiciously flawless English.
Chaplin, somewhat flustered as he realized he had nothing to give in return, fumbled for his glasses, then examined the horse, turning it over in his hands. ‘It’s um, it’s quite exquisite,’ he told them, then handed it straight to his SPAD to carry.
He could see Craig Dunne standing just a few feet away, speaking into his Motorola PTT short-range radio, the acoustic tube earpiece dangling from his right ear. He had stationed one officer up ahead and one behind at the entrance to the bazaar. ‘If you see anything you don’t like,’ he was telling his team, ‘inform me immediately. And keep an eye out for exit routes. We need to keep everyone moving.’
