Ultimatum, page 19
‘Right. Meeting adjourned until the same time tomorrow.’
As the intelligence chiefs, ministers, diplomats, senior police, senior servicemen and -women who had gathered around the table in that COBRA meeting got up to leave, they were stopped at the door by an apologetic Cabinet Office official. ‘There are satellite TV trucks outside on Whitehall,’ he told them, ‘and the media are at the steps outside with cameras. You’ll have to leave by the rear entrance.’
Everyone was crowding round the lifts on their phones. One call being made that afternoon was from the Director of Special Forces to a well-guarded military base in Dorset. It went straight through to a sparse, functional room in Poole, the office of Lieutenant Colonel Chip Nuttall, Commanding Officer of the Special Boat Service. The standby squadron for crisis operations and hostage situations such as this rotated between the SBS and their more famous cousins, the SAS. Right now, Poole was the standby squadron.
‘You’ve seen the news?’
‘Just heard it,’ Nuttall replied.
‘Good. You’re on four hours’ notice-to-move.’
Chapter 48
Qom, Iran
JUST AS THE COBRA meeting was ending in Whitehall, in an upstairs room of a nondescript building in the holy city of Qom, Karim Zamani allowed himself a rare smile. It was, he knew, far too early to celebrate. And yet, as he looked around the table at the five men he trusted most, his loyal co-conspirators, he couldn’t help but feel a sense of triumph. Battle had been joined, the first shots fired, literally, in the Circle’s strategic plan. The seizure of ‘the goods’ in Isfahan bazaar had gone precisely to plan. He looked at his watch. Where would the van containing its precious human cargo be? Somewhere just south of Isfahan, he estimated. The device had been prepared the previous week on his orders, transported at night in an industrial supplies delivery van, then manoeuvred, with some difficulty, he had been told, into its current resting place. The ultimatum had been delivered, as planned, to the embassy of the Little Satan on Ferdowsi Avenue, and the crisis he had hoped to initiate for his government was developing nicely. Zamani ran his hand over his neatly trimmed stubble before he spoke.
‘We have every reason to offer prayers of thanks for this day,’ he told the assembled company, spreading his hands before him on the table, then continuing, with a frown, ‘But we must not be complacent. No, my brothers, that would be a mistake.’ His eyebrows knitted together as he looked from one face to another. ‘There are still many pitfalls ahead and much that could go wrong.’ They nodded. ‘And we must be vigilant! Yes! The Zionists and the Americans will be trying their best to uncover our secrets and we must not let them. My brother Hoshyar.’ He turned to the man on his left: black leather jacket, worn thin at the elbows, a large, bearded face and a forehead that was deeply lined. ‘I believe you have an update for us on the operation in Armenia?’
‘I do, Karim-jaan. Our sources in Yerevan have made many enquiries and worked tirelessly to discover who could have killed our men in that monastery.’ He looked at Zamani, who gestured for him to continue.
‘And?’
‘And they found a taxi driver who drove a foreigner, an Englishman, from his hotel up to the monastery on that same morning. There were no other visitors from Europe that day, only one man from Japan.’
‘Go on,’ Zamani said.
‘They located his hotel where he was registered under the name of “Brendan Hall”. He had a woman with him. Maybe his wife, maybe his cover, we don’t know. And we have obtained a photograph of him from his passport copy at hotel reception.’
‘This is excellent work,’ Zamani replied. ‘Your people are to be congratulated, Hoshyar-jaan. And do we know if this Brendan Hall has tried to enter the Islamic Republic?’
‘That is being checked. An instruction has gone out to border police and Immigration. If he has entered Iran we will find him.’
Karim Zamani nodded approvingly. ‘Good,’ he concluded. ‘Please make this a priority. And if this Zionist-imperialist agent has dared to come to our country, bring him to me when you find him. You know where I will be.’
Chapter 49
Tehran
THINK. THINK HARD. I’ve got just one asset in this country, Luke said to himself, and that’s Tannaz Zamani. So how do I turn this to work to my advantage? And all with the clock ticking and Vauxhall breathing down my neck for updates.
He sat on the bed in his room and ran his fingers through his hair. The photos he had shown her on the park bench earlier that day had cut deep. Tannaz was vulnerable right now, but that didn’t mean she’d be prepared to help him. What would it take to make her turn against her father, to betray him?
He remembered the words the instructors had used, over and over, on the agent-running course at the Base. ‘Your job is to make contact with the person chosen by Targeting, recruit them, then act on the information they supply. You’ll need to use your personal intellectual charm, your emotional intelligence, to build up a source and develop them.’ Did he, Luke, have any ‘personal intellectual charm’? God knew. That hadn’t exactly been part of the job spec when he was serving in the Corps or going out on night raids into Taliban territory with the SBS in Afghanistan. But he certainly needed it now, in spades. A plan began to form in his head, a proposition that just might work. He needed to see Tannaz again, as soon as possible. But would she be prepared to see him, given their last meeting had ended in tears? He took out his phone, scrolled through his Telegram contacts till he found ‘Aesthetica’ and sent her a quick text message. She didn’t answer at first, and when she did, her message was curt and businesslike. Can’t meet now. Suggest we meet Café Rameez 6 p.m.
Damn. That was still more than an hour away. Frustrated and impatient, he lay on his bed, switched on the TV and tuned in to the BBC World Service. The Chaplin abduction was all over the news, that and the murder in Isfahan bazaar of Craig Dunne, the Protection Officer. There followed commentary and punditry from various ex-ambassadors and Iran ‘experts’. Luke listened for a while, then used his phone to read whatever he could find online.
‘All US Options on the Table’ read the headline on CNN.com. It quoted an unnamed Pentagon official as saying, ominously: ‘The US is ready to play its part to support its ally Britain to bring this crisis to an end in a decisive and effective manner.’ Al-Jazeera English, the Qatar-based satellite TV station, was already running a logo on its main portal that said: ‘Gulf Crisis Day 1’. It reprinted an official statement from IRNA, Iran’s state news agency:
The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran deplores this despicable act. It condemns kidnapping in all its forms. The Supreme Leader has expressed his confidence that state security agencies will succeed in bringing a swift end to this situation without interference from external powers.
There was no mention of the ultimatum handed in to the British Embassy but it concluded: ‘Those responsible for this Zionist-inspired plot will surely be hunted down and punished.’
Logging off, he got up and reached for his jacket, pocketing his phone and his room key, then glanced round the room before heading out to meet Tannaz. At the last minute he stuffed some packets of peanuts and sweets in his pockets, just in case. In the hotel lobby the young receptionist came out from behind his desk and stopped him with an excited wave of the hand. ‘Have you heard the news, Mr Hall? Very bad things. And now they are saying we must watch out for spies in our country. What do you think will happen? How will America react?’
‘God knows,’ Luke replied. ‘But who do you think is behind this kidnapping?’
‘But it’s the Israelis, of course! And the CIA,’ he replied, without hesitation. ‘They are doing this to bring shame on Iran and make problem with other countries.’
Luke smiled but said nothing. Pushing open the door, he stepped out into the cold Tehran night and flagged down a cab to Café Rameez. He managed to get the same table as before – at the back, up against the wall, and with a clear view of the entrance – and waited for Tannaz. A TV set was mounted on one of the walls, volume turned up, and nearly everyone in the café was glued to it. It was all in Farsi but Luke could follow the gist of it from the pictures on the screen. Iranian Air Force Mig-29s and Sukhoi fighter jets were shown flying over the Gulf in formation; there were flotillas of high-speed gunboats, then radar installations scanning the skies in perpetual vigilance. People in the café were talking animatedly, some nodding approvingly. Others, perhaps old enough to remember the devastation left by eight years of war with Iraq, looked deeply concerned.
The screen cut abruptly to the owlish features of a man pictured beside a diminutive Union flag. With a shock, Luke recognized him as Geoffrey Chaplin, the Foreign Secretary. He wished he could understand the commentary but then the image changed to a shot of the Israeli flag, with a large question mark superimposed over it. Finally, he watched a clip of the US President addressing a large audience of men and women in uniform in some cavernous hall decked out with Stars and Stripes flags. He was pumping his fist up and down, shouting something, and he did not look happy.
The café door swung open, letting in a blast of icy air, and Tannaz swept in, the tails of her coat trailing behind her. She hurried over to Luke’s table, her face a mask of worry. Luke waved her towards a chair next to him but at first she seemed almost reluctant to join him. He put it down to the national state of nervousness now gripping the country. ‘No more nasty photos, I promise,’ he reassured her, but she dismissed this with a shake of her head.
‘Brendan!’ she hissed, taking her seat while checking no one was watching them. Luke winced inwardly – he still hated his cover name. ‘You don’t know what’s happened, do you?’ she said.
‘Well, yes,’ he replied. ‘Our Foreign Secretary’s been taken. In Isfahan today. In fact, I wanted to talk to you about it.’
‘No! That’s not it.’ Tannaz’s eyes were darting around the café now. She was a bundle of nerves. He couldn’t remember ever seeing her like that. ‘Oh, my God, you don’t know, do you? It was on the radio, just now.’
‘What was?’ Luke’s face was calm, in sharp contrast to hers.
‘The police and the Revolutionary Guards are looking for you! They named you in person! They’re charging you under moharebeh!’
‘What? What’s that?’
‘Moharebeh means “making war against God”. It allows them to arrest whoever they want. They’re saying you might be connected to this kidnapping on the news today.’ Tannaz’s eyes were wide open and staring at him. ‘Brendan, what are you really doing in Iran? Who are you exactly?’
‘Tannaz, this is crazy!’ He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Honestly, do I look like a troublemaker to you?’ Fuck. This was serious. This changed everything. He’d need to alert Vauxhall.
‘Is it? Is it really so crazy?’ Tannaz hadn’t even bothered to remove her scarf – she looked ready to get up and walk out again at any moment. ‘Maybe you really are a British spy and you’ve been lying to me all this time,’ she replied. She looked both sad and worried. Luke glanced round at the clientele. People had gathered in huddles, noisily discussing the news they’d just watched. As possibly the only non-Iranian in the café, he felt distinctly self-conscious.
‘Oh, come on, Tannaz. You don’t believe this crap, do you? I’m being framed! It’s obvious. Surely you can see that. Look, I’ve been right here in Tehran, all day, and the Foreign Secretary got kidnapped in Isfahan. This makes no sense at all. None.’
Tannaz considered him, her head cocked slightly to one side, as if judging him. And right there, in that moment, Luke knew he was horribly exposed. Everything, his mission, his freedom, perhaps his life, lay in the hands of the twenty-two-year-old Tehran University student who happened to have a dad in the IRGC. This was not a good position to be in.
‘All right,’ she said at last, giving him a calculating look, then glancing quickly round the café once more. ‘We need to get you out of here. And fast. You don’t have much time left, mister.’
Chapter 50
Musandam peninsula, Oman
SCORCHED AND BLEACHED by a relentless sun, the massive mountains of Oman’s Musandam peninsula rise up sheer from the glittering waters of the Gulf. Formed at the end of the Cretaceous period, the sedimentary rock formations lie piled one on top of another, resembling a block of flats collapsed by an earthquake. At some of their highest points, the mountains afford a commanding view across the strategic Strait of Hormuz towards the coast of Iran. In one place, the two countries’ territories are just twenty miles apart across the channel. Winding up through this austere, shadeless, rust-coloured landscape, a narrow road twists and turns past the rough stone shelters of hardy goatherds and long-gone hermits.
The road is not accessible to the general public because what lies up there is classified ‘Secret’ by the Omani government. Beyond the barrier and the sentry post, the road leads up to a well-guarded and highly secretive establishment: the Musandam listening post. With permission from Oman’s Sandhurst-trained ruler, the Sultan, the base is staffed by Western Signals Intelligence – SIGINT – operators, trawling daily through the wealth of data gleaned from underwater cables, listening into phone calls, emails and internet traffic emanating from across the water in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Their reports are fed directly into the UK and US intelligence agencies: GCHQ and the NSA respectively.
At 1732 hours Oman time, thirty minutes ahead of Iran time, the team of monitors up at Musandam were at full stretch. It had already been a frantically busy day. Iran’s military and security apparatus was in a state of near-nationwide panic following the Chaplin abduction, its commanders convinced they were about to be attacked by the US, Israel or both. In the Musandam listening post the empty coffee cups and drained plastic bottles of Masafi mineral water stood testament to long hours of constant scanning, listening, recording and filing of encrypted reports back to Cheltenham and NSA HQ at Fort Meade, Maryland.
US Airforce Sergeant Todd Bergensen took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. With his talent for making sense out of streams of numbers and data, he had always known he was destined for a lifetime of staring at screens, which suited him just fine. He drained the last of his lukewarm coffee and tossed the cup into the bin beside him. Then something caught his eye. It was just the briefest of messages, something that, on its own, would not have attracted the slightest attention. It contained no trigger-words, nothing that would set off any alarm bells in Washington or London. No, it was the sender’s number that was significant. It was from a known senior operative in the IRGC’s Quds force, the covert action wing of the Revolutionary Guards, a man on the watchlist databases of several Western intelligence agencies. It was the first time this number had surfaced in weeks and it was being used to send a message from Qom to an unknown recipient in the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas.
The algorithms in Todd Bergensen’s system had already made a connection. The alert icon was blinking red, on and off, in the top right-hand corner of his screen. He pushed back his swivel chair, got up and hurried to the adjacent room. The door was open, but he still tapped politely on the glass window anyway. ‘Ma’am, you’d better come take a look at this,’ he said.
‘Be with you in one,’ she replied, holding up her index finger without looking up. She had her headphones on and was busy writing something on a pad.
The analyst was insistent. ‘Ma’am, we might have some actionable intel here. I think you need to see it now.’
She swept off her headphones, shook out her hair, then followed him next door without a word. They stood leaning over his console, peering at the words of the text, which had been instantly and automatically translated for them using Parstext, a program preloaded into their monitoring system along with similar ones for Arabic, Urdu and Baluchi.
‘I’m correct, aren’t I, ma’am?’ Todd asked. ‘This is significant, right?’
‘Are you kidding?’ his team leader replied. ‘Damn right it’s significant. This could be a major piece of the jigsaw right now. Good work, Todd.’ She peered at the message again. Praise be to God, it read. The goods have been sent.
‘Okay, then,’ she said, pointing both index fingers straight at him, like drawn pistols. ‘We need the number of whoever received that message. We need to geo-locate his exact location and we need to pass all of this data ASAP to Cheltenham and Fort Meade. I’ll warn them it’s coming in.’ She turned on her heels, then paused in the doorway and looked directly at the analyst. There was a strident edge to her voice. ‘Don’t waste a moment here, Todd. Do whatever it takes. I’m counting on you.’
Chapter 51
Somewhere in central Iran
THE SHAME AND humiliation he felt at having been unable to control his bladder had given way to something else. Geoffrey Chaplin, father of two, Her Majesty’s Foreign Secretary, was starting to shiver uncontrollably. He was cold, soaked from the waist down, and he stank. He stank of the rank, ammonial smell you only got under bridges in certain cities or round the back of the suburban pubs he vaguely remembered from when he was a teenager. As far as he could tell, this vehicle, the mobile prison they had loaded him into, with his captors, had no heating as well as no suspension.
With every hour that passed, his captors seemed to grow less nervous, he could hear it in the pitch of their voices as they started to come down off high alert. When they stopped again, after several hours’ driving, someone behind him pulled him up into a sitting position, then fumbled at the back of his head. The next thing he knew both the gag and the blindfold had been removed and Geoffrey Chaplin got his first proper view of his surroundings and of the people holding him prisoner. Neither filled him with a great deal of hope.
