Ultimatum, page 3
‘She comes from a very well-connected family,’ Leach went on. ‘Business interests right across the country, so plenty of money there.’
‘What does she do with it?’ Luke asked.
‘She collects art,’ said Angela. ‘Persian art, mostly. And she travels a lot on business. Berlin, London, New York, the Gulf.’
‘They sound an oddly matched couple. She’s hardly the revolutionary zealot,’ Luke remarked.
‘She’s quite the opposite,’ said Leach. ‘We’re hearing there may be serious strains in their relationship.’
Luke pushed his chair back from the table and folded his arms. ‘Okay, so I’m guessing where this is going,’ he said. ‘You want me to get myself in front of her and try to recruit her?’
The pair from Vauxhall Cross smiled and shook their heads.
‘Good guess, but no.’ Leach handed him a second photograph. ‘This is the person we want you to recruit. She’s his daughter, Tannaz Zamani. She’s twenty-two, attends Tehran University, she’s the apple of her father’s eye, and she absolutely hates him.’
Chapter 6
Tehran
THE PARTY WAS strictly word-of-mouth, invitation only. Parked in the leafy side-streets of north Tehran, off Fereshteh Street, the drivers of the imported luxury 4x4s sat patiently in the dark while their passengers lost themselves in another world inside the darkened three-storey house. The drivers kept their engines running, watching, wary, ready with the denial story in case the Gasht-e-Ershad, the morality police, came banging on the window and asking awkward questions.
It was a substantial mansion set in substantial grounds, built in the 1900s, its creamy walls fronted by imposing faux-Roman columns and a flight of wide, sweeping steps guarded by a pair of stone lions. There were domed cupolas, balconies and balustrades. It had once been home to a wealthy family with close connections to the Shah, long ago departed for a different life in Santa Monica. Back then, in the 1970s, before the seismic upheaval that was Iran’s Islamic Revolution, the lights would have been blazing late into the night, the sound of Western music – the Bee Gees, Blondie, Boney M – spilling out into the street, neighbours dropping by to join in. Not these days. You could still have fun in Tehran, a lot of fun, if you moved in the right circles, but you had to be careful and you needed to know which parties to avoid. All it took was for word to get out to one wrong person and you could land yourself in a whole world of pain.
Pulling up in a taxi, Tannaz shuddered to think of what had happened to her friend Farah, swept up in that police raid back in April, carted off in a windowless van to the detention centre at Vozara. Still wearing that designer dress of hers and the earrings, questioned, humiliated, searched in the most intimate, invasive way imaginable, then weeks later forced to sign a confession to immorality. She was out now, with a stern caution, but everyone agreed she had never been the same since.
Tannaz chose her friends carefully, perhaps even more carefully than most, given who her father was. Coming to this party was far more than a social call: it was a deliberate act of rebellion against him. She loathed what he stood for, all those killjoy religious rules and telling people to cover up in public. She was sick of hearing how the Islamic Revolution had cleansed Iran in 1979 and how terrible life had been under the Shah. What did she care? The Shah had been dead for fifteen years by the time she was born. And yet, despite everything, she knew that her father, Karim, loved her, doted on her in his way. It was as if he saw in her what had once made him fall in love with her mother. She shuddered, repulsed by the thought.
Tonight it was a trusted crowd – she would know everyone – but still she chose to come by taxi. The family driver was not a risk worth taking. She let herself out of the rear door and pulled the black folds of her chador tight around her face. There had even been stories of the Gasht-e-Ershad hiding in the shadows outside parties like this, quietly taking pictures and, days later, presenting them as irrefutable evidence in a police interrogation room.
Outside the blue-painted steel gates she pressed the buzzer twice, then once again. The agreed signal. A tiny window with a grille opened and a man’s clean-shaven face peered out at her. There was a pause, then the gate slid back just far enough to let her slip through. Once inside the inner courtyard she swept the veil off her face and let it hang loose across her shoulders. Two young men with walkie-talkies nodded to her in recognition. They pointed over their shoulders to where a single, fat candle cast a flickering pool of light onto the path. Encased in glass against the chill evening breeze, it had been planted in a bucket of sand. Tannaz strode past it in her Valentino sandals. She knew the way. She had been there before. If she stood still, which she did now, and held her head to one side, she could just make out the faint sound of voices laughing from upstairs. And music. Not the Bee Gees, these days: ‘Saturday Night Fever’ had given way to Beyoncé, Rihanna and, more often, Iranian singers, like Kiosk and King Raam, now trending in twenty-first-century Iran.
Tannaz pushed open the door on the ground floor, removed her chador, and handed it to a boy in a Led Zeppelin T-shirt. Revealed in her strapless black minidress, split right up the thigh, and her metallic leather sandals, she was like a different being. Down a carpeted corridor, the music pumping louder now, then through another door – and suddenly she was in a world of kaleidoscopic lights and sinuous, gyrating bodies, dancing, twirling, embracing. A young DJ was nodding rhythmically to the music at a deck, earphones on, eyes shut, a sweet smile of contentment on his face. That would be Rami, she thought, stoned again.
From out of the shadows friends emerged and hugged her wildly, dragging her straight onto the dance-floor. Someone offered her a shot of vodka, and she tossed her hair to one side as she knocked it back. A boy with gelled hair and a designer leather jacket draped an arm around her, planted a wet kiss on her cheek and offered her a joint. Tannaz laughed, waved it away, then changed her mind, took a long drag and handed it back. The boy blew her another kiss, then wrapped his arms around his boyfriend’s waist, their hips grinding together in time to the music.
Upstairs it was a different scene, more chilled, less manic. As Tannaz went in search of a bathroom she found herself stepping over slumped figures in the corridor. Through an open doorway, several of her friends were sprawled on cushions. Between them, on the table, lay a small mountain of coke. Not her thing. There was a queue outside the bathroom so she moved on, making her way upstairs to the top floor. There was a master bedroom, she remembered, with an ensuite. Probably, she thought afterwards, she should have stopped and turned the moment she heard the sounds but she really, really needed the loo so in she went.
She froze in the doorway. How many were on the bed? Five? Six? Seven, even? With all the thrusting and groaning and gasping, it was hard to tell. The room was a blur of intertwined limbs, of hairy buttocks and heaving breasts, shiny with sweat in the yellow glow of the bedside lamps.
‘Tannaz-jaan!’ someone called. ‘Come and join us!’
‘Goh khordi. Oh, shit.’ Her mobile was going off in her bag. She turned away and pulled out her phone. Her father. At this time of night. Not good: four missed calls and a text: Where are you? Nana is unwell. Come home now or I will send someone to find you.
Tannaz knew exactly what that meant. Two minutes later she was outside, back in her all-enveloping black chador, flagging down a taxi in the street. No one would have guessed she had come from an orgy. She crammed a stick of menthol-flavoured chewing gum into her mouth and spritzed a squirt of perfume on her face to hide the smell of alcohol. The driver caught her eye in his mirror and grinned knowingly. She averted her gaze, staring intently at the lights of north Tehran as they flashed past the window. How long could she keep up this secret double life, this lie? Free-spirited, hedonistic, party-going twenty-two-year-old by choice, conservative citizen of the Islamic Republic of Iran by birth. Her father would kill her if he knew what she got up to and, she reminded herself, he was not just anyone. He was a very senior officer in the Revolutionary Guards. He was Karim Zamani.
Chapter 7
Parchin Military Complex, Iran
DRIVING SOUTH-EAST OUT of Tehran down Highway 44 or, rather, being driven, Karim Zamani squinted up at the early-morning sun. Slanting low over the powdery, ochre-coloured hills, streaked red with ore and dusted with the first snows of winter, it glinted off the golden domes of a roadside mosque. He liked winter. It reminded him of his childhood, growing up in the foothills of the mighty Elburz Mountains. Old enough, just, to remember standing shoeless by the side of the road, watching the convoys of rich people’s cars going past, heading up to the ski resorts of Shemshak and Dizin in their furs and aviator sunglasses. The Shah’s people. The enemy. Long gone now but what had replaced them? Another elite, the new rich of Tehran in their Lexuses and Porsche Cayennes, clogging the weekend roads out of the capital. Karim Zamani disapproved of this flagrant display of affluence, with its connotations of Western cultural decadence. And then there was his wife, Forouz, elegant, fragrant Forouz, her curious obsession with art and all the costly visits to galleries in Europe. Some of her tastes were anathema to him but he tolerated them because her family were rich and powerful, and she had defied them to marry him when he hadn’t had a pot to piss in. But his daughter, Tannaz? Now she was a worry. He had resisted allowing her to attend Tehran University. And now look what was happening. He was convinced that, as he had feared, she was mixing with the wrong sort of people. He should have her followed, or married off, or both.
Karim Zamani put aside these thoughts as he sat up in the back seat and placed the braided peaked cap on his head as they approached the first gates. He was wearing his dark green dress uniform, the gold wreath and crossed-sword epaulettes on his shoulders denoting his IRGC rank of Second Brigadier General. It was a rank to be respected and even now, after all these years of service to the Islamic Revolution, he felt a twinge of pride each time he put it on.
A large sign read in Farsi and in English: ‘Parchin Military Complex. No photography’. ID check, three armed guards, weapons lowered as they recognized him, saluting him smartly and waving his car through. Down a dusty road beside a chain-link fence, guard towers, red-and-white-striped barriers, speed bumps, more security checks, and then a smaller, narrower road, unpaved, hugging the contours of the mountain, leading away from the main complex until it reached what might, at first glance, have been taken to be a natural cave. It was no cave. A reinforced-steel door sealed the entrance to a tunnel bored deep into the rock face. No guards this time, but Karim Zamani understood what he had to do. Slowly, carefully, knowing he was being watched by hidden cameras, he stepped out of the car and walked to the steel door. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a small digital LED device, then peered closer at the flickering green numbers displayed on the screen. He keyed them into a console on the side of the door. For a moment nothing happened. Then, quietly, it slid open. He nodded at the car and it drove off to park in the shadow of a nearby cliff.
Inside the tunnel Zamani adjusted his eyes to the semi-darkness. The sodium bulbs embedded in the walls at intervals gave off a half-hearted light as if nearing the end of their useful life. He walked on, down the empty tunnel, and stopped at a door. Another console, set into the wall, this time with an iris scanner. He removed his spectacles, placing them carefully in the pocket inside his tunic, then placed his hands on the console and leaned forward slightly, bringing his eyes level with the scanner. Four seconds later there was a discreet click and the door opened to reveal two armed guards wearing gloves and off-white face masks. They spoke into a radio, then handed him his own pair of protective gloves and a mask. Flanking him, side by side and saying nothing, they went down in the lift together. Down and down they descended, into what felt like the very core of the Earth. The lift had no sides and seemed to scrape the surface of the exposed rock until it stopped with a jolt and the guards clanked open the mesh gate.
Zamani stepped out into the subterranean corridor and smiled. The team were all assembled, waiting for him, expectant and deferential in their white lab coats.
‘Khosh amadid, Rais,’ said the man in front, the chief scientist, stepping forward to greet him. ‘Welcome, Commander.’
Zamani moved down the line, greeting each one in turn, telling them how important their work was in the service of the nation. He resisted the temptation to look at his watch. With so many responsibilities in the Revolutionary Guards Corps, he was always pressed for time. But then he remembered. Time was of little importance on this visit. This was a strategic project that transcended all timetables.
They moved down the narrow corridor in single file, turned left, through another doorway, more guards, weapons clasped tightly to their chests, and on down a passageway until they came to a door marked with a large yellow-and-black triangular nuclear hazard symbol. The chief scientist stepped forward and slotted his electronic pass into a reader. The door opened into a control room where more men in white coats were working at a bank of computer terminals. After the catastrophe of the Stuxnet virus, a piece of computer malware developed by US and Israeli scientists, introduced via a USB stick that had wiped out around a thousand of Iran’s nuclear-enrichment centrifuges at Natanz, everyone in the room had had their backgrounds and family connections exhaustively checked and rechecked. The project under way down here, hundreds of feet below the wrinkled deserts of northern Iran, was such a closely guarded secret that almost no one in government even knew it existed.
When they were all assembled inside the control room, the scientists looked at Karim Zamani, waiting for him to give the order to begin.
‘Run the sequence,’ he said quietly, then stood back, arms folded, waiting and watching intently. All faces turned towards a chamber, separated from them by a thick glass screen. On the other side a long, thin ballistic missile rested on a metal stand. It was painted in khaki camouflage but marked with the Farsi letters spelling the word Zolfaghar. A serial number was stencilled on its side, B-313-92-05, and next to that the tricolor of the Iranian national flag: green, white and red. But where the business end of the missile should have been, at the pointed tip, there was a gaping hole, a cavity waiting to be filled. That was as it should be.
Now a remotely controlled robotic vehicle on caterpillar tracks moved slowly towards the front of the missile. Its rear was held down with heavy lead weights for balance while from its front protruded a small crane. Beneath that, hanging by chains, was a white cylinder the size of a diminutive barrel, the black-and-yellow triangle stencilled on the side denoting its radioactive content. Painstakingly slowly, centimetre by centimetre, the cylinder was positioned over the cavity in the missile, then lowered until it was settled into its new home. Immediately, tumultuous applause broke out in the control room, and the chief scientist beamed with pride. He turned to address Karim Zamani. ‘We are close now, very close, to completion. Just a few more weeks of tests and then everything will be ready, God willing.’
A strange, almost beatific expression had come over Zamani’s face. His normally stern demeanour had given way to something else: he looked almost happy, as if he finally felt himself at peace with the world. Those who didn’t know him might easily make the mistake of thinking him a humourless man, a man incapable of kindness or generosity, but that was far from true. He would see to it now that every single person working on this project was amply rewarded. When he spoke, his rich, gravelly voice carried a note of triumph.
‘You are doing magnificent work here,’ he told them. ‘What you have achieved already, in this blessed laboratory, is a symbol of our struggle against the shackles imposed on us by neo-imperialist and Zionist powers. Powers that would seek to humiliate and belittle us. When, soon, your work here is complete, we will show the world that the Islamic Republic of Iran is nobody’s servant. We have an absolute right to nuclear power.’ Zamani paused, searching their faces, then raised his voice in a crescendo: ‘And, by God,’ he thundered, ‘we have a right to become a nuclear power. My brothers, this warhead you are creating here is that power.’
The applause lasted for several minutes in that underground chamber, unheard by the world, more than a hundred metres above. Everyone present had a smile on his face, including an individual who was not smiling inside. Someone who was deeply disturbed by what he’d just witnessed. Someone who knew he needed to get word of this to those who should know, even if that meant risking his own life.
Chapter 8
Vauxhall Cross
NO POT OF coffee, no tray of biscuits, no rambling preliminaries. Just straight down to business. Eight were sitting round the boardroom table on the sixth floor at Vauxhall Cross, the cream-and-emerald Thameside monolith that served as the headquarters of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. The last to arrive, Luke took his place beside Angela and kept a respectful silence: he had been officially on their books for less than a year.
As the man in charge of Iran and Caucasus, Graham Leach was in the hot seat and the first to speak. He cut straight to the chase. ‘Black Run has broken cover.’ He let that sink in around the table.
Luke, nonplussed, leaned over to Angela. ‘Black Run?’ he whispered.
‘One of our agents inside Iran,’ she whispered back. ‘He’s been sending us grade-A product.’
Grade-A product? He wondered how they came up with these terms. It made MI6 sound like an iron-ore smelting plant.
‘He had eyes on Echo Sierra two days ago,’ Leach was telling the room. ‘At Parchin.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ said someone, quietly.
Again Luke had to nudge Angela for a translation. He had always expected to find himself in a world of codenames at SIS, just hadn’t imagined he’d have to guess whom they referred to.
‘Echo Sierra,’ answered Angela, ‘is Karim Zamani. It’s in your briefing pack.’ She shot him an admonishing look.
