Ultimatum, page 9
‘Let us start,’ he began, in an accent they all recognized as coming from the holy city of Mashad, home to the most sacred Shia shrine in Iran, ‘with an assessment of what went wrong in Armenia.’ There were nods and frowns of disapproval around the table, but Zamani was watching him closely. He had already privately earmarked this man for a special role. If their plans were ever discovered, and they were forced to explain themselves to the Supreme Leader’s office, Zamani had more than enough on him to let him take the fall.
‘The decision to monitor the Armenian border crossing proved a wise one,’ the man from Mashad continued. ‘We thank you, Karim-jaan, for your foresight and planning.’
Zamani tipped his head in modest acknowledgement.
‘We believe that disaster was only narrowly averted, thanks to our surveillance team. The traitor who crossed illegally had high-level clearance at Parchin. He could have compromised everything. But, as you know, we … dealt with the situation. It is our assessment that no information has escaped these borders.’
‘How can you be so certain?’ an older man asked. He was sitting towards the back of the room, with thinning hair, a faded suit, and permanently surprised eyebrows. Zamani knew him well. He had been his mentor when he’d first graduated into the Revolutionary Guards Corps.
‘Because if anything had leaked out,’ replied the man from Mashad, ‘you can be certain that those UN nuclear inspectors would be crawling all over us by now. And they are not.’ He adjusted his glasses and threw him a glance that seemed to say, ‘No more interruptions.’
‘And yet we now have unfinished business here,’ he resumed. ‘Our Armenian friends tell us they had nothing to do with the martyrdom of our men at Geghard Monastery and I believe them. So who killed him? Whoever it was, he has slipped through their hands, like rice through open fingers. Karim-jaan?’
Zamani’s turn to speak. He stood up and, as he always did on these occasions, smoothed the creases from his tunic before he spoke. ‘I think we are all agreed, are we not, that the man who did this is dangerous?’ It was a rhetorical question and he didn’t wait for an answer. ‘He is a danger to our project and a danger to us – yes, all of us, here in this room. We must assume he was sent by a Western agency – CIA, Mossad, MI6, the French, we don’t know yet. But we must find him.’
Zamani could see the questioning look in their eyes. Why were they wasting precious time talking about going after this one individual when there was urgent work down in the tunnel at Parchin to discuss?
‘My brothers,’ Zamani continued, ‘this is not about vengeance for our martyrs, it’s not even about justice. We have to know what is in his head. We need to find out what they know. So … I am pleased to tell you that progress is already under way in identifying him. Our agents in Yerevan are making checks at all the hotels, examining the registers. Once we have a name, our people at the airport will find a face, a passport number, a description. Let me assure you now, here in this room, in this blessed city of Qom that is so dear to our hearts, that wherever he is hiding in the world, we will find this … this kosskesh, this pimp! And when we do he will dearly regret the choices he has made.’
Chapter 23
Goring Hotel, London
LUKE CARLTON WAS on his best behaviour. Jumping smartly out of the taxi as they pulled up at 15 Beeston Place, SW1, holding open the door, then offering his arm as he helped Elise’s mother up the steps from the pavement. It was always this way when he was around her. Luke had warmed to Helen Mayhew right from the first heart-in-mouth moment, that Saturday morning two years ago, the day when Elise had brought him home to Buckinghamshire to meet The Parents. Luke had brought chocolates, good ones, and flowers, addressing her respectfully as ‘Mrs Mayhew’ and offering to help with the washing-up after lunch. Elise teased him afterwards that he was behaving like an obedient spaniel, but in the months that followed Luke, orphaned at the age of ten, had come to see Helen as the mother he had never had.
Now the three were sitting on sofas in the Edwardian dining room at the Goring Hotel, their faces lit by the subdued light of green-shaded lamps. Coming here for afternoon tea at the discreet, upmarket establishment, just a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace, had been an annual pre-Christmas indulgence that Elise and her mother had shared since the year she’d graduated from Durham.
‘So, I gather the trip to Armenia was a bit disappointing?’ Helen flashed him the sweetest of smiles as she poured the tea.
Just a bit. You could say it was a total bloody car crash. But Luke just smiled at the question and turned to Elise for help.
‘A lot of the galleries turned out to be closed,’ she lied, ‘so we came back earlier than expected.’ Luke watched her admiringly as she spoke. She was wearing a soft white cashmere poncho, which he’d bought her on a ski trip to Courmayeur, and a small gold pendant around her neck. Such an angelic creature, such perfect poise, he noted, and so easily the lie tripped off her tongue. Luke was impressed.
‘I see.’ Helen turned to him. ‘And now you’re here to stay for a while, I hope? No more trips in the pipeline so close to Christmas? My daughter does miss you when you’re away, you know.’ She patted his knee affectionately.
‘Nothing.’ Even as he said it Luke knew full well that his phone could ring in the next minute, he’d get his marching orders from Vauxhall and be on a flight that night to somewhere he could never reveal to either her or Elise.
‘Good,’ said Helen. ‘That’s what I like to hear. Family is everything, you know, and you’re a part of ours, Luke. Now, let me go and find out what’s happened to our sandwiches. Oh, here they come.’
A uniformed young man appeared at their table and gave a deferential nod to Elise’s mother. She spoke quietly into his ear, as if confiding some great secret. Minutes later he returned with a bottle, its green glass surface glistening with beads of condensation. He peeled back the gold foil, gently popping the cork into a white napkin, then filled their glasses with an ice-cold Bollinger.
Luke wondered what they should be celebrating. Their escape from Armenia? The impending Christmas season? That he was still in a job after failing to debrief a doomed agent in time, leaving a trail of dead bodies behind him? It really didn’t matter. What counted for him was that this was a wonderful interlude of calm, a luxurious moment of escape from all the pressures around them. He looked at Elise’s mother, serene and dignified in her pearls and country tweeds, and raised a glass towards her. ‘To you, Helen, and thank you.’
‘And to both of you,’ she replied. She took a long sip, winced and placed a hand on her abdomen.
Elise leaned forward, concerned. ‘Mummy? Are you all right?’
The colour seemed to drain from Helen Mayhew’s cheeks. Then whatever it was passed and she was back to her normal self. ‘I’m fine, darling. I don’t know what that was.’ She giggled. ‘Probably just wind. Right, come on now, drink up both of you. Nothing worse than warm champagne.’
Luke sensed Elise drawing subtly closer to him on the sofa. Beneath the table he could feel her hand, warm and soft, resting on his knee as she closed the space between them. There would come a time, he was absolutely certain, when he was somewhere dark and dangerous and he would treasure this moment, drag it up from his memory banks, turn it over in his mind and savour it.
Chapter 24
MI6 Headquarters, Vauxhall Cross
THE POST-ACTION REPORT from Poland Station lay on the table, like a piece of damning evidence, staring up at everyone in the room. Graham Leach picked it up, riffled through its pages, frowning, and stopped at a passage in the conclusion that he had already marked and began to read out loud.
‘“Carlton’s obvious physical stamina and personal survival skills do not mask the fact that his mission was essentially a failure. He reached Black Run too late to carry out the debrief before the agent was murdered and the intelligence was lost to us. It is therefore my conclusion that an officer with a more in-depth knowledge of the region might have reached the target sooner and completed the mission with none of the three murders taking place.”’
MI6’s Head of Iran and Caucasus replaced the file on the table and swept his glasses off his face. ‘So, Luke, anything you’d like to add?’
Luke looked quickly round the room before he spoke. In the military, a meeting like this was known as ‘an interview without coffee’. Aside from him and Leach, three others were present. There was the ubiquitous Angela Scott, his line manager, whose last words to him before he had left for Armenia had been ‘Don’t sweat it, Luke. It’s just a debrief.’ There was the rather unwelcome figure of John Friend, a Service lawyer he recognized from Legal Affairs. Christ, those people had practically a whole floor to themselves, these days, and seeing him right now did not bode well. And then there was a small, neat woman he didn’t know, wearing a white hijab, and a dark blue suit over a white blouse.
‘Well, yes,’ Luke replied, looking Leach straight in the eyes and holding his gaze. ‘I would like to comment. As I said in the initial debrief on that stopover in Warsaw, I could not have got to the monastery any sooner. The moment I got the message with the RV location I was in a cab and on my way. In fact I was there early …’ He trailed off because he could see Leach was holding up his hand for silence. So let me guess. It’s a foregone conclusion. I’m to be fired and this lady in the headscarf has been sent over from HR to sign off on the end of my career here.
‘I hear you,’ said Leach. ‘I’ve read the report, I’ve talked to our embassy in Yerevan and …’ He paused.
‘And?’ Come on, don’t drag this out. Let’s get it over with.
‘… I’m satisfied,’ continued Leach, ‘that you did everything you could. In fact’, he leaned forward in his chair towards Luke, ‘I would probably have done exactly the same in your position.’
Luke relaxed, just slightly, but he was damned if he was going to show it. MI6 might be his employer but he still trusted nobody, inside or outside this building.
‘You’re probably wondering what all these people are doing here.’ Leach swept an arm round the room. ‘Well, John Friend is from Legal, as I think you know. He’s here to sign off on the next operation. I wanted him in on the ground floor of what we’re planning. And Jasmine is on loan from GCHQ. She’s helping us get the most out of the SIGINT intercepts we get from Cheltenham.’
Luke tipped his head towards her and the lawyer and turned back to Leach. ‘So what are you planning?’ he asked.
It was Jasmine who answered, speaking with just a trace of an accent. ‘Hello, Luke,’ she began, as if they had met before, which he was certain they hadn’t. ‘You know, of course, that we’ve been watching Karim Zamani in Iran for some time now. Black Run saw him in the tunnels at Parchin only last week before he was … Well, you know the rest. Anyway, Targeting think there may be an opportunity, an opening, we can exploit.’
Luke watched her as she spoke, listening intently. She had pronounced angular features and a thin, aquiline nose. Her eyes seemed to sparkle as she addressed him, yet he detected seriousness behind them. You don’t say? This lady is either Arab or Iranian and she’s working for the biggest government eavesdropping station in Europe, listening in on her former countrymen’s conversations and tagging the bad guys for surveillance. Of course she’s bloody serious.
‘We’ve learned that Zamani’s wife is about to take a trip outside Iran,’ Jasmine continued. ‘To Abu Dhabi. She’s taking her daughter Tannaz with her, to visit an art fair in the Emirates.’
Leach cleared his throat. ‘We want you to get in front of her,’ he said bluntly. ‘Remember, she’s a serious party girl.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning she’s into a Western lifestyle and can’t stand the people her father works for, the Revolutionary Guards. She’s ripe for recruitment, Luke. If we can get her onboard it’ll give us unparallel access into what Zamani’s up to.’
Luke thought for a moment. He was used to winging it and taking snap decisions, but this wasn’t the military: it was intelligence work and to him it felt very, very rushed. ‘I can see the end-state we’re aiming for here,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got to say this feels a bit hasty. I mean, I only went on the agent-handling course a short while ago and you pulled me off that, remember?’
Leach smiled. ‘It is rushed. I won’t deny that. But we don’t have the luxury of time. The situation in the Gulf is getting extremely tense and we’ve got the National Security Council screaming at us for better optics on Iran. We’re pulling out all the stops here, Luke.’
‘How soon are we talking?’
Leach and Angela exchanged glances. ‘You fly tonight. You’re booked on the overnight Etihad flight to Abu Dhabi. Jasmine will give you the full target profile and everything you need to know about Tannaz. You’ll be met off your flight so don’t worry about that bit.’
All this time, Luke noticed, the Service lawyer had sat there quietly without saying a word. Luke remembered John Friend from his Colombia mission two years back. The man’s heart might have been in the right place but he had been a royal pain in the arse. Please, God, don’t tell me I’m being saddled with him again on this one.
‘John!’ Luke addressed him briskly, so briskly that the lawyer started and dropped the pen he was holding. ‘What’s your part in all this? Are you coming to hold my hand again?’
‘Me? Heavens, no, you’re on your own on this one. I’m just here to sign off on this at the ground floor, so to speak. It’s the way C likes things done, these days, dotting the is and crossing the ts. Nobody wants another Gibson Inquiry, do they?’ He laughed weakly, then busied himself with his notes.
As the room cleared and Luke moved to where Jasmine was sitting, bringing up a page on her data tablet to begin her briefing, a thought struck him. This is your last bloody chance, Carlton. You messed up on the agent-handling course, you came back from Armenia in mild disgrace and with a triple body count. That makes this trip to Abu Dhabi your last-chance saloon. One more fuck-up, and you’ll be out. End of.
Chapter 25
Abu Dhabi
BLINDING SUNLIGHT AND cloudless blue skies. Luke squinted as he peered through the plane’s smudged window at the sunbaked tarmac. Not yet eight o’clock and already the heat of the Gulf made everything appear bleached white. Blending in with all the disembarking passengers, he strode up the sloping air bridge to the terminal, his eyelids still sticky with sleep. Just a single piece of hand luggage, a holdall slung over his left shoulder containing everything he would need. ‘Never check anything into the hold’ had been his mantra for as long as he could remember. Low profile, incognito, under the radar: that was how he liked to operate – just an inconspicuous British art dealer come to visit an art fair and conduct a little gentle networking. True, he was still coming to terms with the absurd cover name they had given him. ‘Brendan Hall’. One day, he vowed, he would track down the bastard at Vauxhall Cross who had come up with it.
‘Excuse, please, Mr Hall?’
They were still in the air bridge when he spotted a tall Emirati official in spotless white national dress and black camel-rope headband, holding up a sign with his cover name handwritten in felt tip. Luke looked around him to check whether anyone was paying attention. They weren’t.
‘Yes, that’s me,’ he said quietly to the man from Government Protocol, and followed him through a glass door into Abu Dhabi airport’s futuristic terminal. Luke had been there before, years ago, on an SBS job, training Emirati Special Forces. They had spent most of their time sweating it out in the desert and mountains but, still, he could do without any of them recognizing him now. Somehow he didn’t think they would buy the art-dealer story.
‘Juice, sir?’ Inside the VIP lounge a Filipina waitress came up to offer him a chilled rolled face towel and a choice of mango or carrot juice. Luke chose mango and drank it in one gulp. The lounge was decked out with soft cushions and Islamic patterns on the walls, interspersed with a giant portrait of the founding ruler of the modern UAE, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan. Over in the corner a trio of jaded British business types had formed a circle round their matching Samsonite luggage. A very thin Indian waiter busied himself with straightening the already straight copies of that day’s newspapers as they lay on glass tables.
Luke’s passport had been whisked from him to be processed, sparing him the tedium of Immigration. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes after the overnight flight, he picked up a copy of a local English-language paper. On page four of that day’s Gulf News there was an article about the exhibition: ‘Manarat Art Gallery Draws Thousands’ ran the headline. Was that a deliberate pun? He looked up, checking that no one was watching, then neatly tore out the page with the article, quickly folded it and slipped it into his jacket pocket. ‘Brendan Hall’ had better know everything there was to be known about this art fair.
The trio of businessmen got up and left, passports in hand, luggage trailing behind them on wheels. Luke was alone. He took out his smartphone, keeping it offline and on flight mode in case there were scanners in the vicinity. He scrolled through Photos until he came to the image he was after: Tannaz Zamani. His target. In another life, on covert night raids into mudwalled Afghan compounds with the SBS, a ‘target’ meant exactly that: some local warlord considered to be a serious enough threat that he had to be removed from the battlefield, often permanently. But Tannaz was an intelligence target and that was a different proposition. He would need charm and guile, picking his way through a verbal minefield to avoid revealing who he was and what he was after.
