A Colder War Page 7

  Douglas Tremayne, Wallinger’s number two in Ankara and the acting head of station, was waiting for him in the arrivals area. Kell couldn’t work out whether his presence at the airport was an indication of the seriousness with which he was taking the Wallinger investigation, or evidence of the fact that Tremayne was bored and starved of company. He was wearing a pressed linen suit, an expensive-looking shirt, and enough aftershave to water the eyes of anyone within a twenty-foot radius. His hair had been carefully combed and the brown brogues he was wearing polished to a brilliant shine.

  “I thought we were meeting for dinner?” Kell asked, shouldering his bag as they headed toward the car park. Tremayne was an unmarried former army officer with a fill-in-the-blanks personality whom Kell had briefly worked alongside in the late 1990s when both men had been stationed in London. Along with several other colleagues, Kell had formed the opinion that Tremayne had not yet found the courage to admit to himself, far less to others, that he was gay. Personable to an almost suffocating degree, he was best enjoyed in small doses. The prospect of spending the next several hours in his company, not to mention two full days and nights at the British embassy combing through the Wallinger files, filled Kell with a sense of despondency bordering on dread.

  “Well, I had some time on my hands, I know what the taxi drivers are like round here, thought I’d surprise you so we could make a start on things in the car.”

  Given that Tremayne was declared to the Turkish authorities, there was a chance that anything they discussed in the vehicle would be recorded and relayed back to MIT, the Turkish intelligence service.

  “When did you last have this thing swept?” Kell asked, swinging his luggage into the trunk. There was a dent in the left back panel of the car, an unhealed scar from a collision in Ankaran traffic.

  “Don’t worry, Tom. Don’t worry.” Tremayne opened the passenger door for him, like a chauffeur anticipating a tip. “Picked it up yesterday afternoon.” He patted the roof for good measure. “Clean as a whistle.”

  “But you’re followed?”

  Tremayne waited until he had sat in the driver’s seat and switched on the engine before replying.

  “By the Iranians. By the Russians. By the Turks. Isn’t that part of my job description? To suck up surveillance so that the likes of you can go about your business?”

  If such a status bothered him, Tremayne did not betray his distress. He was the quieter breed of spook, grown somewhat lazy, certainly happy to serve time in the shadow of more dynamic colleagues. Wallinger had been the star in Turkey, Amelia’s point man for the restructuring of SIS operations in the Middle East, heading up a team of hungry young officers eager to recruit and run operations against the myriad targets presented to them in Ankara and beyond. Tremayne would not have considered himself in the running for head of station.

  Within minutes Tremayne’s Volvo was crawling along a standard-issue Turkish highway, Kell reviving a sense he dimly recalled of Ankara as a soulless city, deposited on the Steppe, buildings of no recognizable age or tradition strewn across an erratic landscape. He had visited the city on two previous occasions, solely for meetings with MIT, and could recall nothing of the trips save for a January blizzard that had given the British embassy the look of an Alpine ski lodge.

  “So we’ve been battening down the hatches, trying to come to terms with the whole thing.” Kell’s mind had wandered; he wasn’t sure how long Tremayne had been monologuing about Wallinger. “I wasn’t able to go to the funeral, as you know. Had to mind the fort. How was it?”

  Kell cracked a window and lit a cigarette, his fourth since landing.

  “Difficult. Very moving. A lot of old faces there. A lot of unanswered questions.”

  “Do you think he might have crashed the plane deliberately?”

  Tremayne had the decency to make a momentary, glancing eye contact as he pitched the question, but the timing of it still irked Kell.

  “You tell me. Did Paul strike you as the suicidal type?”

  “Not at all.” Tremayne’s response was quick and forthright, though he added a caveat, like a quick adjustment to the steering wheel. “Truth be told, we didn’t see a great deal of each other. We didn’t fraternize. Paul spent the majority of his time in Istanbul.”

  “Any particular reason for that?”

  Tremayne hesitated before responding. “It’s an attack Station.”

  “I’m well aware of that, Doug. That’s why I said ‘particular reason’.”

  Kell was trawling again, for anything: Wallinger’s assets—conscious or unconscious—his contacts, his women. The files and telegrams he would pore over in the next forty-eight hours would give an official version of Wallinger’s interests and behavior, but there was no downside to the raw intel of gossip and rumor.

  “Well, for one thing, he loved the city. Knew it like the back of his hand, enjoyed it as Istanbul deserves to be enjoyed. Things are always more formal here. Ankara is a government town, a policy town. As you will be aware, most of the important discussions on Iran, on Syria and the Brotherhood, are taking place in Istanbul. Paul kept a lovely house in Yenikoy. He was surrounded by his books, his paintings. That’s where Josephine would visit him. She loathed Ankara. The children did, too.”

  “Rachel came here?”

  Tremayne nodded. “Only once, I think.”

  Kell took out his iPhone and checked the screen for activity. There was a single text, which turned out to be a welcome message from his mobile phone provider, and three e-mails, two of which were spam. It was a bad, addictive habit he had developed after spending too many solitary days and nights in London without sufficient intellectual stimulation: a craving for news, for the tiny narcotic fix of contact from the outside world. Most days he hoped for a friendly message from Claire, if only to reassure himself that she had not entirely vanished from his life.

  “Is that the new one?” Tremayne asked.

  “I’ve no idea.” Kell put the iPhone back in his pocket. “Tell me what Paul was working on when he died. Amelia said you’d be able to bring me up to speed.”

  A change of gear and Tremayne crawled toward a red light.

  “I suppose you’ve heard about the Armenian fiasco?”

  It was a reminder to Kell that he had been out of the loop for too long. Whatever operation Tremayne was referring to had not even been mentioned by Amelia in Cartmel.

  “Assume that I’m starting at zero, Doug. The decision to send me here was only taken two days ago.”

  The traffic light began to flash. Tremayne moved off in bunched suburban traffic, passing beneath a giant billboard of José Mourinho advertising what appeared to be contents insurance.

  “I see,” he said, plainly surprised by Kell’s ignorance. “Well, best described as a bloody farce. Eight-month joint operation with the Cousins to bring a high-ranking Iranian military official across the border. Everything going like clockwork from Tehran, he gets as far as the frontier with his courier, Paul and his opposite number in the CIA about to pop the champagne and then—bang!”

  “Bang?”

  “Car bomb. Asset and courier both killed instantly. Paul apparently had the whites of his eyes, the Cousin bloody filmed him. It’s all in a report you’ll read tomorrow.” Tremayne overtook a truck belching fumes into the Ankaran evening and changed into a lower gear. “Amelia didn’t tell you?”

  Kell shook his head. No, Amelia didn’t tell me. And why was that? To save face, or because there was more to the story than a simple botched joint op?

  “The bomb was planted by the Iranians?”

  “We assume so. Remote controlled, almost certainly. For obvious reasons we weren’t able to get a look at the wreckage. It’s as though we were allowed to glimpse our prize, and then that prize was snatched from our grasp. A very deliberate snub, a power play. Tehran must have known about HITCHCOCK all along.”

  “HITCHCOCK was the cryptonym?”

  “Real name Shakhouri.”

  Agai
n, Kell wondered why Amelia had not told him about the bomb. Had the operation been spoken of at the funeral? Were there half a dozen conversations in the barn about HITCHCOCK to which he had not been privy? He felt the familiar, numb anger of his long exclusion from privileged information.

  “What’s the American line on what happened?”

  Tremayne shrugged. He was of the view that the post-9/11 Cousins were a law unto themselves, best treated with deference, but kept at arm’s length as much as possible. “You’re meeting them on Monday,” he said. There was a note change in Tremayne’s voice, as if he was about to apologize for letting Kell down. “Tom, there’s something I need to discuss with you.”

  “Go on.”

  “The CIA head of station here. I assume you’ve been told?”

  “Been told what?”

  Tremayne stretched the muscles in his neck, releasing another puff of aftershave into the car. “Tom, I’ve been made aware of your situation. I’ve known about it for some time.” Tremayne was referring to Witness X. It sounded as though he wanted Kell’s gratitude for remaining circumspect. “For what it’s worth, I think you were strung up.”

  “For what it’s worth, I think I was too.”

  “Hung out to dry to protect HMG. Made a scapegoat for the numberless failings of our superiors.”

  “And inferiors,” Kell added, squeezing the cigarette out of the gap in the window. In that moment, passing a group of men standing idly beside the road, he knew exactly what Tremayne was about to tell him. He was back in the room with Yassin Gharani, back in Kabul in 2004, with a pumped-up CIA officer throwing punches in the face of a brainwashed jihadi.

  “Jim Chater is in town.”

  Chater was the man whose reputation and good name Kell had protected at the expense of his own career. That naïveté, in itself, had been a principal component of his anger in the past two years, not least because he had never received adequate thanks for suppressing what he knew about the worst aspects of Chater’s conduct. Gharani had been beaten senseless. Gharani had been waterboarded. For his uncommitted sins he had then been dispatched to a black site in Cairo and—when the Egyptians were done with him—to Cuba and the prolonged humiliations of Guantanamo. And Chater was now the man with whom Kell would have to discuss the death of Paul Wallinger.

  Kell turned to Tremayne, wondering why “C” hadn’t warned him. Amelia had placed her own needs—her desire for her affair with Paul never to become public knowledge—above the good sense of putting Kell into an environment in which he would clash with one of the men he held responsible for terminating his career. Perhaps she had seen a benefit in that. As Tremayne, in an effort to locate Kell’s hotel, began taking directions from a Turkish sat-nav, Kell reflected that Chater was a rogue element, a running sore in the otherwise cordial relationship between the two services. However, Amelia had presented him with an opportunity, a chance for explanations, for closure. Something cold stirred inside Kell, a dormant ruthlessness. The chance to do business with Jim Chater in Turkey was also the chance to exact a measure of revenge.

  13

  Massoud Moghaddam, a lecturer in chemistry at Sharif University, a commercial director with responsibility for procurement at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant near Isfahan, and a CIA asset recruited by Jim Chater in 2009, known to Langley by the cryptonym EINSTEIN, woke as usual shortly before dawn.

  His routine did not vary from morning to morning. He left his wife sleeping, showered and brushed his teeth, then prayed in the living room of his two-bedroom apartment in northern Tehran. By seven, his six-year-old son, Hooman, and eight-year-old daughter, Shirin, were both awake. Narges, his wife, had washed and was preparing breakfast in the kitchen. The children were now old enough to dress themselves, but young enough still to make an apocalyptic mess at the table whenever the family sat together for a meal. At breakfast time, Massoud and Narges usually ate lavash bread with feta cheese and honey; the children preferred their bread with chocolate spread or fig jam, most of which ended up in crumbs and splatters on the floor. While mummy and daddy drank tea, Hooman and Shirin gorged on orange juice and made jokes about their friends. By eight, it was time for the children to leave for school. Their mother almost always walked them to the gates, leaving Massoud alone in the apartment.

  Doctor Moghaddam wore the same outfit to work every day. Black leather shoes, black flannel trousers, a plain white shirt, and a dark gray jacket. In the winter he added a V-neck pullover. He wore a cotton vest under his shirt and rarely, if ever, removed the silver necklace given to him by his sister, Pegah, when she had moved to Frankfurt with her German husband in 1998. Most mornings, to avoid the rush hour traffic that blighted Tehran, Massoud would ride the subway to Sharif or Ostad Moin. On this particular day, however, he had an evening appointment in Pardis, and would need the car to drive back into the city after supper.

  Massoud drove a white Peugeot 205 that he kept in the car park beneath his apartment building. He would joke to Narges that the only time he was ever able to accelerate beyond twenty miles an hour in Tehran was on the ramp leading out of the car park. Thereafter, like every other commuter heading south on Chamran and Fazlollah Nouri, he was stuck in a permanent, hour-long crawl of traffic. The Peugeot was not air-conditioned, so he was obliged to drive with all four windows down, allowing every molecule of air pollution and every decibel of noise to accompany him on his journey.

  On certain mornings, Massoud would listen to the news on the radio and to intermittent traffic reports, but he had recently concluded that each of these was as pointless as the next; there were now so many subway construction sites in Tehran, and the city so overwhelmed by traffic, that the only solution was to drive as assertively as possible along the shortest geographical route. Come off any of the main arteries, however, and he ran the risk of being redirected by traffic police, or stopping altogether behind a broken-down truck. Today, with smog shrouding the Alborz mountains, Massoud eased his irritation by plugging an MP3 player into the stereo and clicking to The Well-Tempered Klavier. Though certain notes and phrases were hard to detect against the noise of the highway, he knew the music intimately and always found that Bach helped to ease the stress of a hot summer morning in near-permanent four-lane gridlock.

  After almost an hour, he was at last able to loop down from Fazlollah Nouri onto Yadegar-e-Emam. Massoud was now within a few hundred meters of the university car park, although there were still two sets of traffic lights to negotiate. It was fiercely hot, and his shirt was soaked with sweat. As he came to a halt, a pedestrian walked past the driver’s window, the smoke from his mint cigarette drifting into the car, a smell that reminded Massoud of his father. Up ahead, he could see yet another traffic cop directing yet another group of jousting cars. All around him, the ceaseless, Bach-drowning cacophony of horns and bikes and engines.

  Massoud glanced in his opposite sideview mirror, preparing to push into the outer lane so that he could later make the turn onto Homayunshahr. A motorbike was snaking through a gap in traffic, about two meters from the Peugeot. If Massoud pushed out, there was a chance he would knock the bike over. Looking again in the mirror, he saw that there was a helmeted passenger riding pillion behind the driver. Best to let them pass.

  The motorbike did so, but drew up alongside the Peugeot. To Massoud’s surprise, the driver applied the brakes and stopped. There was space in front of him in which to move, yet he had come to a halt. The driver bent forward and seemed to look at Massoud through a black visor that threw sunlight into the car. Massoud heard a muffled word spoken under the helmet—not Persian—but lost his concentration when the lights turned green and he was obliged to engage first gear and shunt toward the turning.

  It was only when he sensed a weight magnetizing to the rear door, pulling down on the Peugeot’s suspension like a flat tire, that Massoud realized what had happened and was seized by black panic. The bike was gone, swerving directly in front of the car, then angling back in a fast U-turn into the riv
er of traffic moving on the opposite side. In desperation, Massoud reached for his seat belt, the engine still running, and pulled the belt across his chest as he tried to open the door.

  Witnesses to the explosion later reported that Dr. Massoud Moghaddam had one foot on the road when the blast shaped toward him, obliterating the front section of the Peugeot 205 but leaving the engine almost intact. Four passersby were injured, including a customer emerging from a nearby café. A nineteen-year-old man on a bicycle was also killed in the attack.

  14

  Kell spent the next two days, from half past eight in the morning to ten o’clock at night, in Wallinger’s office on the top floor of the British embassy. SIS Station was reached through a series of security doors activated by a swipe card and a five-digit PIN. The last of the doors, leading from the Chancery section into the Station itself, was almost a meter thick, heavy as a motorcycle and watched over by a CCTV camera linked to Vauxhall Cross. Kell was required to open a combination lock and turn two handles simultaneously before pulling the door toward him on a slow hinge. He joked to one of the secretaries that it was the first exercise he had taken in almost a year. She did not laugh.

  In accordance with Station protocols the world over, Wallinger’s computer hard drive had been placed inside the strongbox prior to his departure for Greece. On the first morning, Kell asked one of the assistants to remove it and to reboot the computer while he made a brief mental inventory of the personal items in Wallinger’s office. There were three photographs of Josephine on the walls. In one, she was standing in a damp English field with her arms around Andrew and Rachel. All three were wearing outdoor coats and smiling broadly beneath hoods and caps—a happy family portrait. On Wallinger’s desk there was a further framed picture of Andrew wearing his Eton morning suit, but no photograph of Rachel from her own school days. The Daily Telegraph obituary of Wallinger’s father, who had served in the SOE, was framed and hung on the far wall of the office beside another large picture of Andrew rowing in an eight at Cambridge. Again, there was no comparable photograph of Rachel, not even of her graduation day at Oxford. Kell knew very little about Wallinger’s children, but suspected that Paul would have enjoyed a closer and perhaps less complicated relationship with his son, largely because of the broad streak of unemotional machismo in his character. There was very little else of a personal nature in the room, only an Omega watch in one of the desk drawers and a scuffed signet ring, which Kell could not recall ever having seen on Wallinger’s hand. Finding the largest desk drawer locked, he had asked for it to be opened, but found only painkillers and vitamin pills in half-finished packets, as well as a handwritten love letter from Josephine, dated shortly after their wedding, which Kell stopped reading after the first line out of respect for her privacy.