A Colder War
‘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 towards 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 waved at 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 his grasp. A very deliberate snub, a power play. Tehran must have known about HITCHCOCK all along.’
‘HITCHCOCK was the cryptonym?’
‘Real name Sadeq Mirzai.’
Again, 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 brain-washed 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 naïvety, 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.
Dr Moghaddam wore the same outfit to work every day. Black leather shoes, black flannel trousers, a plain white shirt and a dark grey 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 Fazlolah 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 Clavier. 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 Fazlolah Nouri on to Yadegar-e-Emam. Massoud was now within a few hundred metres 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 wing-mirror, preparing to push into the outer lane so that he could later make the turn on to Homayunshahr. A motorbike was snaking through a gap in traffic, about two metres 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 past.
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 towards 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 tyre, 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 river 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 towards him, obliterating the front section of the Peugeot 205 but leaving the engine almost intact. Four passers-by 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 metre 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 towards 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 Strong Box 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 schooldays. 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 did not know a great deal 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.
The hard drive gave him access to the SIS telegrams that Wallinger had sent and received in the previous thirteen months, copies of which were also being read by one of Amelia’s assistants in London. Wallinger’s internal communications within the Station, and to the wider Embassy staff, had not been automatically copied to Vauxhall Cross, but Kell found nothing in the intranet messages to the Ambassador or First Secretary which appeared out of the ordinary. Amelia had gone over the heads of SIS vetting to ensure that Kell was given immediate DV clearance to read anything in Turkey that might help him to piece together Wallinger’s state of mind, as well as his movements, in the weeks leading up to his death. He was permitted to read four ‘Eyes-Only’ telegrams on Iranian centrifuges that had been seen only by H/Istanbul, Amelia, the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister. The classified internal report into the failed defection of Sadeq Mirzai had been copied to Jim Chater, who had added his own remarks in anticipation of a similar CIA report into the incident. Kell could find nothing in the manner in which the recruitment of Mirzai had been handled, nor in the planning and execution of the operation, that seemed problematic or misjudged. As Tremayne had suggested, the Iranians must have been alerted to the defection, likely because of an error in Mirzai’s tradecraft. Only by talking to Chater face-to-face would Kell be able to get a fuller picture.
On his third afternoon in Ankara, Kell took a taxi to Wallinger’s suburban villa in Incek, a property owned by the Foreign Office and occupied by successive Heads of Station for most of the previous two decades. Turning the key in the front door, Kell reflected that he had searched many homes, many hotel rooms, many offices in his career, but had only had cause to snoop on a friend once before – when searching for Amelia two years earlier. It was one of the healthier house rules at SIS and MI5: staff were required to sign a document pledging not to investigate the behaviour of friends or relatives on Service computers. Those caught doing so – running background checks on a new girlfriend, for example, or looking for personal information about a colleague – would quickly be shown the door.
The villa was starkly furnished in the modern Turkish style with very little of Wallinger’s taste apparent in the décor. Kell suspected that his yali in Istanbul would be quite different in atmosphere: more cluttered, more scholarly. It appeared as though a cleaner had recently been to the property, because the kitchen surfaces were as polished as a showroom, the toilets blue with detergent, the beds made, the rugs straightened, not a speck of dust on any shelf or table. In the cupboards, Kell found only what he would have expected to find: clothes and shoes and boxes; in the bathroom, toiletries, towels and a dressing-gown. Beside Wallinger’s bed there was a biography of Lyndon Johnson; beneath the television downstairs, box sets of all five series of The Wire. The villa, as soulless as a serviced apartment, revealed very little about the personality of the occupant. Even Wallinger’s study had a feeling of impermanence: a single photograph of Josephine on the desk, another of Andrew and Rachel as children hanging on the wall. There were various magazines, Turkish and English, paperback thrillers on a shelf, a reproduction poster of the 1974 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck. Kell read through a few scribbled notes in a foolscap pad, found an out-of-date diary in the desk, but no hidden documents, no letters concealed behind pictures, no false passports or suicide note. Wallinger had kept a tennis racket and a set of golf clubs in a cupboard under the stairs. Feeling somewhat foolish, Kell checked for a hidden compartment in the handle of the racket and for a false bottom in the golf bag. He discovered nothing but some old tees and two hardened sticks of prehistoric chewing gum. It was the same story upstairs. Checking behind drawers, unscrewing lampshades, looking under cupboards – Wallinger had hidden nothing in the house. Kell moved from room to room, listening to the intermittent sounds of birdsong and passing cars in the suburban street outside, and concluded that there was nothing to find. Tremayne had been right – Wallinger’s heart had been in Istanbul.
Kell was in a bathroom adjacent to the smaller of two spare bedrooms when he heard the front door opening and then slamming shut. The sound of a set of keys falling on to the surface of a glass table. Not an intruder; it had to be someone who had legitimate access to the villa. A cleaner? The landlord?
Kell left the bathroom and walked out on to the landing. He called out: ‘Merhaba?’
No reply. Kell began to walk downstairs, calling out a second time: ‘Merhaba? Hello?’
He could see down into the hall. A faint shadow moved across the polished floor. Whoever had come in was now in Wallinger’s office. As he reached the mid-point of the stairs, Kell heard a reply in a sing-song accent he recognized instantly.
‘Hello? Somebody is there, please?’
A woman came out of the office. She was wearing blue leggings and a black leather jacket and her hair was grown out and tied at the back. Kell hadn’t seen her since the operation to save François Malot, in which she had played such a crucial role. When she saw him, her face broke into a wide smile and she swore excitedly in Italian.
‘Minchia!’
‘Elsa,’ Kell said. ‘I wondered when I’d run into you.’
15
They hugged one another in the hall, Elsa wrapping her arms around Kell’s neck so tightly that he almost lost his balance. She smelled of a new perfume. The shape of her, the warmth in her greeting, reminded Kell that they had almost become lovers in the summer of the Malot operation, and that only his loyalty to Claire, allied to a sense of professional responsibility, had prevented that.
‘It is so amazing to see you!’ she said, raising herself up on tiptoes to kiss him. Kell felt like a favourite uncle. It was not a feeling he enjoyed, yet he remembered how easily Elsa had broken through the wall of his natural reticence, how close they had become in the short time they had spent together. ‘Amelia sent you?’ she asked.
Kell was surprised that Elsa did not know that he was going to be in Ankara. ‘Yes. She didn’t tell you?’
‘No!’
Of course she didn’t. How many other Service freelancers were working on the Wallinger case? How many other members of staff had Amelia dispatched to the four corners of the Earth to find out why Paul had died?
‘You’re picking up his computers?’
Elsa was a Tech-Ops specialist, a freelance computer whizz who could decipher a software program, a circuit board or a screen of code as others could translate pages of Mandarin, or sight-read a Shostakovich piano concerto. In France, two summers earlier, she had unearthed nuggets of intelligence in laptops and BlackBerrys that had been critical to Kell’s investigation: without her, the operation would certainly have failed.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Just picked up the keys.’
She glanced towards the glass table. Kell saw the keys resting against the base of a vase containing fake plastic flowers.
‘I guess that’s what you call good timing,’ he told her. ‘I was about to start downloading the hard drive.’
Elsa’s face screwed up in confusion, not merely at the obvious overlap in their responsibilities, but also because she knew that, to Kell, computer technology was a gobbledygook language of which he had only a rudimentary understanding.
‘It’s a good thing I am here, then,’ she said. And it was only then that she let go of his hands, pivoting back in the direction of the office. ‘I can tell you which plug goes in the wall and which one goes in the back of the computer.’
‘Ha, ha.’
Kell studied her face. He remembered the natural ebullience, a young woman entirely at ease in her own skin. Running into Elsa so suddenly had lifted his spirits out of the despondency that had plagued him for days. ‘When did you get here?’ he asked.
She glanced outside. She had three earrings in her right lobe, a single stud in the left. ‘Yesterday?’ It was as though she had forgotten.
‘You’re going into the Station at some point?’
Elsa nodded. ‘Sure. Tomorrow, I have an appointment. Amelia wants me to go through Mr Wallinger’s emails.’ She pronounced ‘Wallinger’ in two separate parts – ‘Wall’ and then a Scandinavian ‘Inga’ – and Kell smiled. ‘Is that not correct, Tom Kell? Wallinger?’
‘It’s perfect. It’s your way of saying it.’
It was good to hear the music of her voice again, the mischief in it. ‘OK. So I take a look at this man’s computers, take the phones and maybe the drives back to Rome for analysis.’
‘The phones?’ Kell followed her into the office and watched as Elsa powered up Wallinger’s desktop.
‘Sure. He had two cell phones in Ankara. One of the SIM cards from his personal phone was recovered from the aeroplane.’
Kell did not disguise his astonishment. ‘What?’
‘You did not know this?’
‘I’m playing catch-up.’ Elsa squinted, either because she did not understand the expression, or because she was surprised that Kell appeared so far off his game. ‘Amelia only brought me in a few days ago.’
During the operation in which they had first worked together, Kell had spoken to Elsa about his role in the interrogation of Yassin Gharani. She knew that he had been sidelined by SIS, but made it clear that she believed in Kell’s innocence. For this, she occupied a special place in his affections, not least because her trust had been more than Claire had ever been able to afford him.
‘You’re going to Istanbul?’ she asked.
‘As soon as I’m done with the Americans. You?’
‘I think so, yes. Maybe. There is Wallinger’s house there? And of course a Station.’
Kell nodded. ‘And where there is a Station, there are computers for Elsa Cassani.’
The booting desktop played an accompaniment to Kell’s remark, a rising scale of digitized notes issuing from two speakers on Wallinger’s desk. Elsa tapped something into the keyboard. It was only then that Kell saw the ring on her finger.
‘You got engaged?’ he said, and experienced a sense of dismay that surprised him.
‘Married!’ she replied, and held up the ring as though she expected Kell to be as pleased as she was. Why was he not glad for her? Had he become so cynical about marriage that the prospect of a woman as lively, as full of promise as Elsa Cassani walking up the aisle filled him with dread? If so, these were cynical, almost nihilistic thoughts of which he was not proud. There was every chance that she would find great happiness. Plenty did. ‘Who’s the lucky man?’