LITMIR.BIZ

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      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

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