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.
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
