“I wish to leave a message,” Leblanc spoke hesitantly into the mouthpiece.
“I’m listening,” was all he heard from the other end. It was a strange voice, electronically distorted, the sound cold and disinterested. By the time that Leblanc had finished a short while later, he was less certain that he had, in fact, done the right thing after all.
But by then, of course, it was too late.
131
Geneva
“What exactly was in the sealed envelope?” Holly asks. They have been walking at a brisk pace back towards the main railway station. Holly’s arm has been linked through Lewis’s. The two of them have crossed the river and are now about four hundred metres from the pedestrian area in front of the station.
“A handwritten ‘To Whom It May Concern’ letter from beyond the grave. I’ll show it to you when we get on the train. It raises more questions than it answers, that’s for sure.”
“No reference to the dossier, I suppose?” Holly says. In addition to a set of keys and detailed instructions on how to access a certain property, the only other item in the locked box had been a hand-written, plain manila envelope. This had been secured with tape around all its edges. Having struggled to open it, Lewis had kept the contents to himself, insisting whilst in the course of reading it that Holly call Leblanc back into the room so as to enable them to be on their way again as quickly as possible.
“We’ll find everything we’re looking for once we get to the property, apparently. However, the letter is a revelation. We are going to need Zeltinger’s help on one aspect in particular.”
Lewis stops unexpectedly to stare at paintings on display in a small art gallery. “What’s the matter?” Holly asks, confused by Lewis’s interest in two boring still life’s. “Why are we stopping?”
Lewis is using the reflection of the glass to scan the other side of the street. He says nothing for several seconds, his head motionless but his eyes moving rapidly.
“Don’t turn around, just keep looking at the paintings, same as me,” he says, pointing at one randomly as if making conversation about the artwork. “Across the road and behind us, almost at seven o’clock. There’s a woman in a blue jacket and dark trousers. She’s been with us since we left the bank. When we stopped just now, she came to a halt the same instant we did.”
“Are you serious?” Holly looks hard in the reflection to see if she can spot the woman but can’t see anyone. “Probably some bored Swiss house frau on her weekly tour around Geneva’s shops, doing a spot of window shopping.”
Lewis shakes his head.
“What makes you so sure?”
“I’ve seen her before. She was walking a dog earlier. We passed her outside the bank building moments before we arrived for our meeting with Thierry Leblanc.”
“Bloody hell.”
“Precisely. If there’s one, there’ll be others. I simply can’t see them at the moment.”
“So what do we do?”
“Let’s continue towards the station and keep our eyes peeled.”
They set off in the same direction once more, this time coming to a natural pause by a major road junction about a hundred metres from the station itself.
“Is it me,” whispers Holly, pulling herself closer to Lewis as they wait for the pedestrian crossing light to turn green. “But doesn’t that look like an unusually large number of police outside the station up ahead?”
It is true. Immediately in front of the station entrance there are several police cars parked up, one with its blue lights flashing. They could also see various uniformed officers milling around as well.
“You’re right. It looks like a reception committee,” Lewis mutters.
“Do you think Leblanc would have tipped them off?” Holly asks.
“Unlikely,” Lewis says. “They probably traced our taxi driver from earlier and found out where he dropped us.”
“So what do we do?”
“I have an idea.”
The pedestrian light turns green and they cross the street. Lewis has spotted a white taxi with his green ‘for hire’ light waiting in traffic up ahead. He opens its rear door moments before it is about to set off, bundling Holly and himself into the back.
“Airport,” Lewis says to the surprised driver, who despite the unplanned and usually not permitted curb-side pick up, reluctantly accepts Lewis’s offered twenty Euro note peace offering. He drives off with the rest of the flow of traffic. Lewis and Holly both risk a rearward glance. The woman in the blue jacket has abandoned any pretence at stealth. She is now desperately searching the junction for a taxi as well.
“Why the airport?” Holly asks looking bewildered. For the second time that day, Lewis squeezes her hand and shakes his head, the message once more clear. They sit in silence for the short trip back to Cointrin, the driver dropping them off at the departures level where they quickly disappear inside the terminal itself. Lewis then leads a bemused Holly by the arm down one flight of stairs to the arrivals level where they emerge into the open air once more and join a short queue for a different taxi.
“Gare de Nyon, s’il vous plait,” Lewis tells the driver of a new Mercedes taxi, a young Genevoise who appears happy to be taking his passengers to a destination outside the city for a change.
A look of comprehension dawns on Holly’s face.
“You’re a cunning so-and-so,” she whispers into his ear as they head down the A1 motorway at speed.
They sit in silence in the back of the taxi, enjoying the scenery. To their left are the gentle foothills of the Rhône-Alps; to their right they can see clearly the distant peaks of more serious mountain ranges that extend beyond the southern shores of Lake Geneva. Suddenly, the phone in Lewis’s pocket vibrates. More precisely it is Leyla’s phone but his number. Lewis takes out the device, surprised that there is any battery left. The cracked screen makes it difficult to slide his finger across the glass to answer the call. He doesn’t recognise the number. It is an English cell phone calling.
“Hello?” he says. The line is crackly. Removing the device briefly from his ear he sees that there is less than four per cent battery life left. This was not going to be a long call.
“Ben? It’s Mel. Mel Allen.”
“Mel? So, you were still able to track me down then?”
“I was worried about you, to be honest. How are you? Have you managed to find the dossier?”
“I’ve got very little battery left, let’s make this short. Quick answer, still alive, but only just.” He looks at Holly and winks at her. “No dossier yet but I have managed to find Leyla Zamani’s safe deposit box.”
“Amazing,” she says, although she sounded more incredulous that delighted. “What was in it?”
“Just some keys and a handwritten letter.”
“What did the letter say?” The line was bad all of a sudden.
“Mostly about her brother. She thought he’d been killed because someone found out about the dossier.”
“I can’t hear you. Say that again?”
“She was worried that someone had leaked information about the dossier. Hello?” The line has gone dead. Lewis looks at the phone and the screen is completely blank, the battery drained once more.
“Do you want to call her back on my phone?” Holly asked.
“No need. She was only on a fishing trip to find out whether I had the dossier yet. She’ll just have to wait her turn until we’ve got it.”
Some time later at Nyon station, whilst waiting on the platform for their train, Lewis asks to borrow Holly’s phone. He wanders off to make another call, this time to Zeltinger. The call lasts only five minutes. However it was a conversation that everyone agreed later was to prove critical in allowing all the pieces of the complex puzzle finally to be pieced together.
132
To Whom It May Concern
I do not, as I write, know who you are or where I might have found you. My name, as I hope you will know, is Leyla Zamani. I am Persian by birth and although I have hardly lived in my country, I still feel its soul and history within me.
My parents died when I was two, killed during an outbreak of violence before Khomeini returned on that infamous plane from Paris in 1979. I was taken into the care of my mother’s sister, moving with her to Geneva where other members of her extended family had set up new homes and lives away from their homeland.
I never knew him at that time, of course, but my cousin Shafiq was by then already in his teens. He was the eldest son of my father’s brother, Shahbaz, their family remaining in Teheran through the thick of the Revolution. As cousins we grew up apart, although as time passed we became steadily closer. Not least this was because Shafiq was intrigued that I had chosen a career in journalism, a subject he saw as vague and nebulous, a long way removed from the rigour and discipline of nuclear physics.
Academically, Shafiq was always the cleverest of my extended family. There was never any doubt that he would rise to the top of his chosen scientific discipline. He studied abroad, spending three years at the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute in western Russia before doing further research at Tsinghua University of Beijing. He returned to Iran and quickly became a rising star in the Iranian Atomic Energy Organisation. Fuelled, literally, by Iran’s not insubstantial uranium reserves, this secretive organisation oversaw the running of several experimental reactors, a uranium processing facility, as well as Iran’s first steps towards uranium enrichment. These latter operations, secretive and little known about by the average Iranian, are located in underground bunkers in places such as Natanz, Fordow and Lashkar Ab’ad. Within these facilities, large numbers of centrifuges spin tirelessly to produce the much sought after uranium hexafluoride, the same ones that in 2009 were disabled by the Stuxnet virus, forcing them to over-speed and burn out.
Increasingly Shafiq was centre stage in an enrichment programme that he was increasingly uncomfortable about, viewed by the new Iranian regime as a person suddenly too valuable to be allowed to leave the country. Overnight his freedom to travel internationally was permanently withdrawn. He and I have not been able to meet face to face for some years as a result.
After the fall of the Shah in 1979, several commercial reactors either under construction or promised but not yet built, were left abandoned. This was both because of sanctions and Khomeni’s disapproval of nuclear weapons. Iran’s latent nuclear potential, however, continued to tempt certain superpowers to our country like moths to a flame. After a suitable pause, the flame once more rekindled, the usual culprits began to wend their way back to the corridors of power in Teheran. These were the political entrepreneurs, those only too eager to participate, collaborate and ultimately profit by their association with our burgeoning nuclear industry. Firstly the Chinese, who helped build the experimental reactor in Esfahan; then the Russians without whom Iran would never have had its first full-scale commercial reactor up and running in Bushehr.
Fast forward to five months ago. Sanctions and crippling inflation are now well established in the country. Talks are underway in Geneva between Iran’s esteemed leaders and the world superpowers. The optics of the main event is, in theory, about curbing Iran’s uranium enrichment programme. China and Russia are sat on the opposite side of the table to Iran, appearing to shake their disapproving heads in unison with their nuclear partners in the UK, Germany, France and the US, tut-tutting where appropriate about why Iran even needs an enrichment programme, let alone a heavy water reactor in Arak. Eventually, a diplomatic solution emerges. With a flourish, an interim agreement is announced, valid for six months and renewable by mutual consent, whatever that means in practice. A number of sanctions are lifted, a mutual backslapping is underway, and a mood of cautious optimism fills the air. Whether this is warranted, the cynical journalist in me asks, I shall leave others – and time – to be the judge. Let me state for the record that I believe that some of the country’s more radical leaders, the people I like to call ‘the Crazies,’ have no intention of curtailing anything.
To that point, behind the scenes Chinese and Russian strategic planners start sensing a major commercial opportunity. With all sides stating publically that the days of large-scale enrichment in Iran are over, the Crazies are also stirring. They too can smell a secret deal in the making, with large prizes up for grabs. They can see only too clearly the new Sunni-led extremist ferment brewing across the borders in both Syria and Iraq. The Crazies urgently want quick and easy access to the types of weapons that their hated Sunni’s enemies will never have. They want a deal that gives them instant regional power and supremacy. Who better for the Crazies to turn to than my cousin, Shafiq, in order to begin clandestine negotiations? Talks about how a new, Crazier, Iran could, very privately and very secretly access some of the forbidden fruits, all the while its senior politicians making public statements about Iran’s new desire to curtail enrichment, going through the motions to invite international inspectors in dribs and drabs to inspect some of our facilities?
Sadly, there was probably no one better placed than dear Shafiq. Here was a top nuclear scientist, a man who had lived and conducted research in both of these two countries. He even spoke a little Russian and Mandarin Chinese – although his Iranian modesty naturally made him reticent about bragging about that. Every atom of his body hated the idea of what was being contemplated, hated the very notion of selling mineral rights and oil in return for ‘nuclear assistance’, as the official jargon labelled it: also known as ‘below the radar’ access to weapons-grade nuclear fuel to the average man and woman on the street.
So, my darling cousin finds himself between a rock and a hard place. He cannot flee the country, his travel rights long-since withdrawn. He cannot refuse to co-operate, otherwise they will view him as a traitor and VEVAK’s notorious agents will take him away and shoot him. Instead, what he choses is a path that is a combination of total lunacy and unbelievable courage in equal measure. For reasons best known to his conscience as well as his fervent love of the country, Shafiq begins sneaking out of meetings with files and memoranda, taking photographs of documents with his cell phone. He makes a habit of working late at night in his office where, because of fears over further virus attacks, none of the computers are ever connected to the Internet or have USB ports capable of accepting memory sticks. Instead Shafiq is forced to sit there using his phone snapping images of the computer screen in front of him. One by one, not daring to use the printer, not daring to sneak anything out of the building in hard copy. He is in perpetual fear that a colleague might discover him with camera poised as he painstaking begins to build a dossier of evidence. Only when he gets home, to his government-funded apartment late at night, is he able to upload the images to his computer. There he prints them, and then erases all electronic traces on all devices. Slowly and painfully, he faxes the printed copies to me, page by page, wanting to rely on old-fashioned technology rather than risk sending scanned images over the Internet. In Iran, one never knows when or where VEVAK agents might be snooping. Then he has to wait for an innocuous email to arrive from me, his cousin in the West. I am meant to be telling him in my email about the flowers on the balcony of my Paris flat, this being our agreed code to indicate safe arrival of his faxes, the signal for Shafiq to start shredding the papers.
Interestingly, it has been the Chinese who have been the hungriest, the most entrepreneurial and with whom Shafiq had most dealings with, not the Russians. They seem better versed in crafting appropriate diplomatic language in their draft agreements, possessing a natural fluency for presenting proposals in ways that give the Crazies’s plans legitimacy. They also know about the art of ‘encouraging longer-term co-operation and mutual understanding’ better than the Russians, bestowing small tokens of app
reciation in the form of personal gifts in a manner that builds trust and obligation, these gifts typically far from small, their details faithfully captured, page by incriminating page, on my cousin’s cell phone.
Ten days ago, all contact with Shafiq inexplicably was terminated. Never at any time in the last fifteen years has he dropped off my radar for as long as this. I have tried his mobile, sent emails, everything. Each time with no answer. In desperation, five days ago I rang his office. I was transferred to three different people before finally being connected to an unknown man of dubious authority who explained curtly that Shafiq was on sabbatical and would be gone for several weeks. It was then that I knew for certain that he had been taken. Most likely dragged from his bed in the middle of the night and hauled to some appalling underground cell, there to receive the very worst of Iranian hospitality.
Shafiq, if you are able to read this from the heavenly place to which I pray endlessly that you have gone, I hope so very sincerely that your passage from this life was swift and that God spared you the indignities that I have been so fearful might have otherwise have come your way.
Shafiq, so courageous and yet so foolish, so principled and yet so innocent, a scientist so gifted and yet possibly so naïve: how did this happen? How did they learn about what you had done? I am beside myself with worry. The doubt growing within, gnawing away, tearing me apart, is that unwittingly, I might have been in some way to blame. I cannot yet for the life of me fathom precisely how.
We had agreed between us that I was to show a sample of the dossier, a teaser we had called it, to my good friend and close confidante, Mel Allen. In return for exclusive access to the dossier for a limited period, she would use her contacts within the British establishment to find a way to spirit Shafiq out of Iran. Once safe, I would then publish and be damned. In the meantime, Shafiq was to keep a low profile and wait, business very much as usual, not a hair out of place, not a wrong foot at any time.
The Dossier (Ben Lewis Thriller Book 1) Page 28