Exit wound

As we walked towards the lobby, Majid pointed down the street to a busy junction. ‘We are on Mofateh Street. The big road that crosses it there is Taleqani Avenue. The Alborz Mountains – the range you saw as we drove in, and will see from your room – lie to the north of the city.’

He smiled again and this time I noticed a row of chipped white teeth. ‘Mr Munley, you have me as your guide. As I say, you can call me day or night. No problem too large or too small.’ He pointed to the card he’d given me. ‘What time do you want to arrive at the exhibition?’

‘How about as soon as it opens? I always like to be one of the first. Get to know the ground, that sort of thing.’

‘The exhibition centre is some way to the north. I will be here at six thirty. We have to allow for the traffic. Do you need any help checking in?’

‘No, you’re all right, mate. I’ll be fine.’

I bent down to get a view of the driver and gave him a wave. ‘See you later, mate.’

51

My room was on the seventh floor. It wasn’t much bigger than my cell at Paddington Green and stank of old cigarettes, but there was no point asking them to change from the one Majid had picked for me. How else would he have known what I could see from my window?

All the foreigners’ rooms would be crawling with surveillance devices. Even looking for the mikes and their transmitters would flag up things about me I didn’t want them to know. After all, I was just a geek journalist.

The view from the window made up for everything. I moved the plastic garden chair and got comfortable. Set between high-rise hotels and office buildings I picked out the spindly outline of the Milad Tower, the fourth tallest in the world, Majid had told me with some excitement, and the glowing minarets and dome of Khomeini’s shrine, another landmark he had proudly pointed out to me on the drive in.

I wondered what Altun was doing right now. Something more interesting than counting cars and minarets, I was sure. If his picture was anything to go by, he’d followed the Shah’s example and embraced all the trappings of the American Dream. Come the revolution, he’d slipped seamlessly into the new way of life. Maybe he was like the KGB guys before the Wall had come down, just someone who saw what was coming and adapted to make the best of it.

From then on, Julian reckoned, he’d been climbing the greasy pole. First as a back-room boy during the Iran-Contra scandal. He was still a back-room boy, by the sound of it, but one who’d helped Armoured-dinner-jacket into power – and was still the main broker when it came to deals between Iran and anyone who had a beef with the West. I bet that made him a very busy man.

The trouble was, Julian had no information on where he might be. It was reasonable to assume he still lived in the city, but that wasn’t going to help me get a cab to his place.

There was no getting away from the fact that this city was the capital of the most powerful and stable country in the Middle East. The lads buzzing about in their cars below me knew it wasn’t called the Persian Gulf for nothing. They were busy riding the Islamic fundamentalist wave and wiping out the last vestiges of a secular Middle East.

They weren’t doing the mad-mullah thing, though. They were cleverer than that. Armoured-dinner-jacket and his pals pursued Iran’s interests coldly, rationally and methodically. They were fighting an asymmetric war. Why take on the West militarily when they’d lose? Better to back a bunch of other nutters and let them do the fighting.

Everything boiled down to one central objective: clearing out the old Sunni order, the foundation stone of American interests in the Middle East. With Saddam – a Sunni – gone, they had a very friendly Shia government in Baghdad. They were backing the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, both Sunni power bases. How long could they last? The Af-Pak situation was a nightmare, and a fight Obama might very well lose. Then there was US-friendly Saudi Arabia with a Sunni royal family to sort out – and Altun tucked away in the shadows, keeping the pot on the boil by supplying weapons and the means to fight the jihad without Iran having to commit a single soldier.

I turned my back on the view and started to sort myself out.

There was a single bed, a fridge containing a jug of iced water, a wardrobe, a phone, a table and two plastic chairs. There was also a Koran, a prayer mat and slippers, and an old twelve-inch TV. A notice on the table in English and Farsi proudly announced that the Bandar Hotel had ‘why-fi’. The motel we’d stayed at in Dubai had had nothing on the Bandar.

The TV was even older than I’d thought. It didn’t have a remote. I hit the ‘on’ button. It took an age to warm up. As the speaker mushed away, I slung my clothes into the cupboard.