The driver and the front seat passenger were talking quietly and smoking, the air heavy with harsh tobacco fumes and adding to the stale smell of perspiration and unwashed clothing. Farshad and the man alongside him were silent, each looking out at the passing scenery.
The journey was surprisingly brief. Arash looked up. They were nowhere near the MOIS headquarters, but turning into a wide street in a quiet commercial district not far from where he had been picked up.
He looked around and felt his stomach flip. He knew of this place; he’d seen and read of people being taken here into a compound located at the far end of this street, never to emerge.
It was a place of death.
He moaned softly, earning another sharp elbow dig from the guard. The passenger in the front seat turned his head to say something, but was interrupted by the driver, who cursed and slowed sharply.
A couple had made to step into the road maybe thirty metres ahead. The man was nondescript, dressed in a dark jacket and tan pants. Alongside him was a slim figure in a long dress and a scarf covering her head, being supported by the man’s arm.
‘Drive on!’ the passenger snapped. ‘Let them wait. We don’t have time.’
The driver shrugged and hit the horn, and the heavy car surged forward, visibly possessing its space on the road as a warning. As it did so, the man on the sidewalk stepped back a pace and watched it approach.
Just before the car drew level, the man hurled the woman into the road.
Someone inside the vehicle screamed like a girl, and Arash wondered if it had been himself. There was a loud bang as the woman’s body surged over the radiator grill and bounced off the windshield, shutting out the sunlight for a brief moment. Then she was gone, leaving her scarf snagged on the radio aerial and snapping in the wind like a pennant.
The passenger cursed. A single finger was trapped behind one of the wiper arms and pointing accusingly at them all.
The driver swore repeatedly and stamped hard on the brakes, throwing them all forward and ignoring the other man’s orders to drive on regardless. Alongside Arash, Farshad had doubled over, striking his head on the back of the front seat and was now throwing up in the footwell. The guard on his other side was swearing and reaching for the gun at his waist.
Then the rear passenger door was flung open and a figure appeared. It was the man in the dark jacket. He was holding a pistol with a large bulbous shape over the end of the barrel, and Arash noticed that the ground around his feet was scattered with fragments of pale plastic; an arm, a foot and part of a leg. And rolling into the gutter was a head with the empty, sightless eyes of a mannequin.
The man shot the armed guard once in the head, then pulled Arash out of the car, before turning to fire with absolute calm three more times into the interior.
The engine died and was silent.
‘Come,’ the man said urgently, and hustled Arash away to a small car parked back down the street. They climbed in and the man drove away, steering into a maze of streets until they were lost to any possible pursuit. As they drove up a ramp on to the expressway and joined a mass of other traffic, Arash finally found his voice.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said weakly. ‘Who are you? Where are we going?’
‘I was sent by Langley,’ the man said, and smiled. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a passport and a driver’s licence, which he handed to Arash. ‘Remember that name; it’s yours until we get out of this country.’
THREE
I’m a close protection specialist. I run security, evaluate risks in hostile situations and, where needed, provide hard cover. To do my job I have to look ahead of where a principal is going to be at any time, checking details, terrain, routes in and out — most especially out — and providing the best possible solution for a happy outcome. If it works the principal won’t even know I’m there and will go home happy. If it doesn’t, I get involved.
Which is where the hard cover comes in; it means I fight back. Like in Tehran.
Traditional security pros — the kind who wear suits and ties and have those little squiggly wires tucked behind their ears, work up close and personal in teams several operators strong. They cluster tightly around the VIP in a physical screen, their function to display a visible deterrent to a would-be assailant. If attacked, they provide a rapid evacuation exercise and get their VIP out of harm’s way. Mostly it works fine.
The main problem is if the threat comes from outside the obvious security cordon. And the larger the perimeter, the longer it takes to shut down. By the time the team reacts and mounts a search, especially if the target area is surrounded by tall buildings or raised elevations from where a sniper can calmly take his shot, the VIP is down and the shooter is long gone.
Staying back, I get to see more of what’s going on in the surrounding area. If the principal suddenly becomes a target and I’ve done my job right, I can take preventative action. That might mean snatching him or her up by force if necessary and moving them on. Mostly it comes down to neutralising the threat before they can attack. No fuss, no mess. Well, maybe a little mess.
Overall, I like to be ahead of the game to see what’s coming. Like in Tehran.
I pick up most jobs by recommendation. Others I hear about through a loose network of former military personnel, spooks and private security contractors trading information on intelligence or security assignments around the world. I vet as many as I can before making a judgement, but you can’t always be too selective. And I like to work alone.
The Tehran job had come through a contact in the US intelligence world, a man who’d steered jobs my way on previous occasions. He followed it up pretty quickly with another call a few days after I got back.
‘You’re in demand,’ he’d said, when I responded to a message on my voicemail. ‘A certain government agency not a million miles from Washington wants you to ride shotgun on an operation. Level urgent and critical. You interested?’
He could have been talking about any one of a dozen agencies, all gathered around the seat of government like vultures on road-kill. But I was guessing CIA, since that was the one Arash Bagheri had worked for. Urgent and critical was how they usually operated, and they use private contractors like me. ‘Where to?’
‘That hasn’t been specified but if I’m reading the news right, it’s probably somewhere in Europe.’
Russia. It had to be — or over that way. Where else in the world right now was the focus but on Ukraine and the surrounding states? Where else might the CIA be running an operation requiring an unassigned operative like me?
By unassigned, read deniable. It’s what they call it when they want to keep their hands clean and their teeth pearly white. If the operator gets caught or blown, he’s on his own. It’s part of the risk in this business.
I’d worked in central and Eastern Europe before and knew my way around. And I had contacts from previous operations, although how much use they’d be depended on the precise location. Going in cold looking to buy resources is hard work — and risky.
But, as I was going to find out, using known resources also has its problems.
Twenty-four hours later I met up with a Clandestine Service Officer named Brian Callahan in a CIA front-office in New York. Urgent and critical was about right. This was fast work and I wondered what had got them in such a spin.