Gamely, Demopoulos tried to recover lost ground. “Conventional weapon or not, it’d be a hell of a black eye for the administration and for the Agency if the Iranians or one of their terrorist group surrogates managed to lob a warhead into New York or Washington or Houston,” he warned. “The kinetic impact alone could knock down a skyscraper and kill a lot of people.”
“Maybe so… if everything went right for them and wrong for us,” Reynolds allowed with an unconcerned shrug of her shoulders. “But how many times did you say the Iranians have tested their Zuljanah rocket?”
His mouth tightened. Plainly, he saw where she was headed. “Twice, so far,” Demopoulos said quietly.
She smiled sweetly back at him and then went ahead and stuck her metaphorical shiv right between his ribs. “And what happened on that second launch, Phil?”
“We think the payload vehicle malfunctioned on its way to orbit,” he conceded tightly. “Which apparently forced the Iranian launch crew to order it to self-destruct.”
Reynolds turned back to Horne, who wore an expectant expression on his florid face. “There you have it, Charles,” she said calmly. “I don’t believe this is a threat worth getting all worked up over.” Her shoulders lifted again. “Anyway, we have excellent coverage of the entire Western Hemisphere. If Tehran does ship this missile somewhere within range of the U.S., we’ll spot it soon enough. And, if necessary, we can always blow it up on the launch pad then — without unnecessarily upsetting our masters in the White House.”
From the pleased look Horne gave her, she knew she’d made her point. She almost felt sorry for Philip Demopoulos. He should have known better than to hope she’d back him up on this. Besides, if he’d bothered to share that private source of raw intelligence material with her first, she could have warned him off before it was too late. No, she thought coldly, this was all his own fault.
The head of the Analysis Directorate had played games to make himself look good… and instead all he’d managed to do was guarantee that the CIA’s risk-averse director would turn a blind eye to whatever the Iranians were planning. If she’d honestly believed this missile they were smuggling posed a real threat, that would have bothered her. As it was, Miranda Reynolds was just grateful she’d been given the opportunity to bolster her own standing inside Langley at Demopoulos’s expense.
Twenty-Two
Sixty-eight stories high, the shining steel-and-glass Almas Tower soared nearly twelve hundred feet into the air. Even then, it was only the eighth tallest of the more than two hundred high-rises that crowded Dubai’s skyline. Almas was the Arabic word for “diamond” and, seen from above, the tower’s shape resembled an enormous cut gemstone. It had been purpose-built to house firms linked to the UAE’s prosperous diamond, precious gemstones, and pearl trade — including Dubai’s Diamond Exchange. As a result, security was extremely tight. That factor alone had attracted the Quartet Directorate’s favorable attention back when the office tower opened. Now one of Four’s front organizations, Sykes-Fairbairn Strategic Investments, maintained a small office on one of the highest floors. Most of the time it was empty, serving only as a useful accommodation address that helped maintain the illusion that Sykes-Fairbairn was a legitimate investment firm with worldwide connections. Tonight, however, it provided a convenient place for a secure meeting only a hundred and sixty air miles from Bandar Abbas.
Nick Flynn stood at one of the office’s large windows, looking out across a sea of dazzling light. Dubai’s highways, skyscrapers, and extravagant, palm-shaped artificial islands were all brightly illuminated — turning night into near-day for miles along the coast. Life in this oasis of commerce and luxury ran around the clock.
Stifling a yawn, he rubbed hard at his tired eyes. Sleep had been scarce over the past seventy-two hours. He’d spent most of those hours arranging the safe departure of his Quartet Directorate ops team from Afghanistan — along with their gear, including the BushCat light plane and the Predator. Once that was done, and everything was on its way to storage in various warehouses Four owned in the United States, Middle East, and Europe, he’d flown directly here to confer with Fox and Gideon Ayish about possible next moves.
Just at the moment, however, they were all waiting to hear back from Fox’s contact inside the CIA. At a muttered “damn” from Fox, Flynn turned away from the windows in time to see the other man put his smartphone down with a frustrated expression on his thin face. “No joy from Langley?” he guessed.
Fox shook his head. “None.”
“As we expected,” Ayish reminded him with a shrug.
“Low expectations are one thing,” Fox said wryly. “Having them met in reality is another.” He tapped the phone. “I did pick up one piece of fresh information from my source, but it’s not good news either. The Gulf Venture has moved from the shipyards to a berth at the Bandar Abbas oil terminal.”
Flynn frowned. “So whatever the Iranians and their Raven Syndicate allies are planning must be about to kick off.”
“That is the most logical assumption,” Ayish agreed.
“And even knowing that, the CIA is really just going to sit by on its high and mighty ass and do damn-all?” Flynn asked.
“Langley won’t step on White House toes,” Fox explained quietly. “Not when the threat seems so low.”
“Low?” Flynn retorted. “That rocket I saw on the move is bigger than some of our ICBMs. You can pack a helluva lot of explosives on something that size.”
The older American nodded patiently. “True, Nick. But one missile with a conventional warhead still only adds up to the modern equivalent of a WWII-era V2 rocket. A weapon like that might take out a block and do a lot of damage, but it’s not a city-killer. And Iran doesn’t have nukes. Not yet, anyway.”
And then, in the blink of an eye, Flynn saw the piece of this puzzle they’d all been missing from the very beginning. Son of a bitch, he thought, feeling suddenly afraid. As hard as they’d worked this problem, he and the others in Four had still been acting as though it was just the usual spies and counterspies variant of a low-stakes poker game — one where move met countermove and deaths could be counted on one or two hands. But now it turned out that the bastards sitting across the table were actually going all in — and this game was really being played for the life and death of hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions.
“Iran may not have nukes,” he said tightly. “But Russia sure as hell does.”
Ayish furrowed his brow. “What reason do we have to believe Moscow would ever provide the Iranians with such weapons?”
In answer, Flynn leaned over the table and flipped open the folder Fox had brought with him. It contained all the photos they’d been accumulating from the beginning, those retrieved from Skoblin’s computer and other sources, and now the images he’d taken outside Bandar Abbas. He pulled out their single blurry black-and-white contemporary picture of Pavel Voronin and slid it across to the two older men.
“This guy Voronin is my reason,” he said flatly. “Why else would Tehran need the Raven Syndicate? That rocket they’ve stowed aboard the Gulf Venture is Iranian-made from top to bottom. So’s the oil tanker itself, for that matter. And the Revolutionary Guard Corps doesn’t exactly have a shortage of trained killers in its own ranks. So the Iranians have zero real need to rely on Voronin’s ex-Spetsnaz mercenaries as muscle for this MIDNIGHT operation of theirs.” He shook his head. “All of which indicates the Raven Syndicate must have brought something extremely important to the table. Something the Iranians couldn’t provide themselves. Something like a nuclear weapon.”