Eva was working as hard and fast as she could, but after the way she had been treated, she was not doing any of it for the NSA nor for the CIA. She certainly was not busting her tail for President Jackson or Roger Allen or Tom Murray or Jack Zalinsky. Everything she was doing now was for David Shirazi — to save his life and get him out of Iran and back to Washington in one piece. She had no idea what motivated everyone else around her to work such grueling hours for such minuscule pay. But at the moment, she didn’t really care. She had gotten David into this mess, and she was determined to get him out of it. If it were up to her, she’d be on a plane to Incirlik, Turkey, and then HALO dropping into Iran to help David in person. But that, clearly, was not in the cards. This was what she had been assigned to do, and she wanted to do it well, fearing if she didn’t, she might never see David again at all.
After scanning another thirty or forty transcripts without hitting pay dirt, Eva suddenly sat bolt upright in her chair. Her red pen started marking furiously. She opened a file on her computer and began typing up an English translation. When she was done, she went back to the top and double-checked her work, then checked it again. How had this been missed? she wondered. She had to get it to Murray immediately… unless there was more. On a hunch, she began leafing through her stack of transcripts, looking for any others that had time stamps similar to this one. After about a minute, she found one. A moment later, she found another. Then a third and a fourth. She carefully translated these, too, typed up her work, triple-checked, and then e-mailed everything by secure server to Murray. Then she picked up the phone and speed-dialed the Global Ops Center at Langley.
“Tom, stop what you’re doing,” she said when she got him. “You need to open the e-mail I just sent you, and we need to talk.”
Jazini’s convoy raced along Route 21, heading southwest to Mamaghan. From there they continued along the same route to the town of Miandoab. Jalal Zandi was already fast asleep in the backseat, so the general felt comfortable unlocking his briefcase, pulling out his laptop, and powering it up. He had no intention of watching the increasingly lush Persian countryside, green with grassy hillsides and valleys and speckled with the colors of a hundred kinds of flowers, whiz by. This was not a family vacation. This was war. He had plans to make and refine — and precious little time to finish them.
No sooner had Jazini entered his password and opened his to-do file, however, than a call came in on his driver’s satphone.
“Yes, hello?” the driver asked in Farsi. “Who’s calling? Oh yes, my Lord. Thank you, my Lord. He is right here. Please, one moment.”
The driver quickly handed the phone to Jazini, who recognized immediately that it was the Mahdi and braced himself for whatever was coming next.
“General?”
“Yes, my Lord?”
“Are you in motion?”
“We are.”
“Any problems?”
“None,” Jazini said. “Everything is going very smoothly.”
“Good,” said the Mahdi. “Now, you wrote about another matter in your proposal. Do you remember?”
“Yes, my Lord.”
“Your idea is an excellent one, but we must move up the timetable. Tomorrow midday will be too late. It must be tonight.”
Jazini was stunned. “Tonight, Your Excellency? With all due respect, my Lord, I don’t know if we can arrange matters so quickly.”
“You must,” the Mahdi said. “Set it for midnight, and set into motion all the plans you laid out in the memo.”
“Yes, Your Excellency, I will—”
But before Jazini could finish his answer or ask another question — as was characteristic of a call with the Twelfth Imam — the signal went dead.
David pulled Marco Torres aside and complimented the paramilitary commander on his choice of their temporary safe house. The Tooska Park Inn, located in the southeast quadrant of Tehran, just off the Tehran South Highway, was a seedy-looking joint typically used by pimps and prostitutes. But now, with the war in full swing, the parking lot was empty. The place was completely deserted.
Not surprisingly, the owner was a “don’t ask, don’t tell” kind of guy who desperately needed the cash Torres had given him. And it wasn’t like he could have called the police anyway. The landlines connected to the motel weren’t working any more than the owner’s mobile phone was, a fact Torres had double-checked before directing Mays at the very last moment to take them there. The police had not been on regular patrols since the beginning of the war, so there should be no interruptions.
David instructed Mays and Crenshaw to ditch their bullet-ridden van and steal two alternate vehicles, quickly. They couldn’t afford to be stranded. “Also, ask Nick to look at Javad’s phone,” David said to Torres. “See if he’s got a contact list. Who’s in it? Who is he calling? Who is he getting calls from? You know the drill.”
“Will do, boss.”
“And one more thing,” David added.
“An extraction plan,” Torres said, seeming to read his mind.
“Right,” David said. “Make one. Fast.”
David had to get started, and he really didn’t know how to break Javad Nouri, how to get a zealot like him to talk. On the entire drive from the gun battle at the hospital, the question had been foremost on his mind. He didn’t have a lot of time to warm Nouri up, and the normal inducements of money and freedom and a new life in the United States weren’t likely to work on a top personal aide to the Twelfth Imam. What would work? Fear, perhaps, but fear of what? David had no answers.
Pondering all that, and saying a silent prayer for wisdom, David opened the door to room 9 and stepped inside, Torres right behind him. As Torres closed and locked the door, David surveyed the room. It stank of stale cigarettes. A queen-size bed with a lumpy mattress and a thin blue quilt took up the center of the room. Along the right wall was a beat-up wooden dresser, on top of which sat an old television set covered in dust and looking like it hadn’t been used in twenty or thirty years, if that. He doubted it even worked. If it did, it looked like it might actually be black-and-white. Along the far wall was a small closet and a door, presumably leading to a bathroom. On the left side of the room was a battered wooden desk and a crooked lamp. The walls were painted a light blue but were dingy and smudged.
Fox had taken up a position by the desk, occasionally peering through the threadbare plaid curtains, looking for signs of trouble, his weapon at the ready.
As David had instructed, Javad Nouri was blindfolded and gagged, strapped to a wooden chair, his hands and feet tightly bound. Fox nodded when David glanced at him, letting him know Fox had, as directed, given Nouri an injection to wake him up but leave him in a somewhat foggy state of mind. David’s voice would be the first Nouri would hear in captivity, and a plan began to come to him. It wasn’t foolproof by any means, but it just might work, and in the absence of an alternative, David decided to go with his gut.
He walked behind Nouri’s chair and motioned for Fox to hand him a pistol. Fox gave him a black Sig Sauer P226 Navy, a 9mm handgun built specifically for the SEALs. David stared at it for a moment, weighing it in his hand. It felt colder than he’d expected and heavier. He walked over to Nouri, pulled back and released the slide, chambering a round, and held the 9mm to the man’s temple.