“Please, Asher, for heaven’s sake, we have to strike now,” Shimon insisted.
32
“You’re Israeli?” David asked, incredulous but realizing that was the accent he’d been detecting — the sound of a native Hebrew speaker talking in English. He just couldn’t believe he was hearing it in the heart of Iran.
“And you, are you the one they call Zephyr?”
Now David’s eyes widened. How could they know that? No one outside the top echelons of the U.S. government knew he existed, much less his code name.
David hoped the ski mask was covering the stunned expression on his face, on all his team’s faces. “We’re asking the questions. Who are you? Are you two Mossad?”
The man said nothing, and David wasn’t sure if he was following security protocols at that moment or simply too surprised to answer his question.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” David said. “Are you the guys who took out Mohammed Saddaji?”
“We don’t know what you’re talking about,” said one.
“Sure you do,” David replied. “You — or your colleague — put a car bomb in his Mercedes. It was a nice piece of work.”
The two men said nothing.
“Look, I don’t have time to play games,” David said. ”You’ve got three seconds to let me know who you are, or we’ll end this now.” He chambered a round and aimed his pistol. “One…”
Nothing but silence.
“Two…”
Still more silence, so David put the muzzle directly on the second man’s forehead, right between his eyes.
“Three.”
“You can call me Tolik,” one said.
“Why are you here?” David asked.
“Same as you,” said Tolik. “To shut down this war.”
“But why here, why the apartment of Omid Jazini?” David pressed. “You didn’t come here to find him, to interrogate him, to shake him down and squeeze him for information. You came here to kill him.”
“Omid is part of his father’s security detail,” said Tolik. “And his father was just promoted to commander in chief of the Caliphate’s military.”
“We know.”
“So our orders were to assassinate him.”
“Why?”
“To send a message to his father.”
“What message?”
“That we’re onto him,” Tolik said. “That we’re closing in. That they’ve got moles in their ranks who are talking to the outside world and that they can’t ever know whom to trust. We did our job. And believe me, word will spread fast through the top ranks of the Mahdi’s inner circle. Key men are being picked off left and right. We’re guessing you’re the ones who kidnapped Javad Nouri today.”
David didn’t respond.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Suddenly Fox called from the master bedroom. “Boss, there’s something here you need to see.”
Rashidi hated having the Mahdi out in the open. There were too many risks, too many threats. What if there was a sniper out there? What if there was a team of assassins? This wasn’t a bulletproof truck. The agents in the back had machine guns, but they didn’t have RPGs or heavy firepower. And to minimize the risk of a leak, almost no one — including most of the security detail back at the war room — even knew the Mahdi was in this vehicle. But as General Jazini had explained, they had to take a risk if they were going to get the Mahdi to Kabul in time to meet President Farooq. The key wasn’t avoiding all risks, Jazini’s memo insisted; the key was doing everything possible to minimize the risks and then being ready for any threat you couldn’t rule out.
They were nearly three-quarters of the way around the traffic circle, with Azadi Square on their left and Jenah Highway coming up fast on their right. In a few seconds, they would be on Lashkari Highway, taking a quick exit to the firehouse. That’s certainly where the driver thought they were going. But it was Rashidi’s job to make sure they never got to the firehouse.
“Turn here — right now!” Rashidi shouted. “Yes, right here, onto Jenah Highway. That’s an order from the Mahdi!”
The driver was completely confused, but he was a man trained to follow orders, so he turned the wheel hard to the right and exited onto Jenah Highway.
Naphtali had just given the order to fire at the hazmat truck when he saw the vehicle make a sudden turn.
“What’s going on?” Naphtali shouted. “Belay that order, Zvi. Belay that order.”
“Abort, abort!” Dayan screamed into the phone in his hand.
Shimon began cursing. The entire communications center erupted in confusion.
“Why are you aborting the mission?” Shimon demanded to know.
“Why is that truck turning?” Naphtali asked.
“How should I know?” Shimon shot back. “We’ve got a clean shot. Let’s take it.”
“No, not until I’m sure,” Naphtali said.
“Sure of what?”
“Sure the Mahdi is in there.”
“Sir, with all due respect, we can be even more certain the Mahdi is in that truck now,” Shimon said.
“Why?”
“Because whoever is driving doesn’t want to take him to the firehouse.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s not a firefighter. They don’t want him mingling with real firefighters. They’re taking him someplace else.”
“Where?” Naphtali pressed.
“I don’t know, sir,” Shimon conceded. “But once he gets there, I can’t guarantee we’ll ever have a shot like this again.”
Naphtali stared at Shimon, then at the screen as the hazmat truck zigzagged down a series of side streets at breakneck speed, heading east. With the roads essentially devoid of rush-hour traffic since no one in Tehran wanted to be driving around during a war, the chance of collateral damage was minimal. Maybe Shimon was right. The PM now looked to Dayan for counsel.
“Sir, I’m with Levi,” said Dayan. “I think the truck is heading for the Tohid Tunnel. You should take him out now, before he reaches it.”
“Okay, take another right at the next intersection and then head west,” Rashidi ordered, checking his BlackBerry to make sure he had the directions right.
The driver had no idea what was going on, but he complied. Rashidi checked his watch. They were doing well. They were actually a few minutes ahead of schedule. But they were not out of the woods yet.
The driver slowed down ever so slightly and then made a hard right turn.
“Good,” said Rashidi. “Now race for the tunnel entrance at Fatemi Street — and step on it.”
By Rashidi’s reckoning, they were less than a quarter of a mile away now from the ramp into the Tohid Tunnel, a three-kilometer, six-lane highway that ran underneath the heart of the capital. It had cost nearly half a billion dollars but had been completed in just thirty-one months, setting a world record for the fastest construction of a tunnel this size. Rashidi couldn’t be sure the entire plan would work, but his job was to make sure they got underground, at least, and he was determined to impress the Lord of the Age with his ability to manage in a crisis.