“Because I need you to make a pickup for me.”
He stared. His eyes seemed to cloud over. “I have a feeling you’re not smuggling Russian vodka into the country.”
“It’s a package from Saint Petersburg. A crate probably three feet square with the markings of an owl and a hawk. Nothing else.”
“Arrives how and when?”
“By truck. Three hours from now.” I gave him the rest of the specifics. Then I said, “I don’t want to sugarcoat this, Charlie. This is serious business. All the marbles.”
“That it’s serious business is clear, my friend.” Charlie lit a cigar. “I’ll have someone there when the package arrives.”
He blew smoke toward the ceiling and returned his attention to the workstation. Two dozen of his men had spent the last twelve hours planting GPS transmitters on MEK cars throughout Tehran. It was a start at least. Now, two of our computers were busy tracking the telltale blips crawling across the street maps of the city.
Next, we hacked in to Tehran’s central phone exchange, using a contact Charlie had on the inside, and tapped in to as many MEK landlines and cell phones as we could locate. Snooping those phone numbers led to more phone numbers, and within twenty-four hours we had constructed a good schematic of the MEK organization.
I was pumped. On my own, this kind of op would have taken a month. Naturally, the song that came to mind as I was watching the monitors light up was the Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime.” “Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons/Packed up and ready to go/Heard of some grave sites, out by the highway/A place where nobody knows.” Very appropriate.
We had an avalanche of data pouring over the wires and from the cellular towers. Problem was, we couldn’t listen to everything, even if we’d had twice the manpower. Never fear. My mission was top priority. Top priority meant that a thirty-second phone call to a certain three-star general in the Pentagon got us tapped in to the NSA’s supercomputers. There were no machines on the planet better suited to listen to the cacophony of voices we had created and to sift through it all for telltale phrases, keywords, and names. When the NSA’s computers shouted “bingo,” metaphorically speaking of course, an alert would ping on Charlie’s laptops and his men would put it on speaker.
Charlie looked over my shoulder. I had my iPhone in hand and was tweaking the connection between our laptops and the NSA. He appeared mesmerized by the capabilities of my iPhone. “Where can I get one of those?”
“When I get home, I’ll FedEx you a spare.”
“With all the bells and whistles, right?”
“Hell, I’ll even hand deliver it, Charlie.”
“Why do I detect a note of insincerity in your voice, my friend?”
Charlie had plenty of police on his payroll. But Charlie’s connections were paid to turn a blind eye on smuggling things like booze and pot and caviar. They weren’t paid to protect him from the kind of security breaches we were perpetrating at the moment. We figured to have another couple of hours before we attracted the wrong kind of attention, namely from the Vezarat-e Ettela’at Jomhuri-e Eslami, a mouthful of a name for the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and National Security. Very nasty folks who had a license to drive people straight to Evin Prison, no passing Go, no get-out-of-jail-free card, no nothing.
As discreet as we tried to be, we were beaming gigabytes of data into space, an electromagnetic smoke signal begging for attention. Honestly, I was surprised that their security apparatus hadn’t found us already.
Charlie had guards watching from windows in all directions. More stood vigil upstairs. He had men manning a perimeter several square blocks wide. He had a woman on his payroll called Janatta who worked in National Security’s communications center and made more in a month just to keep Charlie informed than most Iranians made in a year.
I sipped absently at tea that had long ago gone cold. The remnants of a sack lunch lay crumpled on the floor next to my chair. It was one o’clock in the afternoon and we’d been hard at it since before daybreak. So far, we’d intercepted hundreds of calls and texts worthy of a second listen. We’d flagged three transmissions that were routed through Iranian government agencies, but in the end they hadn’t amounted to much. We traced four calls between deep-cover MEK agents and police stations in and around the city, but these were clearly guys who were working the system and trying to build viable connections. There was an upside to these false alarms: we were identifying sources, and I would be tapping those sources in the coming days.
We were hunting a traitor. MEK, DDO, or otherwise. It was like searching for a needle in an electronic haystack, but all we needed was one good hit.
“Got something!” The young man sitting at the computer three seats down from me had scars running down the right side of his face, immensely dark eyes, and a black head scarf. He hadn’t said a word all day. Now his hand shot into the air.
“What do we got?” The words had no sooner left my mouth than Charlie’s private cell phone chirped. Everyone who was looking at the kid with the black head scarf and his hand in the air turned to watch Charlie.
“It’s Janatta,” Charlie snapped. As he listened, the corners of his eyes pinched, and his jaw tensed. He snapped the phone closed and jumped to his feet. His voice was calm, but filled with urgency. “Okay, people. We gotta move. There’s a van headed our way, and it’s not a tour bus filled with seniors.”
Too bad. The clones from National Security were on their way, and whatever the kid in the head scarf had spotted was put on hold. The room became a beehive of activity of a completely different kind. I disconnected my iPhone. Men and women snatched headsets off their heads. They unplugged laptops and shoved them into briefcase carriers. Others collected the routers, cables, and shop lights. One jerked on the cable hooked to the satellite dish. The cable tore free and tumbled into the room. The man coiled it around his arm and stowed it in a canvas bag. Everyone folded tables and chairs and pushed them into one jumbled pile. The boxes and crates that had been pushed aside earlier were nudged back into place.
Less than a minute passed, and by the end of it Charlie’s crew had calmly and efficiently erased all signs of anything resembling a counterintel op. Impressive.
“Get moving,” Charlie said to me. “We’re right behind you.”
I went through the numbers: iPhone. Passports. Money. Backpack. Walther.
“See you at the next rendezvous,” I said to him. We’d mapped out three contact points going forward, all buildings that Charlie owned, but none that could be traced to him directly. “Be careful.”
“My middle name,” Charlie said.
“Bad guys in two minutes,” one of his guards called. He held a door at the rear of the building open for me. “All clear.”
I halted in the shadow of the threshold and studied the alley. Nothing but trash and weeds. Trash and weeds I could deal with; going toe-to-toe with a van filled with National Security agents may have been tempting, but I figured I might as well save the bullets.
I ducked into the alley, went a block south at a run, then turned left for the rail yard. I spotted a freight train traveling north toward the city. Perfect.
I had to dash across an open lot and into the yard. I cut between an oil car and a flatbed, made a rather clumsy move in front of the slow-rolling engine, and caught up to the freighter. It was just beginning to pick up speed. I’d always had a fascination with trains, but I hadn’t done the hobo thing since college, when Jimmy Benson and I spent a week riding the rails from New York to L.A. We’d picked up an old Chevy his grandfather was giving him and took another week to drive back. Two of the best weeks of my life.