I didn’t wait for a response. I took a last sip of my coffee, came to my feet, and sauntered out of the café as casually as possible. The kind of intel I had just extracted from the deputy minister of Iran’s Ministry of Interior got the blood churning in a big-time way. It also made me realize there was still work to be done.
I was two steps from the door when Jeri reappeared. She caught me by the arm and steered me back inside.
“Problem?”
“Let’s use the back door.” We walked right past the counter and through the kitchen. Jeri smiled at a chef, two waiters, and a guy in a wrinkled suit. She said something in Farsi that I didn’t understand, and the guy in the suit gestured toward the back door.
When we were outside in the alley, I said, “Jilil?”
“Not Jilil. He looked like a man headed back to work and hoping no one would know he was gone. But I saw a couple of cars that looked just a little out of place, and we’ve still got a traitor on the loose. Why risk it.”
We hustled down the alley, and she placed a call to Charlie. “Abu. Head of the alley. A block east of the café. Just a precaution.”
We were inside the car fifteen seconds later — Jeri in front and me in back — and Charlie, looking as fresh as a daisy.
“I saw them,” he said as we worked our way through the neighborhoods west of the park. “Two cars that didn’t belong. Our guys are on it. If they can pick up their trail, maybe we can pin them down.”
I didn’t say anything. Like Jeri had said, there was still a traitor out there, and if they tracked me to Café Rumi and a meeting with a government minister, then they were as good as in my back pocket. It took twenty minutes to work our way into the Ajoudaniyeh neighborhood. We dumped the car in a parking lot next to a busy market and walked three blocks to an abandoned warehouse. Charlie’s IT team had already set up shop on the second story.
Six guys and two women were huddled over banks of laptops in the middle of the room. They had honed a routine of setting up and tearing down their equipment to a well-rehearsed drill. They could hardwire their laptops to a secure router and connect the router to a satellite dish in two minutes. And still have time left over to connect the entire setup to my iPhone when the need arose. They could dismantle the operation and be out the door in ninety seconds. What took the longest time was brewing tea and fixing kabobs for their breaks.
The guy in the bow tie, the one Jeri called Amur, gave me an update. “You know that we narrowed our search to eleven potential targets. All with MEK connections and four with substantial government interaction.”
“We’ve got to get that number down fast,” I said, looking from Jeri to Amur. “What’s the plan?”
“Tell him,” Jeri said.
“We sent out some electronic chatter that makes it sound like you’re in for an important rendezvous later tonight. Places all over town. A coffee shop, an abandoned warehouse, a bazaar, a kabob stand, a late-night bookstore. Places like that. Eleven different places. One for each candidate. All at nine P.M.”
“That’s a lot of manpower. We got it covered?”
When I asked this, Amur deferred to Charlie. He said, “My guys will work in two-man teams, watching all eleven rendezvous locales. Should be enough. If someone shows, we’ll pull in some other guys for surveillance. Sound good to you?”
“Your guys have been great so far, Charlie. I couldn’t ask for a better team.” I stole a deep breath and let my eyes travel around the warehouse. We had hacked in to Tehran’s central phone exchange and Internet sites all over the country. We had tagged a half-dozen government databases. We had a direct line into the NSA and computers so strong that no one really knew their full capabilities; or at least I sure didn’t.
We had gigabytes of data and some very sharp guys analyzing it. All this information at our fingertips provided the illusion of control. The operative word here was illusion. Because a whole lot of this mission remained outside my control. The MEK was a perfect example. They were birds of prey waiting patiently to strike. I was the guy providing the opportunity. They needed me, and I needed them, as much as I hated to admit it. They had contacts within the Iranian military command and the upper echelons of the government. They had people in every university in the country. They had people in the media. They had eyes and ears on the street. But they also had someone in the high levels of their own organization playing a very dangerous game. And I was their target.
They had already missed me twice. A third attempt was inevitable.
“So?” I heard Charlie’s voice and let out a slow, deep breath. Jeri, Amur, Charlie. They were all looking at me. Charlie put a hand on my shoulder. “You look a little frayed, my friend.”
“Nothing a hot cup of tea won’t mend,” I said.
“I might join you,” he said.
I turned and looked Charlie square in the eye. “How you feeling about Bagheri, Charlie? Gut feeling?”
Charlie raised his shoulders. “I wouldn’t exactly call him a friend, Jake, but he’s running too scared to be our traitor.”
My eyes settled on Jeri. She gave me a curt nod, as if I were asking her opinion. I wasn’t. I had already made up my mind. But it was good to know she was onboard. “Okay. Nine o’clock tonight. Let’s see if we can sniff this guy out.”
Amur, a guy who wore bow ties and pop-bottle glasses, didn’t look like a man of action, but he snapped his fingers and started issuing orders to the rest of Charlie’s team as if he’d been doing it his whole life.
I pulled Charlie aside. “Hey, I’ve been meaning ask. Your nephew…”
“Azran.” The one who had caught the brunt of the explosion at the hotel three days earlier.
“Yeah. How’s he doing?”
“Better. He’ll even play soccer again if things keep going as well as they have been,” Charlie said. “Thanks for asking.”
One of his prepaid phones chimed. He dug it out of his pocket and stared at the incoming number. Looked at me and said, “Bagheri.”
I nodded, and he answered it. They talked for sixty seconds, in typically rapid-fire Farsi. Then Charlie held the phone against his chest and said to me, “He wants to talk. Somebody high up the chain has information to share. Very big-time information.”
“Who?” If there was suspicion in my voice, it was very intentional.
“Bagheri won’t say over the phone. Too sensitive.”
“How high up the chain?”
“Any higher and it would be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself, was how Bagheri put it,” Charlie said. “How shall we play it?”
“Like we’re in charge. And like we don’t entirely trust anyone. Which we don’t. Especially a guy with a mole running around in his organization,” I replied. I turned to Amur and said, “Pull up a street map, can you?”
All Amur did was punch a single key on his computer, and a detailed map of Tehran was on the screen seconds later. “Okay,” I said. “We move him around. Just like we used to do in the old days, Charlie. Tell him to bring Moradi. No one else. Not even his top lieutenant.”
Charlie was shaking his head. “That’s like asking your president and vice president to sneak out the back door of the White House without telling the Secret Service.”
“Like we care.” I didn’t even bother to look Charlie’s way. “And just for the record, I happen to know that the vice president is one badass driver.”
We plotted three different points along Hemmat Highway, and Charlie relayed the first of these to Yousef Bagheri. He hung up and grinned. “He’s not going to like the runaround.”
“Listen. He’s been compromised. So has Moradi. You think our traitor doesn’t know that we’re reaching out to these two? Of course he does. This counterop we’re running is as much for Bagheri as it is for us. And if he expects anything less, then he doesn’t know the rules of engagement.”