I wasn’t all that taken by the compliment. I might feel better about it after a Tomahawk missile burned down the place, if and when that ever happened. I said, “How’s our intel stacking up?” In other words, did we have enough to hit them before they hit us?
“We’ve got eagles and owls all over Europe and the UK locked and loaded,” he said.
This was the real deal. General Rutledge called it “Big George.” He’d been planning it for years. A single wave. A thousand targets. And Iran’s nuclear capacity destroyed in one fell swoop by U.S. aircraft armed with the most powerful bunker busters ever created.
You make it massive, precise, and stealthy, and you light up the targets with boots on the ground. Can’t have one without the other. That was my job.
Big George called for an initial wave of B-2 stealth bombers, F-117s, and F-22s, the “eagles” Mr. Elliot was referring to. Their job was to cripple Iran’s long-range radar and strategic air defenses. The “owls” were carrier-based F-18s and F-15s, and F-16s launching from ground bases all over the Middle East with one goal in mind: to take out places like Qom and Natanz and to blow their missile sites to smithereens.
“But we need those addresses,” I heard Mr. Elliot say. He was talking about the launch sites. “Hate to put such a fine point on it.”
“Wish I had a back-up plan to Bluebird, but I’m playing all the cards I’ve got right at the moment. He promised me the addresses the minute they’re finalized, and he’s probably one of the guy’s finalizing them,” I said.
I saw their reflection in the flat surface of the silver platter. Two men. It was a flash that came and went in an instant, but I knew they were wrong for the bazaar. I yanked the silver platter from the rack and turned into the orange flash of an exploding gun barrel. I had enough time to decide that my attackers were less than fifteen feet behind me, and that they wouldn’t waste a bullet on a head shot. Bad odds. No, a chest shot would give them three or four inches on either side of the sternum, and I’d still be dead.
I wrenched the platter around and took the bullet full force. It blew me backward into the shop display. Silverware and copperware flew in every direction. A second bullet missed by inches, but only because I was tumbling backward and hit the floor in a heap of platters and pitchers and teacups.
I was acutely aware of the noise — the roar of a third shot, a cacophony of screaming and shouting, the clatter of metal — but I turned all my attention to the one chance I had for escape. I rolled to my left, lifted a hammered copper plate in my right hand, and launched it like a Frisbee in the direction of the two men. Now I saw them. Dressed in black from head to foot, as if they’d just jumped off motorcycles. One wore a stocking hat. His gun was still smoking. The other was shouting and throwing a stunned woman with shopping bags in each hand out of the way.
The flying plate was enough to cause a hitch in their steps, enough for me to spring to my feet and dash to the back of the silver shop. I knew from my experience with the herb-and-spice shop not an hour earlier that there were loading platforms out back. I felt bad pushing aside the shop owner, but she was standing between me and the back door. Her scream told me she was more angry than hurt, which meant she might take it out on the two men pursuing me. Probably not.
I threw open the door. The platform was a narrow block of concrete. I took two long strides and jumped. I landed on an asphalt lane between a van and a pickup truck and three men with crates in their arms. I heard the door slam behind me and shouting. I glanced back as I raced along the lane, dodging delivery trucks. The man in the stocking cap was talking into a walkie-talkie. I didn’t bother to reach for my Walther. A firefight was not something I would survive. I ran until the lane made a slight dogleg left, used a panel truck to shield me from my pursuers, and leaped onto the nearest loading platform. A door led back inside the bazaar and into an electronics store mobbed with customers. The store opened onto a corridor that was wall-to-wall people.
I eased into the crowd. I worked my way toward the middle of the aisle, where the traffic flow was a little steadier. If only I hadn’t been taller than everyone else.
Fifty paces farther on, the corridor forked. I took the right fork into a long, narrow food court. I’d been in the Grand Bazaar only once before, and that had been two decades earlier. All I remembered for sure was that there were a dozen entrances and exits. Find one, and I’d be home free. Maybe.
I had the strangest thought as I carved my way through hordes of patient shoppers. Who knew I was going to be in the bazaar at exactly that moment? General Navid, General Navid’s cousin, and the guy in the van. Charlie and Jeri. Bagheri and Moradi. No one else. It was an unlikely group. Allies, one and all, right? Apparently not.
I needed time to think, and Leila came to mind at that exact moment. She’d given me a key to her place. I hated using it. I wasn’t sure I had a choice.
I saw the entrance up ahead. In the second-to-last booth before the entrance was a man roasting beef-and-vegetable kabobs over an open fire pit. I took the memory stick Navid had given me from my pocket. I slid up to the fire pit as the man was waiting on a group of three women and tossed the stick into the flames.
I hailed the first taxi that I saw. I handed him enough rials to get me halfway across town and gave him an address on Jalilabad Street, close but not too close to Leila Petrosian’s market. I circled the block and entered the alley behind her place. Her car was not there, so I used the key she had given me to open the back door.
I eased the door closed. I called her name. “Leila. You here? Hey, it’s Jake?”
I didn’t need Rahim — clerk, protector, and jealous suitor — rushing in with a gun or a knife or the police in tow. “It’s me, Jake,” I said again, and moved from the entrance into the lounge that Leila used to introduce her customers to illegal contraband, which was her primary source of revenue. I could feel Leila in the room just by looking at the simple, classy way she’d arranged the velvet love seat and the leather chairs and the soft light spilling from perfectly placed wall sconces.
I went to the bar and poured single-malt scotch into a cocktail glass. The heat of the liquor exploding in my stomach wasn’t quite enough to take the edge off the encounter in the bazaar, but it helped. I carried the glass to the love seat and settled in. I took a second sip and closed my eyes. I wrestled the temptation of a quick nap. Sleep and food had not been much of a priority over the last twelve days, and I felt the nerve endings in my arms and legs twitching.
Keep your mind on business, Jake. Figure it out. Who knew you were going to be at the bazaar at exactly that moment? I kept coming back to Bagheri and Moradi. They were MEK. Everyone they knew and trusted was MEK. Believing that there was a traitor among them stung. You naturally tried to talk yourself out of believing it could actually be true. You confided in people, never thinking the people in your confidence would betray you. Yeah, well, somebody did.
I didn’t know Bagheri’s hierarchy. I didn’t know his top lieutenants, and that was a mistake. I did know Moradi’s. Ora Drago was his second-in-command in Amsterdam and a rising star in the MEK upper echelon. Why would he kick away everything he’d worked for by pulling a Benedict Arnold? Didn’t make much sense, but stranger things had happened.
I was about to call Jeri to find out how our surveillance op was shaping up — I wanted her to give special attention to Ora Drago — when my iPhone chimed. The number on the screen belonged to Professor James Fouraz.
I sat straight up and nearly spilled my drink. If it actually was Fouraz, he would never risk calling unless he’d come across information that couldn’t wait. The other option was that he’d come across information he didn’t care to share with anyone but me. Including Bagheri. An option I didn’t want to consider was that the Revolutionary Guard or National Security had discovered the professor’s duplicity, and now they were trying to get a fix on my location.