“Smart. If his people are monitoring him the way he thinks they are, they’d know before we did, and the addresses would be changed in a matter of minutes,” I said. “How’s Bluebird communicating?”
“Memory stick. It’s been picked up now. We’ve got a rendezvous set. Honcho is sending a couple of his guys to pick you up. Where the hell are you?”
I wanted to protest using Yousef Bagheri’s men for the pickup, but I didn’t have a chance. Not a second after Charlie finished his question, a voice boomed from a loudspeaker hidden behind the bar. It was Rahim, Leila’s eyes and ears at the front of the shop. He was shouting in Farsi. “Leila. Police. Revolutionary Guards. Front and back.”
Leila was on her feet even before I was because I was still translating. My first reaction was to reach for my gun. “Your gun won’t help. The Revolutionary Guards travel in packs. Very large packs.” She grabbed me by the arm. “This way!”
“Trouble!” I shouted into the phone. “I’ll get back to you.”
I hung up, and Leila grasped my hand. She pulled me to the door at the front of the lounge. The door led to the same hall I had come down the first day I’d been here. This time, we scurried in the opposite direction. A door halfway along the hall opened onto a large storage closet. Leila flung it open, crouched down, and started pushing aside crates filled with canned fruit. I knelt down next to her and helped. When the crates were out of the way, Leila peeled a square section of linoleum off the floor. Below was a square section of hinged wood with a handle embedded in the surface. A trapdoor.
Leila grabbed the handle and raised the door, her face glistening with perspiration. There was a meter-wide hole in the concrete beneath the door. The hole dropped to a tunnel three meters below. Handholds had been molded into the concrete.
We heard banging at the other end of the hall and shouting.
“Quickly, Jake,” Leila said. She pointed to the tunnel. “It leads to a storage room at the end of the alley.”
I lowered myself into the hole. I reached up and kissed her lips. “I won’t forget this.”
I dropped into the tunnel and heard the trapdoor close above me.
CHAPTER 26
Darkness swallowed me.
I reached into my pocket for my iPhone. In the pitch black, the screen’s light had the power of a single candle. The tunnel ran straight out in front of me, rough concrete that looked as if it had been poured in haste many years ago. Condensation dripped from the ceiling. A dank, musty smell weighted the air.
I didn’t wait for my eyes to adjust. I fell into a low crouch and followed the light. My feet scraped along the floor, and my lower back took the brunt of the punishment. I tried to envision the distance from the market to the alley.
Lengths of rebar curled along the walls and ceiling, like the exhumed bones of corpses buried long ago. A fine glaze of dust ran out ahead of me. I saw no sign of footprints or any other evidence that the tunnel had been used recently.
I counted my steps, as abbreviated as my stride might have been. My vision improved.
At thirty paces, the passage made a right turn. I stopped and listened for five seconds, but the only sound was the drumming of my heart. Seventy-two beats per minute. A little high, but not bad.
I peeked around the corner and gazed into total darkness; a buried coffin didn’t have a thing on this tunnel. I switched on my iPhone and pressed ahead. Another thirty-five paces, and I felt a slight incline beneath my feet.
I switched off the iPhone and listened. This time I heard the murmur of conversation wafting from somewhere above. I felt my way to the top of the incline. The murmur grew in volume. I could just make out the distant chatter of men and women speaking Farsi. It sounded like the casual talk you’d hear in a shop or a café.
I felt along the wall and crept forward. I took my Walther in hand and clicked off the safety. The incline emptied into a crawl space six feet long, twenty feet wide and not quite three feet high by my estimation. Light trickled in from a small ventilation grate on the right and two thumb-size holes at the far left of the crawl space. I smelled coffee and sweet spices. Shadows flickered across the grate and I heard the rattle of plates, the splashing of liquid, rapid conversation, and laughter. Definitely an outside café.
I holstered the pistol, crawled in complete silence toward the grate, and peered out. Strange, seeing the bottoms of shoes, the occasional bare ankle, and trouser cuffs. I heard the scraping of a chair as someone sat down, the click of a glass, laughter. All routine activities for a café doing a fair run of business for a Thursday night. Or was it Wednesday? It didn’t matter. What mattered was the normalcy. You wouldn’t hear laughter if the Revolutionary Guards were parading about.
I moved away from the grate and crawled toward the holes on the left. I put my eye up to one of them and saw cardboard cartons. More cartons sat on shelves along the wall at the opposite side of a narrow floor. There was a door to the right, which was closed. This had to be the storage room Leila had mentioned.
I used the light of my iPhone to get a better view. The holes ran along the top of a shoulder-wide board. I stuck my fingers into the holes, gave a gentle tug, and realized the board was loose by design.
I gave it another tug. If there was anyone in the stockroom, I thought, it would make for an interesting encounter, but I didn’t have the luxury of waiting. Dust sifted from the edges. This time I put a little more weight behind it. The board pulled free, but not without a painfully loud squeak.
I froze. I counted to five. Nothing.
I gave a last tug and the board gave way. I pushed aside the cartons concealing the entrance and snaked out of the crawl space. I replaced the board and yanked it firmly into place. I returned the cartons and felt the strain in my knees as I struggled to my feet.
I was brushing dust from my clothes when the door opened. A man wearing a white apron stepped in. He did a double take. There were about two seconds during which his brain tried to decide whether this guy in the rumpled coat, cross-trainers, and baseball cap really belonged in his storeroom. I used the first of the two seconds to grab a large burlap bag filled with coffee beans. I used the next second to thrust the bag into the man’s hand. This created an extra moment of confusion, enough time to put my hand on his neck and pinch the pressure point at the side of his throat. He gasped; this was normal. His eyes bugged out, which was also normal. He crumpled to the floor, the bag split apart, and beans spilled out all around him. He wouldn’t be out long.
I walked out the door, closed it behind me as if I’d done so a thousand times, and entered the open-air café. No one noticed. I wove in and among a dozen tables until I was outside on the walk.
I put my sunglasses on and spent five seconds studying the street. I glanced in the direction of Leila’s market. Two white Toyota HiLux vans marked with the words SPECIAL POLISE on the side were driving away. I saw Leila standing on the curb with her arms crossed. They must’ve searched her place from top to bottom and come up empty. Otherwise they sure as hell would’ve taken her away, and who knows what would have become of her.
How do you say thank you from a hundred yards away, knowing someone just put her life on the line for you? How do you say thank you to someone you’ll probably never see again, never hear her voice again, never know her fate? I guess you don’t. Which made that last kiss that much more special. I kind of hoped she felt the same.
I hoisted my backpack and headed in the opposite direction. I walked two blocks east and then a block north, just to get off the beaten track. I ducked into a crowded bistro. I took a corner table with a view of the street and quick access to the kitchen, worst-case scenario.