I sent a text to Charlie with my location at the corner of Jomhouri Eslami and Felestin.
He replied, Honcho’s men are on the way. White Nissan van. Two of them. One dressed in black. Will ask if you want a ride to the airport. Say that you can only pay in rials.
I should have ordered something to eat, but I didn’t. I drank coffee with cream and sipped a bottle of mineral water. Real healthy, Jake. Real healthy. Not to worry; I’d put a steak on the grill the day I got home, and Cathy could whip up one of her world-class tomato salads.
I paid my bill and crossed the street to a newsstand. I stood off to the side, pretended to browse, and texted General Rutledge a short update. It didn’t say much, only that things were “progressing.”
I knew that wouldn’t satisfy Tom, but I had learned something about intel over the years. Don’t anticipate. Don’t hope for the best. When you have the intel in hand, say you have it in hand. Otherwise, just keep digging.
I knew Mr. Elliot would understand this, so I sent him the same message. Maybe he’d give the general a call and tell him to sit tight.
With any luck, I’d have the launch sites in hand by nightfall, and then the air force could do their thing. I didn’t often feel nervous about an op. Anxiety was a red flag when you were dealing with the scumbags of the world. But so many things hung in the balance on this mission. I’d been dodging bullets — literally, in some cases — since the beginning. I didn’t believe much in luck, but I had a bad feeling that what luck I had I’d used up. And now I was waiting on two guys I’d never met before, two guys who worked for an organization with a traitor in their midst.
Tehran was lousy with white vans — at least that’s the way it seemed as I thumbed through a magazine dedicated to Iranian soccer — and they paraded north and south on Felestin Street along with a scattering of taxis and buses and cars manufactured in places as far away as Korea and Sweden. After a good forty minutes, one rusted junker with TAXI printed on the sides slowed in front of the bistro and halted. A man wearing a black coat over blue jeans dismounted from the front passenger’s side. Thick mustache. Twentysomething. He had a definite edge to him. He waited as the van sputtered away, then glanced into the bistro.
This had to be the one Charlie had referred to as the man in black. I went to the next corner and crossed with a half-dozen other people when the light changed.
I watched as he drew out his cell phone and made a call. Ten seconds later, the van returned from an apparent trip around the block. The man in black had his hand on the passenger-side door when he saw me coming. He didn’t wave, and he didn’t stare. Good. What he did was smile at several other people coming his way, gestured toward the van as if it were the best taxi in Tehran, and apparently offered them transportation, which none of them seemed inclined to accept.
I was liking how this guy handled himself. When I approached, he went through the same routine. A smile, a nominal gesture in the direction of the van, a polite invitation in surprisingly polished English: “You would like a ride to the airport, sir?”
We made eye contact. I studied his face for less than a second and drew on thirty years of stress-recognition training. Tension, but not anxiety. Focus, but not trepidation. Good. “That would be nice. But I can only pay in rials.”
“Rials are fine.” He opened the passenger-side door. “Please. Get in.”
I climbed aboard. Duct tape crisscrossed the cracked and tattered vinyl seats. Ragged holes dotted the rusted floor panels. A slab of plywood had replaced the window behind my left shoulder. The rearview mirror was a small bathroom vanity mirror wired to the ceiling post. I settled onto the seat, and a spring dug into my ass. Apparently nothing was too good for an American with rials to spend.
“Nice ride,” I said. “What took you so long?”
“Our guy’s on the run,” the man in black said from the backseat. “We finally got a fix. He’s headed for a warehouse in the Old City.”
I nodded. He wasn’t lying. I said, “You guys got names?”
“I’m Giv. Your driver’s Zand.”
Zand was probably about thirty, but the graying temples added ten years. And the exaggerated worry lines that creased his forehead and branched out around his eyes added another ten. He held out his hand. It was the hand of a laborer. His grip was aggressive and sure.
He shifted the van into gear, and we rumbled from the curb.
Giv pointed to a bundle wrapped in canvas by my feet. I bent down and flipped a corner of the canvas aside. A pair of Russian AK-47s with the tubular stocks folded against the receivers stared back me. The MEK didn’t care where their armament came from. Carrying a Russian rifle had no bearing on their loyalty, any more than carrying a German handgun or a Swiss blade. The MEK was loyal to only one cause, and that was their own.
“Insurance once we get to our destination,” Giv said.
I wanted to say that if AK-47s were necessary in the next hour, odds were very high that we were all dead and that the mission had fallen short.
Giv fell silent. He watched the traffic behind us like a man expecting the worst. He watched the people on the walks as if everyone of them had it in for us. Zand concentrated on the road, a hand on the wheel, a hand on the gearshift. I powered up my phone and texted an update to Rutledge, this one more detailed than the last. I used the most basic tradecraft lingo to tell him where I was going and why and what I would do the minute I had the launch sites for twenty-one Sejil-2 missiles, each capable of delivering a nuclear weapon twelve hundred miles with accuracy.
I pressed the Send button. I looked up from the phone and glanced across the seat at Zand. “How’d you two rate this assignment?” I asked.
Zand gave me the benefit of a mild shrug. “Mr. Bagheri has seven daughters and six sons-in-law. We’re two of the six. We’d die for him. Which means we’ll die getting you where you’re going if we have to.”
He cast a glance my way. I answered with a short nod and bit of sarcasm. “Seven daughters. That must have made life interesting.”
Giv didn’t get my humor. He said, “He wants them to know what a free Iran feels like.”
“I don’t blame him.”
We drove north three more blocks. Then we turned west onto Enghelab Street. A small white Mercedes coupe came south on Felestin Street and accelerated around the corner. The car lunged after us like a dog chasing a rabbit.
“Zand.” Giv nodded toward the rearview.
Zand glanced into the mirror and shook his head, pissed, but not panicked.
Red lights flashed inside the grille of the coupe.
Giv cursed, “Polise.”
The Walther was in my hand even before the word left his mouth. My heart rate jumped three beats a minute. Music filled my head. George Thorogood. “Bad to the Bone.” Fighting music.
CHAPTER 27
Giv reached out and gripped my shoulder. “City police. Not black beards,” he said.
That was the Revolutionary Guards’ trademark: their black beards. Well, their black beards, their patented scowls, their battle gear — anything that heightened the fear. I saw the white Mercedes closing in on our rear bumper, lights flashing. The Revolutionary Guards I had seen outside Leila’s place drove the bulkier, more ominous-looking Toyota HiLux.
“Let’s see what they want. We run or put up a fight, we got no chance of making our rendezvous.”
“Yeah, and if they haul us in, we have even less chance of making our rendezvous,” I said. I glanced at the AK-47s wrapped in the canvas by my feet. Okay, so if it did come down to a fight, at least we had the firepower to make it interesting.