“Can you find your way back downtown?” Naqdi asked at the door to the street. “It is a chore. Some street signs are missing. Some lights are out. They do not look after this district, despite the fact that we are the ones out here who are earning foreign currency.”
“We have a map,” Douglas assured him. “And we made it here, after all. Salaam.”
Bowers and Douglas crammed into the small hire car that they had procured through the hotel. As Bowers started the engine, Douglas unfolded a large street map and began examining it under the pinlight of a small flashlight. Naqdi walked back into his empire of nuts and dried fruits.
Bowers checked the car’s mirrors. There were no other cars on the street. No one else in this industrial neighborhood working at night. “All right, navigator,” he said to Douglas, “you got us here. Let’s see you get us back. Which way?”
For ten minutes they took turns down potholed streets, twice ending up at dead ends. If anyone was watching, they would have seemed lost. If anyone was watching, they might have been revealed by the U-turns and driving in circles that Bowers managed. At the end of it, they found a main road, but mistakenly drove northeast instead of northwest toward central Tehran. As they passed a sign indicating that they had entered the Doshan Tappeh district, they stopped again and examined the map. If anyone was listening, the discussion conformed to the erratic driving.
“You’re an idiot! You’ve got us totally turned around, Simon!” Bowers’s angry voice rang loudly in the car. “You’re less than worthless. After almost screwing up the nut deal, now you can’t even get us back to the hotel.”
“You couldn’t have done that deal alone, Bowers,” Simon Manley replied. “And you probably won’t be able to find your way back to the hotel alone either. But we’re going to find out!” With that, Brian Douglas as Simon Manley grabbed an overcoat and hat from the backseat and got out of the car, slamming the door. He began walking down the street, eastward. Bowers waited for several minutes, then performed a U-turn and slowly headed away. He watched the side streets and his mirror for any sign of surveillance, and saw none.
Douglas walked for twenty minutes, his hands thrust into the Iranian overcoat, the hat pulled low on his head. The snow piles by the side of the road were higher here than in downtown, and whiter. He thought of other nights in the cold, of Mosul, of Baku, where his Iranian network had started to unravel. At 10:10, he stopped at a bus waiting shelter, and at 10:14, he was rewarded by the arrival of a green city bus. Douglas paid the fare and walked past the seven passengers to sit near the rear door. At 10:29, the bus came to the end of the route in the suburban town of Doshan Tappeh.
There were some signs of life around the bus stop. Lights were on in two cafés, and a small market appeared to be open. Douglas entered one of the cafés and ordered a tea and a baklava at the counter. No one followed him inside. Glancing through the window, he could see no sign that anyone was outside. No car had arrived in the little square after the bus. At 10:42, Douglas left the café, putting the appropriate small tip on the counter and wishing the man behind the counter good night.
Leaving the café, he turned left out of the little square and then left again down a side street. Still no tail. At 10:54, Brian Douglas turned a corner into a residential neighborhood and immediately pushed on the gate of the first house around the corner. It was unlocked and opened into an ill-lit white stucco corridor. Halfway down the corridor that led through to the backyard, Douglas turned the knob on a door to the right.
“Punctual as always,” Soheil Khodadad said, striding toward the British agent, across the brightly lit living room.
“Glad you have some heat, Soheil. I was beginning to become numb.” The men shook hands warmly.
“Please, sit here by the fire. I made tea. My wife is at her mother’s or you would have a meal,” Khodadad said, taking the overcoat and hat. “Father was not pleased to see you again. He called you an apparition of the spirit that comes to take you when you die.” The Iranian looked fit and maybe forty as he sat in a chair surrounded by books and magazines. “But I am very glad to see you. We have a lot to talk about. And I didn’t know how to reach you. You should spend the night. Go back into town on the bus in the morning with the commuters. If you walk down the streets here later tonight, it will look odd.”
Douglas agreed. He also noticed that the phone line was disconnected from the wall jack. The curtains were down. A radio played a talk program by the window. An old hunting rifle was over the mantel. “We thought it was safer, after Baku, after the arrests of the others, that we just cut off all communications with you for quite a while,” Douglas said softly, settling into the chair opposite Khodadad. “As I told your father, the others did not know you, so you were safe. But those of us who used to come in to meet you and the others, those that went to the drops and the meets in Dubai, and Istanbul, and Baku…we were possibly known. If I had thought you had been in any danger, we would have gotten you out. Somehow.”
“Well, it is good that you did not try. I am under no suspicion. In fact, I have been advanced thanks to my friends from the Madras Haqqani.” Soheil chuckled.
“You went there for a while, am I right? The theological school in Qom?” Douglas tried to recall the details from Khodadad’s file.
“Yes, I went there. For two years before going back to university. It is where VEVAK, our Ministry of Intelligence and Security, recruits many of its people. My friends from there are now rising to the top of middle management in VEVAK. And so when they needed someone in the Foreign Ministry to be the liaison with VEVAK, they found the deputy director of research in the Foreign Ministry. Me.” Soheil spread his arms wide. “You are looking at the director of Department 108 in the Ministry, chief of liaison to VEVAK.”
Brian Douglas laughed. “Your promotion into that job would have got me a bonus if I were still running the network. That’s amazing. Department 108 is one of those mysterious places we have heard about but never really understood. And now you’re running it?”
“VEVAK runs it, Andrew.” Soheil used the name by which he knew Brian Douglas/Simon Manley. “I provide them a trusted eye to look at the Ministry for them. But I can also sometimes see the other way, into VEVAK. And what I see now frightens me.” Douglas settled into his chair. He had interviewed enough agent sources to know the signs. This one was about to unload something that he had been storing up for some time.
“Andrew, we elect a president and a majlis. It does not matter. We have a foreign minister, a Supreme National Security Council. It does not matter. There is a government within this government. Made up of the faqih, the supreme leader, our grand ayatollah. And the Council of Guardians, his minions. They veto the majlis. They determine who can run for the majlis. When the law enforcement forces kill innocent young students in their dormitory for being dissidents, the faqih lets them do it with impunity. When VEVAK did the serial killing of authors, impunity.
“You know who runs our foreign policy? Not the Ministry. General Hedvai, the commander of the Qods Force of the Pasdaran.”
Brian nodded. “He’s a name that does keep popping up. Commander of the Jerusalem Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Command. When I was hunting down al Qaeda in Iraq, I saw his shadow more than a few times.”
“Of course!” Soheil shot back. “Qods Force was al Qaeda’s greatest source of support. And Hezbollah’s, Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s, Hamas’s. They have unlimited budget, Andrew. They run drugs and black market operations all over the world. In Brazil. In Britain. In New York.” Soheil was standing, poking at the fire. Now he sat on the footstool in front of Douglas. “And Andrew, now the Qods has a plan to unite all the Gulf Shi’as. Already with their coup de main in Iraq they have put a Shi’a government in power, loyal to them. The Americans accepted that because it allowed them to say there was stability, so they could send most of their troops home. Then Baghdad told them to get out altogether. But what the Qods and the faqih want to do now, the Americans could not ignore. So they have found a way of checkmating them. And then they will bleed them. And it will begin soon. It is all laid out in the documents on this flash drive I loaded for you, but you will have to read them all and put it together, so let me explain.”