Mostofi didn’t give any indication he was tense or nervous or excited as the days neared.
On the fifth day to the Fourth of July, he was his usual self. He had tortured a rebel early in the morning and had killed the student when the man hadn’t yielded anything. No information on who Hosseini had been working for, no intel on Carter’s whereabouts, nothing on who the rest of the dissidents were.
‘They are stubborn,’ he grunted as he washed his hands in the sink, the water turning momentarily red as it flowed into the porcelain.
‘Yes, agha. We both worked on him,’ Nassour agreed as he too cleaned up in an adjacent sink. The men were in the same prison beneath the NAJA headquarters where the police had rounded up several students. One male had been identified as a rebel and the Quds Commander and his aide had taken over his questioning.
‘Golzar?’ Mostofi toweled his face, ‘how’s he holding up?’
‘He’s in the Presidential Building, agha. Meditating. He wanted to get involved in the hunt for Carter—’
‘He cannot go out on the street,’ the Quds leader wagged his finger in his aide’s face. ‘He should stick to you like a shadow. Carter, we’ll get him. Salar, Babak and Jehangir are leading that hunt. Let them do their jobs. Come,’ he glanced at his watch. ‘I have meetings with Bijan Noori and Salman Poozesh. I need to check everything is on track for the oil pumping.’
Yasaman discreetly slipped Meghan a note in the library when the elder twin had returned for the surveillance on the second day.
She read it. Her nails dug into her palms for several seconds while she absorbed it and then went to the bathroom where she tore it up and flushed the pieces in the toilet.
‘Mostofi killed another activist,’ she relayed the information to the team. ‘A few hours earlier today.’ She broke it down for them swiftly and returned to her screen.
The DragonFly’s feed had left them stunned the previous day. Beth had raced to the bathroom and thrown up.
Prisoners in the lab, cuffed to beds. Some dead. A few dying as they watched, coughing blood, moaning for help, clutching the air, as their bodies racked with the effort to breathe.
Sohrab Nazer had been there, watching, supervising his assistants behind the protective barriers. However, he hadn’t worked on his screen, which was what the twins desperately wanted.
They got vital information, however.
The lab was self-sustaining. The guards, the professor and the scientists, all lived there. Fourteen security men who took turns guarding the external doors and making sure there were no breaches. Nazer had his own ensuite bedroom. The sentries had a dorm down a hallway and further beyond, the professor’s assistants shared rooms. Two sets of bathrooms, one for the guards and another for the scientists. A common kitchen and a dining room. A separate section for glass encased cells for the prisoners and a secure facility for bringing them in and transporting the dead.
All of it in the small space hidden in plain sight in the MUT campus, with the lab occupying center stage.
It’s easy to clean up whenever there’s an inspection. The guards disappear, the lab becomes a conference room while the other rooms become meeting spaces, Meghan surmised.
Zeb hadn’t spoken a word when she had met the rest of the team briefly the previous night. The twins had shared the fly’s feed by then. His set face and clenched jaw had said it all. Broker had updated the twins on their surveillance, which confirmed the previous runs.
She checked that Beth was in position, forced herself to watch the horror on screen emotionlessly, and crossed her fingers beneath the table. Hoping for Nazer to work on his terminal.
Bear took the wheel of the military van and drove to Hezar Dastgah. Broker and Zeb beside him, all of them wearing Quds uniforms, looking imperious. Chloe in the back, with Bwana, shielded from view.
Through narrow, winding streets and alleys, none of them in the mood for small talk. The images from DragonFly were still imprinted in their minds.
They split up when they reached the fruit market. Zeb headed down one line of stalls, Bear and Broker going in different ones.
They circled in a roundabout way and ended up in front of Parvez’s stand.
The vendor hurried them inside quickly and shuttered his store. He took one look at their faces, sensed their moods and made no conversation.
He took them past shelves of produce, to the grains room. Into the underground room and to the hidden panels.
‘Harness,’ he said simply, pointing to the equipment.
Zeb drew it out and unfolded it. Slipped it on with Broker’s help and tested the belts and braces in the front.
‘You think it will take the weight?’ his friend asked.
‘We don’t have time to experiment,’ he shrugged.
‘It will take three times your weight,’ Parvez replied in Persian. ‘That’s what our mutual friend told me. This was in another location, outside Tehran. I had to shut down my store to get it.’
No accusation in his voice at the loss of business. A statement of fact.
‘And this,’ he went to another concealed storage, ‘is your other item on the shopping list.’
A shoulder-fired Javelin in its case, complete with its Command Launch Unit, missile case, everything.
‘Our friend,’ Parvez said apologetically, ‘said he couldn’t get the specific payload. This is a standard missile, but the warhead has some kind of fire—’
‘Pyrochemicals?’ Bear asked
‘Yes, that’s it.’
Zeb rocked on his heels. I was looking to limit the damage. The Javelin was an anti-material, portable weapon that could be fired from buildings, open spaces, and was particularly suited to what he had in mind. Its HEAT, High Explosive Anti-Tank payload, could take out armored vehicles at a range of up to two and a half miles depending on whether the Command Launch Unit was of the original spec or lightweight.
If Avichai’s got this one to have higher heat generation, then it will work.
‘We’ll take it.’
It happened at three pm.
Nazer watched the last of the prisoners die and got the assistants to load their bodies up and wheel them out. He made observations in his notebook and went to his terminal. Logged into his system and brought up the research paper on USX-74. It wouldn’t be presented anywhere, however, he still was a scientist. He had written it up and was confident it would pass peer reviews.
That many dead bodies and the fact that he and his assistants, Mostofi and his crew, were still alive, meant that other scientists didn’t need to assess the accuracy of his research. The virus worked, as did its vaccine.
He was fastidious, however, and started reading the paper from the beginning, making minor corrections as he did so.
And all the while, DragonFly watched from above.