CHAPTER 3

CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT, FRANCE

It was five thirty in the morning. A sliver of gray light bleached the horizon. Perfect timing. You don’t bring a plane like the Blackbird SR-71 into one of the busiest airports in the world during the middle of the day if your goal is anonymity.

The plane taxied onto the brightly lit parking tarmac and halted.

We had crossed the Atlantic at Mach 3, with my six-foot, 185-pound frame crammed into the copilot’s chair in the cockpit of a plane I would have sworn had been put into mothballs years ago. No pretzels, no hot coffee, no bantering with flight attendants of the opposite sex. But the average commercial flight to Paris from D.C. takes a good eight hours, and we did it in close to three and a half, so I wasn’t complaining. After all, how many people can say they’ve experienced Mach 3 speeds with one of the best pilots on the planet at the controls. And most important of all, the nuclear clock was ticking, and we had to shave every second possible.

My canopy popped open. A couple of U.S. Air Force techs pushed a gantry up against the sleek, viperlike fuselage. One reached into the cockpit and helped me undo my seat harness and uncouple the oxygen fittings from my helmet and bulky pressure suit.

“Good trip, sir?” she said, easing me out of my seat.

“‘Surreal’ doesn’t really describe it,” I quipped. I clambered out of the cockpit and onto the gantry. I descended the metal steps with the visor of my mirrored helmet cracked just enough for me to get some fresh air. This way, I was just another flyboy back on earth; no use drawing attention to myself.

Two guys in flight suits escorted me from the gantry into the back of a nondescript cargo van. They weren’t wearing name tags. The techs hadn’t been, either. No surprise. We might as well have landed in Area 51, because you don’t exist on a mission like this.

A guy with sergeant stripes helped me out of my helmet and pressure suit. He said, “Welcome to France, sir,” and slid a plain black carry-on out from under a bench.

“Good to be here. Thanks for the ride.” The van was already in motion. I opened the carry-on and unpacked a dress shirt, business suit, and black wingtips. An American businessman on the streets of Paris might not be as common as an American tourist, but no one gave a second glance to a guy with a briefcase in his hand.

I fished my NSA-modified iPhone from the carry-on, did a quick function check to make sure the apps I’d requested were there, and dropped it into my pocket. I tucked an envelope stuffed with euros and dollars into the interior pocket of my suit jacket. I examined two passports with two well-vetted IDs and found a pocket for them as well.

“Hungry?” the sergeant asked.

“Starving.” My last meal had been six hours earlier, at Langley, and not much of one at that.

“Thought so.” He handed me a sandwich. “Chicken salad. Best I could do.”

“You’re a godsend.” I unwrapped the sandwich and devoured it. He poured coffee from a thermos and passed me the cup. “You’re fast becoming my favorite person,” I told him.

“Enjoy it. ETA ten minutes,” he said.

I counted the minutes off in my head—an old habit—and hit it right on the number. As the van came to a halt, I checked my tie and ran my fingers through my hair. The sergeant gave me a thumbs-up and threw open the van’s rear doors. They opened onto a service door at Terminal 1. A maintenance tech—by the looks of him, an agent from the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, the French equivalent of the CIA—held the door open and acted as if I were invisible.

I towed the carry-on along a narrow corridor and exited through a plain door into the terminal lobby. I’d been dropped on the other side of customs, free and clear. I was leaving the womb of safety and emerging into the cold world of peril. It was game on, and I could hear music inside my head: Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.” Showtime.

I melded into the crowd and walked toward the passenger-pickup zone. For the casual observer, I projected the nonchalant air of an American businessman back in France, yet every fiber of my being was on high alert and would be for, well, as long as it took.

I stopped for coffee and a newspaper at a small kiosk, paid in euros, and carried my cup to a deserted seating area with a view of the sun breaking above the horizon. I had ten minutes to kill. I opened the paper, but only for show. I hit the Eavesdropping app on my iPhone, clicked the browser, and checked e-mail. There was only one, and only one word at that: pristine. Excellent. My backup was in place.

I opened a secure line on the phone. I sent a text to a longtime contact in Amsterdam named Roger Anderson. There wasn’t a piece of equipment in the world that Roger couldn’t get his hand on, and I would need his procurement skills in the next forty-eight hours. The text was three short words: Halo. Two days.

I finished my coffee and headed for the exit. I stepped outside. The air was cool and moist; it was going to be a typical spring day in Paris. I discerned a pattern among the people streaming in and out of the airport: hurried and self-absorbed; typical airport behavior. I was on the hunt for that one anomaly. That one person whose glance lingered a blink too long, that one airport employee who seemed a step out of place, that one face with a sheen of anxiety.

I stopped and observed the line of taxis waiting for fares. Most of the drivers looked Arab. I spotted a tall, light-skinned man with exceptionally pronounced cheekbones—he looked Ethiopian or Somali, but I knew different—standing against a less-than-pristine sedan third in the queue. He watched the swarm of arriving passengers with the laconic eyes of a veteran while I watched him. He was a veteran all right, but not of the taxi-driving kind.

When I was sure I was the only person taking an interest in him, I dragged my carry-on his way. This didn’t make me particularly popular with the cabbies at the head of the line, but that was not my problem.

He turned my way. He smiled and his eyes flicked in recognition. I studied them, plumbing them in an instant for any sign of trouble. His name was Hammid Zoghby; he was an Algerian operative and an old friend. But in the shadowy world of black ops, alliances can turn in a moment, and old didn’t necessarily mean trusted.

He stuck out a large paw. “Monsieur Green! Bienvenue à Paris,” he said.

Charles Green was one of three aliases I had invented for this mission. As far as the world knew, a guy named Jake Conlan was having dinner in his Annapolis home and sipping a nice chardonnay.

Zoghby threw my carry-on into the trunk and offered me the rear seat of the taxi. There was a blue gym bag with an Adidas logo on the floor, just as I had instructed.

He pulled away from the curb and traded some choice Arabic with the cabbies at the head of the line. Then he laughed, as if screwing a couple of Iraqis was about as much fun as an African could have. He glanced at me in the rearview mirror and in English said, “Where to?”

All Zoghby knew was that he was to pick me up at the airport with a blue gym bag in tow. “Head for the city and take your time.” At this time in the morning, we would have the road more or less to ourselves, and I was in no hurry. My rendezvous wasn’t until midmorning.

“You got it, boss.” Zoghby kept a close eye on his rearview mirror as we made our way out of the airport and gave me a quick nod as we merged onto the highway. “Looking good,” he said. He sat back and turned on the radio.

I set the gym bag next to me and zipped it open. Hidden underneath a layer of folded towels was a Mauser 7.65 mm pistol—not my gun of choice, but acceptable for the work I had to do here in Paris—and an aluminum tube: a silencer. I checked the magazine. Another two magazines were tucked inside a black nylon pouch. I slid the pistol inside my waistband and the spare magazines and silencer into the pockets of my suit coat.

There were also two Cartier jewelry boxes inside the gym bag, and I set them on the seat next to me. I discarded the lids, pushed aside the interior cotton, and removed two stainless steel memorial bracelets with the names of two former comrades laser-cut into the bands. Paul Redder and Clayton Spriggs were operatives killed in Afghanistan four years ago. Good friends. Superpatriots. And, yes, the bracelets memorialized their sacrifices, but they weren’t the work of Cartier or any other jeweler. They were hand-tooled by an explosives expert in Marseilles named Fabian Tomas. I’d known Tomas for twenty-three years, and there wasn’t anything he couldn’t turn into a weapon.

These particular bracelets were coated with a minute amount of Semtex, a relatively stable explosive until it came in contract with a spark detonator. In other words, I wouldn’t want to rub the two bracelets together unless the situation absolutely called for it. Perfect for locks. Perfect for diversions. Perfect for close contact. I’d never gone into an op without them. I wasn’t about to start now.

I fitted Paul’s bracelet around my left wrist and Clayton’s around my right. Hopefully, I wouldn’t need to use them.

Stopping The Twelver meant I’d have to work with Iranians, people I preferred to keep at a distance, preferably in the crosshairs of a .300 Winchester Magnum sniper rifle. To get inside Iran and to gather the kind of intel I needed, I had to enlist the one group that wanted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs who had his back to fail as much as we Americans did. That group was the Mujahedin-e Khalq. The MEK was the most powerful Iranian resistance organization in the world. The irony of the situation was that they were still tagged as a terrorist organization by my own government. Go figure.

Sure, there was a fair share of upstanding patriots in the MEK membership, though most operated in the foggy middle ground between insurgency and organized crime. They bankrolled their operations by dealing on the black market, which meant that their activities also attracted some serious scoundrels. I didn’t mind your average scoundrel. I just wasn’t particularly fond of the kind who looked at patriotism as a marketable commodity.

A Renault coupe slid up next to the cab on our left, close enough for me to recognize the guy riding shotgun. His name was Davy Johansen. Davy was a former SEAL Team Six operator and freelance counterintel specialist, another buddy from the old days. I didn’t recognize the driver, but if he was sitting an arm’s length from a man as cautious as Davy, then he’d been properly vetted. These two were charged with watching my back. Zoghby didn’t know they were there; he wasn’t supposed to know.

As the Renault dropped back a couple of car lengths, the taxi approached the Boulevard Périphérique, the main artery encircling Paris proper.

Zoghby shot me a look in the rearview mirror. I gave him an address in the Tenth Arrondissement. His eyes crinkled. Exactly the reaction I’d expected. We were a stone’s throw from the center of Paris, yet parts of the Tenth Arrondissement made for the roughest neighborhoods in Europe.

“Sounds like fun,” he said.

“A barrel of laughs.” I checked my watch. A quarter to eight.

A block from my destination, we crossed a broad, shimmering canal, and I told Zoghby to take a right turn onto a narrow street crowded with cars and delivery trucks and working folk. It was the kind of place where people scratched out a living and seemed to be enjoying their plight. I could hear radios blasting, people laughing, and the occasional horn sounding. A taxi on these streets hardly warranted a curious glance, but that’s exactly what I was looking for: a curious glance, a face in a window, an idle worker. So far, so good.

“Right there,” I said. I leaned forward and pointed to a dingy apartment building at the end of the block. “Make a left and pull up at the entrance.”

Zoghby did as he was told, though I could see by the look on his face that he was trying to make sense of it. I handed him an envelope with five thousand euros in it, payment for the pistol and the ride and his silence. I left my carry-on in the taxi; it had only been for show as I passed through the airport. If I needed anything, I’d buy it.

“Be well,” Zoghby said with a distracted wave. “You know where to find me if you need me.”

I waited until the taxi was out of sight before setting out. The café I was looking for was a block and a half to the west. I headed that way.

My meeting with the MEK was at ten. My contact was one Sami Karimi. The DDO had supplied me with some background, and Davy had done some digging on his own. I had to go through Sami to get to the right people in Amsterdam. I didn’t like it, but my choices were limited. The MEK had their rules, but their rules didn’t mean a thing if they didn’t conform to mine. The solution was easy. I may have needed them but I had to convince them they needed me more.

The truth was, I needed Sami for more than just his Amsterdam contacts. I needed him to point me in the direction of the drug dealer Mr. Elliot had mentioned—the one who had overplayed his hand by extorting money and information from a member of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; the one who was screwing with my mission.

Inside the café, I ordered a cup of coffee and a croissant and took a seat by the front window, where I could observe the rather dingy storefront across the street. The windows of the storefront were streaked and plastered with ragged posters. Graffiti covered the metal entrance door. The MEK loved these kinds of dumps for their covert meetings, so I wasn’t surprised when Karimi suggested it.

I fished out my iPhone and scrolled through Karimi’s dossier. I stared at his face.

His head was heart-shaped, with a pronounced forehead and a receding hairline brushed into short curly locks looping behind small ears. He had a typical Middle Eastern nose: long, sharp, and thin. His chin was surprisingly weak, which didn’t help with the bucktoothed look. Not a handsome guy.

The dossier told me that Karimi was a “fund-raiser.” He earned his keep in the MEK by smuggling contraband such as beluga caviar, Chinese cigarettes, computer chips, and stolen car parts. Odds were he had a network populated with some very nasty characters, and if he showed up with fewer than two of them in tow, I’d have been shocked. “Come alone” didn’t mean a thing to a guy like Karimi.

At 9:47, Davy Johansen’s Renault rolled past. Ten seconds later, my phone signaled an incoming text. It was from Davy. It read: He’s got company. Front and back, 100 meters.

I grinned. So much for orders, I thought. I finished my coffee and had just enough time for a refill. I held the empty cup up to my waiter.

At 9:52, I got a second text from Davy: In position. He had a clear view of the street and a ten-second dash to the storefront. His driver was holding down the alley out back.

At 9:56, a last text read: One in, one out. Watch yourself. In other words, one of Karimi’s men had taken up a position inside the building and one was stationed in the alley out back.

Karimi appeared ninety seconds later, ambling down the sidewalk with his hands in the pockets of a dark windbreaker and a cigarette dangling from his lips. He wore jeans and looked fitter than I had expected.

When he reached the storefront door, Karimi pulled keys from his pocket, unlocked the three dead bolts, and opened the door with a kick to the bottom. He didn’t go in. He turned and waited, just another merchant getting a late start on the day.

At 9:58, I left the café, crossed the street, and masked my approach in the bustle of pedestrian and vehicle traffic. My pistol pressed against my hip with reassuring heft.

Our eyes met. “Bonjour, monsieur,” I said. “Cigarette?”

“You dress like a bookkeeper,” he said in English.

“And you dress like a pimp.”

Satisfied, he breathed a sigh of relief. I didn’t. I said, “Let’s go inside, Mr. Karimi.”

Karimi tossed his Gauloises into the street gutter. He opened his palm toward the door. “Be my guest.”

“Thanks.” I even smiled. But Karimi had no sooner crossed the threshold and closed the door than three things happened in as many seconds. First, I horse-collared him with one arm. Second, I pressed the barrel of my Mauser against his temple. And third, I said in the calmest voice he had ever heard, “Didn’t you get the message, Mr. Karimi? We were to meet alone. Not with a couple of your buddies hanging around.”

“And so we are.” Karimi gagged on the words. “We are meeting, and I am alone. Just as you requested.”

I had to give it to these Middle Eastern types: they really knew how to split hairs. “Have your friend come out, Mr. Karimi. Now.”

The office was crammed with cheap desks covered by a jumble of desk lamps and open cardboard boxes. Computers ten years past their prime were tied together by extension cords and cables that snaked across the room in search of a functioning electrical outlet. Overhead, a row of fluorescent lamps buzzed and flickered and painted everything with an anemic, greenish cast.

I pushed him through a doorway into an open bay. Car tires and cardboard boxes in various sizes were stacked on sagging plywood shelves. The place smelled of grease and grime like a neglected auto garage. I said: “We’re wasting time, Mr. Karimi.”

I increased the pressure on his esophagus, and a single word squeezed from his vocal cords: “Aziz.”

I didn’t suffer fools well. Never had. But in a voice as calm as a placid lake I said, “Your friend outside has been waylaid by my friends outside, so let’s quit playing games.”

The man named Aziz stepped out from the shadow, his right hand holding a pistol at the ready. A Walther .380. Good gun. Enough to blast a hole through his partner, but probably not through me. Not that I would have bet my house on it.

“Tell him,” I said to Karimi.

“Put the gun down, Aziz. Let’s talk.”

Aziz was a lanky, hard-looking man, maybe thirty or thirty-five if you gave him the benefit of the doubt. The gun dropped to his side. “On the counter,” I said, easing my gun away from the side of Karimi’s head.

Aziz laid the Walther on the counter next to a toolbox. I loosened my grip on Karimi’s throat. “Hell of a way to get an operation started,” I said in English.

“We needed to make sure that we could trust you,” Karimi answered.

Smart thinking, weak execution.

I pocketed the Mauser and picked up the Walther. I released the magazine and let it clatter to the floor. Racking the slide, I emptied the chamber. I tossed the pistol to the floor. “Okay, now you can trust me.”

I pointed to a card table and four folding chairs. “Sit. Now that we’re acquainted, let’s get to business.” I took the chair with my back to the wall. Karimi and Aziz sat opposite me. Stacks of paper littered the table. I saw bills of lading, customs documents, and shipping manifests, all counterfeit of course. I got out my iPhone and shot Davy Johansen a coded text: Shipshape.

Next, I dipped my hand into an interior coat pocket, withdrew an envelope containing fifty thousand euros, and tossed it in Karimi’s direction. “For your time.”

He opened the flap and thumbed the bills in the envelope. He glanced at Aziz. Then he pushed the envelope inside his windbreaker. “That’s a lot of money. What does it buy?”

“I have to get into Iran. I have to do it quickly, and I have to do it with absolutely secrecy. Who better than the MEK. We’ve worked together before. We’ve both benefited. Same deal.”

His brow wrinkled. “When? Why?”

“When is my business. Why is obvious. Regime change,” I said. Those were the magic words with the MEK. They harbored no shortage of hatred when it came to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs on the Supreme Counsel. If the words mortal enemies ever applied, this was a perfect example.

Karimi’s stare deepened. His face bunched into a tight knot. “Regime change. And you can make that happen?”

“Hah!” His friend Aziz was disgusted. He jumped to his feet and threw his arms in the air.

“Have your friend sit down.” I didn’t say this to Aziz. It was an ultimatum that I expected Karimi to use to reestablish his footing in the meeting.

He said, “I wouldn’t presume to tell my friend how to express his indignation.”

“Then tell Mr. Aziz he has two choices. He can sit, or I can help him sit. Please tell him that my definition of help and his definition may not be the same.”

Karimi twisted his head in Aziz’s direction. He gave a classic Gallic shrug and opened his palms to his friend as if to say, You decide.

Aziz stood his ground for three face-saving seconds, then trudged back to his chair and sat.

“Thank you.” I was still looking at Karimi. “I need contacts. I need cover. I need transportation.”

“Why come to me? If my sources are correct about you, you’re a phone call away from our leadership. Why come to me?” he asked again.

“Because I respect the chain of command,” I said. I was lying, of course. I couldn’t have cared less about the MEK’s chain of command. What I respected was the fact that the guys on the ground—guys like these two sewer rats—were the ones in the know about every other sewer rat in Paris, and that’s what I needed.

“Listen, Karimi, you want your country back, then we can’t play games. You have to trust me, and I have to trust you.” Total bullshit. I trusted this guy about as far as I could throw him. “Make a call to Amsterdam. Set up a meeting for me tomorrow. Noon. Tell them Mr. Green respects the MEK hierarchy.” I was making myself ill. “Tell them these are the most important times in the MEK’s history.”

I paused and let the words linger. Karimi wasn’t stupid. He negotiated for a living, and he knew the negotiations weren’t complete. “And?” he said.

“And I need the immediate whereabouts of one of your esteemed colleagues, Mr. Karimi. A complete and total waste of humanity named Reza Mahvi.”

“Reza.” He couldn’t hold my eye. His gaze shifted to Aziz, who used the moment to inch to the very edge of his seat. Karimi drew a noisy breath, glanced back, and said, “Why?”

“Because he’s peeing in my government’s cornflakes, that’s why,” I said. “And because he’s selling the information to your sworn enemy. Any other questions?”