The Istanbul Chief of Station, Steve Chadwick, was still a douche, thought Dale.
After spending a half hour with the man in a café in Erzurum, Dale had been left wondering what in the world his ex-wife saw in the guy. Sure, he was fit and had high cheekbones. And yes, his mother’s Armenian heritage had blessed him with a thick head of wavy dark hair and eyebrows that canted in variously suggestive directions; but other than that, Dale thought him a dandy, a paper pusher, a midlevel bureaucrat. One look and all Dale could think about was Chadwick’s perfectly creased suit and his silky purple pocket square. What kind of CIA chief of station wears a fucking pocket square?
And why had Chadwick gone to all of the trouble to come down personally from Istanbul to Erzurum just to see Dale? Back in Dale’s day, no self-respecting chief of station left the office to see a transient case officer. The guy said Meredith had asked him to do it, which only served to annoy Dale further. This asshole just jumps at everything she says? He’s that devoted to her?
What was more, Chadwick had a way of using those expressive eyebrows to keep staring curiously at Dale, as though questioning why the man in front of him would have ever thrown over a woman like Meredith. He seemed to be wondering why the man in front of him would be skittering around the dusty mountains of Kurdistan at his age with some half-baked plan to get into Iran when he could be going home to a woman like Meredith instead. Didn’t they have a daughter together? Wasn’t he more or less retired? What was he doing here?
Dale had felt his ass puckering. For want of a more urbane response, he had an urge to take a swing at the guy.
And just who the hell did this douche think he was, criticizing Dale’s plan anyway? He didn’t know jack shit about the wizened old Kurdish trucker Dale used to employ to get into Syria. He didn’t know jack shit about alternative covert routes into Iran. Chadwick said he’d always sent people through the regular public routes with better legends. Better than this one, he’d emphasized, tapping Dale’s French passport, the one he’d picked up in Mumbai. Dale would never be able to pull off a surreptitious entry into Iran as a French oil exec, said Chadwick. Dale’s suit wasn’t good enough. His French wasn’t good enough. He didn’t really look the part.
What the fuck did all of that mean?
Chadwick had taken it upon himself to come up with new credos after consulting with Meredith. Dale was supposed to be a Turk now, with Persian ethnicity. His alias was an independent geologist coming down to consult with the mining school at Tabriz University after having done some work for Karzkak, a Turkish oil company on the Caspian that tended to shelter identities for the CIA. Well, that was fine with Dale. But he didn’t like the idea of Meth and this guy discussing him— didn’t like that one bit.
Jesus, he thought now, recalling that faint feeling of betrayal, smothering it. Was he actually jealous? He needed to get refocused on the mission in front of him. That was all that mattered.
Chadwick, for all of his metrosexual ways, had at least delivered the package that Dale had asked Meredith for. Slung over John’s shoulders now was a cheap-looking Turkish-made rucksack with a number of CIA-designed hidden compartments in the lining containing the requisite exfil tools.
Specifically, a satphone, a new Glock 17, two hundred feet of paracord, a wad of cash, a knife, and the assorted tools Dale always tried to take with him on solo missions. Perhaps most important, an innocent-looking piece of shiny fabric sewn to the inside of a strap that would double as his IR reflector when he was finally hightailing it over the border into Iraq. That was the plan he’d worked out with Meth. The US friendlies on the Iraqi side of the border would be able to identify him with ISR from miles away. They’d give him air cover if he needed it. Hopefully he wouldn’t.
The more incriminating items in the pack were concealed artfully in the lining, hidden from customs inspectors. The big open compartment held clothes with Turkish labels, including useful things for tramping around in the wilds: a bucket hat, a checkered kaffiyeh, climbing gloves, a blanket. There were also a couple of implements a mining consultant might have—a rock hammer, a hand trowel, a sifter, a chemical test kit. Dale hoped like hell that no ambitious inspector would ask him to demonstrate that test kit.
He looked up at the checkerboard-tiled train station in the small Kurdish city of Van. As promised, there was no security screening ahead of the train. That was at least one thing Chadwick had gotten right.
Having switched identities, Dale had borrowed a rental car from Chadwick and driven south from Erzurum to Tatvan, where he’d caught the old white ferry steamer across the lake to this picturesque city with its first-century castles.
He’d arrived on a Saturday. Iranian Rail service ran to Tabriz only on Mondays. With two nights to kill, he’d walked around the cobbled streets conducting SDRs and filling up on Turkish food in little restaurants where he could keep an eye on the door. He spoke to no one and kept a black ball cap pulled over his long brown hair. He wore a pair of thick twill khakis, a long black T-shirt, and a pair of desert hiking boots, courtesy of Chadwick. His beard was full, stretching down his neck, brown streaked with gray lines, some areas sun-bronzed.
Though Erzurum was a nice city, Dale liked Van better. There were fewer Russian tourists here, since the Russians hadn’t been too hospitable to the Kurds in the Syrian war. The lack of visible Slavic faces, at least, was something of a relief.
But that didn’t mean he’d let his guard down. The Russians, undoubtedly, were still out there somewhere. Though Dale couldn’t quite put together the whole picture, he knew there’d been a breach. And for that reason, he’d have to keep Meth in the dark as much as possible, which she hated. Tough shit, he thought. As much as he trusted her personally, clearly she’d led the Russians straight to his own house, his mission.
But then there was the even scarier part: he couldn’t pin it all on Meth and the Agency. There was something else going on.
He hadn’t told a soul he was going to Mumbai until he was there in the city, a day before the meet. Either Meth was a Russian agent, which was ridiculous, or they were onto Dale personally. He’d become the magnet for them. But he couldn’t figure out how.
Maybe the Agency had screwed up getting an old-timer like him. Maybe he’d been out of the game too long to know how it was done. But what could he do? He was in it now. Vigilance seemed his only defense. The old methods were really all he had.
Then there was the scale of the Russian operation to consider. It was wildly unusual to see an Alpha team operating with lethal impunity in the US. Waltzing into the Crimea and bullying sotted Ukrainians in the streets was one thing. But that Alpha team had been playing commando in little old Cle Elum, Washington, literally his backyard.
Then they’d shown up in Mumbai, twice as strong. What could unleash that kind of firepower? It had to have been a matter of desperation. Dale was no egghead foreign-affairs type, but he’d read enough to believe that Putin held on to power by barely keeping the petro economy afloat and stoking nationalism through jabs to the US.
Dale’s working theory was that the Russians needed their oil-for-nukes deal to hold all of that fragile business together. They needed it as a strategic hedge against the Chinese and as a way to bully the Americans out of the Gulf. They needed to keep the flag-waving sliver of the populace happy by showing the Americans limping back to their own hemisphere.
Which meant that, most of all, they needed to stop Dale from coming in to fuck it all up for them.
He was relatively sure he’d given them the slip in Mumbai and he felt good about a clean entry to Turkey. But surely they’d have picked up a new piece of the puzzle with Nadia Rahimi’s registration at the Taj. They’d know about Cerberus by now. Dale couldn’t know what kind of relationship Russian SVR had with Iranian MOIS or, worse, Quds. But he figured the Russians would be waiting for him over there, somewhere across that border at the other end of those train tracks.
Shuffling through the station, he ratcheted his hat snugly over his forehead, thinking about his small but suddenly significant role in the world. While his part was scary, he felt a certain amount of masculine pride. Yeah, that was right: he, washed-up old John Dale from Cle Elum, Washington, was going to stick it to the Russians and the Iranians, and they couldn’t figure out how to stop him. Who knew?
Nobody. Fucking nobody . . . as usual. He smiled at his own private joke.
Then he immediately cursed himself, running a hand over his mouth. A man grinning like an idiot deservedly attracted attention. Facial recognition systems were popping up everywhere, even in random little shitholes in the middle of nowhere. Like the Van train station.
Focus, Dale, focus. No more rookie shit.
He controlled his pace through the midsized terminal, shouldering his pack through the crowd of villagers, hiding behind his sunglasses. Van’s historic origins were in evidence everywhere, right down to the leathery Kurds who hunched under the giant mechanical clock with sacks full of belongings heaped onto old porter carts. A rusty PA churned out incomprehensible announcements about train movements. Except for the way the locals kept their noses buried in their phones, Dale imagined the action in this station hadn’t changed much since World War One. Good. That was how Dale liked it in the field.
The platform signs were digital, another grudging nod to modernity. But they were blinking on and off, dim in the blinking old bulbs of the station’s ancient chandeliers. Dale had to raise his Ray-Bans long enough to study them. The signs were almost all in Turkish, which he couldn’t make heads or tails of. But then he saw the one with Farsi subscripts. His route. He made his way toward it.
In the hour wait for the train, he bought a jug of water in a kiosk and clipped it to his pack. Then he settled on the floor to more or less disappear. Like everyone else, he looked at his phone. But he kept his eyes up behind his sunglasses, scanning for surveillants. Finally, the train arrived with a hiss, right where it was supposed to.
Before standing, he took a look at the long silver-and-white train with the red boot stripe. It was a journey of about seven hours to cover three hundred miles, which meant it was either painfully slow or would have some lengthy stops. According to the wall map, there’d be only two before they reached Tabriz—Kapikoy on the Turkish side and Razi just across the border. It was in Razi that Dale would see whether his credentials were really holding up. If they didn’t, he was going to come back and revisit old Steve Chadwick one fine day. The douche.
Approaching the train, his empty jug of water clanking against the outside of his pack, he took one last pause before stepping over the gap. He looked up and down the length of the dozen cars. Entering Iran by rail was a new one for him. He wasn’t too sure about it. But Chadwick had been confident. Hesitantly, Dale stepped into the narrow passage of the second-class car. Even more reluctantly, he put his pack on the luggage rack just aft of his assigned compartment, backing up slowly so he could keep an eye on it. His life depended on the contents of that pack.
His seat was one of six in the tight compartment. Before long three other passengers showed up: an old married couple who spoke a low Kurdish dialect and a serious-looking man in his thirties with a mustache worthy of Saddam Hussein. He wore a black suit with no tie and a white shirt buttoned all the way to the top. He had nothing but an attaché case for luggage. He was big for around here, shaped like a guy who knew his way around a weight room.
Dale stared out the window, trying to become as boring as possible, avoiding a direct glance at Saddam. But their eyes met briefly in the reflection of the window. He didn’t like it. A bolt of concern shot through him. It was off—way off. He glanced toward his pack stowed about ten feet away. He considered getting up, grabbing it, and hopping off.
Fuck Chadwick, he thought. Fuck this train and this buff Saddam character.
He’d go find his old trucker contact and barter a way in over the roads, stuffed into a hidden compartment until dropped in the middle of nowhere the way it was supposed to be done . . . the way it used to be done. He reached one hand forward on an armrest, gripping it, just about to hoist himself up.
But then he heard the hiss of the doors, the electric hum of the train revving. He felt the jostle of movement as it eased away, slowly, easterly, back toward Iran.
Well, he thought, scrunching down into his clothes, maybe it will be fine.
Maybe.
For just the briefest moment, Kasem seemed to experience a sort of calm. Perhaps the physical act of praying, kneeling prostrate toward Mecca, was enough to achieve some sort of enlightenment, he thought, his face buried in the fibers of his namaz. His agnosticism aside, the physical act at least offered him a few moments of reflection, free from interruption. There seemed to be something to that.
Grateful for it, he pressed his cheek to the floor, his eyes wide open. The afternoon sun angled in through the slatted windows and painted stripes across the floor in front of him, marring the intricate pattern of the small rug. He noticed how it made the red and blue stand out in stark contrast, the shine of the worn wool, the intricacy of the tribal patterns. Then, involuntarily, the name of this particular tribal pattern popped into his head. It was called a Tabriz. Though he’d pressed his face to this rug perhaps a hundred times in the past month, he’d never thought about that before.
Tabriz, home of Zaqqum’s secret uranium-enrichment facility.
The time for peaceful self-reflection was over. He couldn’t afford it. Still prostrate, he turned his head in either direction. The office was empty. The young officer who had been assigned to him had been summoned to another office for an urgent phone call. Kasem found himself alone in his mock prayer. Suddenly annoyed by the rug, he rose to his feet, brushed dust off his thighs, and returned to his desk. He had a lot to do.
Rahimi was in the wind. Zaqqum was fucked, throwing a special intensity on the political maneuvers.
Kasem’s few recent encounters with Maloof had been brusque, at best, amounting to a recall of his temporarily assigned lieutenants, a denial of further use of the base helicopter, and a clumsily worded intonation that the Foreign Ministry had said the Russians were no longer satisfied, whatever that really meant.
Kasem knew the game, of course. Maloof was isolating him, setting him up for the inevitable fall. Had the circumstances been reversed, he would have been doing the same thing. Alas, they were not reversed.
The fact remained that one of their best scientists had flown the coop. The postmortem would reveal both a failure to cover the risk, a MOIS issue, as well as the failure to stop a potential CIA incursion, a Quds issue. More specifically, a Kasem issue. Because of the way Kasem had set himself up as the sole proprietor of this particular Quds enterprise, he had no one to blame but himself. Others in the government would quickly agree.
Unless he got Rahimi back—then he would have all the leverage. If only . . .
There’d been a few leads in the search. Under enhanced interrogation, a Saqqez market owner known to be sympathetic to the Kurds had admitted to slipping food to a man fitting Rahimi’s description. The MOIS team on station had leveraged that info to obtain some blurry street video of a man who might have been Rahimi, walking alone, a phone pressed to his ear. With the precise time stamp and location, they were able to use cell-tower triangulation to narrow the list to about a hundred phones in use at the time. All of them were making domestic calls except one, which they suspected to have been Rahimi. But on tracing the number, they found it was to a WhatsApp server, a voice over IP data call that they couldn’t penetrate. Since that sighting, the trail had gone cold.
Just as worrying as Rahimi’s absence was the disappearance of Kasem’s Hezbollah contacts in Beirut. Nabil, the man he’d tapped to round up Kuznetsov, had gone dark. Others who knew Nabil weren’t answering. Kasem’s carefully cultivated network seemed rolled up. That had never happened before. When he made a few more calls to Quds associates to see what was up, he was told there’d been a lot of foreign intelligence heat on the ground. Everyone had gone underground.
In the past, that had almost always meant Mossad. But no. This time, he was told, it was SVR.
Having worked with them for years in Syria, Kasem knew plenty about SVR. For what they lacked in subtlety, they accrued in persistence. Eventually they’d find Nabil, if they hadn’t already. Nabil would talk, as everyone eventually must. The finger would be leveled at Kasem. It was as inevitable as the change of seasons; but like the weather, the timing might vary.
When, then?
He half expected to be arrested every morning that he arrived at the office. The Russians would accuse the Iranian government of murdering one of their intelligence officers. The Supreme Council would happily pay obeisance by sacrificing the rogue who had done it.
If it came to that, Kasem would die in Evin Prison. First, he’d be tortured by MOIS thugs who lived for that sort of thing. He had no stomach for it, but the stories he’d heard were sadistic—an obsession with mutilating male anatomy. After that nightmare, provided he lived through it, he’d be cast to the waiting mobs of prisoners, who would be more than happy to stick a shiv in the side of a hated Quds officer.
No, if he entered Evin, he would be leaving feetfirst. Rahimi must be recovered.
He leaned back in the chair behind his desk and closed his eyes, listening to the distant sounds of Tehran traffic coming in through the cracked window. He wanted to see Kasra. How many more nights would they have together? he wondered, inhaling deeply, sighing. He had come to think of himself as savoring them, cataloging each moment so that he might return to it one day. Worse, he’d been snatching secret glances at her pleasant face, wondering what hell he might have rendered upon her. Perhaps, he’d concluded more than once, he should break it off now for her own sake. It would be easy. He could just disappear, like he usually did. That was the paradoxically noble thing to do.
But then he’d never considered himself to be noble. And what was more, though unable to admit it to himself, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
His lieutenant stepped in, throwing the door wide, interrupting Kasem’s dark reverie. There was something different about the way the lieutenant walked—a confidence, a swagger. An irreverence? Dear God, Kasem thought. Et tu, Brute?
“Good news,” the young MOIS man said, somewhat short of breath.
Kasem was too cynical to get a rise out of this. His young officers were often overexcitable. He raised an inquisitive eyebrow.
“I think we found Shariati,” the younger man said. “NAJA got an Interpol Red Notice. A hit on our man at a Turkish train station.” NAJA was the Persian acronym for the Iranian National Police Force.
Kasem stood and leaned over his desk, his chin thrust forward. “And?”
“Facial recognition hit. Ninety-five percent probability.”
The lieutenant put a folder on Kasem’s desk. Kasem opened it. There was a black-and-white close-up of a face looking up toward the ceiling, a crowd behind him. It looked like an airport or a train station. There were sunglasses draped across the bill of a black ball cap pulled tightly down over long dark hair. A bearded man, a beard streaked with gray. Oddly enough, he seemed to be smiling.
Kasem recognized the eyes, the facial expression. There was no mistaking the memory.
He suddenly felt the need to move. He came out from behind his desk. “Where? How? What now? How did we get this from the Turks?”
The lieutenant pointed toward the blurred background of the image. “That, sir, is the train station in a small Turkish town called Van.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of it.”
“The route crosses the border at Razi and then goes on to Tehran. We have an immigration treaty that lets us share info with the Turks. The Interpol warning popped on both sides and the Turks alerted NAJA.”
“Who put out the Red Notice?”
“Russia.”
Kasem went pale. The Russians. They were looking for Reza too. That probably also meant they already knew everything about Rahimi. Had Kuznetsov known from the start?
Kasem’s mind was racing so fast that he stumbled with what to do. “Well?” he finally blurted at the lieutenant, irritated with himself. “Say more, Lieutenant. Where did he go from there?”
“Sir . . . NAJA keeps a presence in the station. An undercover officer was alerted and initiated surveillance. They’re both on the train. Right now.”
“You’re saying that we have Reza Shariati on a train that’s headed here to Tehran with a NAJA undercover officer tailing him? Has it crossed into Iran yet?”
“No, just left the Van station.”
“How far out?”
“Seven hours to Tehran.”
“Inshallah. Get back on the phone with NAJA. Have their man shadow him. Under no circumstances is he to let the man out of his sight. He’ll lead us right to Rahimi. Do you understand me?”