TWENTY-NINE

Zoya yawned and did a couple of neck rolls in the rear of the surveillance vehicle. She’d gotten nowhere with Sasani today; he was home from work sick, and from the audio, he had been either in bed or on the toilet all morning. She’d not had much luck with her two assistants, either. Both Moises and Yanis seemed a little more tight-lipped today than the previous times they’d been together, at least as far as anything to do with Shrike.

She was about to start a new probing operation to get the boys to talk when she heard her phone chirping in her purse. She pulled it and looked at the incoming number. It was Ennis, her supervisor.

She answered with a light, “Hi, Ric.”

But the normally confident man’s reply seemed surprisingly clipped and serious to her. “Anything going on over there?”

“No, except the target didn’t go into work today.”

“Why not?”

“He’s sick. We can hear a lot of coughing and nose blowing. Sounds like he’s got diarrhea, too. Mercifully, Yanis didn’t put an omnidirectional mic in the bathroom.”

The two younger men laughed at this.

“Has he been on the phone? On his laptop?”

Zoya could detect an anxiety in Ennis’s voice that confused her.

She said, “He . . . he called in sick to work, early. That’s it. Why the sudden interest in this guy?”

“Look,” Ennis said. “We need to . . . we need to abort. Break down surveillance right now. Leave all devices in place but shut them down. Get yourself, and your people, out of there.”

“What’s going on?”

He took a few labored breaths. There was more than anxiety on the part of Ennis, Zoya recognized. This was fear. “Look, someone we have been monitoring in the past, another officer’s target. He . . .”

“He what?”

“He died. Less than an hour ago.”

“Here? In Berlin?”

“Yes. Hit by a bus. Police have not ruled out foul play.”

“Who was he?”

“He . . . that’s not important. He was a foreign national, I can say that. We’d been asked to investigate him for our client. We had completed our investigation and no Shrike personnel were at the scene of his death, thank God. That’s about all I know, but I don’t yet know if there are going to be any comebacks on any of our operations, so it’s best we just give it a couple of days.”

Ennis’s voice displayed none of the bluster or assertiveness she’d known him to possess. He sounded like a terrified kid, and this told Zoya there was more to this story than she was hearing.

“The deceased. He was Iranian, I take it?”

“Yes.”

“An IO? Another VAJA man from the embassy?”

“No. I am not prepared to say who he was affiliated with, but we are pulling all our local operatives out of the field until we see how local authorities react. I’ve got a couple more calls to make, Stephanie, so I have to go.” He switched gears suddenly. “How about we talk more about this over dinner? The Lorenz in the Adlon? It’s very nice.”

And it was also in her hotel. Ennis knew this, and Zoya took this to mean he would be looking for an invitation upstairs after the meal. He wouldn’t get it, but he would get dinner with her. It was her job to learn whatever she could, and this sounded like a perfect opportunity to do so.

“That will be fine,” she said, playing it cool.

He was still distracted, still stressed. “Meet you there at eight thirty.”

Zoya looked at her two techs, who both stared back at her. “Pull the plug,” she said, then turned her attention once again to Ennis’s call. “We are shutting down right now. I’ll await further instructions.”

“See you tonight.”

Zoya hung up the phone, started to reach over to flip off the master control switch to the microphones in the house. She did this just as Yanis began taking his headphones off.

Moises was closest to the front of the van, so he started to move towards the driver’s seat.

Zoya scooted her little stool to the computer terminal and reached to flip the switch that operated the microphone in Sasani’s mobile phone, but just as she did this, Yanis put his headphones back over his ears, fired out a hand, and grabbed her by the wrist. “Call coming in. Do we shut down, or do we listen to it?”

She said, “We listen, of course.” She pulled her own headphones on now, as well. Zoya didn’t speak a word of Farsi, but she wanted to hear her target’s voice nonetheless.

Moises hurried back to his computer to work on squelching any background noise.

Sasani answered after several rings. Zoya could hear both fatigue and congestion in his voice. He sounded like the last thing he wanted to do right now was talk on the phone, so she wondered if the caller might be someone important.

The caller’s voice spoke up, his cadence fast and intense. Zoya turned to Yanis, who began a running translation of both sides of the conversation.

“Where are you?”

“I’m at home. I called out sick four hours ago.”

“Did you hear the news?”

“I haven’t heard anything, brother. I’m in bed.”

The rapid-fire voice coming from the apartment shot out a string of vowels and consonants that impressed even polyglot Zoya Zakharova. Yanis waited for him to finish before translating. “That student with MeK, the one working for German intelligence at the mosque. You know the one?”

“Yeah. Iravani. What about him?”

“Fucking murdered, brother. Just this morning. Witnesses told the polizei that two big white guys knocked him in front of a bus. Definitely an assassination.”

Sasani’s fatigue seemed to dissipate quickly. “We’ve monitored him, but cyber only. We never put men on him. We picked up no signs of anyone else targeting him. Listen, Ali, we definitely didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“It doesn’t matter if we did or not. If the polizei find out he’s MeK, then they are going to point the finger at us. We need to be careful, Javad.”

There was more back-and-forth to the conversation; Yanis relayed it all to the case officer he knew as Stephanie Arthur, but she was barely listening now. Instead she thought about what this all meant. If Shrike Group had been gaining intelligence on a member of the MeK, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, that meant that along with the Iranian government spy she had been surveilling, and the Iranian military operatives that Moises and Yanis had mentioned were also being monitored, it now appeared Shrike was surveilling anti-regime operatives.

The MeK were one of just a few groups of Iranians actively trying to overthrow the government in Tehran. They weren’t one one-thousandth as strong as they needed to be to do so, but they were definitely enemies of the ayatollah and mullahs who ran the nation presently.

And one of these anti-regime people, one who had been under surveillance by Shrike Group, had just been murdered on the streets of Berlin.

Finally, Zoya said to herself. This is getting interesting.

As soon as Javad Sasani hung up the phone, sounding to Zoya almost exactly as worried as Ric Ennis had been about this apparent assassination of someone both VAJA and Shrike had been monitoring, she ordered Yanis to power down the equipment and Moises to drive them out of the area. She didn’t know if German internal security were aware that Javad Sasani was, indeed, an Iranian intel officer, but if they had been aware, then it wouldn’t be a great stretch of the imagination to assume the BfV might come here to talk to him.

And she didn’t want to be anywhere around when that happened.