Fault Line

3 A SIMPLE UNDERSTANDING

Ben Treven sat motionless at the edge of a wooden chair at the Hotel Park Istanbul, watching the rainy afternoon street two stories below through tattered gauze curtains. The room was small and spartan, but its size and furnishings couldn't have mattered less to him. The window was open a few inches, and from time to time the interior quiet was broken by the sounds of the city without: car tires thumping over the antique cobblestone streets and splashing through potholes; the practiced touts of rug merchants calling out to passing tourists from in front of their small shops; the haunting notes of the muezzin, entreating the faithful to prayer five times daily between dawn and dusk.

In addition to letting in the sounds of the street, the open window kept the room cold. When the moment arrived, he would need to move quickly, and he was already wearing deerskin gloves, a wool cap, and a fleece-lined, waterproof jacket. His hair was naturally blond, but the false beard he wore was black. With the hat on, no one would notice the discrepancy.

The warm clothing would be useful in the rain and against the December chill, of course, but that was only part of it. The gloves prevented prints. The hat obscured his features. The jacket concealed a suppressed Glock 17 in a cross-draw holster on his left side.

On the coffee table next to him was a backpack containing clothes, two sandwiches, a bottle of water, a first-aid kit, ammunition, false travel papers, and a few other essentials. Other than the backpack, there was no trace of the room's occupant, nor would there be when he was gone.

He was there to kill two Iranian nuclear scientists, Omid Jafari and Ali Kazemi. Ben knew a lot about the men: their real names, the names they were traveling under, the details of their itineraries. He knew they were in Istanbul for a meeting with a Russian counterpart. He knew they were staying at the Sultanahmet Four Seasons, which is why he had taken this room at the Park, directly across the street. He had copies of their passport photos and had recognized them immediately when they arrived from the airport in one of the hotel's BMW limousines three days earlier. He knew the two men who accompanied them at all times were with VAVAK, Iran 's feared secret service, and that the VAVAK people, in addition to being well trained, would be motivated. If one of the scientists were kidnapped or assassinated, or if one of them defected, as Ali Reza Asgari, the Iranian general and former deputy defense minister, had done not so long before, the man who let it happen could expect to be executed.

He knew considerably less about the Russian: not much more than a real name, Rolan Vasilyev-which he probably wasn't traveling under anyway-and that he was coming to Istanbul to meet the Iranians. Washington had been pressuring Moscow about Russian nuclear assistance to Tehran, and presumably the Kremlin had decided it was too risky to bring the Iranians to Russia, even under false names. Istanbul was a good neutral corner: about midway geographically, with good air links, and security services focused more on ethnic Kurds than on Russians or Iranians.

Each morning since they had arrived, the Iranians and their VAVAK minders had gotten into one of the hotel limousines and returned after dark. Ben figured these trips were for meetings with Vasilyev and would have liked to follow them to learn more, but the likely costs outweighed the benefits. Alone in a car or on a motor scooter, he would be relatively easy to spot. Even if he weren't spotted, catching them in a venue that enabled him to do the job and depart without trouble would require an unrealistic amount of luck. He might have tried taking them as they arrived at or departed from the hotel, but the front and interior of the Four Seasons were quietly replete with cameras, doormen, and security personnel. It just wasn't a good place for a hit, which was part of the reason they had chosen it in the first place.

It didn't matter, though. His gut told him something would open up. After all, the Iranians were in town for seven days, and what did that mean? Probably that they expected to be done with their work in four, or maybe five. Country and culture were irrelevant: when the government or the corporation or anyone else was footing the bill, bureaucrats and other worker bees could always be expected to overestimate the time they would need for meetings. Especially when the meetings required their presence in a city as enticing as Istanbul, and at a hotel as fine as the Four Seasons.

In fact, the choice of hotel increased Ben's confidence about what was coming next. Because if the Iranians could persuade the bean counters to spring for the Four Seasons, cost was obviously not a consideration. If cost wasn't a consideration, they could have stayed at any hotel in the city-the Pera Palas, the Ritz-Carlton, even the second Four Seasons, recently opened on the Bosporus. Ben had checked with all of them, and they all had rooms available. They all offered more or less the same level of luxury and security. The question, then, was, why this hotel?

The answer, Ben thought, was location. All the other luxury properties were in Beyoglu, the newer part of the city, north of the Golden Horn. Only the Sultanahmet Four Seasons was a five-minute walk from the city's most storied attractions: the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace, the Grand Bazaar. And if Ben was right about location being the deciding factor, he was confident the Iranians would take at least a day, and probably more, to see those walking-distance sights. When they set out from the hotel on foot, Ben could get behind them. From there, an opportunity would present itself. All he had to do was wait.

Which was fine. Waiting didn't bother him. He liked to wait, in fact, liked the simplicity of it. Waiting was the least complicated part of an uncomplicated job.

Periodically, he received orders. The orders were always short and direct, and he had extremely wide latitude in determining how to carry them out. He could ask for whatever equipment he needed, and the equipment would promptly turn up in a dead drop as though by magic. There was no questioning, no red tape, no oversight.

The only real constraint this time was that Vasilyev was off-limits. During the early years of the Cold War, trying to remove the other side's pieces from the board was considered just another part of the game. Eventually, like rival mafia families, everyone had figured out the bloodshed was more expensive than it was worth, and a kind of shadowy détente had settled in. Now, no one wanted to be responsible for breaking the truce, for a return to those bad old bloody days.

He tried not to be irritated by the restrictions. After all, it wasn't like the Russians were matching Uncle Sam's restraint. They had killed that guy Victor Litvinenko in London with polonium. And there were all those dead journalists, too-Anna Politkovskaya, Paul Klebnikov, too many to keep up with. Ben thought he could make a pretty good argument that Ivan was getting more aggressive precisely because of Uncle Sam's overzealous devotion to the rules, but that kind of shit was above his pay grade and it wasn't as though anyone would listen to him anyway. But if he could, he would have asked someone what had happened to “You're either with us or you're with the terrorists.” He supposed it had been just another empty slogan from another lying politician.

They were all liars, actually. The left was naïve, thinking you could follow the niceties and still fight effectively against the kind of fanatics America was up against. And the right was hypocritical, thinking you could take off the gloves and still occupy the moral high ground.

Yeah, the left couldn't understand the nature of the fight; the right couldn't accept its true consequences. But Ben didn't care about the niceties, he didn't care about the moral high ground, he cared about winning. And the way you won was by being the hardest, dirtiest, deadliest motherfucker the enemy could ever have imagined in his worst nightmare. Christ, what good were rules if they made you lose the fight? What all the armchair analysts couldn't get their minds around was that when your tribe is attacked, you do what you have to do to win. You win by any means necessary. Later there could be a victor's justice, fine, but first there had to be a victory.

The thing was, most Americans wanted nothing more than to be safe. Maybe it hadn't always been that way, in fact he suspected things had once been different, but these days America had become a nation of sheep. Which to him was a pretty sorry way to live, a way that represented everything he'd joined the army to get away from; but that was American culture these days, and someone had to keep the sheep safe from the wolves. He understood at some level that the bullshit restrictions and the second-guessing just came with the territory. Still, it was galling to be put in a position where he was more afraid of CNN than he was of al Qaeda.

A BMW 750L pulled up in front of the Four Seasons and a doorman with an umbrella moved forward to open the door. Ben tensed, but no, it was an Asian couple, not the Iranians. He settled back onto the chair and resumed his waiting.

No one had told him where the intel behind this op had come from, of course. But from the quality of the information on the Iranians, and its paucity regarding the Russian, Ben suspected an Iranian mole-possibly in the country's nuclear program, more probably in the security services. An asset in the nuclear program would have known the scientists’ names and itineraries. He might even have known about the VAVAK minders. But only someone in charge of security would also have access to the false names and papers under which the men would be traveling, and to their passport photos. Also, understanding the likely fate to which he was condemning them, someone in the nuclear program would have found it harder to give up the scientists. After all, they would have been colleagues, men another scientist would know personally. Betraying your country is easier to rationalize than betraying a friend.

It was interesting. At one point, Uncle Sam had been more inclined to render the Jafaris and Kazemis of the world to friendly governments like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where they could be interrogated with proper rigor. But then the CIA had screwed up the rendition of Abu Omar from Milan, leaving a paper trail so egregious an Italian magistrate had issued arrest warrants for the thirteen CIA operatives behind it, and then “plane spotters” had started to unravel the whole secret rendition network. The Pentagon had decided it was better to act more discreetly, and more directly. No one took the CIA seriously anymore anyway, not since the DCI had been made subordinate to the new director of national intelligence and the agency had been saddled with the problem of those nonexistent Iraqi WMDs. If you wanted actionable intelligence now, and if you wanted the intelligence acted upon, the Pentagon was the only real player in town.

Ben knew all this, but he didn't really care. He wanted nothing to do with politics, national or organizational. Hell, the politicians didn't even know men like him existed, and if they suspected, they knew better than to inquire. The military didn't invent “Don't ask, don't tell.” It learned it from Congress.

So basically, things were copacetic. There was a lot of work, and he was good at it. It all involved a simple understanding. If he fucked up, he would be denied, disowned, and hung out to dry. If he continued to achieve results, he would be left alone. It was the kind of deal he could live with. One where you knew the rules, and the consequences, up front. Not like what his family had pulled on him after Katie. Not that any of that mattered at this point anyway. They were all gone now, except for Alex, who might as well be gone, and good riddance, too.

Another BMW pulled up. Ben leaned forward so he could see more clearly through the curtains, and bingo, it was the Iranians, their first time back to the hotel before dark. This was it, he was sure of it, the chance he ‘d been waiting for. He felt a hot flush of adrenaline-a familiar, pleasant sensation in his neck and gut-and his heart began to thud a little harder.

The Iranians headed into the hotel, one VAVAK guy forward, the other aft. Ten to one they'd be on their way out within an hour, two at the most.

He stood and cracked his neck, then started doing some stretches and light calisthenics. He'd been sitting a long time with nothing but quick bathroom breaks. That was fine while he was waiting. But the time for waiting was done.