Under Fire

10

What’s the saying?” Ysabel asked. “Never meet your heroes?”

Jack had returned to the apartment to find her sitting on the balcony, sipping a cup of tea. He’d joined her and together they watched the lights of Mellat Park below.

“Why? What happened?” Jack replied.

Ysabel sighed. “Dr. Pezhman Abbasi, my beloved mentor and kindly grandfather figure, has been taking kickbacks.”

“Explain.”

“Some investment firm based in Mashhad — the Bayqara Group — hired him as ‘consultant.’ Apparently, our think tank is about looking for opportunities in the Russian Federation.”

Jack didn’t reply immediately. This was unexpected, and probably nonsense. Given the nature of Russian — Iranian relations, unless the Bayqara Group was working behind multiple front companies, it seemed unlikely Moscow would permit such investments. After the business in Crimea, eastern Ukraine, and Estonia, President Valeri Volodin’s policies had grown even more insular.

The question was whether the Bayqara Group was barking up the wrong financial tree or was itself a front for someone else — such as Iranian intelligence.

Wheels within wheels, Jack thought. Before long he’d have to start flowcharting this crap.

“When did Bayqara approach Pezhman, before or after he set up your group?”

“After. It started out as just an internal thing, like all the other ones at the university.”

So how and why did Bayqara get interested in it? Jack wondered.

“Why did Pezhman tell you all this?”

“Guilty conscience, I imagine. He wanted to get it off his chest and I asked the question. His wife is sick. Terminal cancer. He’s been taking her to any clinic or doctor he can find, and that costs a lot of money.”

“Lucky for him the Bayqara Group happened along.”

“My thought exactly. And yes, before you ask, I told him to tell no one about our chat. He will.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I just am.”

“Who’s his contact?”

“I wrote it all down on the pad on the dining room table. Suleiman something,” Ysabel replied, gesturing over her shoulder. “All Pezhman had was a cell-phone number. Tell me what you found at Yazdani.”

“A lot of stuff for you to translate.” Jack told her about the e-mail between Yazdani and Farid Rasulov of Hamrah Engineering. “Your visit stirred up a hornet’s nest — at least on Yazdani’s end. You scared the hell out of the guy.”

Ysabel smiled. “I have my ways. What’s Hamrah Engineering?”

“I don’t know. I’ll give it to Gavin. What kind of name is Farid Rasulov?” asked Jack.

“‘Farid’ is Arabic, but it’s also Azerbaijani. ‘Rasulov’ is Russian, of course, but most Azerbaijani surnames are holdovers from the Soviet days. What do we do next, Jack?”

This question had been in the forefront of Jack’s mind since the shooting at Pardis Condos. “Time to pay the piper,” he said.

Jack settled into Ysabel’s guest bedroom, closed the door, and used his cloned phone to call Gavin Biery. His instructions were curt, and produced nearly immediate results. Ten minutes after his initial call, Jack’s phone trilled.

“Jack, it’s Gerry. I’ve got John Clark with me. You’re on speaker. What’s going on?”

Jack thought, I have no idea, but said, “I’m into something in Tehran.”

For the next ten minutes, he took them through the last four days, from his lunch with Seth Gregory to his breaking into Yazdani’s office. He left nothing out.

There was a long, uncomfortable silence on the phone. Finally, John Clark said simply, “Christ Almighty, Jack.”

“Are you safe?” Gerry asked.

“I think so.”

“What do you know about this woman?”

Jack gave them Ysabel’s particulars, then said, “She’s on the level.”

“Or not, and she’s playing the long game.”

Clark said, “What’s your gut say, Jack?”

“She’s on the level,” Jack repeated.

“Then that’s what she is, Gerry,” said Clark.

Gerry said, “Jack, can you guess what I’m going to say next?”

“Drop it all and be on the next plane out. But I’m not going to do that.”

“The hell you aren’t!”

This gave Jack pause. Gerry Hendley was the epitome of even-keeled; his response was anything but.

John Clark said, “Gerry, hang on. Jack, explain, and whatever you do, don’t say, ‘Because Seth is my friend.’”

That’s exactly what Jack was going to say, despite knowing how juvenile it sounded. “Okay, then, let’s break it down,” he began. “CIA and SIS are running an op out of Tehran; Seth is running the network and he’s gone to ground, along with the operational funds; two men, probably Americans, kidnapped me, and last night someone blew the skull off one of those men simply because he might talk to me—”

Gerry said, “You don’t know that.”

“It’s the answer that makes the most sense. Listen, Gerry, I get it: This isn’t exactly in our brief, but it’s damned close. Let me keep working it.”

“Jack, you’re putting me in a hell of a spot. If this goes bad, the blowback on us could be—”

“I know.”

“What do you want me to say? Come home or you’re fired?”

“Your call, Gerry.”

“You’d take it that far?”

“I would.”

There were a few moments of silence, then Jack heard John Clark chuckle. “Hell, Gerry, friends is friends. Plus, Jack is right: Langley and our across-the-pond cousins are running an op — in Iran, of all places — and if Jack’s right, the thing’s in the shitter, or nearly so. Maybe we should know why that is.”

“That sounds like a ‘them’ problem,” Gerry snapped, but Jack could hear the tone of his boss’s voice softening.

“Never let the plumber who broke your pipes try to fix them.”

“That’s downright folksy, John,” replied Gerry. “Damn, Jack, when did your brass ones get so huge?”

It was a good question, one Jack had never really thought about. A lot had happened since he’d joined The Campus, most of it since he’d started working the ops side of the house: the Emir, India, China, Ukraine, North Korea… Somewhere in there, he supposed.

“When you weren’t looking, Gerry,” he replied.

“Apparently so. What do you need from us to get the ball rolling?”

“How did this happen, Yegor?” Helen said, pacing their loft apartment’s kitchenette. “How could you — you! — get it this wrong?”

Yegor sat at the dining table, his head down, fingers drumming the tabletop. Olik and Roma sat on the couch, the latter watching yet another game show.

“I’m sorry, Helen,” Yegor replied. “They look alike, they stay in the same dormitory, have the same first name—”

“Not the same first name!” Helen shot back. “Amelia… Amy… Not the same!”

“Nickname, then,” Yegor replied. “Their friends call them both the same nickname. I’m sorry, Helen. I assumed it was her.”

As if on cue, bumping sounds and muffled screams came from the bathroom. Helen said, “Olik, go quiet her down. Gently.”

Roma bolted from the couch and headed toward the bathroom. “I’ll quiet her.” In his right hand a folding knife appeared; he flicked open the blade.

“No! Sit down! You’ve done enough.” The girl’s jaw was badly broken and the whole left side of her face swollen and bruised. “Olik, go on.”

Grumbling under his breath, Roma returned to the couch and his game show.

Olik disappeared into the bathroom and shut the door behind him. For several moments the thumping sounds grew louder; then Helen heard Olik murmuring. The sounds lessened, then stopped altogether.

Helen walked over to the couch, her body blocking the TV. “What were you thinking?” she asked Roma.

“About what?”

“You almost took her head off.”

“So? She’s a whore, a disgrace to Islam—”

“Shut up about that,” Helen said, then thought: As am I, strictly speaking, but here we are. She loved her faith and loved Allah and the prophet Muhammad, but sometimes the myriad dictates felt like a boot on her neck. Surely that wasn’t what Allah intended, was it, for women to feel like this?

Eyes narrow, Roma sat up. “Woman,” he growled, “you will not speak to me like this. You should know your place.”

Helen stepped closer to the couch, penning him in. “And you yours,” she said. “I’m in charge. You knew that when you joined. I’ve done this before. Have you?”

“What’s to know? You grab them, you hold them, you let them go.”

“You’re an idiot,” Helen replied. “You’ll do as I tell you.”

“I won’t—”

Before she could stop him, Yegor was out of his seat and moving toward Roma, shoulders hunched and fists raised. “You stupid bastard!”

Helen raised her arm, blocking Yegor from reaching the couch.

“Do you know what they’ll do to us if we get caught?” shouted Yegor. “In their eyes, we’ll be terrorists. No trial, no lawyers, just some dark hole the British have dug specially for people like us! Use your head! Helen knows what she’s doing. If you want to get paid and get back home, you’ll listen to her.”

Yegor’s words “back home” resonated with Helen. If they failed here, ending up in prison would be the better of their two fates. Her employer, wildly generous though he was, had made plain the price they’d pay for either failure or refusal to do exactly as he ordered. And even if they succeeded, what would await them back home? Almost certainly she and the others would be loose ends that needed tying up.

First, finish the job, she thought.

For several seconds Roma said nothing. Then he leaned back on the couch. “Fine. Now let me watch my program.”

“First give me the knife,” Helen said.

Without looking at her, Roma dug into his front pocket and handed her the blade. “I’ll want it back,” he said.

Olik emerged from the bathroom and walked to the sink, where he began filling a glass with water. Helen joined him. “Well?” she asked.

“I’m going to give her some aspirin. She’s in a lot of pain. And very scared. I told her we weren’t going to hurt her.”

Roma muttered, “Moron. We can’t let her go.”

“We’re not doing that,” said Helen.

“Then we have to go for the right girl and make sure we don’t mess it up,” replied Olik. “Helen, we can’t deal with two of them at the same time. It’s too much of a risk.”

Objectively she knew he was right, but the girl in their bathtub was there because of their mistake, and until now Helen had never had a job go wrong. She’d never killed one, had never tortured one, and had never accepted a contract that had asked for either. What sympathy she felt for the girl was reinforced by… what? A commitment of professionalism? The thought was almost laughable, but there it was.

She wouldn’t kill the girl.

Even so, Helen knew none of her personal reasons would convince her team, especially Roma, and while she didn’t particularly care, this wasn’t a discussion she wanted to have again.

“If we kill her, we can’t keep the body here. And if we dump her we’ll have a constable on every block, knocking on every door,” Helen said. “As it stands, that girl is simply missing. The police will assume she’s gone off with her boyfriend. It’ll be a few days before they start asking real questions, then another day or two before they start hunting for her. By then, we’ll be out of the city.” Helen looked at each man in turn. “Agreed?”

Yegor and Olik nodded, but Roma never took his eyes off the TV screen.

“Roma, answer me.”

“Where I would dump the body no one would ever find it.”

He said this with a smug half-smile. Helen felt a chill on her neck. Roma meant it.

“Okay, have it your way,” he said. “Let’s grab the other one and get out of this place.”