Authors: Greg Rucka
Gordon-Palmer demanded she send both Minders. Chace refused, allocating Poole for the job, and maintaining that Lankford had to be held in reserve in case another Special Op arose elsewhere. Less than twenty-four hours after Poole hit the ground in Manila, London received the ransom demand, and with it, the ticking clock. Forty-eight hours or the boy would start coming home in pieces, wrapped in what was left of the girlfriend.
For two days, Chace had walked Vauxhall Cross, aware of the whispers, of a looming sense of doom. C pressed again for Lankford to be deployed, and Chace again refused. She was called to Whitehall, to the office of Sir Walter Seccombe, the Permanent Undersecretary to the Foreign Office, certainly the most powerful person in Government she’d ever been made to answer to. He demanded to know the disposition of Tiretrack. He interrogated her at length about each and every decision she’d made, then asked why she wasn’t doing more. He informed her that, without question, HMG could not concede to the kidnappers’ demands. He then warned her about the acute embarrassment to HMG if the operation failed. He pointed out that the MP in question was of the Opposition, and that a successful operation would have as profound political repercussions as a failure. He sent her back to Vauxhall Cross with the clear knowledge that, should SIS blow this, it would be her head sent to the MP in question.
With just under two hours left on the deadline, at four in the morning London time, Poole contacted Chace via the Ops Room. She hadn’t been home since the crisis began, and had even resorted to sending Kate to her home in Camden to look after Tamsin the previous night, when no one else could be found for the task. In the three days since the kidnapping, she’d managed, perhaps, three hours of sleep, and had been forced to send a runner out to buy her clean clothes, just to keep from smelling like the inside of a gym sock. She’d been called a bitch twice to her face, and behind her back so many times she’d lost count.
Poole had a lead on a possible location where the two were being held. Could he get support for a rescue attempt? Lankford, preferably, or at least some CIA assistance?
No, she told him. There isn’t time.
You’re going to get me killed, Poole said.
At which point Chace told him, in front of God and the Ops Room, to draw arms from the Station and get on with the fucking job, and that if he had wanted things easy, he should have stayed in the fucking SAS.
Two hours and six minutes later, Poole contacted the Ops Room again. He had the boy. He had the girlfriend. Might he come home now, please?
Yes, Chace said. You can come home now, Nicky. Nicely done.
And she could swear she heard the smile over the crackle of the satellite phone, as he said, “Thank you, ma’am.”
She’d informed C, the Deputy Chief, and the FCO of the successful completion of the mission. She’d told the Ops Room staff they’d done a damn fine job. Then she’d gone home, hugged her daughter, and managed a full six hours of sleep before returning to the office.
Crocker came back to work a week and a half later. Lankford became Minder Three again, Poole Minder Two, and Chace returned to the Pit as Minder One, with a sense of relief only matched by her sense of regret.
“Minder
One to see you,” Kate said as the door to the inner office cracked open.
“Is there coffee?”
“You know, even decaf has caffeine in—”
“Shut up.” Crocker’s head appeared past the doorframe. He glared at Kate, then at Chace. “You can come in if you bring coffee.”
Chace took the mug Kate handed her, stepped into Crocker’s office to find him standing behind his desk, sorting the folders heaped there. She handed over the coffee, which he set aside without tasting. He continued playing solitaire with the files, so Chace turned and closed the door, then took a seat opposite the desk.
“Make it quick,” Crocker said, still searching the paperwork. “I’m already late for the daily with Daniel and Simon.”
“Ops Room wanted me to give you this.” Chace handed over the copy of Barnett’s signal. “There’s no Falcon running in the Iran theatre. They can’t crack the second sequence, but it looks like a number string.”
“Thomas Bay’s got a Falcon in Jakarta.” Crocker glanced at the paper without taking it, went back to sorting, stopped, and pulled the signal out of Chace’s hand. “What the hell does this mean?”
“That was Barnett’s question, though phrased more politely. I’ve already got Lex onto Tehran for more details, and Ron’s put a signal in to Bay.”
Crocker grunted, thrust the sheet back. “Well in hand, then. Anything else?”
Chace hesitated. “It can wait.”
“Is it quick?”
“Depends, really.”
He stopped, fixed her with a stare. Crocker had three inches and a dozen years on her, black hair and mean, brown eyes that had seemed to grow meaner since the heart attack. Always lean to the point of thin, he’d lost weight, too. The combined effect now made him look, more than ever, like a malevolent scarecrow dressed in a dark three-piece suit. “What is it?”
“No, we can talk later.”
She saw his eyes dart past her, to the door, registering that she’d closed it. Crocker took his chair. “Tell me.”
“You heard about what happened at the School?”
“You took a fall.”
“Yes.”
“I talked with Chester when the scores came in. All of you did exceptionally well, as expected. The fall is nothing, Tara. It happens, could’ve happened to Nicky or Chris.”
Chace shook her head slightly. She’d told herself the same thing. Then she’d told herself that wasn’t the point. She set the copy of the signal down on his desk; then, after a moment to commit herself, took the letter she was carrying from her pocket and handed it across to Crocker. She watched his jaw work while he read, imagined the ferocity of his desire for a cigarette. At the moment, she wanted one, too.
“The Ops Room?” Crocker asked.
“I think I’d do well in Mission Planning.”
He set the letter on the desk in front of him. “This is because of the fall.”
“No.”
“Because if it is, I’ll tell you again, it happens to everyone. Chester says it was raining. He says you were ahead of Nicky when it happened, you were leading.”
“It’s not the fall, Boss. I’m nine years in. It’s enough, it’s time for me to go.”
“I did nine years.”
“You did eight,” Chace corrected. “Four as Minder One, and I’m coming up on my sixth, now. And that’s not the point. Tamsin’s five, Boss, and I’ve lost count the number of times she’s called the nanny ‘Mommy’ instead of me. She’s starting school, she deserves to know that I’ll be there when she gets home. Even if I weren’t getting old, even if I weren’t slowing down, I long ago outlived my operational usefulness to the Firm.”
“If this is about self-esteem—”
“Don’t be daft. Nine years in the field, Paul. For Christ’s sake, if there’s an intelligence agency anywhere in the world that doesn’t know who I am at this point, it’s because they’re not bloody trying.”
“I think you may be overstating things a bit.”
“Hyperbole for the sake of rhetoric.”
“I thought you wanted my job.”
“I thought I did, too.” Chace grinned at him. “Then I did it.”
“You did it very well, by all accounts.”
“I’m not a vulture, Boss, I’m not going to sit on a branch and wait for your time to come to an end. Nicky’s more than ready to run the Section, and Lankford’s learned all that we can teach him.”
She went silent, watching as Crocker frowned at her from across his cluttered desk. Now that the deed was done, Chace was all the more certain it was the right thing for her to do. She had expected a twinge of regret, had been afraid of taking the step, but there was no anxiety in her at all, just the same certainty that had come to her at the base of the climbing wall, the knowledge that this was right.
She was done, and from Crocker’s expression, she knew he saw it, too.
“I’ll need you to stay on as Head of Section until I can find a new Minder Three,” Crocker said, finally. “Once that’s done, I’ll move you to Mission Planning, promote Lankford and Poole in order. Will that work for you?”
“More than fair. I’m not looking to leave you holding the bag, Boss.”
“No, I know you’re not.”
He checked his watch, pushed himself up from his chair, and Chace took the cue, got to her feet, as well. “You’ve informed Nicky and Chris?”
“I wanted to talk to you first,” Chace said.
“I’ll have to tell the DC and C.”
“Of course.”
Crocker glanced back at his desk, grabbed two of the red folders waiting there, then saw the copy of the signal from Tehran and took that, too, handing it back to Chace. “Keep me posted on this. If Jakarta’s got an agent on walkabout, I want to know.”
“Will do.”
He appraised her for a moment, and Chace thought he looked uncharacteristically sad, his many years revealed, with all the ghosts that haunted them, a number of them ghosts they shared. Men like Brian Butler and Edward Kittering and Tom Wallace, all of them Minders at one point or another, all of them taken before their time.
“You had a good run, Tara,” Crocker said.
She thought about Tamsin, how she would ask about her Da, who he was, what had happened to him. It had been less than a year ago that Chace had finally explained to her daughter that his name was Tom, and that he had died before she was born. The inevitable question: how did he die?
Chace had lied, she’d had to. She’d said nothing about Saudi Arabia, or the Wadi as-Sirhan, or how SIS had been willing to sell her life for a political convenience. She’d lied. She’d told Tamsin they would talk about it when she was older, and that all she needed to know is that Tom would have loved her every bit as much as Tara herself did, that Tom Wallace had been a good man, an honorable, brave, and honest man, and that Tara loved him still.
“I finished the race, at least,” Chace said to Crocker.
CHAPTER FOUR
IRAN—TEHRAN, U.S. DEN OF ESPIONAGE
6 DECEMBER 1428 HOURS (GMT +3.30)
One of the problems
Shirazi was now dealing with, certainly, was one of his own making, though he had fought against it at the time. The order to arrest the ten British Embassy workers at the beginning of November had come from on-high—not via the President’s office, but rather from the National Security Council, the members of which had all been appointed by the Supreme Leader himself. Such was government in Iran; there was a public face, as embodied by the Office of the President, and then there was the real power, hidden deep and out of sight, controlled by the Supreme Leader and his handpicked cadre of supporters.
Shirazi’s place in VEVAK put him deep within the second camp, but his role was as a subordinate, and it had not been an order he could refuse. He’d tried, anyway, fighting to secure a meeting with one of the Council members, where he explained why the idea was, to him, such a bad one.
They all knew how this would end, Shirazi said. It would end with the release of all who are arrested, and the declaration that they are all now persona non grata. It would be for show, nothing more, and the British would have to replace the embassy staff they had lost, and Shirazi and his people would be back where they had started, once again trying to determine who of the new arrivals worked for SIS and who didn’t.
We know their people at the embassy, Shirazi said. We have already identified them. We will lose time, time that SIS will capitalize on to strengthen their network.
His argument fell on deaf ears. There were other things afoot, he was told, in particular the Kurdish Hezbollah operations in the north of Iraq, not to mention the situation in Basra, as well as a purchase of heavy weapons from China, all of which required shifting the West’s attention for the moment. It had been decided that this was the best way to manage it. Certainly, Shirazi would have no difficulty in identifying any replacements SIS sent into Tehran. Or was he telling them otherwise?
So the British had been arrested, amongst them the man Terry Ricks, who Shirazi had months ago identified as the main player for SIS on the ground. Ricks had been very good, had made things difficult for them, never obvious in what he did, never revealing when or if he knew he was being watched. Some days, the follow teams would have no difficulty at all in keeping eyes on him; others, Ricks would seem to shake his watchers by dint of nothing more than good fortune. It was frustrating, even agonizing, but he was, at least, a known quantity. Shirazi was certain that, with patience and time, the man’s secrets would be revealed. They would learn the identity of his agents, they would uncover the extent of the British network, and then they would strike, shutting the whole thing down and putting SIS, once more, out of business in Iran.
As Shirazi had foreseen, Ricks was PNG’ed following his release, and over the next weeks the replacements for the depleted embassy staff had trickled into Iran. At least one of them, if not more, was working for SIS and was Ricks’ replacement. But who the man was Shirazi did not know, and he hated that. Not simply that there were spies in his country, on his ground, in his face, but that he knew it and yet had not identified them.
Surveillance had been placed on the new arrivals, but all of them, thus far, seemed to be exactly who they claimed. It would be another month before their routines could be firmly established, mid-January, at least, before he would be able to look at the reports the teams had compiled and try to determine which of the staff wasn’t exactly as he appeared. It was, once again, a situation that demanded patience.
But knowing who the British had in Tehran would have made managing the situation with the dead drop in the Park-e Shahr so much easier.
Shirazi
was in his office on Monday morning, looking at the very surveillance reports in question, when Zahabzeh called from the apartment in Karaj, just west of Tehran, where he and another four trusted men were keeping Hossein out of sight. Zahabzeh’s absence from the office had yet to be noticed, and even if it had been, Shirazi knew it would be assumed that he was on assignment, which, in fact, he was. The call, consequently, angered Shirazi; his orders had been for Zahabzeh to wait for contact, not to initiate contact himself, and he found the younger man’s impatience annoying.
“What?” Shirazi demanded.
“He’s getting anxious,” Zahabzeh said. “We hadn’t heard from you.”
“I don’t care if he’s wetting himself in fear. This is why you called?”
“We hadn’t heard from you. Can you meet me? Taleqani? By the museum?”
“Two hours,” Shirazi said.
Zahabzeh
was waiting for him near what had once been the U.S. Embassy, gazing at one of the many political murals that decorated both sides of the street in the neighborhood. This one was of the Statue of Liberty, her face a skull, standing against a background of the American flag. Further along there was another mural, similar in theme, depicting both the United States and Israel as devils, the Big and Little Satans, attempting to shackle the freedom-loving people of Iran. In case anyone missed the point, there was another section of wall, white letters on baby blue, written in English.
DEATH TO U.S.A.
To be honest, Shirazi found it all a little much, as if the neighborhood had been decorated for the benefit of tourists, rather than Tehran’s residents. One could travel the entirety of the sprawling city, from the wealthier, newer buildings on the northern side of town in the shadow of the Alborz, where Hossein was now being held, to the southern, older city, and find no such rhetoric. Political, even patriotic murals, yes, normally of the Supreme Leader or his predecessor, Khomeini, each man depicted larger-than-life, gazing down with stern rebuke or paternal affection; and others, a lonely soldier or a weeping wife, pieces done to commemorate the suffering caused by the War of Iraqi Aggression, what was known in the West as the Iran-Iraq War.
Shirazi came alongside Zahabzeh, adjusted his glasses, looking up at the skull. When he spoke, he did nothing to keep the annoyance he was feeling out of his voice.
“Your orders were to stay with Hossein and wait until I contacted you.”
“He’s being watched,” Zahabzeh said. “There are four men with him, he won’t go anywhere.”
“But he will note your absence.”
“I hadn’t heard from you, not since Saturday. We’ve seen nothing at the apartment, no sign that anyone is even looking there. I wanted to be sure that everything was still going as planned.”
“He takes his walks as instructed?”
“Twice a day, once in the morning, once in the evening, carrying the book. We wire him each time, but so far he’s had no conversations with anyone.”
Shirazi grunted, turned away from the mural, began making his way up the block, towards the embassy. Zahabzeh fell in beside him. After the hostages had been released, someone, somewhere, had decided that the building should remain as a reminder, and the chancery had been converted into a museum. Only a couple of the rooms were open to the public, and then for just a few days a year, in February. Shirazi had seen the displays inside, the shredded papers that had been painstakingly reassembled, the Farsi translations of the CIA’s activities. Some were quite damning, going all the way back to Operation: Ajax, when the CIA had engineered the coup d’état against Mossadegh’s democratically elected government, replacing him with a leader more to both American and British liking, Shah Mohammad Reza.
Only part of the embassy was a museum, however. Now the majority of the space was taken up by the Sepah, the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, known in the West as the Republican Guards. The Basij militia was now controlled out of the building, as well, under direct supervision of the Guards.
Shirazi wondered if Zahabzeh’s choice of a meeting place wasn’t meant to be a message. The Republican Guards were the army within the Army, a private enterprise of their own, as much a part of the Supreme Leader’s apparatus of control as the National Security Council. No one rose to power—at least, no one rose very high in power—without some connection to the Guards. Shirazi had served within their ranks for a short time, running operations in Lebanon during the late 80s, and Zahabzeh, too, had been one of their number, though his time had been spent mostly in western Afghanistan, in Herat.
If it was a message, Zahabzeh was displaying a subtlety that Shirazi had been sure he lacked. The fact was, they were blackmailing a member of the Supreme Leader’s family into doing their bidding for the sake of an operation that had no official approval or oversight. To some, that would be tantamount to treason, no matter the reason, no matter the goal.
“Everything is still going as planned,” Shirazi assured him, as they crossed the street, dodging traffic.
“Did surveillance see anyone clear the drop in the park?”
“There was no surveillance.” He saw Zahabzeh’s surprise from the corner of his eye. “What if the British had made us watching the park? Their agent would have aborted, he would have known the drop was compromised, and all of this would be for nothing.”
“But if Hossein is wrong? If his memory betrayed him? What if they no longer use the drop at all?”
“You know as well as I that a good dead drop is worth gold, and the drop in Park-e Shahr is a very good drop, indeed. You can enter the park from any direction, take as long as you like to reach it, as long as you might need to flush anyone watching you. It was safer this way.”
“Then we don’t even know if they have the message.”
“They have the message. I walked through the park Sunday afternoon, the all-clear had been chalked up on the garbage can, just as Hossein described it. I checked the north entrance on my way out, no drop-loaded signal.”
Zahabzeh stopped, and Shirazi was obliged to do the same, turning back to face him. “How much longer do we wait?”
“It won’t be long,” Shirazi said.
“But how much longer, sir?”
“Hossein did as he was instructed?”
“I was with him when he made the phone call. He told his family that he was in Mashhad for the week, to visit a friend.”
“Then we have until this coming Sunday before he will be missed. That is what this is about, isn’t it? You’re losing your nerve?”
Zahabzeh stiffened. “I am not.”
“Then stop worrying about what will happen if we fail, and instead worry about keeping Hossein under control. The British will respond. They will have to. When they do, things will begin to happen very quickly, indeed.”
“No, I know that.” Zahabzeh struggled with his next words. “You’re not trying to get me out of the way, are you, sir? Having me stay with Hossein, I mean.”
So that was it, Shirazi realized. Zahabzeh’s ambition was at war with this newly discovered subtlety. “You are with Hossein because you’re the only person I trust in this, outside of myself.”
Zahabzeh studied him, then glanced back across Taleqani, towards the embassy and the Guards. “It’s a big prize, that’s all.”
Shirazi removed his glasses, holding them up to catch the midday sun, checking the lenses. They were clean, but he put a breath to them all the same, thinking that Zahabzeh had revealed much of himself in just a few minutes, and that it could make things difficult later. That the younger man had his eyes on Shirazi’s job was a given; his impatience to obtain it was something Shirazi had never considered.
“Big enough for us to share it.” Shirazi replaced his glasses. “I promise you, when the time comes, you will be there. Everyone who matters will know your part in the operation. You have my word, Farzan.”
“You speak as if we’ve already succeeded.”
“We must succeed,” Shirazi said. “If we fail, we’ll both be shot.”