“Copy that,” Chavez said. “Midas got a screen grab of the girl from the mini-drone footage. I’ll send it off to Gavin and have him try and get an ID.”
“Finally,” Clark said. “Some good news.”
Lisanne flipped the switch on her radio, changing it to push-to-talk mode so she wouldn’t broadcast to the rest of the team. Teeth clenched, she was obviously in pain, her face pale. She cradled her right wrist in her lap but reached across with her left to touch Ryan on his hand where it rested on the steering wheel. “Thank you, Jack,” she said. “I gotta tell you, you’re a pretty handy guy to have around.”
8
Some people were born spies. Others found themselves deceived by the lure of international travel. Erik Dovzhenko was shamed into it by his mother.
The slap of Dovzhenko’s scuffed leather shoes pinged off the concrete walls of the stairwell, sounding like a handful of coins dropped into a wishing well. Wishes were wasted in Evin Prison. The Ministry of Intelligence, or VAJA, made certain of that. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps stomped out any hope they missed.
Dovzhenko paused mid-step, taking a contemplative sip of his coffee — a third of it milk — and steeled himself in the sterile quiet. He was already exhausted and wanted to sit down right there on the stairs, but he was on camera so there was no point in that. Stopping to drink some coffee was one thing. Sitting down to think would surely spawn questions he did not care to answer. Russia and Iran were allies, but the IRGC mistrusted even those in their own ranks — especially now. A moment of weakness or indecision would be seen for what it was — a lack of commitment. So Erik Dovzhenko took another drink of his coffee and hauled himself downward with the metal banister. The journey to section 2A, subbasement 4, of Evin Prison was not an easy one to make, and he needed all the help he could get.
He was an experienced, if uneasy, professional, fifteen years with the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki — the SVR — half of the Russian version of the old Soviet KGB that worked mainly outside the motherland. If FSB was the Russian equivalent of the American FBI, SVR was the CIA. Dovzhenko had the dark, wavy hair of his Azeri mother, which he combed straight back with pomade. He’d inherited his father’s handsome, if somewhat brooding, Russian face. That along with his olive skin and dark hair made it difficult to tell just exactly where in the world he was from. Such ambiguous ethnicity came in handy for an intelligence officer, and he sometimes wondered if his mother had not married his father for the sole purpose of having a child who could easily melt into a crowd virtually anywhere in the world. Dovzhenko was a fit one hundred ninety pounds and just under six feet tall, with square shoulders and massive boxer’s hands. His thumbs were on the large side, which had prompted a combatives instructor at spy school in Chelebityevo to comment that they would be good for gouging out the eyes of an opponent in battle. Dovzhenko had done some grisly things during his fifteen years with the SVR, but so far, he had yet to poke out anyone’s eyes with his thumbs.
He should have been promoted by now, certainly further along in his career than watching the goings-on of IRGC thugs in the belly of an Iranian prison that stank of shit and moldy bread. His mother was the spy in the family, using her knowledge of Azerbaijani and other Turkic languages in service to the KGB in the early 1980s. She had good stories and told them often, joking that she had started pushing Erik toward the clandestine life while he was still “hanging on the tit.”
As far as Erik knew, she’d not been employed since the KGB was dissolved, but, as she often said, there was no such thing as a former KGB officer. You were always active, just waiting to be called back into service. No one called. Erik could tell she missed the action, the excitement. He supposed that was the principal reason she pushed him toward the SVR — so she could live vicariously through the exploits she knew he would have. His father had been a teacher. An unassuming and gentle man who sat in his chair with his nose in a book while his wife skulked around the house with an old Makarov in her pocket, drinking a potent Azerbaijani mulberry liquor called tutovka—or, worse, cheap Russian vodka in a bottle with a tearaway foil lid. There was no need to replace a cap once Zahra Dovzhenko tucked into a bottle.
His mother’s drunken tirades alone had been enough to push Erik out of the house. She still had enough contacts that she was able to get him recruited. He was athletic and smart, and he found he had an aptitude for the work, though he never really enjoyed it. There was a certain sociopathic nature to spying that always left him a little bilious. He had no trouble walking up to a criminal and punching him in the face — or even shooting him, if it came to that. But he had too much of his father in him to enjoy the lying game as much as his mother did.
Men and women who lied for a living tended to be uncomfortable around those who valued the truth. Erik Dovzhenko was trusted implicitly, but he was not loved — by his peers or by his superiors. In an organization like SVR, not to be loved meant not to be promoted. While so many of his cohort had already attained chief of station in places like Prague and Berlin, Erik Dovzhenko was stuck in the eternal purgatory of mid-level case officer, descending into the lowest circles of Hell — like here in Tehran.
Six meters above, spring had come to the city. Sparrows flitted and chirped among new sycamore and mulberry growth, grass turned from brown to green overnight, and the snow that blanketed Mount Tochal was beginning to melt. Six meters below, deep in the bowels of section 2A, subbasement 4, things were much darker. Sewage gurgled through open drains. The smell of urine and hopelessness mingled in the fetid air with stale cigarette smoke and the overwhelming stench of the IRGC guards’ cologne.
The prison — sometimes called Evin University because of the intellectuals and student activists housed there — could be unbearably hot in summer and bitter cold in winter, adding to the misery of the prisoners. Dovzhenko’s white shirt was damp from his short walk across the parking lot in the rain. He customarily wore a brown horsehide jacket, though it made him look decidedly more like the Russian spy that he was. But good jackets were hard to break in, so he’d left it in his car, not wanting the stink of the prison to seep into the leather.
Maryam would smell it, even over the smell of his cigarettes. She was attuned to such things.
Reaching the bottom level, he took a long drink of coffee and pulled open the heavy steel door. It was not locked. No one in their right mind would come down here unless they had to. Dovzhenko almost smiled at that notion. Major Parviz Sassani wanted to be here, but the IRGC thug only bore out Dovzhenko’s theory. The man was good at his job but definitely not in his right mind.
The moans and whimpers of the prisoners met Dovzhenko before he got the stairwell door open — along with something else.
In Lefortovo, the prison in Moscow where this sort of work was undertaken, detainees were kept isolated from outside stimuli. But the Iranians had taken a page from the playbook the Argentine junta had used during their Dirty War. The sounds of traffic driving down from the ski resorts on Mount Tochal, planes flying overhead, and groundskeepers’ equipment were clearly audible. Like a medieval oubliette or “pit of forgetting,” prisoners heard the world above as it carried on around them as if they did not exist. These sounds went only one way — piped in electronically so the prisoners’ complaints and the torture itself could not be heard above. The Ayatollah had assured the world that this sort of thing did not go on in Evin. According to the Supreme Leader, the government had built a swimming pool and Jacuzzis in the prison. In Iran, as elsewhere, the biggest lies were more easily swallowed.