“Did you see anyone behind you?”
Kazem shook his head. “I did not.”
“I thought you might have noticed some of the men who work for me,” the Russian said. “They are bumbling imbeciles, all of them.”
Kazem knew different.
He said, “Am I to infer from this meeting that your superiors have agreed to help our cause?”
“In a way,” Bobkova said. She took another drink of coffee, then swirled the cup around, sizing him up. “As I am sure you are aware, my country has been a remarkable ally of the present regime, but we are certainly not averse to what is happening now. This insurgency, this… Persian Spring, as it has been called, is quite… remarkable.”
Kazem stifled a smile. He’d lived in the United States long enough to know that she was overusing the word.
“Our cause has a groundswell of support,” Kazem said. “Demonstrations beyond Tehran — Qom, Isfahan, east to Mashhad and as far south as Bandar Abbas, and countless other cities. Facebook, Twitter, Telegram — the government blocks them all, but we find ways around.” He waved his hand as if that were old news. “But you do not care about this. Will Russia provide what we need?”
“This is proving to be… remarkably difficult…” Bobkova looked up as she spoke, flashing her toothsome smile at a passerby to her left.
Kazem followed her eyes to see a young man in a beige trench coat — like something out of a Humphrey Bogart movie — stumble over his own feet. The man came to a full stop for a brief moment. A new flood of commuters coming in from a recent train outside across Crystal Drive, loosed mumbled curses at the man’s stupidity, flowing around him toward the Metro station as a river flows around a boulder. The man, likely a few years younger than Kazem, had pink skin that looked as if it had been rubbed with salt. His hair was slicked with pomade. An impeccable navy-blue pinstripe suit was visible beneath the open trench coat.
The pink man licked full, carpish lips as he shot a furtive look back and forth from Kazem to Bobkova. An instant later the spell was broken and he disappeared into the crowd toward the Metro station.
“I think he recognized you,” Kazem said. This odd-looking man with scrubbed skin set his teeth on edge.
“Indeed he did,” Elizaveta Bobkova said.
“What?” Kazem said, astounded at the flippancy of this woman. “You have me spend two hours avoiding surveillance, when all the while you planned for us to be seen together?”
Bobkova patted the table and gave a knowing smile. “My job is one of intricate masquerades. The measures you took this morning were absolutely necessary. If you did not try to lose your tail, the FBI would believe our meeting was of no consequence.”
Kazem shot a worried glance over his shoulder. “That man was FBI?”
“Hardly,” Bobkova scoffed. “I met him at an embassy dinner a few nights ago. But he is the talkative sort. That serves our purpose well enough. You should be happy. This way the United States will want a piece of the action. I would not be surprised if they begin to airdrop suitcases of money to you at once. That is the way Americans handle things.” A mischievous grin perked her lips. “And anyway, it will drive them crazy trying to figure out the why of it all.”
Kazem shook his head as if to clear it. “I do not understand any of this,” he said. “But you are the expert. As to the other matter, what do you mean by ‘in a way’? We have been specific enough in our requests. Iranian intelligence is bad enough, but the Revolutionary Guard is ruthless. There are things we will need to combat their effectiveness. Technical equipment that is imperative to the movement. What does this mean that you cannot help us directly?”
“I can see why people attach themselves to your cause.” She was staring into his eyes again. “So very remarkable…” She whispered to herself, dreamily, before snapping out of the stupor. She coughed, sitting up a little straighter. “Anyway, I mean just what I say. The government of Russia can provide you nothing directly.” Kazem started to protest, but she raised her hand. “But I will send you the contact information for the men who can.”
Bobkova was obviously intelligent and wanted him to think she had more information than she actually did. The masquerade of which he was a part made her little games look silly by comparison. He pushed away the uneaten half of his lemon cake and looked hard at the woman. The poor thing had no idea what she was up against, what she had become a part of. Her arrogance was… well, remarkable, and it would be her undoing.
“This is just plain weird,” an FBI counterintelligence agent named Murphy said, taking a sip from his coffee cup at a table sixty feet up the corridor from Bobkova.
“’Tis indeed, Grasshopper,” the senior of the two agents muttered. This one’s name was Coyne. He’d been with the Bureau for seventeen years, eleven of those with the Counterintelligence Division. Hailing from Tennessee, he counted his southern roots as a badge of honor and an outward sign of his savvy as a hunter of men.
The two agents watched the Iranian and the Russian with their peripheral vision while they drank their coffees and chatted. They wore neck lanyards with color-coded badges that allowed them access to the Pentagon, like half the other people in the underground shopping mall.
“The Russians have always played patty-cake with Tehran,” Murphy said. “I don’t get it. Why would Elizaveta Bobkova be meeting with the leader of a group trying to topple the present regime?”
“And better yet,” Coyne said, “why did she park herself right where Corey Fite would see her during his morning commute?”
“Corey Fite?”
“Guy with the puffy lips,” Coyne said. “He’s Senator Michelle Chadwick’s top adviser and boy toy. No, Elizaveta’s a smart lady. A certified no-shit brainiac. She’s the queen of the maskirovka, the big show. Crystal City is the Serengeti Plain of counterintel officers. This place has more spooks per square foot than anywhere in the nation. We’re everywhere, either training or running real ops. There’s no way Bobkova holds a meeting down here if she wants to keep it secret. She wanted to be seen — for sure by Fite, probably by us.”
“Why?” Murphy asked. “What’s the angle?”
“Skullduggery and shenanigans, Grasshopper.” Coyne set his coffee down hard enough that some of it geysered out of the little hole in the plastic lid. “We got the apparent leader of what’s shaking out to be a viable Iranian coup sharing cake with a known Russian spymaster — who wants Senator Chadwick to be aware of the meeting. I don’t know if they taught you this at Quantico, but if the Iranians and Russians are involved, they are up to their treacherous asses in no good.”
3
United States Air Force Captain Will Hyatt pulled his red VW Passat into the parking lot of the twenty-four-hour Walmart just west of Highway 95. People assigned to Creech Air Force Base tended to designate where they lived by the zip code alone rather than saying North Las Vegas. He’d just scored a house nearby in 89149. The kids were loving the new pool. The Walmart was just around the corner, so he’d offered to stop by “on his way into battle” to grab a few things for the twins’ birthday party.
Hyatt was sweating by the time he got out of the car, thinking he should have done a few laps himself just to cool off before work. It was early, not even seven in the morning, but heat already shimmered up from the asphalt.
He was in and out in a half-hour — mainly because he couldn’t buy anything that melted or went bad during his twelve-hour shift, which was pretty much everything on his wife’s list except paper plates and napkins. He’d grabbed a couple of bags of water balloons even if Shannon hadn’t told him to. All seven-year-olds liked water balloons, didn’t they? Will was only thirty, but it seemed like it was half a century since he’d been seven years old.