“Have your friend sit down.” I didn’t say this to Aziz. It was an ultimatum that I expected Karimi to use to reestablish his footing in the meeting.
He said, “I wouldn’t presume to tell my friend how to express his indignation.”
“Then tell Mr. Aziz he has two choices. He can sit, or I can help him sit. Please tell him that my definition of help and his definition may not be the same.”
Karimi twisted his head in Aziz’s direction. He gave a classic Gallic shrug and opened his palms to his friend as if to say, You decide.
Aziz stood his ground for three face-saving seconds, then trudged back to his chair and sat.
“Thank you.” I was still looking at Karimi. “I need contacts. I need cover. I need transportation.”
“Why come to me? If my sources are correct about you, you’re a phone call away from our leadership. Why come to me?” he asked again.
“Because I respect the chain of command,” I said. I was lying, of course. I couldn’t have cared less about the MEK’s chain of command. What I respected was the fact that the guys on the ground — guys like these two sewer rats — were the ones in the know about every other sewer rat in Paris, and that’s what I needed.
“Listen, Karimi, you want your country back, then we can’t play games. You have to trust me, and I have to trust you.” Total bullshit. I trusted this guy about as far as I could throw him. “Make a call to Amsterdam. Set up a meeting for me tomorrow. Noon. Tell them Mr. Green respects the MEK hierarchy.” I was making myself ill. “Tell them these are the most important times in the MEK’s history.”
I paused and let the words linger. Karimi wasn’t stupid. He negotiated for a living, and he knew the negotiations weren’t complete. “And?” he said.
“And I need the immediate whereabouts of one of your esteemed colleagues, Mr. Karimi. A complete and total waste of humanity named Reza Mahvi.”
“Reza.” He couldn’t hold my eye. His gaze shifted to Aziz, who used the moment to inch to the very edge of his seat. Karimi drew a noisy breath, glanced back, and said, “Why?”
“Because he’s peeing in my government’s cornflakes, that’s why,” I said. “And because he’s selling the information to your sworn enemy. Any other questions?”
CHAPTER 4
It was a black night. Moonless. Ideal.
Not that I had planned it that way.
I’d been given the word. Mr. Elliot said the Iranian had to disappear. My mission depended on it. He didn’t say to wait for the perfect night.
Disappear was one of the many euphemisms guys like Mr. Elliot used. You know, one of those words that’s maybe just a little less offensive or distasteful than coming right out and saying, Kill the bastard.
Politicians love euphemisms. I guess we like them all right in our business, too. We used the term special ops when what we were really talking about was burning down unsavory governments, sabotaging narco-terrorist operations, torturing people who may or may not know things we needed to know, assassinating the rottenest apples in the barrel. Controlling a little war in Africa or a well-meaning skirmish in the Middle East. You get the picture.
But this kind of thing was done neither haphazardly nor irreverently. Every operation, every assignment, every action was plotted with purpose and clarity. Some people might look upon sabotage or assassination or insurrection as indefensible, but nothing could be further from the truth. They were acts with a singular purpose, acts bent on defending the American way of life.
I had no problem putting a gun in the face of a drug dealer suspected of blackmailing a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and I had no problem pulling the trigger. You play with fire you pay the price. But I did have a problem with a U.S. senator who lacked the pluck and the self-control to keep his cocaine problem behind closed doors. Now he was jeopardizing my mission, and now I was being asked to clean up his mess.
The drug dealer’s name was Reza Mahvi. I’d known him back when he worked as a captain in a swank restaurant on New York’s Upper East Side and owned a little piece of a crowded honky-tonk bar in the Village. Reza knew half the politicians in D.C. back then, and the senator from Massachusetts was just one of them. Reza had fixed up dozens of congressmen with expensive women and nearly as many with enough pot and blow to keep them high twenty-four hours a day.
The last time I’d seen the Iranian, I was undercover in New York, and he was bragging about the women he dated as if half of them were movie stars and the other half were United Nations staffers instead of call girls and political wannabes. I remember his making a federal case about the orange Corvette he drove back then, as if he’d plunked down forty grand in cash for the thing instead of digging himself further and further into debt the way all his Iranian buddies did.
Yeah, I’d known Reza Mahvi well enough. Did I like him? The truth was, liking him or disliking him wasn’t part of the job back then, even though I’d acted like he was my best buddy every time I went into the club. Reza wasn’t a big enough fish or a ballsy enough player to trade heavy in the hard stuff, but he knew the guys who did. Part of my job for the twenty-seven years I’d spent running black ops was to find them.
Apparently, somewhere along the line, Reza had relocated to Paris and graduated from drugs and women to extortion and blackmail. The senator from Massachusetts had become one of his favorite targets. But now Reza wanted more than the senator’s money: he wanted the kind of information that only the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was privy to. I didn’t know which of them was more stupid or more careless, the guy doing the blackmailing or the guy with the target on his forehead. I had my opinion, but it didn’t mean much under the circumstances.
When Mr. Elliot said that Reza Mahvi had to disappear, I knew immediately that the order had come from the highest level. No one had to say another word. I understood completely. Reza and his once benign dog-and-pony show had stepped over the line, and the most important mission of my career was in jeopardy. Wasn’t going to happen.
I didn’t like carrying a gun in a foreign city, especially with a fake passport in my pocket. I didn’t like using MEK sewer rats for my source information. It also wouldn’t have been my first choice to make the hit on a street as busy as the Rue de Pantin, but I didn’t have the luxury of waiting for Reza to take a midnight stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens.
The Iranian had taken up residence in a seventeenth-century apartment house within spitting distance of the Seine, but just far enough away to keep the rents reasonable. He was on a month-to-month lease. It was 11:30 P.M. when I cruised down the street the first time. I was driving a beat-up Renault that Davy Johansen assured me could not be traced. It was Thursday night, and I had the windows down. The fragrance off the Seine hinted of an early autumn, my favorite time of year in Paris. Too bad I wouldn’t be around long to enjoy it.
Lights blazed from a dozen or more windows across the face of the complex. I heard music drifting down from a third-floor balcony, and I saw a half-dozen people with wineglasses in their hands. I made two more passes. Then I toured the parking lot out back and found the space reserved for unit 19, Reza Mahvi’s place. Cars filled half the other spaces, and most were newer models owned by twenty- and thirty-year-olds who probably saw themselves as “upwardly mobile.” Too bad Reza had given up his orange Corvette: it would have stood out like a sore thumb and told all his neighbors that an Iranian pimp lived in unit 19. These days he drove a white 1984 Mercedes convertible, as if that were less conspicuous.