“Please put your gun away, Mr. Moreau,” the man at the wheel said. He was already rolling down his window. “They may have recognized our van.”
“What’s that mean?”
He glanced at me. His expression only reinforced that I clearly had not had time to grasp the unwritten rules that governed the underground in a city run by fanatics. He said, “The Guards we cannot buy off. We don’t even try. It’s the next best thing to signing your own death warrant. The police, they are a different story. Most loathe the current regime. Most have families.”
Zand eased the van up to the curb and rolled to a stop.
Have at least two contingencies, Mr. Elliot used to say. Contingency number one: a viable escape route. I spent three seconds building a visual map of the neighborhood. There were small shops and apartments jammed together on either side of the street. But there was a florist on the immediate right, with the front door propped open with a plastic bucket that held fresh bouquets. Assuming the florist had an exit onto the alley — nobody likes assumptions, but this seemed like a pretty safe one — I could be out in the alley in ten seconds and improvising my next step. Contingency number two: incapacitate the police, relieve them of their weapons, and trade the van for their police car. I liked this one better, though I didn’t know if Giv and Zand were up to it.
The Mercedes halted behind us. The frantic rhythm of its red emergency lights screamed danger. I watched in the van’s side mirror.
The driver got out. He adjusted his uniform and hitched up his pistol belt; in other words, he could have been any out-of-shape cop in any city in the world. He walked toward the left side of the van while his partner stayed behind in the sedan. Zand waited, his gaze shifting from the rearview to the outside mirror. He prepared himself with a deep breath.
By this time, I’d decided on contingency number one if things went bad. If push came to shove, the cop approaching Zand’s window would get the first bullet. I’d roll out the passenger-side door, drill the other one with a couple of shots through the windshield, and sprint into the florist. It wasn’t a great plan.
I scoped the area, looking for unmarked cars or suspicious figures among the pedestrians. I saw none. So, if it was a trap, it was a well-disguised one. If the Revolutionary Guards were onto me, they would never send just one squad car. They’d send two dozen commandos. That was how they operated.
The cop sauntered up to the window. He peeked in, his dark, pointed face charged by an elongated nose and a poorly trimmed mustache. Sunglasses covered his eyes, even though the sun had long since hidden itself along the western horizon. He eased an elbow onto the doorframe and smiled the kind of smile that a banker shares with a customer seeking an embarrassingly high-interest loan.
He and Zand exchanged greetings in relaxed Farsi, and I had to wonder what the hell was going on. He glanced into the back at Giv. He said, “Pleasant day, no, Giv?”
“Not a bad day, Farid,” Giv replied.
Very chummy. If this cop was after me, he did a great job of hiding his jitters.
Farid looked at me now. He lifted his sunglasses. His brow cinched and the edges of his mouth quirked. His gaze traveled to the canvas bundle on the floor and returned to me with an amused grin.
I smiled. It wasn’t a particularly friendly smile because I was also calculating the geometry necessary to plant a 9 mm slug in his forehead.
Giv coughed, loudly and deliberately. I saw him turn a palm up at the cop. He said, “What do you want, Farid?”
The cop turned from me and replaced his sunglasses. “I was getting worried you had forgotten me.”
“We’ve been busy. What do you need?”
“What I always need.” The cop rubbed his fingertips together. This wasn’t about me after all. It was about his regular shakedown. Yeah, I was relieved, but a guy on the take was no better than a cockroach on the sidewalk. Both deserved to be squashed. Maybe I’d shoot him just on principle alone. His grin widened. “Could be your boss’ warehouse is overdue for an inspection. What do you think?”
It was no secret that the MEK smuggled contraband in from Europe and the Far East. They were one of Charlie’s biggest competitors.
“Can’t have that, can we?” Giv said. He reached into his coat and retrieved his wallet. He counted out all the bills that he had, euros, not rials. He held it out. “I’m short. You’re not gonna make an issue out of it, I hope.”
Farid gestured for the money. Giv reached across Zand’s chest and gave it to him. Counted it. Then grinned. “Nah, this’ll hold you till next week.” He slapped the money against the doorframe and turned back to his car.
“Baksheesh,” Giv said to me. “Protection money.”
“Yeah, I got it,” I said. The question was, did I believe it? This op was so full of smoke and misdirection that an elaborate double cross would not have surprised me.
The three of us were watching as Farid got back inside the Mercedes. The windshield threw shadows across his face, but there was no mistaking the smirk as he showed off the payout to his partner. The emergency lights stopped flashing.
Zand put the van in gear. We lurched away from the curb and back into traffic. If I hadn’t been so exhausted, I probably would have burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of what had just happened. On balance, we’d just lost ten minutes, and I wasn’t sure we had ten minutes to lose.
I felt my iPhone vibrate. An incoming message from General Tom Rutledge read: Need to talk.
“Problem?” Zand misread the expression on my face.
“I need two minutes,” I said to him. “Find a place to stop.”
Zand swung onto a side street and pulled up next to small, neighborhood park. Before I climbed out, I looked back at Giv. “Check with your boss. Make sure we’re on schedule.”
Then I glanced at our driver. “Keep the engine running.”
I connected an earpiece to the phone and put some space between myself and the van. I stopped under a shaggy plain tree, engaged the secure-call app, and called General Rutledge’s number.
On the second ring, he answered, his voice brusque and strained. “I know you’re on the move, but I wanted you to know what we know.”
“Go.”
“You were right,” he said, and then confirmed that everything I’d sent him since day one had been verified, including the fact that satellite recon and sources on the ground had established that all twenty-one Sejil-2 missiles were on the move.
So, Professor Fouraz’s information had been spot on. “Okay. What else?”
“Listeners picked up chatter bouncing between major players”—meaning all branches of the Iranian military—“which means the clock is seriously ticking.”
I wanted to say, It’s been seriously ticking for the last eleven days, General, but I didn’t. Instead, I said, “It’s showtime. What else?”
“Ever since we got your note about The Twelver’s pond, we’ve been keeping tabs on the area,” Tom said. “And there’s been an increase in traffic there, just like Bluebird said there would be.”
The Toad’s pond: Tare Ankaboot. The secret facility where Ahmadinejad and the mullahs were set to ride out a nuclear exchange. “The Toad and his friends are on the move. Chickenshit bastards,” I said. “How much time do we have?”
“Safe to say that the margin of error between success and catastrophe is thinner than thin,” he said. “Yoda has ordered Big George.”
So the president had set the wheels in motion on Tom’s attack plan. And it went without saying that if we missed the window to hit the launch sites, any number of the Sejil-2 nukes would get away. I ran their target cities through my head: Tel Aviv. Rome. Vienna. Istanbul. Athens. Nuremberg.