“ETA on the party?” In other words, when would our bombers be in the air?
“Six hours.”
“What’s my data exchange?”
“We’ve got a link that will route you through the listeners and right to the eagles and owls,” he said. “Hey, do me favor, will you? Try not to cut it too close.” He hung up.
Six hours. So I had provided enough intel to set a preemptive operation in motion, but not the most important piece of the puzzle, the one that could save how many millions of lives? Well done, Jake. I shook my head in disgust. Get your ass moving.
I jogged back to the van, threw open the door, and jumped in. “How we doing?” I said to Giv.
“We’ve got our coordinates. A warehouse on the edge of the Pameran district. We’re fifteen minutes away.” He showed me a map as Zand urged the van forward. “We have to come at it from the south. Across the railroad tracks from the public market and over this bridge.”
He jabbed a finger at the map. A two-lane bridge ran parallel to a footbridge spanning a river that apparently wasn’t large enough to warrant a name, at least not on Giv’s map. I didn’t like the bottleneck created by the bridges, but the next crossing was a half mile east.
“How well do you know this guy we’re meeting?” I asked.
“His name is Aiden. His driver is Sui. We’ve known them both forever. I trust them with my life,” Giv said.
I hated when people said that. I trust them with my life. Trust was one of the greatest gifts on the planet, but it was also one of the most abused. Trust gave you a license to be careless and sloppy, and careless and sloppy got you dead.
“I don’t care how much you trust them,” I said. I pointed to the AK-47s. “We go in armed. And we go in expecting the worst.”
“Got it,” Giv said.
I vouchsafed Zand with the coldest eyes I could muster. “Got it, Zand?”
He shrugged. “I don’t go anywhere unarmed, monsieur,” he replied.
We rumbled toward the Old City. The nervous tension in the van wasn’t a bad thing. The hard part was finding a balance between raw nerves and heightened senses. I had made an art form of it for nearly three decades, which was damn near longer than the two guys in the van with me had been alive. The diamond-hard resolve I was feeling grew even harder with every passing block, and the resolve also fueled a growing sense of calm.
The problem with the MEK was that they were used to creating conflict, not confronting it. They were two entirely different ball games. I saw Zand’s viselike grip on the steering wheeclass="underline" he could have been riding a bucking bronco. I watched Giv’s head swivel, taking in every building and every window as if they bristled with binoculars and video cameras and rooftop snipers.
“Relax, boys,” I said calmly. “The fun’s just about to begin.”
Tehran for the most part was a juxtaposition of the modern against the ramshackle. Brand-new high-rises and four-star restaurants stood cheek-to-jowl with shabby apartment buildings and decrepit shops. But the Old City was a grand pile of neglect with no pretense of gentrification; that’s what happens when you have mosques from the Qajar era, tombs from the thirteenth century, and churches from the 1700s. Were there Islamic fundamentalists obsessed with the fall of mankind back then? I didn’t think so.
A wide boulevard fronted the area like a moat. Dilapidated buildings sagged against one another like weathered cardboard boxes. Zand guided the van onto a street with mixed commerce and apartment living that seemed more like a funnel with crooked walls that might teeter over on us, like the last stand of a house of cards.
Tangles of electrical wires crisscrossed the street. Rusted marquees and hand-drawn signs dangled from storefronts. Knots of pedestrians strolled along uneven sidewalks. Bearded old men sat inside open windows, nursing cigarettes and watching the world like grizzled house cats. The air was saturated with the funk of musty blankets, stale tobacco, dust, diesel, and rot. Which fit perfectly with the infestation of pollution that hung like a pall over Tehran day and night.
Our van joined a procession of carts piled high with produce and a flock of sheep on the way to slaughter. The mist hung over the open market directly ahead, and Giv made a quick gesture to his map.
“The warehouse is just beyond the market,” he said. “Three, maybe four minutes.”
“Let Mr. Bagheri know where we are,” I said. “And make sure he keeps Charlie Amadi in the loop, hear?”
Three, maybe four minutes. I was thinking about the bottleneck at the river. I should have been thinking even further ahead than that, because in the next ten minutes Giv and Zand would both be dead and everything I had worked for over the last eleven days would be on the verge of falling apart.
CHAPTER 28
Dusk.
The worst possible time to be moving through the streets of Tehran’s Old City.
A half mile stood between me, a warehouse, and a memory stick containing the launch sites. The trouble was, dusk made that half mile seem like a marathon. Too many shadows. Too much broken light. Not enough people in the streets. Or too many if I decided to use the street bazaar for cover, which was exactly my plan.
An hour later and night would have been my ally. Too bad I didn’t have an hour to burn. The mission would be over in a matter of hours, or I’d be dead. I didn’t plan on being dead. General Patton had it right when he told his troops, “No dumb son-of-a-bitch ever won a war by dying for his country. You win a war by making the other dumb son-of-a-bitch die for his country.” Yeah, I’ll try to remember that, George. Great advice.
Until then, I would follow my three golden rules: take nothing for granted, expect the worst, and trust no one. That included the two MEK agents riding with me in the broken-down piece-of-shit van that was supposed to deliver us to our warehouse.
“Park here!” I shouted to my driver suddenly. I used Farsi even though Zand understood English a whole lot better than I spoke his native tongue. When I saw the confused look on his face, I pointed to a gravel lot wedged between a machine shop and a plumbing-supply house a half block from the local bazaar. “There! Right there.”
“Why here?” Zand didn’t wait for an answer. He jammed on the brakes, cranked the van’s wheel, and found a spot between a flatbed truck loaded with plumbing supplies and a pickup truck that had more rust around its wheel wells than our van did.
Zand looked into the backseat at me. He opened his palms. “We’re four blocks from the bridge.”
“We walk from here,” I said calmly. I rested a dirty white headdress on my head and wrapped a scarf loosely around my neck. I had already mapped out our approach to the warehouse using the bazaar as cover, but I hadn’t told Zand or Giv. “Bring your weapons. Put them under your coats. We’re going shopping.”
I didn’t wait for a reply. Zand apparently liked to argue; I didn’t, especially when there wasn’t anything to argue about. I threw open the door and jumped out. Zand shrugged his shoulders in the direction of his younger companion. They both jumped out behind me and quietly closed their doors. Giv’s dark face gave nothing away, even as he slung the AK-47 over his shoulder and threw on his jacket. By all rights, Giv should have been chasing girls instead of fighting in the underground, but this was his life. He’d probably been carrying a gun since he was twelve.
“Ah!” Giv said, as the smells of the bazaar filled his nose: curry, boiled lamb, damp textiles, sheep dung, exhaust fumes. He nodded his approval. “The market. Good cover.”