“Hello? Sorry to interrupt…” Kate was saying. And then as Rusty looked up from the BlackBerry: “I left a message. If he calls back and agrees to meet my editor, I’ll call you.”
“What’s today’s date?” Rusty asked, distracted.
“February eleventh, here on earth,” Delmarco needled. “Right. Sorry. So — tonight. I really need to see him tonight.” A three-ship flight of Bahraini F-16s swept low over the port, headed out to the Gulf, out toward the Zagros.
“Simon, old boy. How was the flight? Bloody cold here compared to back home, i’n’ it?” a tall, broad man in a heavy overcoat said loudly as he approached Brian in the sparkling, high-vaulted glass cathedral that was the international arrivals hall. “Did Limpopo really beat us? God, you know, I leave Durban for a little bit and our team starts losing to the likes of Limpopo. Next we’ll be going down to the likes of Mpumalanga. Here, let me take that,” he continued boisterously. This, apparently, was Martin Bowers, of the SIS Durban base, playing the nut importer and partner of fellow South African Simon Manley.
Brian Douglas let his newfound friend take his bag. He looked about in amazement at the modern airport.
“Yes, it is a wonder, isn’t it, Simon? They tell me the old airport was a proper dump, Mehrabad with emphasis on the ‘bad.’ Glad we never had to use it,” Bowers continued as they pressed through the mob by the Customs door. “This is only about forty-five kilometers south of the city, so at this time of day less than two hours’ drive. After the traffic here, I’ll never complain again about Durban. That’s why I splurged and got us a driver for the run in: I couldn’t navigate us safely with these crazy drivers.”
Good, Brian thought, a hired driver taking two foreigners in from the international airport is likely to be on the hook to report to VEVAK, the Ministry of Intelligence Service. Let VEVAK know that the two white South Africans were not afraid to get a hired driver and that they spoke only about traffic, football, rugger, and pistachios. Someone trying to avoid VEVAK attention might take the crowded bus downtown; Simon Manley and Marty Bowers would never even think of VEVAK. Maybe Bowers is more than the oversized blowhard he played.
When they got in the car, Bowers started, “We’re staying at the Homa Hotel, which they say was once a Sheraton. Very nice and on the high street, or what passes for one — Valiasr, I think they call it. Now, let me tell you about Tehran…” Brian Douglas, now Simon Manley, tuned out of the explanation that was meant mainly for the driver to overhear. He thought instead of the Tehran he knew so well, the back alleys off the bazaar, the poor streets in the south of the city, the dead-letter drops in the mountain parks an hour north of the sprawling, polluted jumble that was now the capital of Persia, or the Islamic Republic of Iran.
He thought of the network of Iranian sources that he had run successfully until, after he had moved on to the station chief Bahrain job, his best source in the Iran network had been shot dead on the street by VEVAK. Shot dead after depositing the plans for Iran’s new air defense system in a dead-letter drop in Baku two days before. Until then it had worked well, largely because it had not involved the British Embassy in Tehran. VEVAK kept close track of the entire embassy staff. His network of Iranian spies had survived because only Brian and a few in Vauxhall knew who they were and the meets were almost always out of the country: Ankara, Istanbul, Dubai, and, of course, Baku.
After the hit, London had ordered all contact broken until an assessment could be made of how the source had been compromised. They never had figured it out. Months went by and Brian had been posted to Bahrain as chief of station for the lower Gulf, including the posts in Doha, Dubai, and Muscat. Downsizing had forced SIS into having one senior officer for all four posts. Now, three years on, he did not even know if the members of the network were still alive, still at their old addresses, still in the jobs that had made them so valuable. Most important, he could not know whether they would still recognize the invitation to a meet. He thought of the cameras in the Border Control booth at the airport and subconsciously wiggled his newly shaped nose.
“So here we are, the Homa,” Bower said, breaking Brian’s reverie. “Owned by the airline, this chain is. Not really what we would call a five-star, but Iranian five-stars are the best they have. What we would think of as two-star.”
The room was simple and relatively clean. His window looked down on Vanak Square and did little to stop the noise of the incessant Tehran traffic below. He gave it a quick check for audio and video surveillance, without being too obvious about what he was doing. If they already knew who he was, the surveillance devices would be too good to detect. If they thought he was a South African nut buyer, there might be some lower-quality devices placed there on a purely random basis. The fact that he could not see anything told him he was either clean or under sophisticated monitoring.
He dined that night with Bowers at a place near Vanak Square, a place with a mix of locals and some foreign businessmen. The hotel doorman had recommended it. When they returned to the Homa, they approached the front desk. “Could you give me a wake-up call at eight o’clock tomorrow?” Brian asked in English. He turned to Bowers. “I’ll see you downstairs for breakfast at nine, since our first meeting isn’t until eleven.” Bowers had arranged to visit a pistachio exporter near the bazaar.
As he got into bed, Brian Douglas set the alarm on his wristwatch for 0530.
Russell MacIntyre looked at his watch again, impatiently. “I thought you said he would show up around eleven. It’s almost eleven-thirty.”
Kate Delmarco sipped her Tanqueray and tonic. “I said he gets off shift at eleven, assuming no one is dying on him. Chill. Anyway, people here work on a different rhythm of time. This isn’t Washington.”
“Miss Delmarco, my name is Fadl.” The young man had appeared out of nowhere. He wore jeans and a T-shirt that said “California University” with a map of California below it. “Dr. Rashid would like your guest to come with me. I will take you to him, sir.”
“Well, we both want to…” Rusty began.
“Just you, sir. Dr. Rashid was very specific,” Fadl insisted. “Not the woman.”
“Okay. Well, Kate, I’ll meet you at the Ritz later. I’ll call your room and we can meet at the roof bar.” Rusty wanted to make sure that somebody actually saw him later that night to know that he was all right. He hoped she understood what he was doing.
“And if I don’t hear from you by last call?” Kate asked, smiling. She was enjoying seeing MacIntyre squirm. She was actually surprised that he’d agreed to go with the young man he had never seen before.
“Call the place where I’m staying. Tell them to leave a light on for me.”
MacIntyre followed Fadl and climbed into a minivan, which pulled up as they made it to the curb. There were two more men inside. Fadl introduced them. “This is Jassim. He will pat you down. No guns, cameras, recording devices. You understand.”
Jassim looked closely at the BlackBerry and then removed its battery. “You will get it back when we return you to your ambassador’s residence, Mr. MacIntyre.” So much for being Delmarco’s editor from the New York Journal, thought MacIntyre.