“The clock is now ticking, Captain Ledger. Once I disconnect, please follow the instructions you have been given.”
“Wait—” I said, but the line went dead.
I held the phone in my hand and looked across the street to the office building. Even without the sights I knew they could take me anytime they wanted.
There were no real options left. Just because the laser sights weren’t on me didn’t mean that I was safe. I think they’d used them for effect. It was broad daylight; they certainly had scopes. So I did as I was told. I dismantled my phone and put the SIM card in my left coat pocket and the empty phone casing in my jeans. With great reluctance I walked to the edge of the pavement and stared for a moment down into the black hole of the culvert.
“Crap,” I said, and dropped the battery, which vanished without a trace. All I heard was a dull
plop
as it landed in the subterranean muck.
Before I turned to go into the store I scratched the tip of my nose with my forefinger. I was sure they’d see that, too.
Chapter Three
Starbox Coffee
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 7:39 a.m.
I went into the Starbox and ordered my coffee.
The waitress, a slim gal with a blue headscarf, glanced at my hands, which were visibly shaking. “Decaf?” she asked.
I screwed a smile into place and tried to make a joke. It fell flat. I repeated my drink order in a low mumble, paid for it and a French edition of the
Tehran Daily News
, and took them with me to a table where I could watch the street. It was pretty early, so the place was empty. There were two leather chairs in a corner and I took one, aware that there was no place in the café where a shooter with a good scope couldn’t find me.
Last year I’d been in a coffee shop when a strike team tried to take me out. You’d think I’d have learned by now. My best friend and shrink, Dr. Rudy Sanchez, constantly tells me that I drink too much coffee. He says, “Caffeine will kill you,” all the time. He’ll be delighted to hear me admit that he was very nearly right.
I crossed my legs as if that would offer my groin any real protection from a high-velocity sniper bullet and tried to read the paper.
Apparently America is still the Great Satan. What a surprise.
The main headline was about last week’s assassination attempt on the nation’s Rahbare Mo’azzame Enghelab—the Supreme Leader. A man dressed as a Shia cleric had attended a prayer session at Mashhad, which is the second largest city in Iran and one of the holiest cities in the Shia Muslim world, over five hundred miles east of Tehran, near the borders of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. It’s the resting place of the Imam Reza, seventh descendant of the prophet Muhammad and the eighth of the Twelve Imams. I’ve been there. It’s a gorgeous city, and home to the most extensive collection of Iranian cultural and artistic treasures. Millions of Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mashhad every year, as do scholars and tourists like me; and that’s been going on since medieval times. The saying is “The rich go to Mecca but the poor journey to Mashhad.”
So, after a few introductory speeches, the Supreme Leader stepped up to lead the people in prayer and discuss matters of faith. Problem was, the fake cleric whipped off his coat to reveal a vest packed with Semtex. A group of young men grabbed the bomber and tried to drag him outside before the bombs went off. They only partly succeeded, and though the mosque was not destroyed, it was damaged. The Supreme Leader received minor injuries, but sixty-four people died, and the effect was like cutting a scar into the flesh of Islam.
I’m not a Muslim, and I’m not deeply religious even with my Methodist upbringing—not like my father and brother whose butts have worn grooves in the pews in our church back in Baltimore—but there is something that disgusts me on a deep level when someone makes a deliberate attack on the faith of another person, or in this case on an entire people. I don’t like it when it happens to Americans; and I certainly don’t like it when Americans do it to each other. Can’t say I’m much in favor of it anywhere in the world.
Who was to blame for this particular hate crime?
Hard to tell.
Lately there’s been a weirdly sharp rise in hate crimes throughout the Middle East. Five times as many suicide bombers, a 300 percent increase in political assassinations, plus car bombs, pipe bombs, and even a rash of people found murdered with their throats completely torn out.
At the best of times the Mideast was never known for its easygoing tolerance; lately it’s like everyone has gone just a little bit crazier. My boss, Mr. Church, has been monitoring the escalation of violence, and although he hasn’t come out and said so, I’m certain that he’s suspicious of the rising body count. My friend Bug, who runs the computer resources for the Department of Military Sciences, told me on the sly that Church wanted him to run a thorough background search on the victims, even the ones who appeared to be innocent bystanders.
“Why?” I asked.
“’Cause the boss thinks there’s a hidden agenda,” answered Bug.
“He always thinks there’s a hidden agenda,” I remarked.
“He’s usually right, though, isn’t he?”
And I had no argument for that. Like the bumper stickers say, “You’re not paranoid if they really are out to get you.”
I’d been following this in the local and national news, and I scanned the paper to see if they had anything on the mosque bomber, but this rag was pretty heavily slanted toward the ultraconservative view, which pretty much concludes that if a bird shits on a statue in Iran it’s a U.S. plot. The reporter, probably quoting a government directive, claimed that this was the latest act in a series of escalating terrorist attacks by America. Completely ignoring the fact that half of the recent victims in the Middle East were Americans or allies. Go figure.
The rest of the paper was local stuff. No cartoons. No
Doonesbury
or
Zits
or
Tank McNamara
. No crossword puzzle.
Time crawled by. A few people came in for coffee.
I debated rolling sideways out of the chair and shimmying behind the counter, but if I did that and the snipers opened up I’d be the cause of civilian casualties.
Besides … after all this I kind of wanted to see who was going to walk in the door.
While I waited, I went over everything that had happened last night. This thing with the woman and the snipers didn’t seem to fit, but … how could it
not
? We did a lot of harm last night … Somebody must want some payback.
I sipped my coffee. It wasn’t Starbucks, but it was hot and black.
I could almost hear the echo of gunfire in my ears …
Chapter Four
Afa Police Station
Tehran, Iran
One Day Ago
June 14, 7:20 p.m.
The trial was set to start in two days, so to avoid the crowds near the capital building that had been a constant since the mosque bombing, the military moved the three hikers to a secure location on the outskirts of Tehran. The move was also likely done to reduce the risk of having the press ask any questions of the hikers, and there was an army of reporters from all over the world in Iran right now.
This whole thing worked for us. It gave us a window we otherwise would never have had.
The new location was a small jail near a residential district; no one would think to look there. Except we were already looking there. Our computer, MindReader, was plugged into the Iranian military police network, courtesy of Abdul Jamar, an Iranian on the CIA payroll. Abdul’s older brother had been murdered by the secret police for writing essays in protest of the nuclear program. This was his form of payback.
When Mr. Church formed the Department of Military Sciences he built it around the MindReader computer system, which was his sole property. Bug, our head of computer operations, hinted that Church may have written some of its more advanced software packages, but Church refused to confirm it. Actually, Church simply ignored the question, which was his style. MindReader has a lot of functions, but two stand out and make it the most valuable tool in the intelligence arsenal. It is designed to look for patterns, and though computers can’t generalize, MindReader comes damn close. It gathers information from other sources, including many that refuse to share their intel with the DMS. That doesn’t matter to MindReader, and that’s the other reason it’s so valuable. It is designed to intrude into virtually any other computer system without tripping alarms, and when it backs out, it rewrites the target computer’s software so that there is no record that it had ever been hacked. The system is proprietary and no one outside of a select few DMS senior staff has access to it; and no one has full access except Church.
My team and I were staying in a seedy hotel near the center of town—one that allowed dogs—and my dog was currently waiting there for us. When we got word about the transfer, we began tracking the move through a series of high-security-coded e-mails. I had half of Echo Team with me for this: my number two, First Sergeant Bradley “Top” Sims; the big California kid, Harvey “Bunny” Rabbit; the professorial Khalid Shaheed; the laconic former LAPD sniper John Smith; and the newbie, Lydia Ruiz, who was in the navy’s first covert group of women SEALs.
Khalid was, among other things, a makeup artist who could have gotten work on Broadway. When we arrived at the hotel room, among the equipment delivered for us was a professional stage makeup kit. Khalid used it to transform us all into Iranians. Luckily a lot of people in Iran look like their European forebears. Khalid had to tone down his own darker Egyptian complexion. Bunny and I both got our fair hair dyed black. Lydia was Latina but had the olive skin of her Madrid ancestors; with the right eye makeup and a modest chador with a headscarf, she would blend right in. John Smith was already dark-haired, so Khalid gave his pale face a little more color.
Top was never going to look like either an Iranian or an Arab, but that was okay. There were plenty of African Muslims in Iran, and Top could speak Somali and Persian with an African lilt. Except for Top, we all dressed in military police uniforms.
We let the transfer happen and gave it about three hours for all the hubbub to settle down. Top, dressed like a factory worker, came into the police station to report that someone had stolen the tires off of his car while he was out to dinner with his wife. Lydia was the wife. Top was not hysterical but still managed to be loud enough to draw attention, and no matter what he said, Lydia contradicted and corrected him. The officers found it all very amusing, though they dutifully took the report.
The rest of us watched all this on tiny monitors built into the faces of our wristwatches. Very Dick Tracy. One of the last toys Mr. Church got from his longtime friend Steve Jobs. Stuff was three years away from hitting the commercial market. They’ll be going out as iSee, and Apple will make another gazillion off it. Pretty handy for the military, especially when married to the high-definition digital camera built into the middle button of Top’s shirt.
We were parked in two cars, one in front, one in back. The streets were empty. It was nearing the time for
Isha’a
, the evening prayer, last of the five prayer times of the day.
Eight men in the police station’s front room. Top made sure to show us as he turned to appeal to one officer after another in his distress about his tires. MindReader provided us with a floor plan. One door in front, one in back. Ten cells. Thermal scans from a satellite confirmed the eight men up front and four more in the back, plus three thermal signatures in the holding area. The hikers each separated into different cells.
Twelve to five, and if we blew the snatch or let them raise the alarm, we were going to fill those empty cells. Even though none of us carried any ID, and although our fingerprints and DNA were in no databases anywhere, thanks to MindReader, it wouldn’t be a stretch for anyone to guess where we came from. We were potentially bigger political currency than the three college kids, even if one of them was a senator’s only son.
“Okay, Top,” I murmured as we got out of our cars. “Party time.”
The easiest way to do this would have been to kick the doors, toss in a couple of flash-bangs and kill everyone in a uniform. That would also be barbaric. We weren’t at war with Iran, and we certainly weren’t at war with a small regional police station. The officers in there were nowhere near the policy level. They were probably working schlubs like me and my guys; like my brother back in Baltimore PD.
So we went with Plan B.
The flash-bangs? Yeah, okay, we did that. But, hey, everyone likes party favors.
When I gave the word, Top and Lydia jammed their palms against their ears, squeezed their eyes shut and dropped to the floor. Khalid came through the station’s front door and lobbed a flash-bang in a softball underarm pitch that arced it over the intake counter and landed it right on the duty officer’s desk. I was right behind Khalid and I had a second’s glimpse of the officer staring in unbelieving horror at the grenade.
Then …
BANG!
The flash-bang is designed to temporarily blind and deafen anyone in the blast radius. It feels exactly like getting hit in the head with a sledgehammer made of pure light. You don’t shrug it off. You scream, you go temporarily but intensely deaf and blind, and roll around on the floor. If you’re up close and personal it can burst your eardrums.
Everyone in the room was staggered.
I raised a Benelli M4 shotgun and opened up. I wasn’t firing buckshot—my gun was loaded with beanbag rounds. That sounds fun. It isn’t. The rounds are small fabric pillows loaded with #9 lead shot. They won’t penetrate the skin, but it feels like you’ve been punched by the Incredible Hulk. You do go down and you do it right now.
There was one officer who hadn’t gotten his eggs scrambled by the flash-bang and he had a pistol halfway out of the holster. I put a round center mass and knocked him into a row of filing cabinets. He rebounded from the cabinets and fell flat on his face making tiny croaking sounds. Khalid and Top flanked me, drawing and firing X26-A Tasers, which have a three-shot magazine with detachable battery packs. The twin sets of fléchettes struck their targets and the battery packs sent fifty thousand volts into each man. The men dropped and the shooters released the battery packs to allow their guns to chamber the second rounds. The packs would continue to send maintenance charges through the fléchettes until the batteries ran dry, say about twenty seconds. Four down, four to go.