House Justice (46 page)

Ivan walked toward him, a smile on his broad face. “Uncle Lev said something about a device you have on your car. A LoJack? Something like that. I really don’t understand how it works.”

The Porsche he had been driving belonged to Marty Taylor. It had never occurred to him that it might have a LoJack system installed.

“So why are you here?” Yuri asked again, but as he spoke he moved his hand slowly toward the gun that was shoved into his belt at the back of his pants.

Ivan’s hands shot out. One hand grabbed his arm to keep him from reaching the gun. His other huge hand encircled Yuri’s neck.

As Ivan began to squeeze, Yuri heard him say, “Uncle Lev said to tell you he’s going to miss you.”

The doctor—presumably on retainer for the CIA—came out of the operating room, stripping latex gloves off his hands as he walked.

DeMarco had seen the operating room when he and Angela carried the killer into the veterinary clinic. There was an electric hoist over the operating table and the table looked big enough to accommodate major-sized mammals.

“He’ll be okay,” the doctor said. “Whoever owns this clinic has better equipment than I have at the hospital where I work. Anyway, I got both bullets and he’ll recover.”

“Both bullets?” DeMarco said. It looked like both he and Angela had shot the guy.

“Is he conscious?” Angela asked.

“Yeah, but he’s drowsy,” the doctor said. “I gave him some pain medication. I hope that was okay.”

DeMarco shook his head. He guessed the doctor meant,
I hope it was okay to relieve his pain and that you didn’t want him suffering so he’d be more likely to talk
. CIA physicians took a different sort of Hippocratic oath.

“As long as he’s lucid,” Angela said.

It turned out that there was no need to withhold the man’s pain medication to get him to talk. He was more than happy to tell them
his story and he obviously didn’t care about the punishment he would face for killing Sandra Whitmore and Rulon Tully. Whether he’d killed Ray Rudman was debatable, and at this point irrelevant.

He said his name was Parviz Kharazi—and that he was Mahata’s uncle.

“You’re lying. Mahata’s family is all dead,” Angela said.

Kharazi shook his head. “All but me,” he said. And then told his story.

In 1979, the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was driven from the country and Iran became a theocracy led by the Muslim cleric Ayatollah Khomeini. At the time, Parviz Kharazi was just a young man who couldn’t find a job. He wasn’t religious and he wasn’t the least bit political—he was just broke. So when an old family friend came to him and offered him employment with the organization that eventually became known as the MOIS, the Ministry for Intelligence and Security, he took it.

When the shah was in power, there was an organization called SAVAK, which was the shah’s secret police. It’s function, among other things, was to kill or imprison anyone trying to overthrow the shah. The mullahs, regardless of their religious leanings, soon found need for a similar organization, and thus the MOIS was formed. The organization’s first mission had been to hunt down the shah’s old supporters and dispose of them—even people who had fled the country. Once that task had been accomplished, the MOIS set about doing essentially what SAVAK had done: making sure the population toed the party line.

Young Parviz Kharazi was a mere foot soldier in all of this. He was told to arrest people, and he did. He was told to torture people to get information, and he did. He was told, upon occasion, to kill people and he did this, too. He wasn’t a sociopath or a psychopath, so when he did these things he convinced himself that he was on the right side of God and politics, and that his was an honorable job.

When he saw Angela look at him with distaste, he said, “I served my country in the same way that American CIA and FBI agents serve
their country. I worked for my government and I followed the laws of the land. I was a patriot.”

He rose through the ranks, advanced to a middle management position—and he prospered. He married. He had two sons. He owned a modest home in Tehran but he kept his money in a Swiss bank. He may have been a loyal Iranian but he knew better than to trust the national banks. Had it not been for his brother, he would still be in Iran today and, very likely, a senior member of his former service.

His brother, Mohsen, had been the fly in the ointment. Mohsen was ten years younger than him, the beloved baby of the family, and everyone doted on him including Kharazi. And thanks to Kharazi, his brother received a good education, including some schooling abroad, and he eventually became a professor at a prestigious university. Maybe Kharazi’s downfall occurred because of Mohsen’s exposure to Western culture, or maybe it happened just because Mohsen was an intellectual surrounded by other intellectuals. Whatever the reason, it seemed as if all Mohsen and his friends did was drink coffee and talk about things like human rights, women’s rights, and religious freedom—and all the other nonsense that had nothing to do with the way the world really worked. Kharazi tried to tell him he was going to get in trouble if he didn’t quit shooting off his mouth, but every time he tried, his smart little brother bombarded him with high-toned rhetoric that Kharazi couldn’t even understand, much less counter.

Eventually, his boss came to him—the man that had originally enlisted him in the MOIS—and told him he had to control Mohsen. He knew the only reason his brother was still alive or not in jail was because of his position, but his boss said Mohsen had gone too far and had to be stopped—one way or another.

After that meeting, Kharazi pleaded with Mohsen. He begged him to stop what he was doing. But his brother—his handsome, brilliant, passionate brother—just spouted more nonsense about the need for people to stand up for their rights, to fight corruption, to … Kharazi had slapped him. He slapped him so hard he knocked him to the
ground. “They’re going to kill you!” he screamed. “Don’t you understand that?”

But Mohsen didn’t understand.

His boss came to him one morning and said, not unkindly, that Mohsen was going to be arrested. And then Kharazi made a mistake. He said, “No one better hurt him.” It was okay if his brother had to go to jail for a while—maybe the experience would be good for him, make him grow up—but he didn’t want him to be tortured and certainly not killed. But the way he said it, it came out as a threat. And his boss was not a man you threatened. And his boss knew him. He knew that the man who had just threatened him was a very competent killer.

He begged his boss for one more chance. He told him Mohsen was coming to his house for dinner that night and if he couldn’t convince him to stop what he was doing, he would arrest Mohsen himself. His boss looked at him for a long time, and he thought he saw sadness or maybe regret in his boss’s eyes, but eventually he agreed.

Mohsen came to his house that night. Reluctantly, petulantly, arrogantly, but he came. Mohsen’s wife came with him, but not his daughter. Little Mahata had a cold and they had left her with a kindly neighbor. They sat down at the dinner table—Kharazi’s wife and his two sons, Mohsen and his wife. His plan was to try and have a pleasant family dinner then talk privately to his brother afterward. Kharazi wasn’t going to let him leave until he convinced him to stop his dissident ways—or he was going to arrest him that night.

The thing that saved him was the refrigerator door. They started to eat but his wife had forgotten to put the cheese on the table. Since he was closest to the kitchen, he got up and went to the refrigerator, and when he was bent over, head inside the fridge, reaching for the cheese, he heard glass breaking, then an enormous blast.

Shrapnel flew through the house and the dining room became an inferno. The refrigerator that had shielded him from the shrapnel and the initial fireball was blown into a wall, almost crushing him. The roof partially collapsed and the houses on either side of his also caught fire. He pushed the refrigerator off him and saw that the dining room
was an incinerator and he knew immediately that everyone inside the room was dead. There was no way they could have survived.

He determined later that it had been a satchel bomb filled with explosives, metal—nails, screws, and bolts—and some type of flammable liquid. He also figured out that the bomber must have been standing across the street from his house and had seen the family sit down for dinner, and as the bomber was sneaking up to the window to fling his deadly package, that was when he had left the table to retrieve the cheese from the refrigerator.

He never knew if his boss had ordered them to kill his entire family but he knew his boss had issued the order for him and his brother to die, and he understood why his boss wanted him dead: the man knew that he would avenge his brother’s death. But did he intend for Kharazi’s wife and sons to be killed with him? Maybe. Maybe his boss was afraid that one day Kharazi’s sons would try to avenge their father’s death. Or maybe his boss just said to kill him and Mohsen, but didn’t make it clear it should be done in such a way that others would not be killed. He didn’t know what his boss had intended and, afterward, his intentions didn’t matter. One thing he was sure of: his boss had never considered the possibility that he would survive.

Mohsen’s friends arranged for little Mahata to be sent to London. A year later, she was adopted by an Iranian American couple, the Javadis, who were living in London at the time. She was such a beautiful, bright little girl that it was easy to understand why a childless couple would welcome her into their home.

Parviz Kharazi spent the year Mahata was in London avenging his family. He killed the man who made the bomb, the man who threw the bomb, three of his boss’s bodyguards, and finally his boss. After Kharazi killed the bomb maker, his boss must have known that he had somehow survived the explosion, and the man did his best to protect himself, but Kharazi—the man he had recruited and trained— was just too good a killer to be stopped.

Ironically, it was his brother’s idealistic friends who helped him flee Iran, and it was a network of those same friends who helped him
get false papers and eventually immigrate to America. And because his money was in a Swiss bank, he had money when he arrived in the United States and he bought his flower shop about a year after his arrival. And his luck continued. He was always so damn lucky. His flower shop provided a good living.

By then Mahata had been with her adopted family for over two years and was living in America. He considered approaching her and telling her that he was alive. He even considered kidnapping her from her adopted family and raising her himself. But he did neither of these things. He could see she had a good home, was being raised by people who loved her, and was better off with them than she would ever be with him. The other reason he didn’t try to take her from her adopted parents was that he knew his old organization was still trying to find him, and if they ever did they would kill him—and then Mahata would be an orphan again.

He watched her grow up from afar. He attended her soccer games and he watched with pride as she played the violin in her high school band. He was in the audience when she graduated from high school and from college. He knew she had been hired by the CIA. One of the things he did occasionally was follow her to a coffee shop near her apartment. The last time she had seen him she had been four, and he wasn’t worried that she would recognize him. He just liked to sit near her, listen to her and her roommate talk, and he heard her tell her roommate she had been hired by the agency as a translator. That had made him smile—that a daughter of Iran was now working for the American government. Then she disappeared—and for six agonizing years he had no idea where she was—until he read about her death in the paper.

He concluded with, “I never remarried. She was the only person left on this earth that I loved.”

Angela asked him how he had killed Whitmore and Tully, and how he had found out that Rudman was the one who leaked the story.
He told them, and DeMarco was, of course, embarrassed. It had happened just as Angela had said—Kharazi had started following him the day he visited Whitmore at the federal lockup in Manhattan. He and Angela were both surprised, though, when he told them how he had captured and tortured Acosta’s killer, which led him to Jimmy Franco, which in turn led him to Rulon Tully.

“And Tully told you about Rudman before you killed him?” Angela said.

“Yes.”

Just
yes
. No remorse. No attempt to rationalize what he had done.

Looking at Angela, Kharazi said, “I know Mr. DeMarco works for Congress, but may I ask who you are?”

“I’m a federal agent,” Angela said.

That was true, but DeMarco noticed she didn’t say that the federal agency she worked for was the CIA. But Kharazi seemed satisfied by her answer.

“And so what happens now?” he asked. “Will I be placed under arrest and stand trial for my crimes or do you have something else in mind for me?”

Instead of answering his question, Angela said, “Don’t make any attempt to escape from this clinic. It will go badly for you if you do.”

Kharazi was recovering from two gunshot wounds and his right ankle was handcuffed to the bed, but DeMarco was thinking he would have liked it better if they had a few more people watching the man. The only ones in the clinic were him, Angela, and the indifferent surgeon who had tended to Kharazi’s injuries—and what they really needed for Kharazi were a couple of heavyweights with machine guns.

But in response to Angela’s threat, all Kharazi said was, “I’m not going to try to escape. I’ve done what I needed to do, and now you people can do what you need to do.”

Then he closed his eyes and fell asleep, a man at peace with himself.

DeMarco knew that there was no way in hell the CIA was going to turn Parviz Kharazi over to the cops. If he were to stand trial, the CIA would have to explain how they had caught him, which would open up a very smelly can of worms as to exactly what the CIA had been doing in regard to everything Mr. Kharazi had done.