The Colonel's Mistake (28 page)

He eyed the church. It was made of stone similar in color to the surrounding houses, but unlike the old houses, the church walls had more of a smooth, polished look. Built just a hundred or so years ago, he guessed. Which meant no tourists would bother to visit it—not when there were gorgeous medieval cathedrals to look at all over France—and since hardly anyone in the country under
the age of eighty bothered to go to church for religious reasons anymore, tearing it down had likely been deemed a more practical option than renovating it.

Evidence of neglect abounded. The roof had a few big holes in it where patches of slate tiles had fallen off, exposing the wood timbers beneath; the pavement surrounding the building was half-covered with weeds; and most of the varnish on the massive front entrance door had peeled off. Anything of value appeared to have been removed—a gaping circular hole hovered behind the altar where a rosary window had once stood, and what Decker had called a lookout Mark pegged as a former bell tower whose bell and roof had been salvaged, leaving just an open platform on top.

“Are workers going to be showing up this morning to take the rest of this thing down?” asked Mark.

“Maybe, but I’ll be watching from the ground so I can call you if we get any surprises.”

In the east the sky looked as though the sun would crack the horizon at any moment. Except for the sound of a distant owl, it was absolutely quiet. Mark concentrated on the silence, listening for a break in it, maybe the sound of an approaching car.

He heard nothing. “All right, let’s do this.”

Washington, DC

Colonel Henry Amato fumbled in the dark for his cell phone, finally locating it on the end table next to his bed. After pushing a few wrong buttons, he found the one that allowed him to answer.

“Amato, here,” he half shouted, still disoriented from the several glasses of grappa he’d downed just a few hours ago. He was bare-chested, wearing only boxer shorts.

An antique brass lamp embossed with a Persian design stood on the end table. He turned it on as he sat up in bed.

“This is Martinez, sir.”

Amato asked for a verification code. Upon receiving it, he said, “Confirmed.”

“There’s been activity in France. Two individuals are monitoring Minabi.”

“Have they been identified?”

“No, sir.”

“What’s their present status?”

“Well, they’re watching the house from a church tower.”

Amato ran a hand through his disheveled hair. “A church tower?” he said skeptically.

“Yes, sir, it’s about a half kilometer away from the compound where Minabi’s being held. One of our NightEagle drones picked up a suspicious thermal image on top of it five hours ago.”

“Human?”

“We thought. But the image was taken from a few miles up, so it wasn’t conclusive. We continued to monitor the site from a better angle but didn’t see anything else—until dawn that is, when we picked up two bodies. That’d be zero one thirty your time, just a half hour ago.”

“You have the images?”

“I sent them to your account.”

Amato slipped out of bed, being careful not to stand up too quickly because of his bad back, and made his way out to the spare bedroom where he kept his laptop computer.

He logged on to an anonymous, nongovernment e-mail account and typed in an additional security code to view the files. The first was a five-second infrared video clip shot five hours ago. The central image was a grainy blur of green, red, and yellow—indicating heat—against a background of deep indigo blue. The video had been shot from directly above the church, and the size approximation was in meters, so it was impossible to know whether he was looking at a large bird or a human being.

He played the second video clip, which had been recorded just a half hour ago. Here there were two blotches, each a mix of red, green, and yellow. This time the video had been taken at a forty-five-degree angle to the church, allowing for a size approximation down to the nearest centimeter.

In this clip each figure looked like a ghostly human being.

One was of average height, just under six feet tall. His thermal image was distinct and bright, with a hot red core. The other was
shorter in stature and gave off a thermal image dominated by yellows and greens.

Amato felt a stab of pain in his gut and his chest tightened.

“Sir?” said Martinez.

“I have the images.”

“I anticipate I’ll be able to get you some decent conventional photos within the hour, assuming they stay up there and the clouds hold off.”

Would they have had time to travel from Dubai to France? Barely. But how could they have known to go right to where Minabi was being held? It was insane. How could they possibly have figured that out?

Amato was both proud and appalled. “You’ve already alerted the Iranians, I take it?”

He needed time to think, but he didn’t have time.

“It was the first thing I did, to confirm that they weren’t just maintaining precautionary surveillance on their own compound.”

“What was their response?”

“They’re arranging for a takedown.”

How could he have let it come to this?

Amato looked around his spare bedroom, as if searching for an answer. His eyes lit on a crucifix that he’d hung on the wall, a simple ceramic one that his wife had picked up on a trip they’d taken to Rome fifteen years ago, and then on a photo of his parents that he’d inherited when his father had died last year.

He stared at his father, gray-haired and stooped from years of laying brick, and for a fleeting moment remembered how his father used to sing to him at night before bed, then kiss him on the forehead. That small display of love had meant the world to him when he was a little boy.

He hadn’t deserved a father like that.

“Do we even know that the subjects are still in position?”

“The Iranians sent a team over as soon as we alerted them and they haven’t reported any movement. And the subjects were still showing up on our thermal images until a few minutes ago, when dawn hit.”

“They need to be taken alive.”

“Those were my instructions to the Iranians, sir. They agreed to wait until the subjects descend and then take them on the ground rather than storm the tower. It’ll be safer that way, especially if the subjects are armed.”

“The Iranians will still foul it up,” said Amato sharply. There was a long silence. “It’ll piss them off, but I want you and Davis there as an auxiliary force to ensure the capture goes as planned. The subjects have to be apprehended alive and interrogated. Is that understood?”

“Understood.”

“Not shot through the head and half alive. I mean definitively alive.”

“Wilco.”

“In the meantime, tell the Iranians not to alter the daily routine for Minabi or do anything else that could send signals that they know they’re being watched. Also…”

Amato’s voice faltered. If he spoke the words that were in his throat, he would be crossing the Rubicon.

Of course he should never have let it get to this point. He should have acted sooner, years ago, when he’d first learned Daria had applied to the Agency. He should have used his connections to have her rejected, to steer her into a profession that didn’t involve
such terrible risk. At the very least he should have found a way to protect her after Minabi had told him that a CIA officer named Daria Buckingham had helped the MEK steal the uranium.

But he hadn’t. At every stage of her life, he’d been absent. Because he’d been a coward. As a young man he hadn’t wanted to admit it, but he was too old now to lie to himself.

“Also, I’ll be joining you in France to assist with the interrogations. Inform the Iranians that immediately after the takedown you are to take possession of the detainees.”

There was a long pause. Amato knew his announcement would come as an unwelcome shock—a case of a higher-up trying to micromanage a field operation. Martinez said, “What’s your ETA, sir?”

“As soon as I can get there—figure ten hours tops. I’ll contact you for coordinates when I’m close.”

“If the subjects are set up for a long stakeout, it’s possible the capture won’t even have been executed by the time you get here, sir. Unless you want us to try to force them down, which again, I wouldn’t recommend. Better to stay back a bit until this thing plays itself out.”

“If I can be on the ground with you prior to capture, all the better.”

Amato hung up, dialed another number, and gave orders for a C-37A jet—the military version of a Gulfstream—to meet him at Reagan National in an hour.

He did the calculations in his head—deal with Ellis quickly, make it to the airport on time, figure a six-hour flight, then an hour or so to get from the airport to the church…he could be there by late afternoon French time.

The last thing he did before getting dressed was to go online to his personal bank account and electronically wire every cent of what was left in it to an offshore account he’d set up yesterday, just in case.

The sunrise was stupendous, a pastel smear of red and yellow. Blackbirds, perched in trees around the church, were calling out. But all Daria could see was an image in her head of a muddy field with newly dug graves and all she could hear was the voice of her uncle.

He’d been panic stricken when she’d told him of her intention to help smuggle the uranium out of Iran.

You have given enough!

It will be enough when the mullahs are dead.

Don’t talk like that. Don’t do this.

I already told Minabi I would.

Minabi doesn’t care about you—

I’m not doing this for her.

She and Mark sat forty feet off the ground, cross-legged and hunched under a brown canvas tarp atop a rickety half-rotted wood platform. A two-foot-high stone parapet, which had previously served as a base for the roof of the bell tower, encircled the platform. Directly behind the church stood a grove of apple trees, and a half kilometer or so farther away, amid a fallow field overgrown with weeds, lay the farmhouse.

“We’ll take shifts,” said Mark. “I’ll watch the house first, you scan the surrounding fields and woods.”

Daria recalled presents her uncle had given her on her birthday—a little Iranian jewelry box decorated with ivory inlay; a gift certificate to Macy’s; a miniature watercolor, painted on camel bone, that depicted beautiful yellow irises. Her uncle had never wanted her to get involved with the MEK in the first place. The only thing he’d really pushed her to do was to study hard at Duke and get her degree.

“OK?” said Mark.

“Yeah, fine,” she answered, but what she was thinking was that she didn’t know whether she could do this anymore. Anger had sustained her for so long. But losing her uncle went beyond anger. The mullahs had now taken from her everything in this world that she’d loved. They had won. There was nothing left for her to be angry about.

“Switch every half hour?”

“That works.”

At seven thirty in the morning two men with automatic rifles emerged from the rear of the house. The stone wall that enclosed the backyard blocked out their legs, but through the telephoto lens of her camera Daria could see them from the waist up. They could be Iranian, she thought—but they could also just as easily be French, given the mix of cultures in the country.

“Know any of those guys?” Mark asked.

Daria looked for markings on their olive-green shirts, searching for clues as to their identity.

“No.”

She saw Mark squinting as he looked through his binoculars. It reminded her that, back in Baku, he’d sometimes worn glasses.

“Their rifles are Iranian-made AKMs,” Mark said.

“How can you tell?”

“Black plastic stocks.”

Her uncle had been right, Daria thought. This hadn’t been worth it. She should have done something decent with her life. Her uncle should have done something decent with his life. Instead they’d both devoted their lives to a failed cause.

A couple of minutes later a woman wearing a red headscarf emerged. She was shorter than the armed men who’d preceded her, and wasn’t carrying a weapon.

“Heads up,” said Mark.