The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller (10 page)

“
I don’t mean just the hazy areas between black and white,
” she had said in one of their early sessions. “
I’m talking about the aging of the individual. We play our own devil’s advocate. That fudges the clean, clear certainty of youth
.”

“
But I
am
clearer about so many things
,” he had replied.

“
Only politics
,” she had said. Kealey had been about to protest. She held up a hand. “
Religion? Movies? Romance? If you didn’t have money on a big game, would you care
that much
who won?
”

“
No—
”

“
Dating. Looks matter less, other qualities matter more. Your views are blended
.”

She was right. He
was
mellowing.

“
Why politics—and music
?” he had asked.

“
Politics? Because the non-grays—not just the physically young but the emotionally immature—think they know everything. They support politicians who tell them they’re right
.
Music? A lot of it is inherently political
,” she had gone on. “
And loud. Your graying ears don’t like that
.”

What Allison had described was true about both combat and covert missions. The sliding scale didn’t slide so much. He tracked down mostly really bad men: warlords, ethnic cleansers, homicide bombers. Later, at the Company, he went after moderately bad men like paid assassins, arms dealers, drug traffickers, and only the occasional genocidal maniac. By his hand or by his efforts, they all got the same death. But the higher his security clearance climbed, the more apparent the gray areas became—like the impoverished villages that harvested opium to survive, the cartels who put money into local education and health care, the people who saved four children by selling one into slavery. If Americans and Europeans and Asians chose to stick powder up their noses or juice in their arms, if they went to Thailand and paid staggering amounts of money for young virgins, how did that merit a block of plastic explosive under the Humvee of the middleman?

“I’m my own Stockholm Syndrome,” Kealey had admitted to Allison in one of their sessions. That was his parting comment and resulted in her suggesting they continue the session over dinner. Over a shared key lime pie, they both agreed that the gray areas of doctor-patient relationship were also worth exploring a bit.

They were at Rayhan’s house before she realized she hadn’t given the driver the address. It was scary, even to Kealey, how much information was transmitted electronically. In the old days—less than a decade ago—the deputy chief of staff would have hand-delivered the destination typed on pink slips of paper. Those would be time-stamped in the vehicle and turned in after the pickup or drop-off.

Before the young woman left, Kealey took careful note of her straight black hair, which reached to her jawline.

While the young woman was gone, Kealey texted Allison that he was going out of town, probably for no more than a day. She wished him a pleasant trip. No details were expected or provided.

Kealey sat back in the leather seat. There was a Plexiglas screen between the front and backseat. Kealey used to roll those down and talk to limo drivers whenever they stopped at a light or pickup. But these days the “dashboys” as they used to call them—White House drivers always faced front, like coachmen for the Queen of England—were texting or checking email about road and traffic conditions, security concerns, and schedules. This driver, a man of about thirty-five, dressed in a black suit, also wore a Bluetooth headset.

Instead of chatting, Kealey looked out the smoky window that turned afternoon to dusk and thought about Uncle Largo. He had to confess to some genuine excitement about the visit. Kealey never got to talk to many veteran field agents, let alone one who came from the same gene pool. He was optimistic—or at least cautiously hopeful—that Uncle Largo would consent to talk; the situation seemed to demand it. He was eager to learn not just about his uncle’s wartime experiences but also about the psychological issues they might have caused. What Kealey had told Rayhan about his experience wasn’t an understatement. It was taking more and more effort to saddle up; and perhaps worse, more and more effort to enjoy life when each day was finished. He would fall into bed, sleep the sleep of the just, then wake up looking for someplace useful and satisfying to put his energies. Uncle Largo’s insights from further down that road were a potential treasure.

Rayhan returned with a thickly stuffed shoulder bag that she carried with her into the car. She seemed eager bordering on excited. That was good. More important, Kealey noted, she had not bothered to brush her hair. That was even better. He noted that with male agents, too—mostly about their ties or shirttails. Vanity raised a red flag that an operative was not fully engaged. It was a crude barometer, like sticking a wet thumb into the wind, but it never failed him.

They sat in silence, each with their own private expectations, as the sedan got on 95 South for the forty-five-minute trip.

I
t was late at night and the lights of Tehran glittered proudly through the dark outside his window.

Mahdavi Yazdi crushed out his cigarette and sat staring at them through the bulletproof window of his office. Cigarette smoking had recently been pronounced
haram
—forbidden—to followers of Islam. Yazdi was not a scholar but he knew that smoking had not been invented at the time of the Prophet and so there could be no true
fatwa
on its religious legality or illegality. It was one of those details he chose to overlook, and he did not believe it made him a bad Muslim. To the contrary. His life was about belief in the Word of God.

Which is why he was thinking just now, with a sense of frustration, how he did not like the
Majles-e Khobregan
—the Council of Experts. He liked their religious beliefs enough. He shared most of them. He had a good relationship with some of the Experts and a very close personal relationship with their intelligence advisor, Farhad Salehi of the Bakhtiari tribe of the Bakhtiari province.

What Yazdi resented was their arrogance.

The body of eighty-six
mujtahids—
an assembly of Islamic clerics and scholars—represents the interests of every province with the sole official function of telling the actual leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran what they were doing wrong.

As the director of
Vezarat-e Ettela’at Jomhuri-ye Eslami-ye Iran
, the Intelligence Ministry of Iran, Yazdi had no use for the so-called Experts. They were inexperienced outside their fields and knew nothing beyond the borders of their localities. Yet they spoke loudly, publicly, and often about how foreign influence was undermining youth, how foreign ideas were undermining Islam, how foreign powers were strangling the nation.

They weren’t wrong, but they were like university professors: they didn’t understand how things worked in the real world. A non-nuclear Iran, an Iran with an infant navy, an Iran with no allies in the region—that was not an Iran that could do anything more than selectively harass enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan, root out agitators at home, and quietly continue to use oil revenue to develop both conventional and nuclear weapons. He wished the last of those were not so. He believed that the Hand of God was more than adequate to shield them and that He would punish those who did not trust in this. Yazdi was a radical in his fervor, in the strength of ideas—not in the weight of arms.

Director Yazdi understood the desires and frustrations of the Council. He had spent thirty years rising through the ranks as an intelligence officer of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, the elite, theocratic warriors of the military. He began in the field, spying on Iraq in Iraq. Life was simpler then, more exciting, and he missed those days. What he learned there was that the Sep
h-e P
sd
r
n-e En-qel
b-e Esl
mi had plenty of sabers and they knew how to rattle them. But an occasional skirmish, in the shadows or worked by proxy, was not a great victory.

Which is why Mahdavi Yazdi was smiling as he sat at his desk in his fourth-floor office on Second Ne-garestan Street, Tehran. He turned back to the computer monitor on his desk. He had just read a decrypted report from field operative Qassam Pakravesh in Rabat. The events that had begun suddenly, startlingly, had been a gift and blessing from God. They started with the report from the heroic Nakhoda Yekom Elham about what had been discovered and then, incredibly, recovered in the Arctic. There would be repercussions among the military leaders about the price of that recovery, the loss of the
Jamaran
—but it had been the correct call. That crew was doomed. Other nations had to have picked up the anomaly and were surely en route to investigate. The evidence of what was uncovered had to be eliminated.

I will see to it that the crew receives accolades on earth as they will in Paradise
, Yazdi reflected.

For now, however, he was considering his options for recovering the item. He had to make arrangements for Pakravesh to leave Morocco, as he had arranged the operative’s departure from so many other nations in the past. By land, through Algeria and across Africa, then east over the Mediterranean to Iraq or Saudi Arabia where money would guarantee safe passage. And then Iran would have a nearly functioning nuclear weapon armed with what appeared to be high-grade plutonium.

The United States and Israel will know it is authentic because they will visit the recovery site
, he thought. Then the vision of the Council and the other government ministries would align, finally and fully, with the patriotic heart that beat in every Iranian.

Negotiations for a nuclear Iran, without the resistance of the international community, could begin in earnest.