The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller (13 page)

Kealey heard the oil burner come on in the basement. He remembered thinking, as a boy, that it was a monster. He didn’t know anything, then, about monsters. Not the way he did now.

“Well,” Kealey said, “this has been very helpful, Uncle Largo.”

Largo knew better than to ask who had it. He didn’t need to. If it were someone rational, or even someone irrational who already had a nuclear weapon—like the North Koreans—his nephew wouldn’t be here.

Largo did ask, “Who’s been watching me all day? G-Men?”

Kealey snickered. “Yeah.”

Largo shook his head. “My lawn care guys don’t bother with bug spray. And their shoes have grass stains.”

“Glad it was you covering our asses in France, Uncle Largo, and not the Bureau.”

Largo seemed to appreciate that. And the visit. Security demands would not have permitted this conversation to take place over an unprotected line, but Kealey didn’t want his uncle hauled into FBI headquarters for this chat. He owed him the courtesy of talking to him face-to-face.

“Are you sure I can’t get you anything?” Largo asked.

“We’ve really got to get back,” Kealey said.

“I understand.”

The visitors rose. Largo extended his hand toward the doors and followed them toward the stairs.

“The place hasn’t changed,” Kealey told him. “I mean that in a good way. It’s very warm. Always was.”

“That’s all May’s doing,” Largo said. “It’s just sad that the rest of the world hasn’t changed, either.”

“You don’t think so?” Rayhan asked as they reached the door.

Largo looked at her young eyes, still clear with hope. “It’s the same weapon, different enemy. We’re facing the same goals large and small—death, conquest, aggressive ideology. Instead of Nazism or Communism it’s radical Islam. The technological changes we’ve seen . . . those are all on the surface. The awful furnace—that’s the same.” He looked at his nephew and, with tears that quickly reached his smile, threw his arms around him. “Thank you for including me. Thank you.”

“It’s an honor. I’ve always wanted to.”

“If you need a good field hand, let me know. I still do chin-ups downstairs. No one will suspect an old man.”

“If there’s any way, I will. I promise.”

Largo’s eyes still glistened, and his mouth trembled as he stepped back. Kealey could relate to his uncle’s pain. He took out his cell phone.

“You have an email address?” the younger Kealey asked.

Largo gave him a .gov address.

“Who set that up for you?” Kealey asked.

“The VFW,” he said. “It was their idea. They said it was to send me notices about benefits and in-home services like hot meals and sponge baths, but I think it was to keep track of old spies like me.”

“Spoken like an old spy,” Kealey laughed. “Do you take them up on the baths?”

“Once,” he said. “Did you know they have male nurses?”

Kealey laughed again as he finished tapping in the address. Then he sent his uncle an email. “I’ve given you a telephone number, a good friend of mine in D.C. Call her if you want to talk.”

Largo grinned through his tears. “I haven’t ‘talked’ to anyone since I was debriefed.”

“Those were different times,” Kealey said. “I don’t promise it will help, but you know better than anyone that information is essential. You might get some.”

Largo thanked his nephew. There was a final embrace, then a quick one for Rayhan before she and Kealey walked out the squeaky screen door back along the old cement path. They walked in silence.

Kealey did not look back as they drove away, toward the lights of the distant mall. If he had seen his uncle watching them go, he might have gone back to get him. He understood, now, what had kept his uncle silent all those years: the sense that the job was never really done and that it was somehow your responsibility to do it. Kealey felt that, too. But Largo had chosen a domestic life and the chance, at least, to forget the awesome responsibility that had been part of his every waking hour. Kealey felt that in his own life and it frightened him to think that just a few years of service had impacted Largo in this way.

Still, the reason he couldn’t bring him to D.C. had nothing to do with any of that. He didn’t want to get the old man’s hopes up that he could be hands-on again. The Company boys would honor him at “hello.” At best they would patronize him with busywork, at worst, ignore him while they pressed on.

They both knew it. That’s what the tears told Kealey. No operative Kealey had ever known could get used to the idea that, at some point, the only future he would be able to impact was his own.

“What do you think will happen when Iran realizes what it has?” Kealey asked as they got back on Sunrise Highway.

“I couldn’t begin to imagine,” she said. “I’ve never worked with anyone there.”

“Of course. It wasn’t a fair question,” Kealey realized. “Let me reverse engineer it, then. What would
you
do with the object? Scientifically.”

“Study it, of course, though I imagine the mechanism will seem crude to a seasoned eye. And then—it might not be possible to divide the material to make several smaller devices, but that could be an option. That was a very, very hot site when we first saw it.”

“Funny it didn’t show up before, even under the ice.”

“Actually, it did show up but we didn’t correctly identify the source,” Rayhan told him.

“In 2012, a large, hot phytoplankton bloom was discovered beneath the Arctic ice. Their extraordinary growth—dozens of miles of it—was due to the elevated levels of CO
₂
in the atmosphere. The algae was also uniformly radioactive, which we attributed to seasonal holes in the ozone.”

“But it wasn’t on anyone’s to-do list to check.”

“It wasn’t in anyone’s budget,” Rayhan said. “We thought, reasonably, that the readings were simply because there was more algae to suck it up and store it. We never thought the source could be below the ice.”

“Luck of the draw,” Kealey said with annoyance. All that technology, countless agencies watching everywhere on the planet, over the planet, under the planet—and Iran
stumbles
upon a suitcase nuke. It was enough to make one turn away from religion or toward it—Kealey wasn’t sure.

They did not speak again until they were aboard the helicopter and headed back to Washington. Kealey had been trying to work his way through Iran’s options. His biggest concern was not that they would have a working bomb but that the plans to make one could make their way into the hands of a group that managed to get fissionable materials. A dirty bomb was bad; this was incredibly worse.

“I’m still confused why you had me pack a bag.” She sat back in the uncomfortable seat, the shoulder bag on the seat beside her.

“Because, as I said back there, one never knows where information will lead,” Kealey said. He took a cell phone from his jacket pocket.

“Did this interview lead you somewhere?”

“Quite possibly,” he told her as he punched in a number. The helicopter had a secure signal, which the FBI car did not. “This thing Iran found was leaking radiation and now it’s not. If it hasn’t shown up again, we need to go where it might have gone and start sniffing around. Fast.”

Mahdavi Yazdi had dinner in his office before a scheduled meeting with two members of his Department of Disinformation—a large and well-funded division that was currently engaged in a massive program to spread falsehoods about dissidents. He had already been briefed by his counterespionage deputy, who had been monitoring transmissions and maritime activity that appeared to relate to the Iranian discovery in the Arctic Circle. Although most of the messages were coded, their frequency and point-to-point origins and destinations told Yazdi that America and its allies had a good idea what had been found in the ice and who had it—though they had no idea where the discovery had gone, since no vessels made their way to Rabat. He liked the feeling of not only having the weapon but having eluded, so far, the world’s frantic efforts to try and locate it.

As Yazdi aide arrived with the
ghormehsabzi,
an herbal stew, Yazdi received an email alert from the International Communications Center in the sub-basement. The location of MISIRI operatives around the world was tagged to local police reports of activity in those regions. If an agent could not communicate directly with the ministry, he or she would generate an event that was sure to be reported and sent different messages: arson in a parked vehicle meant “success,” broken windows in a government building meant “failure,” and the absence of either of these meant that the task was still ongoing.

Sometimes murder was a situational update.

The homicide was picked up on a police frequency in Salé. The location and room number told Yazdi that either his agent was dead—or his agent had killed someone on his way out the window. The MISIRI chief did not eat as he waited for updates. He sat with his hands folded on his desk. The next report said that nothing suspicious was found in the room. The body had been robbed but theft did not seem to be the motive.

Then the description of the body came in—height, hair color, eye color, facial hair, scars on the left arm. It was Qassam Pakravesh.

Yazdi ordered his chief of records to go back through Pakravesh’s dossier and find out everyone who might have been an enemy. He called his reconnaissance team, which tracked the movements and communications of agents, to find out where the man had been in the preceding two weeks. He wanted the information delivered to him personally, in his office, in an hour. Then he picked up the phone and called Farhad Salehi at his apartment in Tehran. This was not a situation the MISIRI dared deal with alone. The implications were troubling enough to solicit the advice and support of the Council of Experts.

Yazdi ate a few bites of food while the housekeeper summoned the elder. Salehi, affable as usual, agreed to meet the minister at once. Yazdi didn’t have to tell him why; the fact that he was calling at this hour told him it was a matter of some importance. Yazdi had some more dinner while he ordered his car brought from the garage.

The modern twelve-story apartment building was located on Esfandiyar, not far from the Greek Embassy. It was home to many foreign officials, most of whom Yazdi recognized from surveillance—though, of course, none of them knew him. The minister’s driver pulled into the small parking lot after dropping Yazdi at the front door. A concierge announced him as Mohammed. It was the name he had always used in public. He felt a sting of irreverence when he realized the implications of using that name to visit this seasonal home to seven of the Experts.

The “mountain” would never come to him.

Farhad Salehi, an imam in his home province, greeted Yazdi in a traditional white coat, a short-sleeved wool garment that reached to the knees. The old man wore loose-fitting black trousers and a white collarless shirt. A black skullcap sat on his long white hair, which seemed to pour seamlessly into a white moustache and beard that flowed to his chest. Salehi’s dark skin and brown eyes had a healthy look, the glow of a man at peace with his life.

The men hugged briefly before Salehi invited him to sit in one of two armchairs on either side of a small coffee table. A few pleasantries were exchanged. Salehi sat and the housekeeper brought tea, which he poured. When he was gone, Yazdi edged the chair around so he could lean in to the older man.

“I don’t have much time, Imam, but I wanted you and the Society to know that one of our agents has been murdered in Morocco,” Yazdi told him.

“I grieve and will pray for him.”

“Pray for us as well, holy one,” Yazdi said. “In his possession was what we believe to be a nuclear weapon small enough to be carried in a suitcase. We recovered the device from an old German vessel. The device is now in the hands of persons unknown.”

“Persons—on whose side?” the imam asked. “You deal with so many individuals, old friend.”

There was humor in the statement, but also a great deal of truth. Part of Yazdi’s job was to keep Western eyes looking anywhere but on Iran, its nuclear program, its sale of oil in defiance of sanctions. He did this by secretly watching and at times aiding foreign interests who were actively opposing the West, from Hamas and Hezbollah on the Israeli border to al Qaida in Afghanistan and Yemen to small, little-known groups that worked in the shadows waiting for an opportunity to strike.

“The people who took the bomb are thieves,” Yazdi said. “They are on their own side. We know that this device was being tracked by multiple intelligence agencies around the world. And they know that we are the ones who found the bomb.”

The imam said, “You are afraid the international community will blame us if there are consequences.”

“Yes. Even if we were not a part of any act of terror, we made it possible. Our denials will amount to nothing. Even our allies will turn on us. It will hurt everyone but the most militant Muslims among us.”

“They will be empowered as they were in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks,” the imam said. “They will embrace what was not their doing because it supports their ends.”

“This will embolden the domestic forces who oppose us and strengthen foreign intervention,” Yazdi said. “Owning the device would have given us power. Using it removes that power.”

“A strange inconsistency in that,” the imam said. “But true.”

“We will be isolated,” Yazdi said. “Not in name, as we are now, but in fact. Our people will turn on each other. We will see fratricide.”

Despite international sanctions, China, India, and Russia were still purchasing Iranian oil—not from Iran directly but through corporations with foreign bases, such as the National Iranian Oil Company and the Naftiran Intertrade Company. Their out-of-country locations made them immune to many of the international sanctions imposed on Iran due to its nuclear program.

Nuclear.
That one word carried the weight of the worst of the potential consequences.

“It is one thing to challenge Iran’s enemies with words, as our president does,” Yazdi went on—imparting a high degree of sarcasm at the mention of a president whose effectiveness he had always questioned. “It is one thing to intimidate a naval ship or send up a rocket, as the military does. It is one thing, an altogether acceptable thing, to provide succor to the enemies of one’s enemies.”

“But it is quite another to actually use a nuclear weapon against an enemy,” the imam said. “I understand.”

“That wasn’t the reason I wanted that device,” Yazdi told him.

“I believe you, but if a major European or American city is laid waste—”

“At worst, it would lead to reprisals, possibly even nuclear. At best, it would quarantine us until there is a regime change.”

The imam sipped his tea slowly. It was so quiet his guest could hear the man’s beard rustle.

“What do you propose?” he finally asked.

“I am going to gather all available resources to find the device,” Yazdi said. “But the Society must be made aware of the risks—and the steps I must take.”

Salehi regarded his companion. His eyes seemed darker than before beneath their thick white brows. “You wish to contact foreign intelligence agencies? Warn them? I am not sure I could sanction that.”

“No, Imam,” he said quickly. “Many of them would never believe that we are
not
involved.”

“Then what?”

“To begin with, I want to wake a sleeper who is deep in American intelligence. Q
f-3.”

“A letter of the alphabet? Is that all you know of him?”

“In fact, that is all I know,” Yazdi admitted. “No one knows the names of our sleepers, not even in my office. “

“I assume that is a prudent way to run your organization?”

Yazdi ignored the elder’s sarcasm. Even the good Experts thought they knew more than they did.

“It is essential that he have what we call ‘plausible deniability, ’ ” Yazdi explained. “If uncovered, our sleeper would not be able to tell the Americans anything about our operation. We know how to contact them via disposable cell phones, but that is all. They replace the phones after the initial communication. Then they are on their own. We are simply assured of their loyalty to the Ayatollah.”

“By the Ayatollah?”

“That, and by their deeds,” Yazdi said. “The only drawback is that once they are unleashed, they are on their own initiative to interfere with operations. Before you remark on the extreme nature of that, it is the only way to secure the services of many younger agents. The Ayatollah’s loyalists are eager to create havoc, not just mischief. They start small, so as not to be discovered, but their acts grow more elaborate if they think there is a chance of doing severe damage to the Great Satan.”

“I can support that,” Salehi remarked. “How do you reconnect when their work is done? They have thrown away their mobile phones—”

“They contact us with a new number,” Yazdi said.

“It sounds like a passage from one of our laws after a compromise has been achieved,” the Expert said.

“Fortunately, my focus is simpler,” Yazdi went on. He did not have the time to chat as he usually did. “I want to keep the Americans away from us until we can recover the device. It may cost us an asset but it will gain us leverage.”

Salehi took more tea as he considered this. “This sleeper has been a constant source of information?”

“Not the highest level of information, but steady. If the individual is found out now—and most likely they will be, for providing disinformation—it will at worst cause some embarrassment and an end to the flow of information.”

“But we will have more time to recover the weapon.”

Yazdi nodded.

“I approve of this. What else will you do?” the imam asked, sensing that his old friend was not quite finished.

“I’m going to go to Morocco myself,” he said. “There is no one else I trust to do this job as it must be done.”

The imam reflected for a long moment. “I will support you in this.” He raised his hands, palms out. “May the blessings of God be upon you.”

Yazdi bowed and left. He was eager to know what his chief of records had found out in his absence.

Energized in a way he had not been for years, the intelligence minister motioned for his waiting driver.