The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller (25 page)

“My children,” she said. “Want—to see them.”

“You will.” Several people were getting out. He heard two of them calling for the police and an ambulance.

“Is there anything you can tell me about the man who abducted you,” Yazdi asked.

“Muslim—young.”

“Anything else?”

She moaned, shook her head slowly.

“I want to catch him, see that he is punished. When he spoke—”

“My phone,” she said, lurching awkwardly. “He handled it.”

People were beginning to gather. Yazdi felt delicately around her body, as though he were checking for broken bones. He was also touching a woman familiarly—and in public. He looked away to show the others that he was uncomfortable with that; it was the truth. When he found the phone, he palmed it and stepped back.

A doctor announced himself and made his way through the few onlookers. There was an ambulance in the distance.

And then the road erupted ahead of them. Yazdi saw it an instant before he heard it or felt it. A black plume shot straight up, like a crow’s feather, then quickly smeared around the edges. The bang was like a child hitting a Dumpster with a stick. And then the roadway beneath him literally rolled, like the sea.

Yazdi knew who it was, what it was, and who the target had been when he saw the column of smoke flash-form. He was up and running toward it, dodging cars that stopped as other cars, ahead of them, were knocked, pushed, or rolled back. It was about a quarter mile away from him but the heat of the explosion—and the smell of the ingredients—reached him before he had gone more than a few steps. It had the odor of a kitchen where something was burning. It was a home-made explosive, just like the car bomb, made with oatmeal. He knew all of that before he taken a dozen steps yet he didn’t know the most important thing: what he hoped to find. He did not know if he wanted the Americans dead or not. The man was arrogant, the woman was inexperienced, and they had gotten in the way of his mission.

But that man had been seasoned and, because of that, he had been fair. That was a quality lacking even in his own department, especially the younger men who only knew how to hate—even their fellow Iranians.

Yazdi drew a handkerchief from his pocket as he neared the bomb site. The cloud was dissipating in all directions now, with choking, particulate matter from both the bomb and the vehicles that burned around it. The heat came in waves, from hot to hotter, and he ran with his left hand above his brow so he could cover his eyes when the furnace temperatures were their worst.

The police car the American had been driving was not there. Yazdi circled around ground zero, upwind from the heat, saw the vehicle parked on the shoulder. He hurried over and saw the damaged tires, the blasted windshield—and through it he spotted his cell phone on the seat. It wasn’t exactly an act of trust, he knew, but a calculated gamble: the American had put stopping the device above all other considerations—and hoped that Yazdi felt the same.

He did not know if two people could arrive at the same course of action for two very different reasons.

Right now Yazdi needed to get information and the explosion itself might help. Behind, where he had left the woman, he could see the lights of the ambulance through the smoke. Other sirens were approaching from both directions. He would have to act fast before the crime scene was sealed. He made his way as close as he dared, to where the cabin of an overturned motor home had been scorched by the blast. The driver and passenger were dead, charred, their bodies and the seats still ablaze. He had not come to help them. He held his breath and, in the dark, by the light of the burning car, he pinched particles of ash from the ground—burned leather, powdered rubber, human flesh. It didn’t matter. He lay it in the handkerchief and hurried back to the remains of the police car. Spreading the fabric on the seat, he held the injured woman’s phone close to his mouth and exhaled. He quickly put it facedown in the ash and pressed it down lightly. Then he picked it up carefully and lay it faceup. He took his own phone and put it close on top. The built-in camera was equipped with finely engineered optics. He snapped several images, then sent them to Sanjar, in his division, with a text:

He considered ordering them to send the D.C. mole to ground—but felt he might still be useful. Yazdi still hoped to obtain the nuclear device and having someone inside was worth the risk of possibly losing him. He did send a second, different, text, however. When he was finished, the Iranian rubbed the phone clean and threw it toward the nearest fire so his own prints would not be found on it. He saw a suitcase lying in the road and, hurrying over, opened it. He found a man’s shirt, roughly his size, and pulled it on. He also took a sweater he found and threw it around his shoulders. Then he went back to the shoulder and pushed down a section of the wire fence—helped by a huge section of tire that had been blown against it. Scampering over it he ran into the field, in the direction the Americans had to have gone.