The Increment (31 page)

“What are you going
to do with us?” said Jackie quietly. All she had left were words, to barter or provoke; or at least, to comprehend.

“Let you go,” said Al-Majnoun.

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. You’re not supposed to.”

Jackie looked at the Lebanese man. The face looked like a composite of old surveillance photographs; it was an Identi-Kit drawing in which the pieces didn’t fit. She had been trained for everything but this. She wanted to understand the part that was real; the center line in this erratic and unpredictable skid of events.

“How do we leave?” she asked.

“There is a black car downstairs. My driver is waiting for you. He will take you to the border. Not at Saraghs where you entered. They will be looking for you there. But at Kalat, to the north. It is only a hundred kilometers from here. Do you have communication?”

“Yes,” said Jackie.

“Use it. When you are in the car, call your people. Tell them where you are coming out. Have them wait on the other side. It is not an official border crossing, but the smugglers know it. My driver will take you to the other side. He has a gun. If they try to stop him at the border, he will shoot. Unless you are unlucky, you will survive.”

“Who are you?” asked Jackie. “That man called you ‘Al-Majnoun.’”

The assassin winced. The man with no face did not want to have any identity.

“The man lied. I have no name, because I do not exist. I could have killed you and this boy, but I gave you life. Now it is time for you to go.”

He cut her hands loose and pushed her and Karim Molavi out the door of the villa, toward the waiting car. She and the young man had no choice but to do as they had been instructed. If they waited here, they would surely die. If they went in the car as this madman proposed, they might live. They went down to the Mitsubishi. Jackie was sickened by the sight of Hakim. The pool of blood around his body had begun to congeal. Insects had already found the wound on his head and were feeding on the blood and tissue.

Inside the van, the poor driver had bled across the little kilim pillow he used as a seat rest, the pool of blood seeping into the back of the van. Jackie began retrieving any items that might identify her and the other two as British agents, but Al-Majnoun pulled her away. When she resisted, he pointed his gun not at her, but at Karim, and she relented.

“I am saving you,” said the Lebanese. “I want you to escape.”

“Why?” asked Jackie.

Al-Majnoun did not answer.

The two got in the backseat of the Paykan. Al-Majnoun said a few words to his driver, to make clear that the delivery of these two to the border was now his only mission. Then he closed the door. The car turned sharply in the driveway and sped away, headlights extinguished.

Al-Majnoun took one more tour of the bloody array at the villa and then made a call on his phone. A car arrived ten minutes later. Al-Majnoun slumped exhausted into the backseat. He reached into his black bag and removed his pipe; he kneaded a ball of opium carefully into the pipe and fired it with his butane lighter, drawing the smoke into the lungs and the blood and the head. The car sped away in the night, and Al-Majnoun floated away to a place where he truly had no name, and no mission.

The black sedan rumbled
north, up a long mountain valley toward Kalat. The moon was now full, bathing the landscape in an ivory half-light. The switchbacks and rocky hills all danced with shadows of the clouds, cast by the moonbeams. Karim was asleep, finally. Jackie was trying to stay awake. She had combed her darkened hair, and put on the chador to veil her face. She was shaking underneath the black garment, fluttering like a moth stuck on a pin. There were a few cars out on the road, but no cops. Eventually someone in the neighborhood would call the Mashad police, and they would be summoned. There had been too much noise at the house. Then, as the police began to realize what all these bodies meant, a desperate hunt would begin. But maybe by then they would be across the border.

After they had been driving a half hour, Jackie took her GSM phone and called the operations room in London. The call was routed to Adrian at Saraghs, who was awakened from a dead sleep.

“We’re coming out,” said Jackie. Her voice was in a dead register of exhaustion. “Not the way we came in, but another way. It’s called Kalat. It’s due north from Mashad, up in the mountains. It’s not a border crossing, but we’re going to crash it. Wait on the other side.”

“Darling,” he said. He wasn’t supposed to talk that way, but he could not help himself.

“Shut up. Did you get the exfil point?”

“Kalat,” he repeated. “What time?”

“I don’t know. Probably just after dawn.” Her voice was heavy with fatigue and sorrow.

“Are you all right?”

“No. I have lost two people.”

“Dead?”

“Yes.”

Adrian groaned. “I’m sorry.”

“The boy is alive. He’s with me.”

“Did it work? The thing?”

“I don’t know yet. I can’t tell. It all turned to shit.”

“Are you okay?”

“What the fuck is going on, Adrian? Who is Al-Majnoun?”

Adrian didn’t understand the question and asked her to repeat it. She said a few words and then stopped. She had been talking too long. The phone connection wasn’t secure. There wasn’t time for Adrian to explain now, even if he knew the truth. She repeated the name of the place where she would be coming out and ended the call.

The road rose toward
Kalat. The town was topped with cliffs that were a natural fortress. The forces of the Persian warrior Nader Shah were said to have retreated here into the rocks to escape the hordes of the Turkmen conqueror Tamerlane. The driver had slowed. He was looking for his bearings.

A rosy gleam behind the eastern hills signaled the coming dawn. Jackie woke Karim. As his eyes opened and he came to consciousness, a look of deep sadness showed on his face.

“What happened to us?” he asked. “Why were all those people killed? Who was that man? Why are we still alive?” He was too sleepy not to say what he felt.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “I just want to get you out of this place. That is the only way that any of this will make any sense. So please trust me a little longer, even though I don’t deserve it.”

They passed through the little town center. There was a police station. The lights inside were on. Why were they up so early? The driver muttered a curse in Farsi. It was the first word he had spoken during the trip. The border was ahead, up a narrow road through the high hills. The driver proceeded past the rock-ribbed houses that lined the road, the residents coming awake. From a mosque toward the north end of town, they could hear the tinny amplified call to the
Fajr
prayer at dawn.

The driver peered at the road ahead and then jammed on the brakes. There was a roadblock on the main route, a hundred yards distant. The figures of the policemen were indistinct in the dim light, but the barrier across the road was large. The driver cursed again. He backed up thirty yards to a turning, and took the fork to the left. It was narrow road, half dirt and half asphalt, and the Paykan shimmied and fishtailed on the rough surface. He was moving toward the high ground that would lead to the smugglers’ routes that were drawn in his mind.

Jackie looked off to her right. They were even with the roadblock now. She hoped the police at their barrier might not care about the car on the side road. She thought that perhaps they had passed safely, but in the next moment she heard a siren and saw that a police cruiser had set off from the barrier, and then a second one.

“Go, you fucker,” Jackie screamed at the driver. But he didn’t need encouragement. He gunned the car up the steepening slope, spinning out once as he rounded a bend but otherwise keeping the car under control. The two police cars were behind them now on the side road. They were both Mercedes sedans, bigger and faster than the Paykan. Every twenty seconds, the pursuers gained another ten yards.

The black Paykan spun around a high curve and neared the summit of the ridge line. The border must be ahead. Either that or the road would come to a dead end, and they were finished right there. But the driver seemed to know where he was going. He was talking to himself now, in a staccato chatter of Farsi. They crested the peak, with the Iranian car bolting over a bump and into the air, and coming down so hard on its springs that for a moment the chassis seemed to sag. The driver gunned the car faster still.

The road led down now, toward a ravine that was perhaps a half mile away. At the center was a dry riverbed that marked the frontier. There was a little bridge, blocked by a barrier, but off to the left and right were open tracks where a vehicle could pass across the riverbed and over to the other side. The police cruisers continued to gain ground. It was impossible to know which would intersect the Paykan first—the chase car or the approaching frontier.

There was a sharp noise behind them. Karim and Jackie turned with a start and saw the gun firing from the passenger side of the lead police cruiser. It was an arc of bullets, barely aimed, but with each burst they bracketed their fire closer to the target.

“Gun,” Jackie shouted toward the front seat. The driver didn’t understand. Jackie bounded forward across the seat bench and grabbed at the driver’s throat.

“Give me the goddamned gun,” she screamed. The driver pulled something from inside his coat and tossed it on the seat. It was a German automatic pistol. The gunfire from the police cruiser was continuing. A few rounds had hit the thin steel frame of the Paykan.

“Get down,” shouted Jackie to her passenger. Karim drew tighter to her, as if to protect her.

“Get the fuck down,” she said, pushing him to the floor. She opened the window and began firing the Walther pistol. She was a far better shot than the Iranians, and with her second round she hit the driver of the first car. The cruiser spun away, but the second was behind, and the police inside were firing automatic weapons from both wings.

Ahead was the riverbed
and the border. A group was standing on the Turkmen side, their bodies shimmering in the rising light of morning. A helicopter stood waiting, its rotors rhythmically slicing the air. Two men stood at the head of the group, watching the approaching Paykan through binoculars.

The police cruiser kept spraying bullets, and it was the Paykan’s tires that were most vulnerable. The right rear tire punctured first, and then shredded. The car continued to move forward on its rim, but when a second tire was hit, forward motion slowed to almost nothing. The driver swerved the Paykan off the road, into the dirt, hoping that he might limp somehow to the gulley that was only a hundred yards distant now and then crash into the riverbed. But the Mercedes was abreast now, firing volleys of bullets that ripped into the car. The driver was hit; he cursed but held on to the wheel. He tried to go faster, but the little car had no traction left in the dirt.

Jackie looked at the boy on the floor, and at her weapon. They were not going to make it. In a few more moments they would be taken, and that was impossible. Karim was curled against the floorboards, at once a man and a child. She took aim at his head and pulled the trigger. Then she turned the gun on herself.

From the other side
of the border, the last few seconds were the hardest to watch. The automatic weapons fire from the Iranian police cruiser raked the Paykan from stem to stern, until the bullets found the gas tank and the car exploded in a blue plume. That was how they decided later that it must have been an actual police chase, and not an operation coordinated by the intelligence services. The intelligence services would never have blasted the car that way. They would have moved heaven and earth to keep those two passengers alive for questioning.

Adrian Winkler fell to his knees when he saw the bolt of flame, and let out a scream. Harry Pappas tried to find words, but he could not. This had happened to him once before, this sense of the life of a young man given to him for his protection, that he had not been able to save. The two men, in their grief, could not move. The young SIS officer named Jeremy from the Ashgabat station finally helped them to their feet and led them back to the helicopter. They had to get away before more Iranians arrived and things got more complicated.

They flew back to
London in a cabin of sorrow and failure. The deadness of loss was all they felt in the first hours. Kamal Atwan had already left Turkmenistan when their helicopter returned to Ashgabat—pressing business back in London, he said. But he had left a second plane at Adrian Winkler’s disposal at the airport, fueled and ready to go. Jeremy from the Ashgabat station advised that they should leave the country now, before the flap ripened. He solemnly handed Adrian a cable that had just come in from Sir David Plumb in London. The gist of it seemed to be, “Get the fuck out of there, now.”

Harry didn’t argue for staying. He was trying to piece together the chain of events of the last several days, to the extent that he understood them, and he didn’t much care where he was. He was feeding on a private rage—a loathing that included everyone and everything around him, but most especially himself.

The plane was a Gulfstream G-5, Atwan’s personal jet for entertaining friends and clients. It was appointed like a flying salon, with a black leather interior and gaudy gold fixtures. The bathroom had a full-length window. The attendant was a well-endowed woman from the north of England who served drinks leaning in toward the passengers so that her bosom was in their face. Adrian seemed to know the plane. After they took off from Ashgabat, he went back into the aft cabin and had the attendant make up the bed. The sheets were black silk, and there was a mirror on the ceiling. He offered the bed to Harry, who refused, so Adrian closed the door and tucked himself in.

Harry sat in the deep leather of the armchair and closed his eyes. He didn’t want to sleep, but to think. The story was there in his hands, but he couldn’t read it. All he had were questions: How had four of his people died in Mashad? What had surprised the well-trained team from the Increment? Why had their original escape plan been abandoned? Where had Jackie gotten the black Paykan that had nearly reached the border? Who was driving the car? He had seen Jackie’s face through his binoculars, but the driver was a stranger. And what had happened in those final moments before immolation? He had seen Jackie shoot at something on the rear floor before she put the gun to her own head. Who had been the target of that first shot? It must have been Karim. If so, did that mean he had been successful in his mission at the Ardebil Research Establishment, or that had he failed? And the Iranians: How long had they known that this operation was coming at them? Had the operation been compromised from the beginning? Harry hated to admit that possibility; it shamed him. But with so many dead bodies, he could not exclude it.

And what was Kamal Atwan’s role? That was the part of this story Harry understood least. He had been the essential facilitator of every transaction in this process. He had acted with the assurance of a man running his own intelligence service, and he had delivered everything he had promised. But the end product had been a disaster. What had Harry missed? What could have helped him to foresee the disaster that had befallen his team when it took his agent, Karim Molavi, back into Iran? Had he killed the boy, through his own inattention?

Harry let Adrian sleep
for two hours and then woke him up. He brought a cup of black coffee with him back to the aft cabin.

“We need to talk, brother,” he said. “Wake up.”

“I’m busted up, Harry,” the British officer answered groggily. “I loved that woman. I took some pills. I need to sleep. Let’s talk in London.”

“Get up.” Harry handed him the coffee. “I mean it. I need some answers before we land. This whole thing is going to blow, and I want to know what the fuck has been going on.”

Adrian groaned and took the coffee. He knew that Harry wouldn’t leave him alone until they talked. The American had a pliable exterior, but he didn’t bend on things that mattered. The British officer wobbled back to the aft lavatory, decorated in a plush red fabric. He brushed his teeth and splashed some water on his face. When he emerged, Harry made him finish the coffee and then gave him a second cup.

“Is this plane bugged?”
began Harry. They were sitting next to each other in the aft compartment. The bed had been packed away.

“Fucked if I know,” said Adrian. “Probably.”

“Then talk in my ear, and I’ll talk in yours. This is for us, not your business partner.”

Adrian winced. “Ease up, Harry. I’ve got my whole career coming down on my head. If this comes out wrong, I’m destroyed.”

“So what? My career is wrecked, too. Worse than that, maybe. Talk in my ear so no microphone can pick it up, and we’ll do fine.”

Adrian nodded. Harry leaned toward the other man’s head and spoke in a whisper.

“Jackie called you to tell you she was coming out another way. Right? You told me she called.”

“Correct,” he whispered. “She said we should go to Kalat. She made me repeat it.”

“What else did she say?”

Adrian paused and closed his eyes, then leaned back toward Harry and whispered again.

“She said she had lost the two boys. She said Karim was with her, alive, and they were coming out.”

“What else? Did she explain? Did she say what had gone down in Mashad? Why there was a change of plans?”

“Nothing. It was a short conversation. She was afraid it would be insecure. She wanted to get off the phone.”

Harry pulled back. His eyes were flashing. He spoke loudly, almost in a shout.

“I don’t believe you, Adrian. That can’t have been all. Tell me the goddamned truth. What else?” He grabbed the other man by the collar and pulled his head toward him.

“Nothing,” Adrian croaked.

Harry slapped him hard across the face.

“You are a lying piece of shit, Adrian. Tell me the truth. It was an operational call. It was routed through London. You think we can’t intercept and decrypt that? You’re out of your mind. I’m going to find out anyway. The only question is whether I’ll have an ounce of respect left for you. Now tell me the truth, you stupid, selfish prick.” He slapped him a second time.

Tears were streaming from Adrian’s eyes. Not from the blows, but from a deeper anguish. He knew precisely what Jackie had said. Her accusing words would burn in his mind until the day he died. He put his head on Harry’s shoulders. Harry could feel the wet of his tears through his shirt.

“Here’s what she said.
‘What the fuck is going on, Adrian?’
She wanted to know what had gotten screwed up, so that the ops plan had turned to shit. She said she didn’t know if they had succeeded or failed. She was frightened and angry. I could hear it in her voice, even over the satellite link. I called her ‘darling’ and she told me to fuck off. That’s how upset she was.”

“What did you say? When she asked why the operation was blown?”

“Nothing. I didn’t know. I don’t know.”

Harry looked at him, not sure whether he believed Adrian or not. He let it sit.

“What else did she say? Come on. Goddammit! There has to be more.”

Adrian’s eyes filled with tears again. There was a plaintive look to his face now, not just penitent but frightened. He leaned in toward Harry and spoke in the smallest whisper.

“She asked me,
‘Who is Al-Majnoun?’
Right after she asked what was going on, she wanted to know who this Al-Majnoun was.”

Harry held him steady in his arms, their foreheads touching.

“What’s the answer?”

Adrian shook his head. His eyes were red, from weeping and exhaustion.

“I don’t know,” whispered Adrian. “I had no idea what she was talking about. That’s why I was so scared.”

Harry let Adrian’s head fall back limp. He thought that his shattered friend was telling the truth.

When they landed in
London, Harry debated whether to confront Kamal Atwan immediately. Adrian was a spent force. He would get no help there. He decided against seeing Atwan now. The Lebanese businessman would expect it; he would be waiting in his elegant London mansion, with every detail arranged as neatly as the paintings on the walls. All the pieces of this puzzle that Harry could see had passed through the Lebanese businessman’s hands, but unless Harry could distinguish their shapes and edges better, he would never be able to fit them together. Or worse, he would assemble them into the shape Atwan intended, without being able to see an alternative combination. So Harry would wait until he understood better. By then, perhaps, he would be a private citizen.

Harry paid a visit
to Sir David Plumb during his London stopover. He didn’t tell Adrian and called the chief’s office directly to set up the appointment. But when he arrived at Vauxhall Cross, Adrian was waiting with Sir David in his office. They didn’t break ranks, the Brits. It didn’t matter much in terms of what Harry wanted to say.

The meeting didn’t last long. What Harry wanted to know was what London would do now. Sir David explained the situation; he was quite cheery, all things considered. The Iran mission, despite its rough edges, had given the prime minister what he needed. The Iranian nuclear program was well under control. The British had understood that all along, they had it by the head and the tail, but the Americans hadn’t listened.

“But we don’t know what happened in Mashad,” said Harry. “There’s quite a lot we don’t know.”

“Psah!” said Sir David, waving his hand. “The details will emerge. We know enough to brief the P.M. And the P.M. knows enough to take sensible action. We won’t go down with the ship again. You must realize that. No more Iraqs! The special relationship isn’t a suicide pact. Before the White House does anything crazy, the prime minister will take his own actions.”

“What will the prime minister do?”

“Sorry, old boy, but you’re not on that bicker list. In fact, the only real problem that No. 10 has with this plan is you, Harry. I’m afraid they don’t trust you. But I told them not to worry.”

“And why did you tell No. 10 that, Sir David?”

“Because we
own
you, Harry Pappas. You’re our man now, and you’ll do what we like.”