Unforgettable - eARC (12 page)

“Okay,” I said. “Yelena and I will—”

“Don’t take Yelena,” Edward said.

“Why not?”

He sighed. “Have I told you already what Jamshidi is building?”

“A quantum supercomputer to predict the future,” I said, a little confused by the change of subjects. “But what has any of that got to do with Yelena?”

“She’s a security risk.”

“I trust her, and we work well together,” I said. I didn’t bring up her criticisms of my work. “And she wants to find Jamshidi just as much as we do.”

“Look, Nat. I know what it must be like—no, I take that back. I can’t even imagine how lonely you must feel sometimes, so it’s no surprise that you want to be with someone who can remember you. But your attachment to this woman is a weakness.”

“We’re working as a team,” I said. “We’ve each managed to help the other escape, so I’d say she’s a strength, not a weakness. You’ve always said it would be great if I could have someone to back me up. Yelena can. She could be a huge asset—make me far more effective than ever before—if you would just give her a chance.”

“You say she wants to find Jamshidi. Remind me why?”

“To get her sisters back.”

“Right.” He paused. “I’ll withdraw my objection on one condition. Otherwise, I’m ordering you to leave her behind on this mission.”

“What’s the condition?”

“Can you honestly tell me you’re a hundred percent certain she wouldn’t turn you over to Jamshidi in return for her sisters?”

Chapter Sixteen

Yelena frowned. “Why the change of plans?”

“Orders from Langley,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’m sure you can handle things with the Iranians yourself. You don’t need an amateur like me blundering about, anyway.” I tried to make my voice light, but it was difficult. I didn’t want to leave Yelena. I tried telling myself it was for the best, as we could never have a real life together, and she was better off without me. But I felt hollow inside.

“But where are you going?”

“Can’t say. Sorry, it’s a CIA thing.”

She walked into the bathroom, then came out holding a clear plastic bag containing her toiletries. “I was SVR. I understand operational security.” She put the bag into her carry-on.

“Right. Of course,” I said.

“Maybe you should give me alternate contact at CIA, in case I locate Jamshidi’s lab and you are not available.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. I jotted down Edward’s direct line at Langley on a piece of hotel stationery. “Call this number. He’s my handler, but don’t bother mentioning my name; he won’t remember me and it will get complicated. But he’ll recognize your name as someone involved with Jamshidi, so he’ll at least listen to your information.”

She took the paper, then slung her carry-on over her shoulder. “This is goodbye, then. When I pass on location of lab, our deal is done.”

It took me a moment to remember what deal she was referring to: I would help find where her sisters were, and then she would help locate Jamshidi’s lab. I had been an idiot to think we had somehow become a team—she was merely fulfilling her end of the bargain. I wanted her as part of my life because she could remember me, but she had no use for me beyond the mission.

Edward was right—my attachment to her was a weakness.

I held out my hand. “It’s been a pleasure working with you,” I said.

She shook my hand. “A pleasure. You will take care of room checkout?”

I nodded.

“Then I will go catch plane.
Do svidaniya
.” She walked to the door and opened it.

“Yelena,” I said.

She stopped and looked back at me over her shoulder.

I could walk away from the CIA. I could tell Yelena that I’d go with her to help rescue her sisters. I could take her in my arms and kiss her and tell her I loved her.

“Good luck,” I said.

She flashed me a perfect smile and walked out of my life.

* * *

Normally, I would go back to Langley and meet with Edward between missions. But since I was already in the Middle East and the three days of mourning provided a time constraint, I didn’t have time for that. So I was forced to make my own travel arrangements.

Unless you’re flying an Israeli spy plane, you can’t get a direct flight from Israel to Iran. And since American citizens weren’t exactly welcome in the Islamic Republic these days, I decided it would be easier to fly to Iraq and then slip across the border into Iran, rather than obtain a fake non-American passport and fly to Tehran.

So I caught a flight to Amman on Royal Jordanian Airlines and connected to Baghdad, which was actually closer to Parham Rezaei’s hometown than Tehran, anyway. I switched to Iraqi Airways to get down to Basra.

In the Basra airport, I found an ATM and withdrew the maximum cash advance on the credit card. I then waited a minute and did that again. I wrote down the bank name and how much I got in my notebook, so I could get the CIA to reimburse them later.

From the Basra airport, it was only about twenty miles to the Iranian border. It would take more than regular cab fare to get across, but first things first. So I got myself some transportation in the form of a beat-up cab driven by a man who introduced himself as Ali.

“Where to, sir?” he asked as he pulled away from the curb. His accent was more British than American.

“I need to go to Iran,” I said.

“You don’t want to go to Iran, sir. Nasty place for a Yank like you.”

“It’s business, not pleasure.” I took fifty thousand dinars—about forty-five dollars—out of my wallet and flipped them onto the front seat.

He slipped the wad of bills into his pocket. “I can take you to the border crossing at Abu al Khasib.”

“What if I didn’t want to show my passport?”

“Ah,” he said. “That will cost more. But my Uncle Ali knows a place you can get across.”

“I thought your name was Ali.”

“Sometimes it’s safer to be Ali,” he said. “If someone accuses Ali of something, how will the police find one Ali among thousands?”

“Especially if his name isn’t really Ali, right?”

I saw his grin in the rear-view mirror. “Exactly, sir.”

“So take me to Uncle Ali,” I said. It was always possible this was a ploy to rob a foreigner, but I figured that the anticipation of a large fee for getting me across the border would outweigh any impulse to just take what was in my wallet.

As the cab wound through the bustling streets of Basra, I kept my mind from wondering what Yelena was doing by carrying on a discussion with Cabdriver Ali about how life had changed since the invasion. He had initially learned English from British soldiers, and then from an American teacher at school. He hoped to make enough money from driving a cab to someday move to Baghdad.

Eventually we turned onto a narrow dirt road between ramshackle buildings. “Uncle Ali lives here,” he said, pointing to a two-story building with a fenced roof. He stopped the car in the middle of the street. “I will go in and talk to him. You wait here.”

I could let him do that, wait for him to forget me, and then go up to the house and say I’d heard someone there could help me get across the border into Iran. But that would seem a lot more suspicious to Uncle Ali than if Cabdriver Ali introduced me.

“I don’t like sitting alone in a strange place,” I said, holding out fifty thousand more dinar.

“You will be a welcome guest in my uncle’s house, I am sure.”

We got out and went through a wooden door into the tan brick building. Cabdriver Ali called out in Arabic, and was greeted by a wrinkled old man with silver hair. After they conversed for a minute, with Cabdriver Ali gesturing several times in my direction, the old man pointed me toward a wooden chair.

“My grandfather says my uncle will be back soon,” Cabdriver Ali said. “We can wait for him here.”

“Thank your grandfather for me,” I said.

The grandfather spoke no English, but we played chess for over an hour while Cabdriver Ali watched. I was losing my third game in a row—and blaming that on stray thoughts of Yelena—when a man with slicked-back black hair and a light-gray business suit entered. He shot me a sharp look as Cabdriver Ali spoke to him in rapid Arabic.

I rose from my seat.

“This is my Uncle Ali,” Cabdriver Ali said. “He will take good care of you, sir.” He bowed his head in my direction and left the room.

Uncle Ali indicated I should sit again, and he took another chair. “You wish to cross the border into Iran? Where are you headed?”

“Hamidiyeh.” According to my research, Rezaei’s hometown was a small farming community about seventy-five miles to the northeast, as the crow flies.

“Then you will need a car and driver on the other side,” he said. “Are you smuggling anything?”

“Just me.”

“Five thousand dollars.”

“Two thousand,” I said. “I don’t need a driver.”

“It’s more expensive without the driver, because then you must buy the car instead of rent. Eight thousand.”

“Thirty-five hundred, and I’ll take the driver.”

“Four thousand.”

“Two thousand in advance, the rest once I’m inside Iran.” If he accepted the split payment easily, I would suspect he planned to rob me.

He frowned. “What guarantee do I have that you will pay the rest when we arrive in Iran?”

With a shrug, I said, “What guarantee do I have that I’ll arrive in Iran?”

“If I were going to rob you, I would take the money now.”

“Except I might need to get money from a bank to pay for the crossing, so you might wait until after that.”

Uncle Ali straightened in his chair. “I do not like to be accused of being a thief.”

“I haven’t accused you. I merely pointed out the flaw in your argument. Thirty-five hundred up front, and I’ll double that with money I’ll get from a bank in Iran.”

“Done.” He grinned and shook my hand with vigor. “Now, we wait for dark.”

* * *

Uncle Ali decided he would be my driver. We drove through the Iraqi desert at fifty miles per hour over a dirt road in the middle of the night with the headlights off in a car with no seatbelts. The half moon provided some illumination, but I hadn’t felt that close to death since Dmitri’s interrogation room. I clung to a vinyl loop attached to the car frame near my shoulder.

“The Red Sox pitching staff is good this year,” said Uncle Ali, “but I still think the Yankees have the edge.” Not many Iraqis were baseball fans, but Uncle Ali was a Yankees fan and managed to maintain a running commentary about the team during our drive.

I’m a football fan, myself, so I merely interjected an occasional “Uh-huh” and “Right” at appropriate intervals.

A GPS unit sitting on the dashboard showed our location. The road we were on didn’t show up, but the yellow line of the Iranian border grew closer and closer. When we were almost on top of it, Uncle Ali slowed the car down to a crawl. I let go of the vinyl strap.

The moon reflected off standing water in a ditch to one side of us.

A flashlight blinked up ahead, and Uncle Ali stopped the car. “Wait here while I talk with our Iranian friends.”

“No,” I said. I couldn’t have him forget me. Being found unexpectedly in a car on the Iraq-Iran border was rather low on my list of things to do before I died, and if it did happen, it might very well be the last thing I did. “I don’t like people talking about me behind my back.”

“But we will be in front of you.”

“Figure of speech. If you’re going to talk about me, I want to be there.”

“Do you speak Farsi?” he asked.

“Where is the bathroom?” I asked in American-accented Farsi. That was about all I knew.

“Come along then. But keep your hands visible and empty.”

We got out of the car and walked forward. A flashlight shone in my face, blinding me to anything else. To my left, Uncle Ali spoke quickly in Farsi, and someone beyond the light answered him.

After some conversation back and forth, Uncle Ali spoke to me in a low voice. “The usual Iranian border guards are not here. I don’t know these men. There may be trouble.” It could have been a ruse on his part to up the payment, but the tension in his voice seemed real.

“Offer them a reasonable bribe,” I said. “I’ll cover the extra cost.”

After some negotiation, he said, “They will accept two thousand dollars to let us cross the border.”

“Fine. Pay them out of the money I gave you, and I’ll reimburse you when we get to a bank.”

In the bluish glare of the flashlights, he nodded. He pulled out his wallet, counted out a sheaf of dinars, and held them up before him as we walked toward the lights.

A hand reached out from the blackness beyond and took the money. The sound of a rifle shot at close range deafened me for a moment. Uncle Ali looked down at his chest, where a rapidly growing spot looked black and wet in the harsh light.

He fell to his knees.

Before I could gather my wits enough to jump out of the cone of light from the flashlights, a rifle barrel extended to where I could see it, aimed at my chest.

Chapter Seventeen

From the darkness behind the flashlights, a voice jabbered at me in Farsi. I raised my hands and said, “American. Anyone speak English?”

“You have money?” a man said.

“Better than that,” I said. “I have MasterCard. I can get lots of money at a bank, but only if I’m alive. You understand? I’m worth a lot of money alive.”

The rifle barrel remained steady on me as another man came into the light and searched Uncle Ali’s body, pulling out the wallet and removing the rest of the cash. I was next. After pocketing my cell phone, he found my passport and wallet. His tone of disgust was evident when he only found a few thousand dinars—maybe ten dollars’ worth in all—in the wallet.

“MasterCard,” I said. “You understand MasterCard? ATM?” My only goal at this point was to get them to keep me alive. Plans for escape would have to come later.

“I understand,” said the man behind the flashlight. “We take you to ATM.”

My captors searched Uncle Ali’s car. I caught some glimpses of them and realized they were not wearing uniforms. These men were not the border guards.

With a cry of triumph, the man who had taken my phone and wallet pulled my carry-on out of the back seat. He opened it and strewed my clothing and toiletries across the desert sand. There must not have been anything worth taking, because he kicked the carry-on and rejoined the others.

As they marched me across the sand, I glanced over my shoulder at the dark figure lying on the ground. Uncle Ali was dead because of me. He’d been a friendly man, and as far as I knew he’d dealt fairly with me. He didn’t deserve to die.

But then, most people who died didn’t deserve it.

The edge of a flashlight beam caught a uniformed arm lying sprawled in the dirt. Whoever these men were, they were not afraid of killing Iranian border guards.

Rough hands shoved me into the back seat of a large, dark Mercedes that might have been new in the 1970s. These guys were obviously not professionals, as they did nothing to restrain my hands and feet—although they were safety-conscious enough to make me buckle my seatbelt. Instead, one of them sat in the back seat to my right, his rifle pointed at my belly. The other two got into the front seat.

They didn’t start driving, though. We sat in the car for around fifteen minutes before headlights appeared from the Iraqi side. Soon I could hear the rattling engine of a tractor-trailer rig. After some shouted conversation back and forth, the Mercedes pulled out in front of the truck and led the way deeper into Iran.

They were smuggling something. Killing Uncle Ali and kidnapping me were merely crimes of opportunity.

As we drove through the night, I couldn’t help wishing I were back in Uncle Ali’s car—no headlights, no seatbelts and all. That had been much safer.

I also found that it was possible for my mind to simultaneously hold two very opposite thoughts:
I’m glad Yelena’s not here
and
I wish Yelena were here
.

Yelena would have done something very professional to get out of this, I was sure. I was left with my amateur status and my talent. And I couldn’t use my talent as long as I was sharing a seat with a man pointing a rifle at me.

Either he or I needed to leave. And it didn’t look like he was going anywhere.

My first option would be to unbuckle my seatbelt, open the door, and jump out of the Mercedes. This required me to hope that the guy with the gun wouldn’t shoot me in the process—or that he wouldn’t hit anything vital, at least. I also had to hope that I wouldn’t get injured too badly on hitting the ground and rolling, and that the truck following behind wouldn’t run me over. Plus, I would have to find someplace to hide so when they turned around to find me it would take them more than a minute.

I decided to come back to that option if I couldn’t find a better one.

What I needed was for my captors to voluntarily take their eyes off me for a minute. That was what I usually achieved by getting into a bathroom, but as luxurious as this Mercedes might have been back in the 1970s, it had not come equipped with a private bathroom.

But it had a nice private trunk. All I had to do was get them to put me in there without killing me.

After my experience with Dmitri, I was leery of acting like I didn’t want to be put in the trunk. Besides, it wouldn’t really make sense for me to bring up an aversion to being put in dark enclosed spaces just out of the blue. Maybe a more direct approach would work.

“Look, guys,” I said, “I know you need to keep me under guard, but one good bump and maybe this gun goes off by accident. And then I can’t give you lots of cash.”

Before I could suggest that maybe it would be easier if they just locked me in the trunk, the driver said something in Farsi, and my seatmate moved the gun so it pointed at my knees.

“Shot in knee is painful but not fatal,” said the driver.

I sighed. Nothing had gone right for me since Yelena left.

* * *

Dawn gave the sky a grayish glow as we pulled into a town. Since I couldn’t read Farsi, I had no idea what the town’s name was, but based on the direction from which the sun seemed ready to rise, I figured we had mostly been traveling northeast. That was good, at least: it was the general direction I wanted to go.

We traveled through mostly deserted streets until we passed through a gate in a cinder-block wall and arrived at a warehouse. The Mercedes pulled to a stop outside while the truck passed in through a large open door.

Along the warehouse wall was a porta-potty. “Hey, can I go to the bathroom?”

My captors ignored me.

A man in a black business suit came out of the warehouse, and the driver got out of the Mercedes to talk to him. The man in the suit pointed at me, which started an argument between the two of them. Eventually the man in the suit went back inside.

“You had better be worth trouble of keeping you alive,” said the driver as he got back in.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll get paid enough to make you happy.”

“We will find ATM now,” he said, and started up the car.

We drove out of the warehouse district into a more commercial area of town. The guy in the front passenger seat pointed and jabbered, and we pulled into a bank parking lot.

“Come with me,” said the driver. “I have a pistol, so you had better not try anything.”

“I’ll need my MasterCard,” I said.

The guy with my wallet handed it over, and I walked up to the ATM with the driver and the other two following behind me. They left their rifles in the car, probably because a bunch of guys with rifles going up to a bank ATM would look strange, even in Iran.

I slid the card into the slot, and selected English as the transaction language. I shielded the numeric keypad with one hand while punching in the pin number—it wouldn’t do to have them decide they didn’t need me anymore to use the card.

“Five hundred dollars?” He muttered something under his breath. “I thought you said lots of money.”

“This is only the first stop,” I said. “I can take out lots of money, but we have to cycle around between different ATMs because they have a limit.” I could wait a minute and then reuse the same ATM, of course, but I didn’t want them to know that. I wanted to drag this out as long as I could.

“Okay,” he said. “Try ten million rials.”

Marveling at the wonders of currency exchange rates, I punched in the numbers. After a few moments, the screen flashed up a message.

“It says denied,” the driver said, jabbing my ribs with his pistol to show his displeasure.

“Let me try a lower amount,” I said. I entered five million rials, and after a few moments the machine whirred. A neat stack of bills jutted out from the machine, and I handed them over to the driver.

“Take me to another machine,” I said.

We got back in the Mercedes. As we drove, the guy in the front passenger seat split up the money three ways. There were smiles all around.

I smiled with them. “There’s more where that came from. And the best thing is: it’s my company’s money. The insurance will pay for it.” I wanted them to believe I was cooperating fully and that I wasn’t concerned about the financial loss.

We hit three more ATMs with no problems. On our way to the fourth, I said, “Hey, I really need to use the bathroom. Can we stop off somewhere?”

The driver stopped alongside a tiny grocery store that was just opening up. “Don’t try anything,” he said. “I still have pistol.”

“I won’t,” I said. “I don’t want to get shot.”

The driver checked the bathroom, a tiny, dingy room in the back of the store. Satisfied that the tiny window was far too small for me to crawl out, he let me inside. I shut the door and breathed a huge sigh of relief.

I counted off the minute, then opened the door.

The driver was still standing there. I froze. Was my talent fading since I met Yelena?

He barked something at me in Farsi. I recognized the word for bathroom. With relief, I realized he was just waiting to use it.

I got out and let him go in.

The other two were browsing through the munchies section of the store. I walked out the door without them giving me a second glance.

As I passed by the Mercedes, I caught a glimpse of a rifle lying on the back seat. And I thought about how satisfying it would be to pick up that rifle and wait for my former captors to come out of the store. I’d shoot them down, and as the last one fell, I’d say, “That was for Uncle Ali.”

They were killers and deserved to die, but I wasn’t a killer. In self-defense, I would do it, but gunning someone down for revenge just didn’t seem right to me.

Besides, Yelena would think it amateurish for me to risk my life just to get revenge, especially for someone I’d barely known.

I stood in the street and took stock of my situation. My carry-on was gone, so I just had the clothes I was wearing. One of my captors had my cell phone, wallet, and passport. In my life, I had done quite a bit of pickpocketing, but never from people who had guns and were willing to kill me. The smart thing to do would be to write off the phone, wallet, and passport.

So I did the smart thing. I turned my back on the store and walked away. At least I had my MasterCard, so at least I had access to money. With money, I could get transportation to Hamidiyeh and carry out my mission.

I heard the engine of a car as it approached from behind me, its tires crunching in the gravel road. I instinctively moved farther toward the side of the road and then looked over my shoulder. It was the Mercedes.

It passed me by and continued on. I did wonder what it was they were smuggling across the border in the truck, but that was the Iranian government’s problem, not mine. My problem was to get to Hamidiyeh without being arrested as an American spy, get into Parham Rezaei’s house and convince him to tell me where Jamshidi’s lab was, and then get out.

I sighed. Why did these missions always seem simpler when Edward was assigning me to them?