by Chase Austin
Wick was probably the only customer the shop owner had seen in days, maybe even months. Wick asked if he could make a call. The man looked at him and demanded, “You have the money?”
Wick produced a torn piece of a one toman note. The owner glanced at the note, then back at Wick. Then, he reached into his desk drawer, drew out another torn note and laid it down beside the one Wick had produced. The two pieces fit together perfectly. It was an old-school way to determine authenticity in this trade and even in the age of hi-tech gizmos, it still worked like a charm. The shop owner looked at Wick and inclined his head slightly, gesturing for him to go inside.
Wick walked past the man and entered the cramped corridor behind a ragged curtain. A zero-watt bulb dangled before a door at the end of the corridor, dimly illuminating the corridor. Wick paused at the door. It was unlatched. He pushed it open and light spilled out from within. The room was separated into two sections with a long table in the middle. A young man stood on the other side holding a cell phone in his left hand. The shop owner from outside had evidently already informed him about the visitor. As soon as he saw Wick, he pulled a large black canvas bag from the floor and set it down on the table. Wick looked at the boy for a fleeting second and then, without a word, unzipped the bag and made a cursory inspection of its contents. Satisfied, he zipped the bag and lifted it. The weight seemed right too. He drew an envelope from his back pocket and slid it towards the boy. The boy counted the notes within, smiling when he saw the amount was more than that asked. Wick didn’t return the smile. He backed out, without breaking eye contact with the boy. Stepping out of the room, he closed the door and crossed the corridor. In less than thirty seconds, he had left the shop and disappeared into the crowd.
CHAPTER 3
Wick had taken utmost care in traveling to the shop, choosing secluded alleyways and inner streets. Still, the whole business deal had taken less than three hours and he was back in the safe house well in time.
Putting the bag down in the dining area, he checked his watch. In a few hours he would be dropped off as close to the target as they could manage. From there he would be on his own.
He had everything laid out and, for the next half hour, he meticulously analyzed the contents of the bag. This routine, which he followed without fail on every mission, ensured no mistakes. It meant that he would not head into war territory only to find his gun jammed, or his ammunition low, or any of the other thousand possibilities that could occur in the heat of combat. He was always coming up with ways to be more efficient on the battlefield. This line of thinking explained the arsenal he chose for his missions. Operatives of his caliber—of which there were few—often spent hours selecting tailor-made, customized weapons. Not Wick.
He saw nothing but potential problems in guns like that. Most of them were largely untested. He had faced that problem firsthand, ceding control due to a gun malfunctioning during combat and paying dearly for it. He now preferred the toughest, most steadfast arsenal for himself. The weapons that would never in a million years jam on the battlefield.
Over the next thirty minutes, he disassembled all his weapons and checked each part for flaws with extreme patience and care. There was a time for brashness and recklessness, but it wasn’t before the mission began.
Olivia entered the safe house when Wick was in the process of re-assembling the guns. Behind her came Logan and Elijah. They nodded at each other and set about their respective tasks with robotic precision.
Ten minutes later, Wick was standing at the right side of the center table with them. Olivia was going over each detail. They had done this already by video conference but doing it in person was critical. The team was very thorough in this regard. They had planned a concise tactical operation order, breaking down the mission to the last detail. Wick’s experience of working with the Special Forces teams told him that this team had been with one of the military’s elite units.
“We will be out in forty minutes,” Wick stated at the end of the recap.
Then began the standard operating procedure. Before leaving the safe house, all notes had to be burnt. Radio frequencies, escape routes, maps, passwords, codes—everything was committed to memory. Everyone’s fake credentials were placed in flash bags. If things went wrong, all they had to do was pull a string on the bag and its contents would be incinerated instantly.
Everything had been planned and rehearsed multiple times, but Wick didn’t have a good feeling about this one. He couldn’t quite put his finger on the reason for his unease.
He was reminded of a mission, early in his career, where he had been confident about everything and, by the end of it, more than twenty US soldiers were dead. Ever since then, he had never really felt completely confident about any mission. Still, this feeling was different. Was he losing his edge? Maybe. He was just twenty-seven but over the last few years he had been consistently running head-on into dangerous situations and somehow getting out of them alive; and every time something within him changed.
He had been an angry man for so many years and had always used that anger to sharpen his focus, but now the fury was mellowing. He knew that sooner or later this lost intensity would cost him his life. Luckily, he had had no woman in his life so far; flings, but nothing serious. However, that stance was also changing. Now he wanted to feel something different—maybe something on the opposite pole of hatred. Maybe he wanted to put his life as a TF-77 operative behind him and move on. Maybe.
Elijah removed his headphones and announced, “The first set of guests to the convention have arrived.”
Wick checked his watch. It was twenty minutes to one, about ninety minutes before the strike. It was time to check with Helms one more time. Wick grabbed the COMSAT mobile phone and carried it to the next room.
CHAPTER 4
Maryland, USA
If William Helms had bothered to look outside the large glass window in his office, he would have seen a white-faced Storm-Petrel sitting on the windowsill outside. Unfortunately, times and tides were both working against the USA leaving no space for stopping to admire life’s little pleasures. The weak leadership in Washington and an inconsistent foreign policy had left America on shaky ground—under attack both externally and internally. Russia, China, Iran—all were closing in for the kill.
The fifty-eight-year-old director wasn’t one to be interested in petty Washington politics, but the current situation demanded that he think politically while dispatching his primary responsibility—protecting his motherland.
Personally, he had always kept Washington at an arm’s distance. The town loved drama and politicians loved overacting. Despite multiple warnings in the past, they had all downplayed the foreign threats as temporary blips in the overall picture, but Helms knew that these temporary blips could soon turn into painful scars if not checked in time. He had never let his guard down, even for a minute. He knew no one on Capitol Hill liked him. Many respected him but they all hated his guts. He had no friends here.
Helms was at the top of the intelligence food chain. Every piece of information in the world went through the NSA’s fine net. The agency combed through an unimaginable quantity of e-mails, internet phone calls, photos, videos, file transfers, and social networking data from big internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, YouTube, Skype, and Microsoft, besides WeChat, Sina Weibo and Tencent QQ from China; and Paltalk, a video-chat service popular in the Middle East and among Muslims.
No one knew exactly how much Helms knew, and no one wanted to find out. Rumor had it that he already had thick dossiers on everyone who mattered on the global political stage, including the who’s who of Washington.
Helms knew that the politicians couldn’t imagine possessing such valuable information and not using it, but his entire career was built upon only one premise—keeping secrets secret. He also knew that this was of no comfort to those sitting in Washington with a checkered past.
He was pained by the changing political scenarios, but
his immediate focus was the job at hand. The team in Tehran had been given the go-ahead by POTUS (President of The United States) to extract a civilian. And not just any civilian. Helms stared at the eight-by-twelve black-and-white photograph clipped to the dossier on his desk. The man was known as Majeed el-Abdullah, an Iranian cleric and an important figurehead of the Shi’a population. The president took a lot of convincing to authorize the extraction of someone like him, who not only was a civilian but also a religious figurehead of one of America’s fiercest rivals. Before 1980, Iran had been one of the United States’ closest allies. But after the 1979 Revolution, which ousted the pro-American Shah and replaced him with the anti-American Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, things had changed quickly. The developments even surprised the United States government, its State Department and intelligence services, who consistently underestimated the magnitude and long-term implications of this unrest. Six months before the revolution culminated, the CIA had produced a report stating that “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a ‘prerevolutionary’ situation.” Clearly, they had badly misread the situation. In any case, Iran and the United States had had no formal diplomatic relations since 1980. And the Iranians were nothing if not vocal about perceived American arrogance and its desire for global dominance.
All this made the president wary of the backlash if the mission went kaput. He was already on shaky ground and something like this could end his presidency in a snap. His only reason to agree to this mission was Helms. Helms had convinced him to go ahead with this, Helms was shouldering a lot of responsibility, and that’s why his only choice was Sam Wick, a man he could trust with his own life.
The cleric had first landed on the NSA’s radar five years back when the NSA was tracking Al Qaeda’s money trail through Russia and Germany. The information received was deadly. Al Qaeda was planning to build chemical weapons, and the cleric was the face behind getting the money for it. The location was in Iran, near the Iran-Afghanistan border. Just before production started the US president threatened the Iranian leadership with airstrikes and more sanctions. Iran eventually closed the facility, and the cleric decided to search for a new place to fulfill his mission.
Five years later the USA once again discovered the site of the new weapons plant. Al Qaeda was almost on the verge of completing a new plant deep below a mountain. This time it required much more force and time was not on America’s side. The cleric was leading the mission once again, and he had made sure that only a nuclear strike could destroy the facility.
A nuclear attack meant inviting a war when the USA was least ready to engage in one. The only other way was to extract the cleric to the US military base in Pakistan which shared a border with Iran and then track his aides one by one. Getting him alive was key to the whole operation, and Wick was the best extractor TF-77 had ever created.
Helms flipped through the dossier, looking at a series of photos and translated conversations that the cleric had had with Al Qaeda operatives. This relationship concerned the NSA most. Helms knew that there would be only one target for the weapons they were creating—the US.
On the next page were photos of the cleric convention that was scheduled to take place later that day. This was where the cleric was most exposed and would be at his most vulnerable.
NSA analysts had crunched tons and tons of data to find the relevant bits to aid the team. If all went as planned, Helms expected to have the cleric in their custody in the next few hours.
CHAPTER 5
Helms’ secure line phone rang, and he picked up before the second ring.
“We are ready to go,” Wick’s voice echoed through the speaker.
“Updates?”
Wick ran down the checklist of developments and explained the final touches he had added to the plan with Olivia and the team. Helms heard him out with rapt attention. He asked no questions.
When Wick was done, he said, “This is our only chance. If you miss him today, I doubt we'll get another one. The cat will be out of the bag and there'll l be too many eyes on us for another attempt.”
“I understand,” Wick said.
He didn’t sound like his confident self and Helms picked up the slight variation in his tone.
“Is there anything else?” he asked in a mellower tone. Wick was more than his best asset; Helms had seen him transform from a naïve boy to an efficient assassin.
“Everything’s fine,” Wick responded.
There was a moment of silence, then Helms asked, “What’s your gut telling you on this one?”
Wick didn’t know what to make of this question. He hadn't discussed his personal feelings with anyone in a very long time, and this was his boss, Helms, on the other side of the line. Should he let him know about the unease he was feeling?
Wick’s forehead was moist. He was calling from the bathroom, which was cramped, with little or no ventilation. He gripped the handset, not sure if Helms was just asking for the sake of asking or if he genuinely wanted to know. He didn't share a very close relationship with him. Finally, he said, “I’m sure it’s nothing. Just the usual anxiety before we hit the target. A little more prep time would have been nice, but that's usually the case.”
“If there's something not right, don’t force it,” Helms said again.
“I can handle this.” Wick hated himself for exposing his slight moment of self-doubt.
“I'm not going to second-guess you if you don't want to do it.”
“That’s never been the case. I don’t care about what others think of my methods, and nobody knows that better than you.” Wick smiled quietly.
Helms knew what he was talking about. Wick’s tendency to keep to himself was often seen as arrogance in the agency. The other thing that irked people was his nature to call a spade a spade. Wick said it like it was and never shied away from telling the truth, even in front of the president. Once, in the past administration, Helms had taken him to a briefing. He hadn’t wanted to, but Wick had been the most knowledgeable person around about the man they were going to discuss. The meeting had gone smoothly as long as Wick wasn’t speaking but once he discerned that they were going ahead with the worst plan of his entire career, there had been no stopping him. He had told the president to his face that if he was going to go ahead with that plan, he might as well send his men with suicide bomber jackets or a cyanide pill because the plan was as good as his morning dump. Wick hadn’t even waited for the president to throw him out of the meeting. He had seen himself out as soon as he was done massacring the plan of action. The president had been furious and had gone ahead with the plan anyway, but the results were exactly what Wick had predicted. Fewer men would have been killed on a suicide mission than on that particular job.
“You know what I mean. Just be careful.” Helms was concerned.
“I always am.” Wick was now answering without thinking.
“Anything else?” asked Helms.
“Nope.”
“All right ... good luck, and keep me in the loop.”
“Okay.” Wick ended the call. Opening the bathroom door, he stepped out. He still couldn’t shake that feeling deep in his stomach. Something wasn’t right.
CHAPTER 6
Tehran, Iran
Wick put the finishing touches on his disguise. A rinse dye had turned his black hair grayish white. Special contacts transformed his eyes to mild brown, and the makeup made his complexion more wheatish. Wick checked the clothes on the bed and checked his equipment one last time.
The oversized kurta had hidden compartments that were loaded with weapons from his laundry list. The shoes he was going to wear looked broken and old, but they contained his fake Iranian and American passports and twenty grand in cash in Iranian currency. The Iranian passport had Wick’s photo, an alias, and stamps indicating that he had entered the country through Turkmenistan. The American passport contained a photograph of Wick with a trimmed beard and short hair. They were his way out of Iran if something went wrong. No on
e, not even the folks in Maryland, knew about them. If things fell apart, Wick wanted to be able to go completely off-radar.
Wick had already memorized the main streets, alleyways, nearest bus stations and railway routes that would get him out of the area if his pickup failed. He carried a minuscule GPS tracker in his watch to make sure he always knew his exact location. A matte-black K-Bar was concealed in the right sleeve of the kurta, and four extra clips of 9-mm rounds were hidden in various parts of his clothes. Wick’s earpiece would keep him in touch with his team, who would wait for him in a rusty stolen minivan outside the convention center. The minivan had been repainted and given a nondescript trademark along with Iran’s national emblem in red.
He was going into the mission with his trusty 9-mm Glock-26 pistol. The serial number had been removed. The clip had fifteen rounds, and with four more clips, Wick had enough for a small battle. This was his backup, although he planned to get the job done without firing a single bullet. Before leaving the room, he wiped the surfaces to remove any trace of fingerprints. When he walked into the other room Olivia, Logan and Elijah were doing the same. When they were finished, they looked at Wick, who gestured for them to strap the three bulletproof vests below their oversized attires.
