Killer Reads: A Collection of the Best in Inspirational Suspense

by Luana Ehrlich

  Before I could answer his objection, Deputy Director Ira spoke up. His tone was bone chilling. “Well, Tony, in some cases, that might be true, but, as Katherine pointed out, in all our data mining, he appeared to be clean. There was nothing,” he paused dramatically after each word, “. . . zero . . . zilch . . . nada . . . indicating he could be a threat to Titus.”

  The room went silent.

  Since the deputy wasn’t on the debriefing team, he had broken procedural rules by speaking on the record. However, no one reminded him he had breached protocol.

  The look on Fowler’s face could only be described as panicked; I didn’t really believe it was because Deputy Ira had broken the rules.

  I decided to throw him a life preserver. “I admit there were some red flags which should have caught my attention,” I said.

  Fowler suddenly looked hopeful. “Such as?”

  “One day, after having dinner with Farid, I came home and found my apartment had been searched. This was obvious to me not only by all my hidden markers being tripped, but also because whoever had searched the place had been very sloppy. Admittedly, I’m a neat freak, but I think anyone would have noticed a lamp being overturned.”

  “The secret police do this all the time,” Komeil said. “They never need an excuse.”

  “Exactly what I thought, so I passed it off as just a random search. After all, I was a new face in the building, and I held a foreign passport.”

  “You said you weren’t paying attention to several things,” Fowler said. “What else did you miss?”

  That wasn’t exactly what I’d said, but I didn’t quibble over semantics.

  “I discovered I was being followed, but I knew it was probably VEVAK and not the local police, because they were very good.”

  Fowler sounded like a father scolding his son for running with the wrong crowd. “Those were obvious signs you should have broken off contact with Amir.”

  “You’re right,” I agreed, trying to be shrewd and innocent at the same time, “but I was relying heavily on the research Katherine’s office had done on Amir. Since she had no intelligence on him, I saw no need to be overly cautious.”

  “How long did they follow you?” Carlton asked.

  Because he already knew the answer to that question, I assumed he just trying to move the narrative along to its grisly conclusion.

  “They ran surveillance on me for over two weeks, and I took extra precautions whenever I made contact with any of my assets. One day, however, Farid didn’t show up for an appointment. When I tried calling him, it went to voice mail. The next day, when I was sure I’d lost my watchers, I started visiting some of the places Farid had frequented. I finally located one of his friends. He told me he was worried sick because he’d heard Farid had been arrested.”

  Fowler’s chin fell to his chest and Komeil started shaking his head back and forth. Everyone at the Agency knew an arrest in Iran meant endless torture, no matter how minor the offense.

  “I knew it was just a matter of time before Farid broke down and told them everything they wanted to know about me and the network, so I left the apartment immediately and went to ground. Once I felt safe, I started the process of alerting my other assets. Unfortunately, VEVAK had already found most of them.”

  Although the debriefing procedure didn’t require it, I told them in excruciating detail how I’d found the bodies of three of the other six people I had recruited for Operation Torchlight. I deliberately didn’t gloss over the particular aspects of each person’s death, because I wanted at least two people in the room to understand how their actions had affected real flesh and blood people. This gruesome accounting took me a full thirty minutes, and before I finished, I knew everyone in the room was uncomfortable.

  When my voice cracked at one point, Carlton interrupted and said, “This might be a good time for a break.”

  “No, I need to finish this.”

  When I started again, my voice was strong. “I still hadn’t located my last two assets, but I knew Omid, one of the first bankers I’d recruited, had been out of town for a couple of weeks, so I went to his house. It was a tall, three-story structure located in an upscale residential area. After watching the house for a couple of hours, I determined no one was at home, so I picked the lock on the back door and went inside to wait. Omid returned home within the hour.

  “After he got over the initial shock of seeing me, I explained the kind of danger he was in. However, he refused to come with me. Instead, he wanted to join his family who had gone to visit relatives on the Caspian coast. He insisted he could take his family and get out of Iran from there. I decided his plan was a good one, and we went up to his office on the third floor so he could get some cash and documents out of his safe.”

  I took a swig of water and continued, “As we quickly gathered the things he would need, he began chatting incessantly. It was just nerves, and he wasn’t really saying anything important; it was more a stream of consciousness thing. But, as we descended the stairs to the first floor, he looked back at me and asked, ‘Hammid, what is the most important thing in the world to you?’ And that’s when three VEVAK agents burst in the front door and shot him.”

  Fowler made a deep guttural sound, shot up out of his chair and shouted, “Turn off the recorder.”

  When no one moved, he sat back down and pleaded, his voice trembling, “Please, I need to explain.”

  Carlton glanced at Ira, who gave him an almost imperceptible nod. Then Carlton picked up the telephone in the center of the conference room table. “Jim,” he said softly, “kill the feed.”

  Fowler composed himself by wiping his face with his handkerchief and gulping down some water. Then, leaning across the table toward me in a gesture of entreaty, he said, “Titus, as everyone else in this room knows, I work the Iranian desk at Nuclear Security.”

  The moment he divulged this, he sat back in his chair. “Now, because you know my identity, it’s probably going to affect this debrief, but, frankly, I don’t care. I guess they’ll get someone else to be the outside observer and you can just start over. I don’t know.”

  Deputy Ira opened his mouth as if to protest, but Fowler raised his hand and stopped him. To my surprise, the deputy remained silent. It was then I realized Ira wanted Tony Fowler to talk.

  Fowler did so.

  “What I do know, Titus, is our division was never,” he repeated the word emphatically, “never informed by the DDO’s office there was an agent in place in Tehran requesting permission to approach Amir Madani.”

  Ira clinched his teeth and asked, “What difference would it have made if we had told you?”

  Fowler shouted at him, “It would have made a big difference. I would have stopped the whole thing from the outset.”

  Ira leaned across the table with a look of incredulity on his face. “Really? Why would you have done that?”

  He sputtered. “Because . . . because . . . because Amir Madani may have been working for Iranian intelligence for years. He’s a nuclear scientist, sure, but his funding comes from VEVAK. They probably recruited him to monitor the other scientists; we think he’s VEVAK’s eyes and ears in the nuclear community.”

  “Well, he’s not a very good scientist,” Komeil said. “In fact, he’s very mediocre.”

  If the atmosphere in the room hadn’t been about to explode, I would have laughed at Komeil’s professional snobbery.

  No one was laughing.

  Katherine turned sideways in her chair so she could face Fowler. “If that’s true, Tony, then why didn’t I find anything in our databases on Amir Madani? I run the very best analysis team in the building, but we came up with nothing on him. Absolutely nothing. If you had all this intel on his activities with VEVAK, why didn’t you enter it into our records?”

  Even though Fowler’s voice was pitched an octave higher than normal, he still managed to sound defensive. “Because we hadn’t established anything with certainty.”

  Ira’s voice was
menacing. “With certainty?” Beads of sweat were popping out on the deputy’s fleshy brow, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “No. No. There simply wasn’t clarity.” Fowler shook his head in protest. “There wasn’t a substantive basis yet, so I wasn’t at liberty to report it. I always try to be extremely cautious in such circumstances.”

  Ira finally exploded. “Is that any way to run a division? No wonder the Agency doesn’t have a single piece of actionable intelligence on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. That’s either sheer incompetence or gross stupidity.”

  Carlton scooted his chair away from the table. “This might be the best time to adjourn for the day. We’ll make some adjustments and continue this debrief in the morning.”

  The committee members began gathering their belongings.

  The anger inside of me had been steadily building up all afternoon, and now I wasn’t able to contain it. “Remain seated,” I said.

  Every head turned in my direction.

  I looked over at Ira, and then I deliberately turned and faced Fowler.” Do you realize what your in-house political games and ineptitude have done? People have lost their lives because of you two. You owe it to them, and you owe it to me to hear the rest of this narrative.”

  Carlton gave me a sympathetic look, and, without consulting Ira, reached over and picked up the phone. “Jim,” he said, “turn the tape back on.”

  After a few moments of silence, Carlton nodded at me. “Resume the narrative.”

  “When the three VEVAK agents shot Omid, I returned fire. I knew I had hit at least one of them, maybe two. I raced back upstairs, scrambled out a window, and made it to the roof. One agent followed me. It was a flat roof, and I could see VEVAK didn’t have the backyard covered, so when the agent started firing at me from the window, I took the only option available and jumped off the roof.”

  “But how did you survive?” Komeil asked. “You said it was a three-story house.”

  I knew he must have been hearing the account of my escape for the very first time. Unlike everyone else in the room—who didn’t show much reaction to my story—Komeil had no access to classified materials or the Agency rumor mill.

  “I was unconscious for several hours and didn’t immediately know what had happened to me once I hit the ground,” I said, “but when I came to, I was in a clinic being prepped for surgery.”

  Katherine responded as if something had just been confirmed for her. “Oh,” she said, “the Israelis?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The only asset I hadn’t been able to locate was Reza, and in the hospital, I discovered he had been working for Mossad, while pretending to work for us at the same time.”

  Ira muttered, “Not the first time that’s happened.”

  “Evidently Mossad had more intel on Amir than we did,” I said, staring at Fowler for a moment, “so they knew Amir was VEVAK. They also knew he was searching for me and for the members of my network. But, when the Israelis informed Reza he needed to leave Tehran, Reza convinced them to help him find me. Once they did, they followed me to Omid’s place and observed the three VEVAK agents going inside. The Israelis decided to enter the house through the backdoor, so they drove their van through the alley to the back of Omid’s house. When they arrived, I had just jumped from the roof. They shot the VEVAK agent who was about to finish me off, and then put me—”

  Komeil interrupted, shaking his head in disbelief. “God must have been watching over you.”

  I smiled at his statement and nodded my agreement. “The Israelis put me in the back of their van and drove me over to a clinic on the outskirts of Tehran where they found a doctor willing to perform surgery on my leg. They said he was very reluctant at first, but after they promised him a substantial amount of money, he eagerly agreed.

  “Mossad then contacted the DDO about what had gone down at Omid’s house. Since VEVAK’s security forces and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps were combing the city looking for me, Mossad offered the Agency one of their safe houses until my leg healed up enough for me to leave the country. I remained at the safe house for three months. Finally, one of their agents took me across the mountains into Turkey. We arrived in Dogubayazit without incident, and Gordan Bolton, our chief of station in Turkey, arranged transport back to the States for me through the air base at Incirlik.”

  No one said a word.

  I looked over at Carlton. “End of narrative.”

  Carlton nodded at me. Then he picked up the house phone and told Jim to shut down the recording device.

  Fowler grabbed his iPad and stood up.

  “Sit down, Tony,” I demanded.

  He slowly resumed his seat.

  “Now you know how your petty squabbling and irresponsible negligence cost the lives of five people and endangered not only me but also several other innocent people, including the family who took care of me.”

  I pointed my finger at Ira. “When you bypassed NSD and didn’t let them know I was in country, did you honestly think putting people’s lives in danger was an effective way of dealing with an incompetent division? Did you ever once consider how your actions were going to affect me or my assets?”

  Ira’s face was quivering with anger as he stared back at me.

  I wasn’t finished with him yet.

  “If you were so dissatisfied with how NSD was being run, why didn’t you get out of your chair, walk down the hall, and tell them to clean up their act? Oh, wait. Doing so would have been an act of courage, and that’s something you apparently know nothing about.”

  I turned to Fowler.

  “Tony, stop questioning your intel and start acting. Whether you believe in its relevance or clarity, or whatever you want to call it, instruct your people to enter every single scrap of information you or your assets are able to uncover. It’s not up to you to make judgment calls on such things. Leave that to the analysts in Katherine’s office.”

  I addressed Carlton. “And now, I’m finished.”

  He nodded.

  He probably felt I was finished for good.

  I know I did.

  CHAPTER 7

  When I awoke the next morning, I felt utterly alone. I knew my public condemnation of the Deputy Director would not go unpunished, and I didn’t expect to be employed by the CIA at the end of the day.

  Then what?

  For over two decades, the Agency had given me a purpose for living and had provided my every need.

  If the Agency cut me loose, what would I do? Where would I go? How would I live?

  After joining the Agency, I had deliberately chosen not to own a residence in the United States. On those rare times when I found myself between overseas assignments, I had stayed in temporary housing around Langley. Besides that, except for a few items in a storage unit, I owned nothing of a personal nature.

  As I thought back on it, I had only lived in the States on two occasions for an extended period of time in the last twenty years. During both of those times, I had been on an assignment. Oddly enough, both assignments had been in Oklahoma.

  In 1995, I was part of a three-man team sent by the Agency to investigate the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The FBI was the main investigative body, but the Agency was required to send its own agents after receiving reports that Timothy McVeigh, the man apprehended immediately after the bombing, had been seen associating with a Middle Eastern man prior to leaving his Ryder truck full of explosives parked in front of the Murrah Building. When the bomb went off, he’d killed 168 people and wounded hundreds more.

  A woman in Blackwell, Oklahoma had given my team a lead to a group of Arabs who appeared to have had ties to McVeigh. At least one of them had been seen with him at a gun show about a month before he’d rented the truck. We later located the guy, an Iraqi, and a couple of his buddies in Norman, Oklahoma where they had been attending The University of Oklahoma.

  After setting up surveillance on him, we discovered he was part of a much larger Arab community in Norman,
including some Saudis and Iranians. Most of them were college students, but several held down jobs and had families in the area.

  Danny Jarrar, one of the other Arabic-speaking operatives on my team, became convinced the men under surveillance weren’t really students but terrorists in training, maybe even members of a sleeper cell. However, he didn’t have any evidence to back up his theory, and he couldn’t convince anyone else in our division, so after we reported our findings to the FBI, we left Oklahoma.

  Much later, out of curiosity, I had looked up the FBI findings on the Iraqi who had been seen with McVeigh. The Arab student had been labeled an “innocent encounter.” It was obvious to me the FBI had never pursued this lead. Instead, they’d focused on McVeigh’s friends and acquaintances.

  However, Danny's suspicions about something going on with the Arabic students in Norman had been justified when the Agency discovered Abdul Murad, a former student at OU and an al-Qaeda operative, was the person responsible for a suicide attack in Yemen in 1996.

  Six years later, Carlton gave me a second assignment in the States, and it was also in Oklahoma. For over a year, I’d been tracking an al-Qaeda operative, a Saudi, who had been one of the persons responsible for bombing our American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. I’d lost his trail in Germany, only to learn, three months later, he was living in Florida.

  In July of 2001, I convinced Carlton to send me to Florida and allow me to do a liaison with the FBI to see what the Saudi was doing on American soil. However, by the time the Agency had finished all the paperwork required for such an operation, the al-Qaeda operative had flown an American Airlines plane into one of the Twin Towers.

  When Carlton called Danny Jarrar and me into his office one week after 9/11, I expected him to send us to Florida to ferret out some intelligence—albeit too late—on the Saudi. Instead, he sent us back to Norman, Oklahoma to check out the Arab community we’d reported on several years earlier.