Dolab district,
Tehran, Iran
“Iwill not give you red nuts,” Bardia Naqdi insisted. “If you want them red, you must do that yourself.”
“That will add greatly to our costs,” Simon Manley replied. “You must teach the South African market to eat them in their natural color. Do you know who it was that started dying them red? Huh? It was the Americans, not the Persians, not us.” Naqdi slapped the table.
Brian Douglas, playing the part of Simon Manley, looked at his business partner for a decision. “Well, Bowers, do you think we can educate our market to want natural?”
“I do, Simon. The South African consumer is very healthconscious these days, and if we tell them the red is dye, they won’t want it,” Bowers replied, looking up from his ledger of notes of the day’s discussion. “But it does raise the issue of aflatoxin, which as you know is a carcinogen. The EU has had problems with your pistachios exceeding the fifteen parts per billion limit.”
Naqdi threw both arms into the air. “Allah, save me! We Persians have been eating our pistachios for five thousand years of recorded history. Longer before that. Do you see us all falling over of your afla? Pistachios are for lovers. They were the Queen of Sheba’s aphrodisiac. When young lovers sit under a pistachio tree at night and they hear the nuts open, it ensures they will live a long life together, long and healthy, Mr. Bowers.”
“Very well, but we shall want written into the contract that we are not liable for any foodstuffs rejected by South African authorities on health grounds,” Bowers said while making another notation in the ledger.
Douglas looked at his watch. It was almost nine-thirty at night. “Right, then. Shall we go over the list for the first shipment? One thousand kilos of pistachios kernel, hulled, five hundred kilos peeled, five hundred kilos of sweet and bitter almonds, half and half, one thousand kilos of sultana raisins, two hundred kilos of dried figs. Twenty percent payment by wire upon contract signature and eighty percent upon our being notified by an agreed-upon freight forwarder that the shipment is in transit. Bale?”
“Bale, yes, thank Allah it was not more, I would have had to order in breakfast,” Naqdi joked, pointing at the remnants of the dinner they had consumed earlier in his conference room.
“Then we shall expect a contract brought round to the hotel in the morning?” Bowers asked, closing his ledger and rising from the table.
“Yes, and we shall expect a wire transfer to our bank by the end of the day,” Naqdi replied, walking the two South Africans to the door.
“The very next day at the latest,” Simon Manley assured, shaking Naqdi’s hand.
Naqdi opened the door out onto the balcony that overlooked the darkened warehouse, filled with piles of sacks and crates. The pungent smell of mixed fruits hung in the still air. The cool of the vast space helped to revive the men, who had been talking and smoking for almost six hours.
“Can you find your way back downtown?” Naqdi asked at the door to the street. “It is a chore. Some street signs are missing. Some lights are out. They do not look after this district, despite the fact that we are the ones out here who are earning foreign currency.”
“We have a map,” Douglas assured him. “And we made it here, after all. Salaam.”
Bowers and Douglas crammed into the small hire car that they had procured through the hotel. As Bowers started the engine, Douglas unfolded a large street map and began examining it under the pinlight of a small flashlight. Naqdi walked back into his empire of nuts and dried fruits.
Bowers checked the car’s mirrors. There were no other cars on the street. No one else in this industrial neighborhood working at night. “All right, navigator,” he said to Douglas, “you got us here. Let’s see you get us back. Which way?”
For ten minutes they took turns down potholed streets, twice ending up at dead ends. If anyone was watching, they would have seemed lost. If anyone was watching, they might have been revealed by the U-turns and driving in circles that Bowers managed. At the end of it, they found a main road, but mistakenly drove northeast instead of northwest toward central Tehran. As they passed a sign indicating that they had entered the Doshan Tappeh district, they stopped again and examined the map. If anyone was listening, the discussion conformed to the erratic driving.
“You’re an idiot! You’ve got us totally turned around, Simon!” Bowers’s angry voice rang loudly in the car. “You’re less than worthless. After almost screwing up the nut deal, now you can’t even get us back to the hotel.”
“You couldn’t have done that deal alone, Bowers,” Simon Manley replied. “And you probably won’t be able to find your way back to the hotel alone either. But we’re going to find out!” With that, Brian Douglas as Simon Manley grabbed an overcoat and hat from the backseat and got out of the car, slamming the door. He began walking down the street, eastward. Bowers waited for several minutes, then performed a U-turn and slowly headed away. He watched the side streets and his mirror for any sign of surveillance, and saw none.
Douglas walked for twenty minutes, his hands thrust into the Iranian overcoat, the hat pulled low on his head. The snow piles by the side of the road were higher here than in downtown, and whiter. He thought of other nights in the cold, of Mosul, of Baku, where his Iranian network had started to unravel. At 10:10, he stopped at a bus waiting shelter, and at 10:14, he was rewarded by the arrival of a green city bus. Douglas paid the fare and walked past the seven passengers to sit near the rear door. At 10:29, the bus came to the end of the route in the suburban town of Doshan Tappeh.
There were some signs of life around the bus stop. Lights were on in two cafés, and a small market appeared to be open. Douglas entered one of the cafés and ordered a tea and a baklava at the counter. No one followed him inside. Glancing through the window, he could see no sign that anyone was outside. No car had arrived in the little square after the bus. At 10:42, Douglas left the café, putting the appropriate small tip on the counter and wishing the man behind the counter good night.
Leaving the café, he turned left out of the little square and then left again down a side street. Still no tail. At 10:54, Brian Douglas turned a corner into a residential neighborhood and immediately pushed on the gate of the first house around the corner. It was unlocked and opened into an ill-lit white stucco corridor. Halfway down the corridor that led through to the backyard, Douglas turned the knob on a door to the right.
“Punctual as always,” Soheil Khodadad said, striding toward the British agent, across the brightly lit living room.
“Glad you have some heat, Soheil. I was beginning to become numb.” The men shook hands warmly.
“Please, sit here by the fire. I made tea. My wife is at her mother’s or you would have a meal,” Khodadad said, taking the overcoat and hat. “Father was not pleased to see you again. He called you an apparition of the spirit that comes to take you when you die.” The Iranian looked fit and maybe forty as he sat in a chair surrounded by books and magazines. “But I am very glad to see you. We have a lot to talk about. And I didn’t know how to reach you. You should spend the night. Go back into town on the bus in the morning with the commuters. If you walk down the streets here later tonight, it will look odd.”
Douglas agreed. He also noticed that the phone line was disconnected from the wall jack. The curtains were down. A radio played a talk program by the window. An old hunting rifle was over the mantel. “We thought it was safer, after Baku, after the arrests of the others, that we just cut off all communications with you for quite a while,” Douglas said softly, settling into the chair opposite Khodadad. “As I told your father, the others did not know you, so you were safe. But those of us who used to come in to meet you and the others, those that went to the drops and the meets in Dubai, and Istanbul, and Baku...we were possibly known. If I had thought you had been in any danger, we would have gotten you out. Somehow.”
“Well, it is good that you did not try. I am under no suspicion. In fact, I have been advanced
thanks to my friends from the Madras Haqqani.” Soheil chuckled.
“You went there for a while, am I right? The theological school in Qom?” Douglas tried to recall the details from Khodadad’s file.
“Yes, I went there. For two years before going back to university. It is where VEVAK, our Ministry of Intelligence and Security, recruits many of its people. My friends from there are now rising to the top of middle management in VEVAK. And so when they needed someone in the Foreign Ministry to be the liaison with VEVAK, they found the deputy director of research in the Foreign Ministry. Me.” Soheil spread his arms wide. “You are looking at the director of Department 108 in the Ministry, chief of liaison to VEVAK.”
Brian Douglas laughed. “Your promotion into that job would have got me a bonus if I were still running the network. That’s amazing. Department 108 is one of those mysterious places we have heard about but never really understood. And now you’re running it?”
“VEVAK runs it, Andrew.” Soheil used the name by which he knew Brian Douglas/Simon Manley. “I provide them a trusted eye to look at the Ministry for them. But I can also sometimes see the other way, into VEVAK. And what I see now frightens me.” Douglas settled into his chair. He had interviewed enough agent sources to know the signs. This one was about to unload something that he had been storing up for some time.
“Andrew, we elect a president and a majlis. It does not matter. We have a foreign minister, a Supreme National Security Council. It does not matter. There is a government within this government. Made up of the faqih, the supreme leader, our grand ayatollah. And the Council of Guardians, his minions. They veto the majlis. They determine who can run for the majlis. When the law enforcement forces kill innocent young students in their dormitory for being dissidents, the faqih lets them do it with impunity. When VEVAK did the serial killing of authors, impunity.
“You know who runs our foreign policy? Not the Ministry. General Hedvai, the commander of the Qods Force of the Pasdaran.”
Brian nodded. “He’s a name that does keep popping up. Commander of the Jerusalem Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Command. When I was hunting down al Qaeda in Iraq, I saw his shadow more than a few times.”
“Of course!” Soheil shot back. “Qods Force was al Qaeda’s greatest source of support. And Hezbollah’s, Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s, Hamas’s. They have unlimited budget, Andrew. They run drugs and black market operations all over the world. In Brazil. In Britain. In New York.” Soheil was standing, poking at the fire. Now he sat on the footstool in front of Douglas. “And Andrew, now the Qods has a plan to unite all the Gulf Shi’as. Already with their coup de main in Iraq they have put a Shi’a government in power, loyal to them. The Americans accepted that because it allowed them to say there was stability, so they could send most of their troops home. Then Baghdad told them to get out altogether. But what the Qods and the faqih want to do now, the Americans could not ignore. So they have found a way of checkmating them. And then they will bleed them. And it will begin soon. It is all laid out in the documents on this flash drive I loaded for you, but you will have to read them all and put it together, so let me explain.”
Brian Douglas had thought if there was time to contact only one of the people left from the old network, it would be Soheil. He was bright and passionately loved Iran. As a teenager, he had also been the babysitter and then big brother for the baby boy next door. The boy had been among those killed in the 1999 police raid on the Tehran dormitory. That incident had been Soheil’s epiphany. All the things that he had rationalized as a junior officer in the Foreign Ministry, all the prices that he had been willing to pay for an Iran that was truly free of foreign interference, then came crashing down on him. The promises of the revolution had been crushed, the people betrayed. A criminal cartel with imperial designs and religious trappings had stolen the government, the real government.
So, on the margins of the Islamic Conference meeting in Istanbul, Soheil Khodadad had walked by the old British Consulate at lunchtime and followed a British diplomat down the street. He had been a great source for the subsequent five years. Now he was a placement of the kind that SIS saw once in a decade. Brian Douglas had tapped a vein of gold. And as he sipped his tea, and Soheil’s revelations poured forth, Brian began to think how he could quickly get this story to Vauxhall Cross. He couldn’t. Going anywhere near someone from the British Embassy here would be folly. Worse. It would be death.
The fire went out near two o’clock. By then Soheil had finished his story and Brian had walked him back through it several times. How did he know this? Was it possible it was just big talk by people whom he had heard? How could the VEVAK know what the artesh, the army, was doing? Harder still, how could Soheil’s friends in VEVAK know what the Qods Force was planning? Why would they tell Soheil? Was it possible he was being fed disinformation? How sure was he that he was not under suspicion? How had he obtained copies of the documents? Wasn’t there a risk in scanning them into his computer? Who, besides his father, knew that he had these views?
“Andrew, enough,” Soheil said, rubbing his eyes. “Get some rest on the couch. Here is a blanket. You should leave with the early crowd around six. Those of us in the Foreign Ministry are in the late commute, after eight. And Andrew, if you can use this to stop them, loftan, you must stop them. Or this whole region will go up in flames, again.” He placed the USB flash drive in Brian’s palm, embraced him, and walked up the stairs.
Almost four hours later, Brian put the heavy overcoat and hat back on. He was once again glad that his blond beard barely showed after one day. Nonetheless, he felt it and smelled the residue of the night sweat on his shirt. He quietly stepped out into the corridor and felt the morning cold. Then he walked out onto the sidewalk and turned right to walk back toward the bus line. A few others were heading in the same direction. A black Mitsubishi Pajero was headed toward him. Two men were inside. Brian had a sharp stabbing feeling in his stomach and his muscles tightened. He kept walking. The Pajero passed.
Through the corner of his eye, he saw it turn left. Brian was at the corner. The bus line was to the left. He paused. Something. He turned right and right again, walking around the block toward Soheil’s. When he reached the corner, he saw the Pajero. It was parked in front of the house where he had met Khodadad. The Pajero was empty.
If VEVAK was arresting Soheil, they would not send just one car and two men, Douglas thought, his mind racing, his heart beating faster. If the two men were security and saw him walk by again, they might stop and question him. He had the flash drive dongle inside his right sock. By all rights, he should just walk away. Now.
He turned back, toward the bus line. “Crack! Crack!” They were muffled by the buildings, but they were gunshots. Douglas froze. Then, “Crack.” One more shot. He needed to clear the area, fast. But he thought about Baku and how his agents had been killed, how some had first been tortured.
Douglas ran down the sidewalk toward the house. His hat flew off. A woman across the street yelled. He was unarmed because there’d been no way to explain why he was carrying a gun if he was stopped. Somewhere in his head a voice yelled, What the hell do you think you’re going to do?
He pushed open the gate. The corridor was clear. He moved to the door and stood to its left side. There was no sound from within. Douglas turned the knob and threw open the door. He saw one body immediately, blood still pouring out of what was left of the head. Stepping inside and shutting the door behind him, he inhaled the gunsmoke and then smelled the blood. Soheil sat in his chair, with the books. His head hung down, dripping blood from his mouth and from the back of his skull. A pistol lay in his lap.
The second man was sprawled across the couch where Douglas had tried to sleep. His wound was near his heart and it was large. Douglas saw the hunting rifle on the floor. He checked the man on the couch. No pulse. No gun. The identification folder inside his jacket seemed to say something about security, something about the Foreign Ministry. It was quite eviden
t that Soheil was dead. How had they fingered Soheil? In his mind, he saw Roddy Touraine’s face. And then Douglas was aware of a siren, very close.
He moved quickly across the room to the other man. Also dead, but he still had his gun in the holster. He recognized it, a German Heckler & Koch 2000. It was like the Browning Hi-Power, but modernized. He took it.
The siren had stopped. Out front. Was there a back door? Stepping over the body, he rushed through the door at the rear of the room. It opened into a kitchen. There was a pounding on the front door. He saw a stairway, leading down. The house was on a slope. There was a garage and the alley below, in the back. He jumped down the stairs, hardly touching them. He took the HK out of his belt and held it in his hand, inside the overcoat pocket. Quickly, he peered out the window in the rear door. Nothing. He opened the door slowly and moved into the alley.
In seconds, he was down the alley and back on the side street, headed toward the bus line. More sirens. He slowed his walk. There were more people now, moving along the sidewalk in the cold morning air toward the bus line.
A blue light flashed across the building to his right, and instantly a green-and-white police car turned the corner, blaring the up-down siren. He clenched the pistol grip in his coat pocket.
Without slowing, the car shot by. The end of the bus line was no longer a good place to head, Douglas thought. He was suddenly aware that his mouth was bone-dry. He slowed slightly, inhaled. He knew his reflexes were sharp now, the autonomic fight-or-flight juices flowing. He had to be careful, thoughtful, not just instinctive. What was in his head, what was in his sock, had to get out of Tehran today.
Across the street, a man was opening a black wrought-iron gate to his driveway. Douglas strode quickly across the street. “Hello, my friend,” Douglas called out to the man in Farsi. He entered the narrow driveway inside the stucco walls. “Can you give me a ride today? I am late. . . .” The man turned at the door of the car as Douglas moved quickly up to him.
The Scorpion's Gate Page 18
