by Greg Rucka
"If you do all of these things, then you will find yourself still with access to this office come the dawn. If you do not, I will have Security remove you from the premises this instant, and tomorrow you'll be wandering up and down Whitehall in search of an open vacancy."
She held out the handset to Crocker.
"Make your decision now."
He took the handset, raised it to his ear.
"Minder One to the Ops Room," Crocker said.
CHAPTER NINE
IRAN-KARAJ, 22 NILUFAR STREET
10 DECEMBER 1821 HOURS (GMT +3.30)
If there was anything useful to be found in a roundabout, it was that it made flushing a tail easy; if a car followed you around it once, that was just some bloke heading the same way you were; if that car followed you around it twice, that was some bloke following you.
By the time Chace had made her second turn around Sepah Square, she was as sure as she could be that she wasn't being followed. She continued west another fifty meters before turning right, onto Bustan, then turned right again, onto Nilufar, looking for a place to park. The neighborhood wasn't what she'd expected, the dull utilitarianism of the buildings offset by the multitude of trees growing on each side of the street, denuded by the cold and the recent rain. It had turned dark, and a wind had come up, and as she guided her rental down the block her headlamps revealed quick glimpses of leaves as they flipped through the air like wounded birds.
At the east end of the street she turned right once more, and then immediately again, into a wide alley that ran parallel to Nilufar. Several cars were parked along here, and she found a space perhaps midway down and stopped, dropping the manual shift into neutral and letting the vehicle idle. The car was a Samand, essentially the Iranian version of a Peugeot 405, produced under license from the French, and while it was neither fast nor particularly reliable, it had the clear merit of being ubiquitous, something Chace had been able to verify during her long fight with the traffic out of Tehran.
With one hand, she adjusted the rearview mirror, as if inspecting herself in the reflection, and adjusted the black silk scarf she was wearing to hide her hair. A set of headlights flashed towards her, another car turning down the alley, and she watched from her periphery as it rolled slowly past, seeing two occupants, both men, neither of whom gave even the slightest glance in her direction. The car continued, made a left at the end of the alley, disappeared back onto Bustan.
Chace closed her eyes, trying to conjure the man from the photograph Crocker had shown her during the briefing, the man who was supposed to be Hossein Khamenei.
Instead she saw Tamsin, her cheeks flushed pink with heat, and she wondered if her daughter's fever had broken yet. They had been sleeping when the call came, curled together in Chace's bed, each exhausted, but for different reasons. The previous night had been a marathon of sickness, with Tamsin ultimately reduced to spastic dry heaves that had made her sob.
"Why, Mommy?" she'd asked more than once. "Why am I sick like this?"
"It's your body trying to make you better, baby," Chace had told her, stroking her daughter's matted hair back from where it was clinging to her brow. "Just let it happen, don't fight it. You'll feel better soon."
It had been a half-truth. The vomiting had ceased, but the fever had increased, and after a second round of Calpol at four in the morning, Chace had begun to worry that perhaps this wasn't a cold but something else. She'd spent the rest of the darkness on her laptop, working up a fear that contained both the words "swine" and "flu," and by morning had already made an appointment to take Tamsin to the doctor.
No, not the flu, the doctor had said. Just a nasty bug. Home, rest, fluids. If the fever doesn't go down by tomorrow morning, I'll want to see her again.
Only marginally reassured, Chace brought Tamsin back to their home in Camden, tucked her into bed, and tried to do all the things a good mother should do. That Tamsin was willing to let her do such things was a sign of how sick she was; normally, getting her to stay still for more than four or five seconds at a time was a chore, and that included while her daughter was sleeping.
When the phone called out at just past midnight, it needed several rings before it could penetrate either of their sleeps, and Chace felt uncharacteristically groggy as she fumbled for the handset.
"Chace."
"Duty Ops Officer. Minder One to the Ops Room."
For an instant, the incandescent rage that consumed Chace threatened to make her say things, many things, she would regret. She was exhausted, her daughter was ill, for the love of God, and at-what was it, half midnight?-half midnight she was expected to summon a nanny for Tamsin and just rush off to the office? There were three Minders, dammit, why the hell weren't they calling Nicky?
But she didn't say any of those things. She said, "An hour."
"Confirmed."
Dial tone, and Chace blinked at the phone in her hand for several seconds, then pressed the speed dial for Missi Hegland. While it rang, Chace extricated herself from the bed and slipped out of the room, into the hall.
"Hello?"
"Missi, it's Tara," Chace said. "I'm sorry to be calling so late."
On the other end of the line, the nanny groaned. "Again?"
"I know, it's awful of me. Can you be here in half an hour?"
Chace heard a yawn. "How long will you be gone this time?"
"Only a couple of days, I shouldn't think. It's Australia, Hong Kong, and back."
"They do have other flight attendants, don't they?"
"You'd think," Chace said. "Can you be here in half an hour?"
When Chace returned to the bedroom, Tamsin was sitting up, bleary-eyed and disoriented. Chace climbed back onto the bed and wrapped Tamsin in her arms. They stayed that way until the knock came at the door. Missi was knocking a second time before Chace could let her inside.
"Tam's asleep?" Missi asked, removing her coat. She'd brought a small duffel bag with her, and Chace found it bitterly ironic that her daughter's nanny had, in essence, a go-bag. Chace's own was stocked and waiting in the Pit.
"She's down now, yes. She's been ill, running a fever all day. I took her to the doctor, he said rest, fluids, like that. If the fever hasn't broken by tomorrow, she'll need to see him again, and if it spikes, you should take her in right away."
"Tara," Missi said, her tone just shy of a reproach. She was a young woman, mid-twenties, a pretty blonde with an almost perpetual smile. "Why didn't you tell them no?"
"I can't, I just… I can't. This'll be the last time. On my word, this is the very last time."
"And you've got to go now, have you?"
"I do, I'm already late."
"Going?" said a small voice from the end of the hall, and both women turned to see Tamsin wobbling in the doorway of the master bedroom, matted hair and dazed understanding on her face.
"I'm sorry, baby, I've got to go to work-"
"Don't go!"
Chace moved to her daughter, scooped her up, held her close. "I'm sorry, baby."
The tears started, hot and fat. "Don't go! Don't go! Don't go!"
"I've got to go. This'll be the last time. I promise, Tam, this is the very last time."
The sobbing accelerated, becoming thicker and louder, and Chace carried Tamsin back to where Missi was standing. Tamsin refused to release her grip, wrapping Chace's hair in her tiny fists, pulling and screaming, until finally she worked herself into such outrage she was choking on her own tears. Chace managed to free herself from her daughter, and placed Tamsin into Missi's arms.
"You better leave," Missi told her, and though Chace knew better, she was certain it was a condemnation.
Hating herself, Chace headed to the Ops Room.
The wind cut into her as soon as she stepped out of the Samand, grabbed the tail of her manteau, and crushed it against the backs of her thighs. Chace tugged at the hem reflexively, making certain it stayed below midthigh. Iran wasn't as forbidding to women as Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, at least
not this close to the capital, but there was still a standard of modesty that even Chace, as a foreigner, was expected to observe. Here, the maqna'e for her hair and the manteau, a shapeless trench-dress, sufficed enough that she could get away with blue jeans and boots.
It was quiet in the alley, quieter than Chace had expected considering the volume of traffic running on the road just to the south, the buildings on either side of her serving as a sound buffer. She locked the door of the car, tucked her chin against her chest, and began walking towards Bustan, eyeing the apartments on her right. As she passed the third from the end, she noted a rear door up a short flight of stairs, a single bulb in a fixture above it.
At the corner, she turned north, towards Nilufar, and immediately spotted four policemen standing beside two parked cars. There was nothing urgent in their manner, and as she approached she saw that three of the four were participating in some discussion with a group of locals, voices rising and falling with enthusiasm and laughter. Chace kept her eyes down. Almost everywhere else she could think of, avoiding an authority's eyes was a sign of guilt, guaranteed to raise suspicion; here, meeting a man's eyes could be perceived as a come-on.
"Khanom."
Now she raised her eyes, saw one of the officers beckoning to her.
"Khanom," he said. "Shab bekheyr."
"Pardonnez-moi," Chace replied. "Mais je ne parle pas Farsi."
The officer jerked his head back in surprise, realizing, perhaps, that she was a foreigner. He tapped one of his colleagues, which brought the attention of the remaining two, as well, and Chace heard the first officer speak, caught a word that she assumed was Farsi for "French."
"Non," said the smallest of the policemen to Chace. "Non francais. Anglais?"
"Oui," Chace said. "I speak English."
"Are you alone?" he asked. "Are you lost?"
"Traveling alone, oui. But I have a… a colleague? He lives on Nilufar, I am visiting him."
"You are married?"
"Non. A widow."
The policeman's face fell in sympathetic grief. "May I see your papers, please?"
"Of course." Chace turned slightly, reaching beneath her manteau, then offered her passport and visa card to the policeman, watched as he and another of his colleagues examined them with a flashlight.
"You are a Swiss?"
"Oui."
"You are a doctor?"
"Comment vous-parlez… scientist?" Chace clamped her lips together and blew, inflating her cheeks. "Poisson?"
"Fish?"
"Oui! Sturgeon!"
There was a general sound of understanding from the group of officers. "Caviar," one of them said, and Chace nodded.
"Our caviar is the best in the world."
"Oh, yes," Chace agreed, taking her papers back as they were offered to her.
The policeman who had done most of the talking with her, the smallest of the group, indicated the street off to his left. "Nilufar is that way. Have a good visit to our country, Dr. Gadient."
"Merci. Salam aleykum."
"Salam aleykum." "Tehran went sterile this afternoon at roughly fifteen hundred zone," William Teagle told Chace. "Your flight will touch down early evening tomorrow-well, today, really-so by the time you get your legs under you for the rendezvous, Falcon should have had seventy-two hours clear, no contact with anyone from the Station."
"They understand they need to keep the hell away from him?" Chace asked.
"Barnett knows the rules," Crocker said. "They won't go anywhere near Falcon prior to the lift."
"Cover identity is that of Dr. Pia Gadient, with the University of Fribourg. You're a marine biologist, in particular concerned with the declining sturgeon population in the Caspian Sea."
"I'm a marine biologist?"
Teagle slid a folder across the briefing table towards her. "You can read up on it. You've published a couple of very well-received papers on the subject, in point of fact. It's a very good cover for the job, Tara. Of all the countries on the Caspian, Iran is the only one to make any effort at sustaining the sturgeon population, and they're quite proud of the fact."
"I never did like caviar," Chace said, leafing through the folder.
"The cover also justifies why you'll be in the north, why you'll have access to a boat, why you'll be carrying a GPS, a sat phone. You can even get away with carrying a knife, if you like. After all, you've got to open those fish somehow."
"GPS will have the RZ coordinates?"
Julian Seale, sitting silently by Crocker and nursing a cup of coffee, spoke up. "Coast Guard will begin overflight of the rendezvous on the eleventh at twenty-three hundred hours. They'll continue fly-bys once an hour until oh-three-hundred morning of the twelfth. You'll have four shots at pickup before they have to break off and refuel."
"How do I signal them?"
"You don't. They'll be flying dark, using NVG. If you're there, they'll spot you."
Chace looked at the man, considered pressing the point, then decided against it. There was tension running between Seale and Crocker, even if both men were doing their best to conceal it, and she didn't want to inadvertently poke a nerve in the middle of a briefing.
"Exfil plan?"
"Tehran Number Two will be present in the safehouse on your arrival. He has acquired a RHIB, small Zodiac, already secured in Dr. Gadient's name, and will have the boat in position and moored by the time you arrive at the safehouse with Falcon. Once Falcon's bona fides are confirmed, you'll be free to proceed to departure. Sat phone to check in with London once you're on the water, then again after pickup by USGS."
Chace studied the maps on the table for the better part of another minute, then went through the documents again. The passport was Swiss, and according to the stamps, she'd made several visits to the countries that bordered the Caspian, including Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Russia. This was her second visit to Iran in the last three years.
"Good," she said finally. "Now the big question: what's the fallback if it all goes to hell in a handbasket?"
"Instead of exfil to the north, you track west, to Tabriz," Teagle said. "From there you have your choice of borders, either into Iraq or, better, into Turkey."
"Is there a bolt-hole in Tabriz?"
"No."
Chace turned to Crocker. "Can we fix that, please?"
"I don't see how," Crocker said. "Not with the time we have left."
"So if it goes wrong I'm out in the open and on my own, that's what you're saying?"
"That's correct."
"Lovely. And I'm going unarmed?"
"Again correct. You get stopped carrying a knife, your cover supports it. You get stopped with a gun, they're liable to use it on you."
"Agreed," Chace said, immensely relieved that no one from on-high had insisted on her going armed. "All right, I'll need time to study all this, so if you want to sod off now, that'd be grand."
Teagle laughed, but neither Seale nor Crocker shared it.
"You make the approach to the apartment," Crocker said. "You make sure of the ground, Tara. You see anything-anything-that makes you unhappy, you abort back to your hotel in Tehran, take the next flight home, you understand?"
"Hold on-" Seale began.
"When it's your fucking agent, you can give the fucking briefing," Crocker snapped. "She's happy, or she doesn't do the job. It's that simple."
"Boys, don't let's fight," Chace said. "I'm a big girl, and I've played outside before. I know what makes me happy and what doesn't." There was no security that she could see at the entrance of Number 22 Nilufar, just a set of three wide steps that followed the slope up to the front door of the apartment building. Chace took them with purpose, doing her best to appear like she knew exactly where she was heading. The door was unlocked, and she pushed into the narrow lobby of the building, smelling broiling meat and a melange of spices that would have made her mouth water if it hadn't been filled with cotton.
To her right, running straight down, was a hallway that ended
with another, smaller door, apartments alongside. The stairs to the first floor were at the end of the hall, so that one ascended facing towards Nilufar. She headed past them, to the door opposite the entrance, and it opened without difficulty, and she found herself looking out into the alley where she'd parked the Samand. She checked both directions, then looked up and, seeing no one, took the folding knife from her jeans pocket and, shielding her face with her free hand, whacked the closed blade against the lightbulb hanging over the door. The glass shattered, the light went out, and she slipped back into the building.
According to the briefing on Coldwitch, Falcon was on the third floor, either in apartment three, or in the third apartment there, but when she came off the stairs, her first thought was that their intelligence had been wrong. There were six separate apartments and none of them, at first glance, was marked with a three. The lighting in the hallway was weak, as well, and it made determining details even more difficult.
For a moment, Chace held on the landing, waiting and listening. From one of the apartments she could hear conversation, animated and happy, and from another broadcast voices, either the State-run television or the State-run radio, she had no way of knowing. Somewhere below she heard a door slam closed.
She moved forward along the hallway, checking each door in turn, and had reversed, was heading back towards the stairs, when she stopped, her eye catching on a chalk mark high on the wall. Three short lines, running parallel to the ground on the right side of one of the doors, and three more, barely visible, on the left.
Three and three again.
She knocked gently and waited, and after a moment, she heard a lock turn. The door pulled back, and the man who stood revealed matched the photograph, and Chace stepped immediately forward. She covered his mouth with her left hand, pushing him inside, then shoved him backwards against the wall, pinning him in place. With a foot, she shut the door. She put the index finger of her right hand up to her lips, and the man looked at her with eyes wide.
