by Greg Rucka
"We're going to have to get a boat," Caleb said. "And we're going to have to lose them before we do it."
"How lost do we want them to be?"
"Whatever it takes," Caleb said.
MacIntyre nodded slightly, downshifting. Caleb checked the mirrors, then the windows. He didn't see the van, and he didn't see the second jeep anywhere. It was possible that Zahabzeh had backed off, had even turned his attention elsewhere, but Caleb doubted that, particularly the latter. Yes, they were close to the border with Iraq, so close, in fact, that the river flowing past the western side of the city served to mark it, but Zahabzeh was still counting on them to lead him to Shirazi and Chace. If he'd backed off at all, it was only to make them think it was safe to run.
Caleb checked his watch, saw that it was forty-eight minutes past eight in the evening. Less than two hours until the rendezvous. An hour at most to get the boat, another hour to reach the pickup. There wasn't a lot of time.
They had entered a traffic circle, and Caleb realized that MacIntyre was now beginning his second loop, accelerating. A horn blared. In the mirror, he saw the jeep coming up behind them, trying to keep pace. They went around a third time, fast enough that the tires protested, and then a fourth, the squeal from the wheels louder, the grin on MacIntyre's face making him look like a boy deep in mischief. Cars ahead of them, behind them, were pounding their horns, and the Khodro was bleating at them in return, and they rounded the circle a fifth time. Now the jeep was ahead of them, not behind.
MacIntyre wrenched the wheel hard, right, and the rear of the car broke free, tires smoking even more furiously than before, and they shot west, accelerating, and turned, turned again, and again. Caleb saw the speedometer brush past a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour, swiveled in his seat to look back, and they were braking again, hard, turning again, and the jeep was nowhere to be seen.
They headed east, towards the river, driving quickly, and then the road narrowed as they passed into thick palms growing deep alongside the banks. MacIntyre turned them south, skirting the shore, killing their headlamps and slowing, and they could see boats moored along the water. Caleb reached for his backpack, pulled the GPS unit out and switched it on, taking a reading.
"Keep going south."
"We'll need a boat."
Caleb shook his head. "Not yet. Keep going south."
They continued following the river. Somewhere above them, they heard a helicopter drone, rotor pitch fading as it moved away, west.
"Mr. Lewis, we need to stop, find someone who'll sell us his boat."
"We're not going to buy a boat," Caleb said. "We buy a boat, there's nothing to keep the guy who sells it from taking our money and then calling Zahabzeh."
"Steal one, then."
"Can you pilot a boat?"
"No, sir."
"Neither can I." Caleb leaned forward in his seat, catching lights shining on the water. "Stop here. Get our things."
MacIntyre did as ordered, Caleb following, slinging his backpack over his shoulders. He felt for the pistol, still in his pocket, took it out and chambered the first round.
"Follow my lead," he told MacIntyre. "Don't shoot unless you have to."
"Never do, sir," MacIntyre responded, pulling out the Browning.
They made their way along the bank, then down to the small jetty, towards the boat with the lights burning inside. Caleb could hear strains of music, a radio playing, perhaps. The boat was a small one, maybe twelve feet, no longer, with the wheelhouse above the sunken cabin. He saw a shadow against the light, waited a few seconds for signs of other movement, other occupants, and not seeing any, stepped aboard.
He reached into his coat, pulled out one of the stacks of rials, holding it in his left hand. With his right, he raised the pistol.
"Excuse me," he said in Farsi, stepping down into the cabin.
The occupant, possibly the owner, was fixing a glass of tea from a small, single-coil burner, and he jumped in surprise, spinning around, then froze at the sight of Caleb, the money, the gun. He was a small man, mid-fifties perhaps, with a weather-beaten face coated in gray-and-black stubble.
"What-what is this?"
"We need to use your boat," Caleb said. He lowered the pistol, held up the rials, then tossed them forward, to the man, who caught the bundle, more out of reflex than intention. "We need you to take us down to the Gulf. We'll be making a stop along the way."
The man stared at him, then at the thick sheaf of bills in his hands. He ran a thumb against their edge, looked up again, this time past Caleb's shoulder, to where MacIntyre was standing behind him.
"I say no you will kill me?"
Caleb took a second bundle of rials out of his coat, this one from the inside pocket, tossed them as he had the first. The man was ready this time, caught them easily.
"Don't say no," Caleb told him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
IRAN-30.241350 BY 48.464821
13 DECEMBER 2245 HOURS (GMT +3.30)
The jeep, Chace decided raggedly, had probably saved their lives, despite the price she had paid in acquiring it. A military vehicle, it had allowed them to drive almost entirely unmolested, speeding out of the desert through the night, down from the plateau towards the Gulf.
But the price for it, she was beginning to think, might have been a little too high. She was starting to believe she wasn't going to make it.
There'd been three bags of Ringers, or its Iranian equivalent, in the kit, and Shirazi had fed all of them through her IV between that first panicked stop and sunrise. She was certain that was the only reason she was still around. The pain in her chest was constant and almost unbearable now, and it wasn't until he'd hit her with the morphine that she realized she must've been screaming. When the sun rose she understood that it hadn't been the night making her so cold. Through the narcotic haze she knew she was in shock, and falling deeper, the way she knew that while the morphine had stolen her pain, it probably hadn't done her respiratory system any favors. At some point, she'd begun coughing, and there was the taste of blood in her mouth.
Now it was dark again, and she thought her eyes were open and that it was night, but she really wasn't sure.
"Tara?"
She blinked, blinked again, saw Youness Shirazi looking down at her. She croaked at him, mouth coated in copper dust.
"We're here," he was saying. "I think we're here. Come, I will help you stand."
He reached for her, pulling her by her ankles, then wrapped an arm around her waist, and then she was upright, wobbling, clinging to him with her left arm. There was a river in front of her, water flowing quickly past, and the smell of it hit her, strong with oil. She coughed, felt blood in her mouth, tried to spit it out, but instead it ran down, over her chin. She couldn't even spit right.
"The pickup," Shirazi said. "By boat?"
She shook her head, not disagreeing, simply not knowing. Shirazi was walking with her carefully, and then he was lowering her, propping her against something as cold as she was, and Chace looked up, saw that they were beneath a bridge, the jeep parked perhaps ten meters away. Shirazi set his satchel down beside her, then checked her pupils, one eye, then the other. Then he checked his watch, frowned.
"I am going to look for them," he said. "I will not be long."
He started to straighten up. Chace grabbed for him with her left hand, the only one that was still working.
"Gun," she whispered, and even that hurt like hell, just the effort to say the single syllable.
He looked at her, confused, then nodded and pressed a pistol in her hand. She tightened her grip around the butt, barely felt the sensation of the weapon in her grip. With effort, she got her finger through the guard, onto the trigger, watched as Shirazi made his way through the shadows, then into the comparative light of the night, turning out of sight. He was going to check the road, she realized, just to be sure they weren't coming by car.
She closed her eyes, opened them again, saw a boat on the river,
two figures silhouetted at the wheel. She heard voices, distant and dreamlike. She closed her eyes again.
When she opened them this time, there was someone coming towards her. She thought it was Caleb, started to say his name, and then he was on her, and she saw that she had been wrong. It wasn't Caleb.
She was looking at Zahabzeh.
For a second Chace was certain she was hallucinating, the morphine still playing tricks with her mind. She'd seen wonderful, horrible things with the morphine. Tom in her arms and Tom torn apart and Tamsin burning alive with fever, and this was horrible, the end of a nightmare, his hand coming at her out of the darkness, and her mind flashed on that hand tearing at her back, opening her chest to the air, and she tried to kick, bring the gun up, scream, all at once. The only thing that worked was the kick, ineffectual, and then one hand was over her mouth, the other hand tearing the pistol out of her grip, and the back of her head hit concrete, and the world went bright before swirling into shadow again.
She was being moved, pulled to her feet, the hand still silencing her. Chace saw the boat on the water, bobbing steadily, felt her feet dragging over the grass on the bank, out of the shadows. There was more light now-not much, but she thought she saw three figures on the boat.
Zahabzeh pushed her down to her knees. There was a van parked nearby, just off the road, and two other men coming towards them, but Zahabzeh wasn't paying any attention to them. He was focused entirely on the boat. He ran the slide back on the pistol he'd taken from her, pointed it at her head, much the way Shirazi had done only the day before.
Somehow, she didn't think this would end with Zahabzeh declaring his desire to defect.
"I'll kill her!" Zahabzeh shouted at the boat. "I will shoot her here and now!"
Chace wobbled on her knees, barely able to stay upright. There was movement on the boat, she saw one of the figures with a rifle. She didn't think it was Caleb, too large, maybe the other one, MacIntyre. That gave her hope, for an instant an almost indescribable feeling of triumph despite all her pain.
If they had Shirazi on the boat and MacIntyre had a rifle, she knew who he was aiming it at.
It wasn't Zahabzeh.
"My people are coming!" he shouted. "They are on their way! Give him up! Give us back Shirazi and you can still escape, you can take her with you!"
Something Tom had told her, when she had first joined the Section, came back to Chace. There were only three ways a Minder ever left, he'd said. They were promoted, they quit, or they died. Most of them took option number three.
"They won't," she whispered, surprised at the weakness of her own voice, unsure even if Zahabzeh could hear her. "He's gone."
Zahabzeh shouted something in Farsi, and the two men took hold of her, brought her to her feet, and she cried out at the pain in her shattered arm, then laughed when he put the pistol against her head.
"Give him back!"
"Shoot me," Chace whispered.
In her ear, she heard the gun go off.
She had just enough time to be honestly surprised that it was Zahabzeh who pitched forward, and not herself, when there was a flash of fire from the boat, the crack of a high-powered rifle. The man holding her right arm twirled away, and almost instantly she heard another shot, and the one at her left fell forward, as well. For a second, Chace thought she was going to fall herself, wobbling unsteadily on her feet.
Then there was an arm around her waist, and Caleb Lewis was holding her up, pistol in his other hand.
"You're safe," he told her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
LONDON-VAUXHALL CROSS, OFFICE OF THE CHIEF OF SERVICE, "C"
14 DECEMBER 1022 HOURS (GMT)
C leaned forward in her chair, pouring for herself what Crocker thought was a self-congratulatory second cup of tea from the china pot, before sitting back and looking at him with a slight smile. Rayburn, in his chair, and Szurko, beside him on the couch, were likewise jubilant, all of them in their proper place for the traditional morning meeting.
"She'll be all right, then?" C asked.
"They operated on Chace as soon as she was aboard Illustrious," Crocker said. "As of an hour ago, she was stable, and had regained consciousness, though only for a short while. Her shoulder was badly damaged by a rifle round; will most likely require reconstructive surgery."
"And Shirazi?"
"Minders Two and Three took him out via RAF from Kuwait as of oh-four-hundred," Crocker said. "They should have him at the Farm before nightfall. Minder Two reports that Shirazi brought a goodie bag out with him: a list of all VEVAK agents working abroad, including within the U.K."
C moved her cup of tea to her mouth, but not before Crocker saw the smile. "That should earn us some favors from Box."
"I'd hope so," Crocker said.
She took a sip from her cup, set it back on the saucer, then set both on the side table and regarded him. "The Prime Minister phoned me this morning, Paul, once he'd received word of the successful completion of Icecrown. He made a point of saying to me, specifically, that I was to pass on his compliments to you for executing such a successful reversal of fortune. You not only spared the Government a humiliation, you handed them a triumph."
"The Prime Minister is being generous."
"If that's everything?" C asked.
"There is one more thing…," Crocker said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
LONDON-VAUXHALL CROSS, OFFICE OF D-OPS
25 JANUARY 0848 HOURS (GMT)
The phone on the desk rang, the red one, bleating once, twice, then a third time, before Kate stuck her head through the open doorway, asking, "You're going to get that?"
Very gingerly, right arm still aching at the shoulder, the muscles still relearning their role, Tara Chace picked up the handset.
"D-Ops," she said.
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