Crossfire (Kirk McGarvey 3)

by Hagberg, David

  "I speak a little Russian. Do you speak English?" the official countered, his Russian poor.

  "Yes, I speak English," McGarvey said in a broad Slavic accent.

  The official nodded. "What is the purpose of your visit to Iran?"

  "I am engineer. Industrial engineer. Heavy equipment. Motors for factories."

  'Tes, I understand, but why have you come to Iran?"

  "To do engineering," McGarvey said. "With Iranian businessmen, we will build factories. I am here to find out if it is"—he seemed to be groping for the right word—"possible."

  "Do you have a sponsor here in Tehran?"

  McGarvey shook his head, a look of consternation clouding his features. "Is necessary?"

  "No. How long will you be staying in Iran?"

  "One week, perhaps ten days, no more. Then I must return to home."

  The Iranian official stamped the passport and handed it back. 'Tour luggage will come from the aircraft soon. When you have cleared customs you must take a bus or a taxi directly to your hotel. It is not permitted for you to be on the streets at this hour. Your hotel will advise you of our laws."

  'Tes, I understand this," McGarvey said, nodding.

  The official looked beyond him to the next person in line and McGarvey walked through the doorway into the customs area where the baggage from the flight was just coming in, a dozen nervous people waiting for it.

  As McGarvey took his place at the carousel, one of the Iranian officials in civilian clothes came in from the other room and said something to one of the customs men. They both looked pointedly at McGarvey. The civilian was a SAVAK officer; there was little doubt of it in McGarvey's mind. A simple call to the Russian embassy would shatter his cover identity.

  He looked around the hall as if he were merely idly curious about his surroundings. The only way out that wouldn't involve an immediate confrontation with an Iranian official would be through the luggage opening. But what was on the other side

  of the wall? In all likelihood there would be a couple of armed guards to watch the incoming baggage.

  He did not speak Farsi, he did not have a weapon, and he didn't even have any Iranian money. If he had to run now, he would be in serious trouble. Ghfari was doubtless being closely watched by SAVAK If McGarvey was on the run, making contact would be doubly difficult.

  Back in Cairo, while Wills had been finishing the briefing and awaiting McGarvey's Russian identification papers, Jaziraf had somehow managed to dig up a cheap cardboard suitcase and several changes of clothing, all of Russian manufacture. He'd also found a couple of engineering texts, in Russian, and the names of six Iranian engineering firms, which were jotted down in a notebook in Russian and in English.

  The yellow cardboard suitcase came out onto the carousel. McGarvey grabbed it and went across to the three customs counters. The SAVAK officer stepped back but remained within earshot.

  "Do you have anything to declare?" the uniformed customs official asked. They'd been told about him.

  "Nyet" McGarvey said.

  The official opened the suitcase and pulled everything out of it, checking the lining and the hinges before he turned to the clothes and finally the books and notebooks.

  "No cigarettes or liquor?"

  "Nyet"

  "Pornographic magazines or photographs?"

  "Nyet"

  "Weapons?" the customs official asked evenly.

  McGarvey shook his head. "I am engineer, here to help with building. I have no need of ... weapons."

  The customs official looked up as the SAVAK officer came over and held out his hand.

  "I would like to see that notebook," he said, his voice stern. He also spoke English.

  The customs official handed it over, and the officer quickly thumbed through it. "Have you already spoken with these companies?"

  "No," McGarvey said.

  "But you are hoping to begin tomorrow?"

  "Yes."

  The SAVAK officer looked up coldly, his eyes large behind thick glasses. "I think Gorbachev is a very dangerous man. What do you think of that?"

  McGarvey shrugged. "I know people in Georgia and Azer-baidzhan who would agree."

  "How about you, comrade?"

  Again McGarvey shrugged. "I am engineer, not politician."

  The plainclothes officer looked at him for a moment or two before he returned the notebook. "Go directly to your hotel, comrade. The rules will be explained to you."

  "Yes, thank you," McGarvey replied.

  The SAVAK officer left, and the customs official went down the counter to inspect the next person's luggage.

  McGarvey hastily stuffed his things back into his suitcase and hurried into the main hall of the terminal. There he exchanged a few hundred dollars in British pounds for Iranian rials. Even here the Russian ruble was no good.

  As a Russian, he should have taken one of the shuttle buses, but he was impatient to get started, so he took a taxi to a small hotel in Vanak, near the old Sheraton, Hilton, and Hyatt Regency hotels.

  The attention he'd gotten from SAVAK had altered the plan. The agency would check the engineering firms he was supposed to be contacting tomorrow, and find out that no one had heard of him. They would come looking for him immediately.

  The City of Tallahassee would be in port by now, but it would take the better part of the next twenty-four hours for the gold convoy to reach a good position for a Russian ambush. Probably longer. McGarvey had wanted to use the time to poke around Tehran on the chance that Abbas was still in the city.

  But that was changed now. He was going to have to make contact with Ghfari tonight.

  Wearing the dark, Russian-cut clothes he'd brought with him, McGarvey slipped out of the hotel a few minutes before three in the morning, easily eluded the two sleepy policemen posted in front, and made his way through the nearly pitch-black alleys the four blocks to Ghfari's apartment.

  There was no one out on the streets at that hour. No delivery vans, no ambulances, not even the police or military. Stepping to the end of an alley, he looked out across a broad boulevard

  fronted by shops and narrow little stalls that during the day sold hammered brass and copper goods. Above the shops were apartments.

  Ghfari's flat was above a shop selling translations of the Koran and approved foreign-language books. As a safety precaution Wills had made a sketch of the building's layout in case Mc-Garvey was coming in on the run.

  "Only as a last-ditch effort, you understand," Wills had cautioned. "Under normal circumstances Ghfari is watched, but now he'll be very closely watched."

  From where McGarvey stood, he could not spot the SAVAK surveillance team that he knew would be there. The only possibility, he decided, was that they were stationed in one of the buildings or shops on the opposite side of the avenue from Ghfari's apartment. If he crossed the street here he would be spotted.

  A very narrow alley ran behind the shops on this side; he thought it likely that one backed the stalls on the other side, too. If the alleys were also being watched, he would at least have the cover of greater darkness here than on the broad street.

  He turned and hurried back the way he had come, crossing a side street a block away, and taking the alley the long way around. He crossed the broad boulevard a block and a half west of Ghfari's apartment and covered the rest of the distance in a few minutes.

  This alley, like the other, was not much wider than a cart path. Filled with a foul-smelling jumble of litter and debris, it was more of a refuse dump than a deliveryway. Garbage was evidently tossed out on a regular basis and never collected. Even the smell of human waste was strong. There were probably open sewers nearby.

  Nothing human moved in the alley; only rats skittered here and there in the filth. McGarvey remained in the darkness watching the back of Ghfari's apartment house fifty yards away. The ground-floor doors and windows of all the apartments were tightly shuttered.

  Gradually he began to realize that no one could get out of the buil
dings from here. The steel security shutters were all locked from the outside. Short of climbing out a second-story window and jumping down into the alley, the only exit at night would be from the front. Therefore it wasn't likely that SAVAK

  would have posted a surveillance team back here. There would be no need for it.

  Nevertheless he approached Ghfari's building with caution, keeping well within the darker shadows.

  He took a ballpoint pen from his pocket, quickly unscrewed the barrel, and slid out the slender steel pin concealed inside. Jaziraf had given it to him on the way out to the airport.

  "Who knows, maybe it will be of some handiness to you," the Egyptian had said, grinning.

  It took McGarvey a full ten minutes to get the heavy Yale lock open. He unlatched the hasp, and replaced the padlock on the staple with the hasp up so that when he closed the shutter it would look as if it were still locked.

  Very carefully he lifted the metal shutter up on its tracks slowly enough so that it didn't make much noise. Behind it was an ordinary wooden door, also locked. This lock was rusty and it took McGarvey twenty minutes to get it open.

  He had spent too much time outside, exposed. He had to get into the building.

  A narrow passageway ran front to back, a security shutter on the front door. The bookshop was on the left, and a stone stairway lead up to Ghfari's apartment on the right.

  There were no sounds from the shop or from the apartment above. The only light in the passageway came through the front shutter from the main boulevard.

  He closed the back shutter and shut the door, leaving it unlocked in case he had to get out in a hurry. Anything was possible. SAVAK could have arrested everyone at the station and could be waiting upstairs now in ambush.

  At the front door he glanced up the stairs, and then peered through the cracks in the shutter at the buildings across the street. At first he saw nothing, but as he was about to turn away he spotted a glint of light from something metal or glass in an upstairs window. He waited patiently for a few minutes longer. Another movement, and then a brief glimpse of a face in the window. SAVAK was there, as he'd figured, watching this place. Which meant there was no ambush waiting for him here.

  Crossing the passageway, he hurried up the stairs on the balls of his feet, making absolutely no noise. There was only one door at the top, with what appeared to be an ordinary tumbler lock. But Ghfari would be very gun-shy just now. If somebody barged

  in, he might shoot first and ask questions later. And he had probably fail-safed his door.

  McGarvey knocked very softly, hoping that Ghfari would have the presence of mind not to turn on a light.

  There was movement from within the apartment. McGarvey knocked again, softly.

  "Qui est-ceV someone asked softly.

  "It's me," McGarvey answered in English. "From Cairo. There's trouble."

  A moment later the lock clicked and the door swung inward. The apartment was very dark. McGarvey stepped inside and stopped short as the barrel of a pistol was pressed against his temple.

  'Tour name, quickly now," the man said in English.

  "McGarvey. Kirk McGarvey." He could smell gun oil.

  "Who sent you?"

  "Wills briefed me."

  "A name from Cairo. One name. There is no time now. Tell me or you will die."

  "Anwar Jaziraf," McGarvey said without hesitation. SAVAK did not work this way. Only frightened men, backed into a corner, demanded such information in such a melodramatic fashion. Jaziraf had told him the French-born Iranian was good, but young, and at times excitable.

  The gun barrel was withdrawn. Ghfari stepped behind McGarvey and closed the door.

  "Don't turn on the lights," McGarvey said.

  "You spotted my friends across the street, then," Ghfari said, taking McGarvey's arm. "I will lead you."

  McGarvey let himself be led across the totally dark room and through a doorway. Ghfari closed this door, then switched on a dim light.

  "How did you get past them?" Ghfari asked. He was a tiny man with a full black mustache. It was obvious he was deeply frightened.

  They were in what appeared to be a very small storeroom or closet. A piece of black cloth had been attached to the bottom of the door. There were no windows. No light would escape. He probably used the place as a darkroom.

  "From the back. I picked the locks on the shutter and the door."

  Ghfari nodded nervously. "No one saw you come here?"

  "No," McGarvey said. "But we're going to have to get out of the city sooner than planned. I came in under a Russian passport."

  "Very good. I tried to tell those idiots not to send anyone carrying French documents. SAVAK is all over us now. I think they will close our office in the next few days. But why are you here tonight like this?"

  "It couldn't wait until tomorrow." McGarvey quickly explained what had happened at the airport.

  "There is no doubt the salopard was SAVAK. You were not on any of his lists. He will check out your story."

  "Which won't hold up."

  "No, of course not," Ghfari said. He considered the problem for a moment. "You cannot go back to your hotel. They will be back first thing in the morning to keep an eye on you."

  "Is it Peshadi?"

  Ghfari looked up, his eyes narrowing. 'Tes. You have heard of this one?"

  "From Wills."

  "Well, he's behind all this, all right. It was him and his sergeant who found Shahpur's body. I had to identify it, and that prick was standing right over me, ready for me to make a mistake."

  "Did he ask you about the gun and handie-talkie they'd found?"

  "No, but that's coming."

  "Then you'll have to come with me," McGarvey said. There was no way he was going to leave the man behind for Peshadi. It wouldn't take SAVAK very long to open him up.

  "This is my station now."

  "They'll have to send someone else in under a different cover. What's left at the office to take care of?"

  Ghfari was shaking his head. "Nothing," he said. "All the paperwork has been destroyed. I took the only other gun and handie-talkie over to the safe house for you."

  "How about personnel?"

  "Iranian contract people who know nothing."

  "No one else who worked for the Company?"

  "There were only three others. They took off for the Turkish border yesterday afternoon."

  "Sounds like you were ready for this."

  "It's been drummed into my head since Lyon," Ghfari said. "But if I leave, there will be nothing to start with. We have worked damned hard to get to this spot."

  "They'll send someone else, different cover, different everything. Picarde is contaminated beyond repair now. You're going to have to turn your back on everything."

  "We have a lot of assets in the field."

  "Unless they're compromised, which they will be if you are caught and interrogated, they'll lie dormant until a new agent handler shows up. It's happened before."

  Ghfari sighed deeply, as if he were glad to be convinced. "We will have to leave here tonight."

  "I'd like to be out of the city by daybreak," McGarvey said.

  "Impossible. We will have to spend the rest of the day at the safe house."

  "Why?"

  "No car until after dark. It will also give our satellite two more passes over the region. We will get another update on the convoy's position."

  "So will SAVAK if they monitor our transmissions. They've got the handie-talkie."

  "We have always taken enormous chances here, Mr. McGarvey. This is simply another. We have no choice."

  It was loose, but they had no other choices. At least spending the day in the safe house rather than out on the desert would expose them to much less risk. "This is your city," McGarvey said.

  Ghfari shook his head. "No. But it could have been."

  away from the cities, especially Tehran, the interior of Iran was wild, more like a lunar landscape than a place on earth. Bounded to the eas
t by Afghanistan and the rugged Elburz mountains, and to the west by the even taller, more inhospitable Zagros range, much of the ancient nation of Persia was a desolate, windswept high salt plateau.

  Since the reign of the ayatollahs had begun, the populated regions of the country had slid backward by five hundred years. The climate of Islamic fundamentalism had stifled almost all progress. And the eight-year war with Iraq had sapped the economy at a time when a healthy rial was needed the most.

  But nothing had changed in the interior for two thousand years or more. Moses, Christ, or Mohammed would have felt perfectly at home in ninety percent of modern-day Iran.

  Within an hour after the assistant chief of Tehran station had shown up at the apartment, Kurshin had led an unresisting Dick Abbas out the back way, and they'd climbed into a green Triumph sedan that had been supplied to Kurshin by his Russian embassy contact. The two SAVAK officers in front of the building had not even looked up as they'd driven by, and within the next hour they were outside the city, heading south on the main highway to Qom.

  By that evening they had climbed well above the salt desert and were in the mountains. Kurshin had pulled off the highway into a cul de sac. They'd spent the night in the car.

  All day Thursday they had worked their way farther southwest. The going was very slow because of the poor condition of the roads, and the great amount of military traffic they'd encountered south of Qom.

  It had taken them five hours to skirt the city, which had a population of more than one hundred fifty thousand and its own SAVAK barracks.

  By then, Kurshin had figured, Naisir's body would have been found in Abbas's apartment, and the search would be on. But for Abbas alone.

  They'd spent Thursday night in the car, again parked off the highway in the mountains. The temperature had dropped to below freezing, and sleep had been almost impossible for both men, and especially for Abbas. Abbas was not dressed for the cold and he had not eaten in forty-eight hours.

  The sun was coming up now, and it seemed thin and cheerless even to Kurshin, who knew he had won here. The gold would already be aboard the trucks, and the convoy would be on its way northeast. It was only a matter of time now; in twenty-four, perhaps thirty-six hours the gold would be in Russia and he would be on his way back to Europe.