The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller

by Andrew Britton

  “Who are you?” Yazdi asked again, through Rayhan.

  “We’re United States government agents,” was all Kealey replied.

  “That is hardly an equal trade.”

  “No, but this isn’t a prisoner swap and I’m not interested in what’s fair,” Kealey said, Rayhan translating as he spoke. “I will tell you this, however. My uncle’s the man who sent your treasure to the bottom of the ocean. I know exactly what it is. So do you, more or less, or you wouldn’t care that I have a Geiger counter.” They reached the unmarked police car Kealey had borrowed. He waited for Rayhan to catch up with the interpretation, then said, “So here’s the deal. You can go—I won’t try and stop you. You’ve led us to where you think the device is and I’ll probably find it before you do. Or you can help us. We don’t want the thing floating around, and I don’t think you want it out there with your nation’s fingerprints on it.”

  Yazdi considered all this as Kealey opened the front passenger door. He retrieved a leather case from the passenger’s seat. It was black, with an extensible sensor built into the side in the event the user needed to check a specific spot. There was an audio bud, which Kealey placed in his ear. The newest field models were designed to keep from alarming anyone who might hear the familiar clicking. Only the user could see the gauge in the top of the unit, an old-fashioned needle mechanism: radiation could affect and skew the readings if the counters themselves were digital.

  Kealey held it low along his side. He regarded Yazdi. “Are we working together?”

  Yazdi took a long look up the street as he waited for the woman to translate. “You already know the answer to that.”

  The American opened the glove compartment, which was where he had retrieved the knife and also the derringer that was tucked in his pants pocket. The lieutenant was well prepared: the .22 caliber pistol, whose serial number had been scratched off, was a “throwaway,” something to plant on anyone he shot by accident or accidentally on purpose.

  “I’ll have your phone, please,” Kealey said.

  After Rayhan had translated, Yazdi’s reply was firm: “No.”

  “You may not be here alone,” Kealey said. “Or you may take our pictures and keep them in your files.”

  “Those are both true,” Yazdi agreed. “But I am expecting information on our quarry. I don’t want to miss that. You can have the switchblade in my pocket as a sign of trust, but I will keep the phone.”

  Kealey thought for a moment. “Give both to her.”

  Yazdi was obviously dealing with just one novice, the woman, who was probably along to translate. She had that aura of Westernization, of independence, of time spent at university, a radicalization that plagued too many Arab women. This man—he was a veteran. If the American hadn’t thought this through he was improvising wisely.

  I wonder if our inside source can provide information on this man, Yazdi thought.

  With a short, unhappy exhale of breath, Yazdi turned and handed the phone and switchblade to Rayhan. She pocketed the phone and gave the blade to Kealey, who tossed it in the glove compartment.

  “Who are we looking for?” Kealey asked.

  “A professor of physics.”

  “Name?”

  Yazdi said, “This is not a swap.”

  “All right, keep that,” Kealey told him. “You have solid intelligence that he’s in this region?”

  Yazdi nodded.

  “I noticed a medical center down the street,” Kealey said. “That would be the obvious place to hide or work with radioactive material. It has to be checked out. You can do that. I’m going to sweep the street, see if it might be somewhere else.”

  “If it is, how do I know you’ll inform me?” Yazdi asked. “It may be just a few steps from here.”

  Kealey thumbed on the Geiger counter. The needle didn’t move. “We’re wasting time. You and I and the nations we represent do not want Armageddon. We gain by détente. You have my word. I will involve you.”

  It was concise and he seemed sincere. Yazdi wondered for the first time if years at a desk had mellowed him: he agreed to the American’s terms.

  “She’ll go with you,” Kealey added.

  Rayhan seemed surprised. From her expression, Kealey couldn’t tell whether she felt like a ballplayer being benched or a third-stringer being given a shot at the majors. She would have to wonder a few minutes more. It was not a problem as far as Yazdi was concerned. It was better to have two sets of eyes and to be a couple. A man and woman together were rarely suspected of espionage.

  Kealey did not know if Yazdi was merely pretending not to speak English. So he said to Rayhan, “Work with him. Stay in touch by text.” The Iranian wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop on text communications.

  Rayhan agreed and they turned to the right, walking along the modern sidewalk which sat beside a road that had been established before the last millennium, when the greatest dangers facing civilization were disease, natural disasters, and the bow.

  Yazdi was not afraid of the power of the device, which was far less than God could—and had—visited upon His children. What he feared was the erasure of the boundary that divided man from God in the mind of man. The power to spread radiation and blind destruction did not seem to fit with spreading of the word of the Prophet. The people who had the bomb were as bad in their way as infidels were in theirs.

  Despite the millions of adherents at home and abroad, for the first time in his life Yazdi felt more like a buffer between opposing forces than a force himself. He felt like a caged animal, and that did not sit well with his temperament.

  Or his mission.

  Before he had gone more than a few steps, Kealey had already picked up a faint ticking on the Geiger counter. It could have been from any number of sources. Everything from radon to fallout from old atmospheric bomb tests produced background radiation. But those levels tended to remain relatively consistent in an area. This was getting stronger the farther east he went. Not significantly stronger but measurably.

  He did not immediately notify Rayhan. She was still green, and she needed time to get her feet under her. Kealey also needed time to think. He trusted Yazdi only as long as he didn’t have the device. If Kealey found it first, he had no intention of folding the enemy into the process—not if he could help it. Whatever Yazdi said, whatever he believed, he would do as instructed by his masters, from the Ayatollah to the Experts to the President. If that meant sending a young mother or student with the bomb into Tel Aviv or an oil field in Saudi Arabia, he would do it. Kealey would not hesitate to perform a surgical assassination to prevent that. On top of which, the man had a wealth of information that could be of enormous use. He might not know the names of cells or sleepers in other countries—to prevent exactly this kind of compromise—but he would know how to get in touch with them. That could be enormously useful to Clarke.

  That meant Rayhan’s function could go either way. She could learn something about the man by what he knew or said; or she could run interference if Kealey found the bomb. In any case, being around a potential enemy, listening to what he said, and restricting what she said for an hour or so would be good for her. Though there was another option, which he tried not to think about. There was always the possibility that Yazdi could take her hostage. In which case, like Kealey himself she was expendable. The device was the goal, not a one-hundred-percent survival rate. That was the nature of the business. Every field agent knew that. If they didn’t, they learned it fast. And learning it, the fact of that grotesque disposability was never far from the surface. If you allowed it to, it poisoned everything. Kealey remembered a reception where he met the quarterback for the Washington Redskins. The guy was telling a small group what an awful emotional wrench it was getting close to players who ended up being traded and playing against you. And how it was a tactical pain, since the squad all knew the playbook. Kealey would have been content to stick a shrimp fork in one of the man’s vaunted scrambling knees. An officer he did not know saved him
the effort. He glared at the quarterback and said, “When I was in ’Nam, behind enemy lines doing recon with a buddy, he fell in a ditch and broke something big. Made him moan like a sonofabitch. The Cong were coming and I couldn’t get him out. He shot himself so he wouldn’t talk about what we learned. It’s like that, right?”

  Kealey didn’t think it would come to the Iranian threatening Rayhan. No doubt Yazdi had sized Kealey up—at least enough to know that he wouldn’t have left them alone if he were concerned about what the woman knew. But if it came to a worst-case scenario, the recovery of the device, not Rayhan, not Kealey, was the mission.

  He paused to text the man’s name and title to Clarke. He did not want to complicate matters by letting on they were all together, but he wanted photo confirmation of the man’s identity. He got it within five minutes of a steady, elevated radioactive reading.

  Clarke texted:

  IF HE’S IN THE FIELD THEY’RE SERIOUS ABOUT RECOVERY.

  Kealey wrote back:

  NO: BELIEVE THEY’RE SCARED THAT WHOEVER HAS IT WILL USE IT. MORE SOON.

  Kealey followed the straight roadway, looking at the students, the shoppers, making sure that no one was watching him, wondering what he was doing—and, more important, that whoever took the device had not stationed a lookout. If they were dealing with a physicist who was sympathetic to jihad, someone with a little experience, he might not count on a hidden lab as his only means of protection.

  He or his agents might also recognize what I’m carrying, Kealey thought. That was fine; his job was not to alarm civilians. ID’ing him would make his job easier: they’d come to him or they’d run. A good deal of intelligence work was getting close to the hornet’s nest with a big, swinging stick.

  He got a slight uptick as he approached a mosque. It was a squat structure about three stories high with a green, white-bordered minaret that was about sixty feet high. Attached to the minaret, on the other side, was a brick building with a trio of satellite dishes on top. It could be a civic hall of some kind—or possibly a school. The latter seemed likely the nearer Kealey got. There appeared to be a playground on the other side.

  It was a school. Kealey saw young children arriving for afternoon classes. They were boys, about eight to ten years old. Something in or around the building—possibly in one of the cars parked in the narrow street—was causing the Geiger counter to hover around eight millisieverts. Kealey had a good idea what it was. Those levels were acceptable for incidental exposure, maybe two or three hours. Kealey hoped that whoever had it intended to get the device out of there before then. Which also raised the question: if the container had been opened, what the hell was Kealey going to do with it?

  The first thing he needed to do was pinpoint the location. He moved past the school. There was a slight uptick between the school and the playground; there was also a bump from a circa mid-1980s Volkswagen van parked in the street. That was probably what had been used to bring the device here. Kealey took a picture with his cell phone and asked Clarke for an ID. He thought about disabling it, but he wasn’t sure that leaving a man with a suitcase nuclear weapon stranded and desperate was the best tactic.

  He walked past the playground and the needle dipped slightly. The bomb was in the building. Kealey noted that there was an electrical room on the side and it was the only place where—at least from the street—there did not appear to be any windows. The location certainly fit the terrorist mentality: an underground bunker protected from an assault by the presence of children.

  Clarke texted back that the plates were Yemeni but it would take a while to attach an owner. Even then, both men knew, it could well have been stolen.

  Kealey could not see behind the structure, but that didn’t matter right now. As long as the needle remained steady the device was inside. And as long as he remained near the van, it was likely to remain inside.

  There were times when the best strategy was to have none. That wasn’t the same as being inactive; it was letting events dictate your response, in much the same way as jujitsu-ka let the actions of others determine your own defense or offense. The one thing he did need was a plan to follow the van in case it left. The van was parked on a very narrow two-way street. There was no room to turn around. Kealey walked ahead: it was tight and congested in that direction as cars moved slowly around parked vehicles. He calculated that he would have more than enough time to walk back to his car and follow the van. Even if he didn’t, Clarke had a photo. INTERPOL could follow from the air if they had to.

  But with all the preparations made, with his instincts on alert, with his options generally mapped out, Kealey knew there was still room for the unexpected.

  Which was exactly what he got.

  “What should I call you?”

  Yazdi asked the question as they were nearing the front of the hospital. His question was practical, not impertinent.

  “What is your mother’s name?” she asked.

  “Afshan.”

  “That will do.”

  “All right, Afshan.” He began to limp. “We’re going in to inquire about my foot. We will require X-rays.”

  She nodded as Yazdi’s phone vibrated. She took it from her back pocket. After leaving the motorcycle, she had put her passport there as well. She could not remember a time when she had traveled so light

  “It’s an email,” she said.

  Yazdi stopped. “Let me see it, please.”

  “Open it so I can see.”

  “Fine, fine,” he said impatiently. It was from Sanjar, his deputy. It was a file of photographs with a covering email. Sanjar said he had opened channels with Russian intelligence on this matter. In addition to data, they were making regional satellite surveillance available to them. That was part of program in which Russian electronic intelligence—ELINT—was swapped for Iranian human intelligence—HUMINT—in places like Chechnya, Azerbaijan, and other areas where Muslim infiltrators were needed.

  It took long, agonizing seconds to download the images, during which time Yazdi thought of a dozen ways he could have hurt or killed the woman standing next to him. How did the American know he wouldn’t?

  Because there are students around, and students are idealistic. Someone would have stopped me. The chances were good I’d be arrested. He gambles her life on the effectiveness of a system.

  That was a man who understood the heart of this awful business.

  Yazdi enlarged the images as they finished downloading. They showed blurry images of a man, creased and obviously scanned from printed photographs. There were scans of the back as well. The writing was in Farsi.

  Jerusalem, 2008—Mohammed and me

  Istanbul, 2007—Farzad and tourists

  Bagdad, 2004—Brothers

  The men looked alike. Yazdi had a vague recollection of these two. Though his ministry was financing their group, one of them disobeyed an assassination order and had been executed. When he came to the fourth image, Yazdi started. The killing in Rabat had been vengeance—but, by chance, it had become something much greater.

  “We’ve got to go,” he said urgently.

  “Where?”

  “Back to where we began.” He tapped the screen. “I’ve seen this van. Here. Down the street.”

  He started off at a brisk walk with Rayhan hurrying behind. She put his phone away, took out her own.

  “Don’t text your partner,” Yazdi said. He was staring ahead, craning to see past the other pedestrians.

  “Why?”

  “You’ll distract him. I see the van—there’s someone opening the door.”

  “How will we distract him if he doesn’t know—?”

  “He knows. That van has to be hot. He just didn’t tell us.”

  Rayhan held off texting. She peered ahead as they hurried along. There was a figure, a slender man with a beard. He opened the door of the van, put something inside, and shut the door.

  “He didn’t look around,” Yazdi said. “He didn’t want to appear suspicious. But he
still may have been checking to see if anyone was outside, watching.”

  The man started back toward the schoolhouse, down a passage along the side of the building. He opened a door in the side of the building. Yazdi was slightly ahead. He slowed, held up his hand.

  “I don’t like this,” he said.

  Rayhan didn’t have the intuition or experience of the Iranian, but there was something strange about what they’d just witnessed. The man had placed something inside but she hadn’t noticed that he was carrying anything—

  The van exploded.

  The blast actually happened in two stages, as far as Rayhan could tell. The first was the muted pop inside the van that blew out the windows and poured cottony black smoke from the openings and dented the front doors with fist-like blows from inside. The second stage, which occurred roughly one second later—an eternity in the slow-motion horror of terrorist time—occurred when the fuel tank exploded. The car flipped up onto its front end, then fell forward onto the roof, while every piece of metal in the undercarriage flew outward in every direction. For an instant, the exposed bottom of the van resembled a flaming pinwheel.

  The force wave and sound arrived a moment after the first and second explosions. The first was barely felt but the second was like a wave from passing a tar truck: hot, malodorous, and oily. The air stung her eyes and she had to look away.

  She turned back quickly, realizing she shouldn’t let Yazdi out of her sight. He was still there, taking in the situation. The car had settled into a barely recognizable mound of misshapen metal and flame, puffing ugly plumes of inky smoke into the air. It lay just ahead of where it had been parked; in a circle around it, bodies lay in ugly little lines—straight this way and that and charred black. In a larger circle were other bodies that had been dismembered, not burned. The street clothes and head scarves, the dismembered limbs and scattered, burning backpacks were splattered bright red under the shifting shadows of the smoke.