by Jack Mars
Luke took a deep breath. “Okay.”
“Luke?”
“Yes.”
“It’s very, very dangerous. It’s a black site. They’re not going to let you just waltz in there.”
“We’re not going to waltz.”
Something occurred to him then.
“It’s on the far southeastern end of town?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Would you say it’s on the way to the national park?”
“It is, yes.”
“So theoretically, we could just swing by there, pick up our friend, and then head out to the park?”
“Luke, you’re insane. But yes. In theory, you could do that.”
“Good. Now, I’ll need exact directions.”
Trudy put Swann back on the phone. Luke listened as Swann described to him where the precinct house was. It was only four miles east and south of their current location. If they could pick up a ride, they could be there in ten minutes.
“Let’s keep in touch, shall we?” Luke said. “I have a hunch I’ll be needing you again.”
He hung up.
Ed stared at him. “Details?”
Luke explained the details to him. For a few moments, Ed became lost in thought. He eyes were looking at something far away from the dim and dusty insides of this warehouse. After a little while, he seemed to return to the present. His eyes focused on Luke again.
“We find a back way out of here. A quiet street. We carjack something, preferably a military vehicle.” He shrugged. “We go over there to Precinct Thirteen, and we ram the gate. They’re not expecting us.”
He pulled the M79 around to his front. He patted it.
“We knock a couple holes in the wall with this. Go in, get Ari, pop a cap in a few Iranians, then we leave. Go check out these nukes or whatever. Call it in, then we go home. How does that sound?”
Luke made a face. It was a face where he gritted his teeth and his mouth dropped away from his jaw. It was a face he made in childhood a lot when his mother said something he wasn’t happy about. It was a face he rarely made in adulthood. Somehow, the muscle memory was still there.
“It sounds hot.”
Ed shrugged. “We hit hard, we move fast, we get a couple of lucky breaks…”
His voice trailed off. Suddenly, Ed looked tired.
“How does it sound to you?” Luke said. “Honestly.”
Ed shook his head. “It sounds like the hottest thing ever.”
Every second they waited was another second they would be torturing Ari. They both knew that.
And so, with a small nod, they each jumped and bolted from the room at the same moment.
CHAPTER FORTY
8:05 a.m. Tehran Time (12:05 a.m. Eastern Standard Time)
Precinct House 13
Tehran, Iran
“I’ll ask you this again. What is your name?”
Mohammed Younessi stood over the young man chained to the metal chair. The chair had narrow arms, which the young man’s arms rested upon. His wrists were manacled to the ends of the chair arms. The young man was stripped to a white T-shirt and shorts. His T-shirt was stained with dark blood.
They were in an old, long disused meeting room, in a long disused police station. The room was mostly empty. The carpeting had been pulled up. The walls were bare. The large windows were covered by wooden boards. The only light came from a single bulb depending from the ceiling. A guard stood by the door, and two others stood along the wall by the boarded windows. All three carried rifles.
As barren as the room was, there was still electricity. In case they needed it, there was electricity to spare. They might get to that later. Right now, they were only working on preliminaries.
Younessi ran a hand over his perfectly bald head and took a drag on a Turkish cigarette as he stared at the helpless man. The man’s face was bloodied, but not broken. The police had beaten him before bringing him here, but it seemed to have little effect on him. Although his head drooped down from time to time, his eyes did not show fear.
That alone proved he was not Iranian. All Iranians, when they met Mohammed Younessi, were already terrified.
“My name is Alireza Saadat,” the young man said in Farsi. Yet it was Farsi with very little regional accent or flavor. It could be Farsi learned from a book, or from many months in a classroom. “I told this to the police. I come from Rasht. Everything is a mistake. I have done nothing wrong.”
Younessi smiled. “But you lied to the police. You were with two men, and you sacrificed yourself to help them escape.”
The young man shook his head. “Not true. I have no idea what they are talking about.”
“Tell me,” Younessi said. “Where is your accent from? It sounds rather… generic.”
“Rasht, of course. It is an international city, and a melting pot of many cultures. Many of our countrymen come from all of Iran. You fall into an accent that is from everywhere and nowhere at once.”
Younessi took another drag on his cigarette. He decided to change directions a little bit. “They call me the Director of Accountability, did you know that? It’s my title. They also call me the Director of Compliance. I would like you to comply with my questions.”
The young man nodded. “I am trying to do that.”
“Why did you visit the mosque of Siavash Zadeh, the one they call Tehrani?”
The young man shrugged. “I had been told his Quranic talks were excellent. The best in the capital city. I wanted to hear for myself.”
“He told us you are an Israeli assassin, and that you came to his room with two Americans. If an assistant did not ring the alarm, you would have killed him.”
“No such thing happened. I heard that men tried to attack Imam Tehrani. But I was not there. I was worried for him.”
“Well, you needn’t worry any longer. All the excitement was too much for him, I’m afraid. You and your friends did not kill him, but the work was done anyway.”
Younessi shook his head. What he did not say was that Zadeh had died while being interviewed. The moment the hard questioning began, a few slaps, a couple of heavy punches, and poor old Zadeh’s heart had given out. Rather inconvenient, that. They had just been getting started.
“I am very sorry to hear that,” the young man, the supposed Israeli, said.
Younessi almost laughed. “No you aren’t.”
He was already growing tired of this person. It was time to accelerate past the preliminaries. A few simple actions would take them straight to the heart of the matter. He stepped very close to the young man, the Israeli who claimed his name was Saadat, and squatted next to him. Younessi put his face near the young man’s cheek.
He still had the lit cigarette in his outstretched hand. He held the glowing red ember very close to the young man’s forearm.
“I want you to do something for me,” Younessi said, his voice hardly above a whisper. “I want you to show me how very strong you are. I want you to demonstrate your manhood. Don’t scream. Deny me the pleasure of hearing it.”
He pressed the ember to the brown skin of the young man’s arm, right into the muscle there. The cigarette sizzled as it punched into the flesh.
A tiny stream of smoke rose.
The young man’s eyes were pinched. His mouth was clamped shut.
Younessi held the burning cigarette there. Smoke continued to rise. “That’s right, take it like a man,” he whispered. “Show me your manhood. Show me your toughness.” The Israeli’s entire body shook, like he was strapped to the electrical rail of a commuter train system.
After a long moment, Younessi pulled the cigarette away and took another drag from it. He remained crouched next to his prisoner.
“When I discover for a fact that you are a Jew,” he said conversationally, “I am going to put the cigarette in your eyes.”
“Put the cigarette in my skin again,” the young man said, his eyes hard. “And I promise I will kill you.”
Younessi smiled
and looked back at the guards. They were all smiling as well. Younessi almost laughed. “What an enjoyable young man you are. Now we know you’re not really from Rasht. Rasht is such a cosmopolitan place! What a desirable destination. Delicious foods and coffee. Art and fashion. It is so forward thinking, with so many comforts, the men there have nearly become women. I don’t think I’ve seen a man from Rasht take a lit cigarette without screaming in pain. And then to issue threats afterwards? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
Younessi extended his cigarette toward the young man’s forearm again. He held it less than an inch from the skin, very near to the bright red welt of the previous burn. He paused, the cigarette dangling so close.
“Do it,” the young man said. “I dare you.”
Younessi pressed the cigarette into the flesh again. He drove it in hard and deep, burying it. It was amazing the way the cigarette just punched in there. Younessi never tired of seeing that. He would like to conduct an experiment that explained the mechanisms involved.
The young man’s body bucked. He closed his eyes, his breathing coming in harsh rasps, but he didn’t say a word.
After a moment, Younessi pulled the cigarette away again. This time it was out. He had put it out in the man’s flesh.
He stood. “Of course you are a foreign agent. You’ve been trained to withstand torture. That’s fine with me. Wonderful. When the sessions are longer, I enjoy them more.” He looked down at the young man, whose eyes were still closed, and who was still breathing heavily.
“You and I are going to become great intimates,” Younessi said. “Do you think cigarette burns are the extent of my skills? I hope not.”
Suddenly, an alarm sounded. It was very nearby. Indeed, it was here on the grounds of this old police station. In his years of coming here, no one had ever sounded an alarm. Younessi, surprised, found himself looking skyward. All he could see above him were the rotting boards of the ceiling.
Had the war started already?
He looked at the guard near the door. “Find out what that is,” he snapped. “If bombers or missiles are incoming, we need to find shelter.”
Another sound came then, the sound of a very large engine accelerating. It was coming from outside the room, on the other side of the boarded windows. He looked in that direction. The two guards stationed along the windows turned around to look. The sound was right behind them.
CRASH!
The boards blew inward, shards of wood and shattered glass flying everywhere. The two guards were thrown back, instantly eviscerated. Their bodies fell to the floor in two heaps. The grille of a large truck appeared where the boards had just been, headlights on, steam rising from the hood. It looked like a malevolent face.
Younessi reached for his firearm.
Already, the guard at the door was firing at the truck, obliterating the windshield. There didn’t seem to be anyone in there.
To Director Younessi’s left, the wall of the building suddenly blew apart and caved in. He sprawled on the ground like a snake.
He knew there had been an explosion, but it was so loud, he hadn’t heard it. His gun was gone. Burning debris floated everywhere. There was a loud ringing in his ears. He had been in combat against Iraq when he was a young man. In just a few seconds, he pieced together what had happened—someone had fired a mortar or small rocket at the side of the building.
Who would do this? A bombing attack was one thing, but a ground-based mortar attack? Younessi found that he could not stand. He looked and a long shard of wood protruded from his right leg. He began to crawl toward the door.
Where was the other guard? Fled, probably.
As Younessi watched, a large black man stepped through the whole where the wall had just been.
And for the first time in his life, he understood what those whom he tortured felt.
True terror.
* * *
Luke lay on the floor of the truck beneath the steering wheel. He pushed the heavy mat of broken safety glass from the windshield off his body.
Ed had just blown out the wall, and that seemed to have put an end to the shooting for now.
Luke kicked open the driver’s side door and slid out. He looked around. There was big Ed Newsam, kneeling by the kid, cutting his manacles off. The kid’s face was a mess. His shirt was covered in blood. That was okay. He looked all right. At least he was alive.
Closer to Luke was a tall, bald man in the green uniform of the Revolutionary Guards, injured and crawling on the floor. He was moving a little faster than a snail’s pace, and he seemed to be headed toward the door. Probably Ari’s interrogator. Luke would deal with him in a minute.
“Did I tell you?” Luke said to Ed. “Right on the money.”
Swann and Trudy had found an old diagram of this small, squat building. They had guessed, correctly, exactly which room was used for prisoner interrogations.
“That’s why they get the big bucks,” Ed said.
Once he was free, the kid walked toward the bald man, a maniacal look in his eye. Luke had seen that look: it was the look of vengeance. It was a look that said nothing would stand in its way.
After a moment, the kid stepped up behind the man crawling on the floor.
“Hey!” Ari shouted. “Turn over.”
The bald man rolled over to look at him. There was sheer terror in his face.
Luke heard a noise and looked down to see the man had wet himself.
“I wasn’t going to hurt you,” the bald man said, pathetically.
Ari snorted at that.
He bent down, grabbed the piece of wood buried in the man’s thigh, and twisted it. Hard.
The man shrieked like a girl.
“Hey, Ari,” Luke said. “We don’t have all day.”
There was a Mercedes limousine parked behind this building, probably armored, and their next step was to fight their way to it before reinforcements arrived.
Ari extracted the wood slowly from the man’s thigh, then raised it high and plunged down the jagged end between the man’s legs.
The man’s shrieks, if possible, rose another decibel, as blood pooled out between his legs.
“Please!” the man whimpered.
Ari was not finished, though.
“Remember you said my eyes were next if you found out I was Israeli?” Ari asked.
“I didn’t mean it!” the man pleaded. “It was just an empty threat.”
But Ari’s scowl deepened.
“Well, you were right. I am an Israeli,” Ari said. “And this is for you.”
Ari raised the jagged wood and high and brought it down into the man’s eye. The man shrieked as Ari plunged it deeper and deeper.
Finally, the man was quiet. Still.
Dead.
Ari stood and looked at Luke, his eyes glazed, as if coming out of a daze. He seemed almost sheepish.
“I promised him I would do that. And I always keep my promises.”
Luke shrugged. “We’re not taking prisoners today. If you didn’t do it, I would have.”
Ari slowly smiled as Ed stepped forward and clasped his small hand in his huge one with a genuine affection Luke had never seen him display before.
“Welcome back to the team, brother.”
CHAPTER FORTY ONE
12:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time
The Family Residence
The White House, Washington, DC
It was late. She had been awake for eighteen hours.
She sat alone in the kitchen of the Residence. She was ensconced in the breakfast nook, eating a giant bowl of raisin bran topped with almond milk. She was trying to give up dairy products. It was a tough road.
A Secret Service man was posted just outside her door.
She had come up here to take a little break, and get away from the madness of the Situation Room. Kurt had broken up the meeting and sent most people home a little while ago. Still, a skeleton crew was going to stay the night, in case any more crises developed. Kurt was pa
rt of that crew. So was Kat Lopez. So was Haley Lawrence.
It seemed like they were expecting another crisis any minute.
The cell phone at her elbow rang. This was a secure phone, encrypted, and ran on a government network. Long gone were the days when Susan had a private cell phone.
She picked it up without even looking at it. This time of night? It was probably Pierre. It was just after nine on the west coast.
“Hello?”
“Susan?”
She could barely believe it. It was Stone.
“It is so nice to hear your voice,” she said.
His voice sounded like it was coming from inside a sewer grate. There was a delay of several seconds between them, which made talking awkward. Still, it was him.
“Funny thing,” he said. “It only just occurred to me to give you a try. All this time, I’ve been communicating in the most roundabout fashion possible. I could have just gone straight to the horse’s mouth.”
“Should you do this?” she said.
“No. I shouldn’t. But I’m doing it anyway.”
“Where are you?” she said. Somewhere in her mind, she hoped he would say, “At the American embassy in Baghdad,” or “On a flight back to Israel,” or best of all, “I just landed at Reagan National.” Of course, none of these answers were possible.
“I’m driving a black limousine with smoked windows. We are headed to a famous national park to check out the sights.”
“How is your friend?” she said.
“He’s fine. A little bleary, a little wear and tear on him, but all in all, better than I expected.”
“You know,” she said, “you don’t have to do this. Anyone would say you’ve done enough. You could just come home now.”
“You know that won’t work,” he said. “You know that as well as I do.”
“I don’t care,” she almost said. “I just want to see you alive again.”
But she didn’t say that. Instead she said:
