by Mark Henshaw
“He’ll bounce back. Ewan’s father grew up in London when Hitler was trying to turn it into a smoking crater. The Brits are a tough bunch once you get past the tea and crumpets fetish,” Clark said. “But I guess that’s one way to call off the nuke talks. The Iranians will recall everyone who survived.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “The intelligence minister survived, but I’m sure they’ll bring him home.”
“Ebtekar? Well, that’s something. Who did they take out?”
“A pair of bodyguards, a backbencher, and Majid Salehi. I talked to him one-on-one earlier today, but I need to talk to you about that up close and personal.”
She heard Barron grunt into his phone across the Atlantic. “Okay. Can you write up the shootings for us?”
“I’ll sit down here with one of your people and draft a cable,” she said.
“Great. I’ll tell the Ops Center to wake up the right people. Are you and Jon coming home?”
“Tomorrow—well, today I guess,” Kathy confirmed. Barron looked at the wall clock and added five hours. It was a little after two o’clock in the morning in London. “Lunchtime, if Scotland Yard is done taking our statements by then. If not, it’ll probably be the day after before we can get out of here. Jon is working on the flights.”
“You want to do me a favor and let some of our people debrief you after you two get back and catch some sleep?”
“Sure,” Kathy agreed.
“Tell Jon we’re glad you two are safe. I’ll see you both when you get home.”
He heard the line disconnect from the other end. Barron reached out, touched a button to switch to a different line, and made two calls of his own. The first was to the Ops Center, which confirmed that the officers there were in a panic mode, gathering all of the intelligence there was to be had on the shootings. The second was to a town house in Leesburg, thirty miles to the west. It was only nine o’clock, so he doubted he would be disturbing anyone’s sleep.
The phone rang three times before the owner picked up, just a second before the voice mail threatened to do it for her. “Hello.”
“This is the acting director,” Barron announced. “Something just went down in London and Jon was in the middle of it. I need you back in the building in one hour.”
US Embassy
London, England
Kathy disconnected the call, cradled the phone, and looked up at her husband.
“They killed Salehi, not the head of the delegation and not the intelligence minister,” Jon said, thinking out loud.
Kathy stared at him a moment, then realized that his surprise was understandable. He didn’t know the players. He hadn’t spent one minute at the closed conference, and was happier for it. She shook her head. “I saw Ebtekar and the head delegate run for the hotel. They made it,” she said.
Jon pulled a notepad and a pen over and sketched out the street where they had just watched men die—the hotel, the line of cars, the doorman. Then he drew eight stick figures in a circle, the formation in which the Iranians had gathered before Mossad had executed half of them. “Identify them for me.”
Kathy took the pen from her husband. “You think Salehi was the target.”
“Mossad doesn’t kill people randomly, not that I’ve ever heard, and those shooters had all the time in the world to pick their first target,” Jon continued. “If Salehi was the first man down, he was the one they wanted. The rest were just a smoke screen, or someone racking up bonus points.”
“It might’ve just been bad luck on his part,” Kathy said.
“I wish. If it was bad luck, it would mean that my vacation didn’t just end.” Jon sighed.
“You think Mossad knew he was the head of Iran’s nuclear program?”
“Yeah.”
The White House
Washington, DC
Daniel Rostow had cursed the Twenty-Second Amendment every day since he’d taken the oath of office that first time on the Capitol steps. It was an ugly injustice in his mind that he held the only office in Washington subject to term limits, though a few thousand bootlicker jobs technically depended on him staying in power, not that he worried about them near so much as himself. And even if he won the election, two months off now, his days in the Oval Office would still be numbered, albeit fourteen hundred or so more than before. Each president of the United States had one chance to reset that clock, after which it would begin to count down again if he managed the feat. And once the date of his departure was set on that 20 January, whether in four months or four years, he would grow a little more impotent every day, watching his party’s loyalty rot away at a creeping pace as his allies looked more and more to their own political survival.
For the moment they wanted his help, but he’d been surprised to find the campaign was sour. He’d always enjoyed these political wars fought on the stump before, the marathons of sleep deprivation, fast food, and endless lies told in small towns and big cities, all relieved only by the joy of humiliating some opponent every day the polls told him that he was on top. Now he looked at those numbers each morning like a cancer patient reading his own chart to see whether some treatment would buy him a few more years of life. It was cruel, he thought, to chase this office since his youth, with every decision weighed against whether it brought him closer, and then to find the ecstasy of winning it turning a little more bitter every day.
He pushed the thought aside as often as his mind allowed, but it was usually there, leering at him every moment—
The Oval Office door opened, the sound cutting off his meditation. The people who felt free to enter unannounced numbered less than five and only one was in Washington at the moment. Gerald Feldman, the national security adviser, walked in carrying several file folders. “Make it fast, Gerry. I’m on the way out.”
“Andrews?”
“Quick hop down to Charleston. Turns out that one of the Haifa dockworkers has a mother down there. Had? He’s dead, she’s not, you figure out the grammar. The campaign managed to set up a photo op. Should dominate the news cycle tomorrow.”
“They’ll wait for you.” He offered the folders to the president. Rostow made no move to take them and the national security adviser set them on the desk.
“Those the latest numbers?” Rostow asked.
“Among other things,” Feldman replied. “Rasmussen has you four points down, CNN by three, the usual margins of error. Trend lines look flat. We’ve got eight weeks to boost you up, if you believe any of these,” Feldman said, touching the papers.
“I stopped believing any of them back when Trump got elected,” Rostow lied. “Haifa didn’t give us a bump?” His new terrorism speech was all Churchill and Reagan, wrapped in high school words, but an attack on Israel was no 9/11, not here. Terrorists had attacked the Jewish state too many times for another assault to turn enough voters’ heads here, even if it had been a dirty bomb. The fascination with that development had faded within days as the masses tired of hearing about radioactivity and dispersal patterns that sounded like science lectures and weather reports.
“If it did, it’s within the margin of error.”
“That doesn’t help,” Rostov grumbled. “We need to shake up the race.”
“Ask and ye shall receive.” Rostow glared at the religious reference. He was a private atheist and a public Methodist. Feldman ignored the look as he pushed the second folder in the stack toward his commander in chief, this one labeled with classification markings. “Someone fired on the Iranian reps to the nuclear talks in the middle of a street in London.”
Rostow looked up to his national security adviser, the news seeming to take its time registering in his mind. The president opened the folder on the Resolute desk and stared at the AP photo inside. It was a full-color image, sharp resolution, dead bodies still uncovered, with blood visible under the streetlights. “When?”
“A few hours ago,” Feldman said. “Four dead.”
“Has anyone claimed responsibility yet?” Rostow asked.
<
br /> “No, but you know who it is.”
Rostow said nothing for a minute, riffling through the photographs and staring at Salehi’s dead eyes. “Has this hit Iran?”
“I’m sure the rest of the delegation has called home by now, so the mullahs must know. We’ve probably got an hour before the masses hit the streets over there. I don’t speak Arabic, but I know ‘death to Israel, death to America’ when I hear it.”
“No response from Iran? Nothing from Hezbollah?”
“NSA reports some chatter in Tehran and Beirut, but nothing between them. Hezbollah hasn’t moved any assets toward the border. It’s strange.”
“Yeah. You’d think they’d be shooting Katyusha rockets into Tel Aviv by now,” Rostow observed. “I want updates on this hourly from the Situation Room . . . and call the DNI. From this point forward, no one shares intel on this with Israel. If Mossad’s willing to do something like this in the middle of London, then it must be Operation Wrath of God all over again. They’re looking for a bloodbath.”
“Half the public is going to want you to be in the middle of that bloodbath,” Feldman observed. “It’s a bad time to look weak on terrorism.”
“That half was never going to vote for me no matter what,” Rostow countered, waving away the argument. “Look, we’ll support the Israelis in public. In private, I don’t want anyone giving them so much as a National Geographic map until they’ve settled down. We’re not going to be accomplices to a massacre. Besides, if I start sending out Delta Force operators to shoot terrorists on Israel’s behalf, the other side is going to accuse me of killing people to earn votes. The public gets a whiff of that kind of desperation and I’m done. I’m not that far behind in the polls, so that’s not how we’re going to play this. Understood?”
“Tel Aviv won’t like it,” Feldman noted.
“Tel Aviv doesn’t like me anyway,” Rostow said. “As for the race, let’s see if we can get Iran to come back to the table. We take the calm approach and tell Iran to do the same, but with a lot more security. The more Israel gets rowdy, the more my opponent calls for military action, the more we’ll look like the grown-ups in the room . . . and maybe Israel will want to look like grown-ups, too, so they stand down on their own,” he continued. “Not exactly a Nobel achievement, but I get free coverage doing something only the president can do, while my opponent sits back and snipes. Then we tell the voters that hotheads can’t be peacemakers.” He put his finger on the photographs. “It’s not much, but maybe it’ll shore up the numbers until we can figure out another way to play it. So let’s see if the mullahs are willing to talk.”
Beit Aghion (residence of the prime minister)
Jerusalem
The prime minister offered Ronen no Scotch this evening and was drinking none himself. The alcohol and small talk had eased their way into the ugly discussion they’d endured when the Mossad chief had visited last. Now the operation had begun, blood had been shed, and there was no room for clouded judgments and Dutch courage. “I am told that your operation in London turned out well,” the old man offered.
“I hate to say such operations ‘turn out well.’ The target was killed and we suffered no casualties or arrests. By that standard, it was successful.”
“The Iranian delegation was recalled to Tehran and those foolish talks are over. We offended an ally, but we will heal that in time. It is worth the price to sow confusion and panic among the mullahs of Tehran.”
“Not too much, I hope,” Ronen said, his voice quiet and flat. The prime minister looked up at Ronen, surprised at the man’s expression of apparent sympathy for the enemy. “It is a difficult thing, to instill enough fear in an enemy that he retreats instead of lashing out,” he explained. “It would not take much to push them into war.”
“When have we not been at war?” the senior official asked.
Ronen nodded at the remark. “That is true, but there are levels and infinite varieties of war. Not all of them can be controlled or managed. Few of them, in fact.”
“Yes. But in all of them, uncertainty is our friend. I assume the British have not traced your operation back to you?”
“They saw me at Heathrow, no doubt, but I could not have stayed home, not for an operation such as this one. It is our tradition that the man who gives the order shares the risk on such dangerous assignments. I could not lead my people if I did not do that,” Ronen said. “And given the little time we had to plan, we could not hide the nature of the operation, but we left no physical evidence they can tie to us. So they will have their suspicions but no proof. When their foreign minister calls to demarche you, I suggest you deny everything.”
The older man nodded. “I would not do otherwise, but I will not enjoy it. Where will your next operation be?”
Ronen considered the question. There was only one answer he could give. “Tehran. Where else could we go? The real threat is there, so we must attack it there.”
“You have another name?”
“Several. I have four teams in the field now casing targets and people,” Ronen said. “But Shiloh gave us a true prize already, one that our own assets had not given up. So I think we would do well to prioritize the targets he identifies for us. We may do more damage to Tehran’s nuclear program and it will protect our own assets from discovery. That alone would make it a wise course.”
“He has given us more information?”
“No, but he will very soon,” Ronen said. “Ideological spies are usually the most eager to share, to the point that they often must be restrained for their own safety. I hope that Shiloh has more discipline . . . and we must be cautious. He has promised to connect us with others who may be sympathetic to us. After Haifa, I think it unwise to depend on a single source, no matter the quality of his information. We need to build our networks, even in our allies’ countries, so I intend to give our people my approval to approach the candidates Shiloh names, but with care. Any of them could suffer the same weakness of eagerness.”
The prime minister nodded. “They have my approval as well, for what it is worth. I trust your judgment, Gavi. Do your duty.”
“Always.” Ronen bowed his head slightly toward the Israeli chief of state and then made his way out of the office, not wanting to prolong the conversation more than was truly useful. Almost one hundred of his officers were in the field, engaged in the most dangerous operations they could perform for Israel, and there was work for him to do tonight.
He would not enjoy it. Tehran, he thought. He had run operations there before, but he had never sent one of Mossad’s teams to kill a man there. His predecessors had, but not him.
He thought of Hasan. It had been forty years since they had last spoken, the night the revolution began. If you are still there, still working for your people, then I am sorry to make life hard on you, but you understand what I must do. Ronen knew the other man would do the same. They would not have been the first friends to find themselves facing each other across a battlefield. History was cruel that way. Do what you must, old friend. I expect nothing less of you. But we will win. I will pray that you will not suffer for it too much.
CHAPTER THREE
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
There was little sun today, but it was still a bit warm for the season. Virginia summers usually broke in late September, which was still a few weeks away. Kyra Stryker was a native but had never really been comfortable with the wet summertime. She had heard that some foreign countries gave tropical hardship pay to their Embassy Row workers in the District to make the midyear suffocation a little easier to bear. She supposed that was more than the CIA would ever be willing to do.
The glass door to the courtyard closed behind her and she ignored the smell of tobacco and the muttered conversation of two colleagues. The yard usually was empty at this hour and the smokers could come here to punish their lungs out of sight of their coworkers. Only a raft of ducks searching through the colored leaves on the lawn took notice of the
m before returning to their business.
Her target was no challenge to find. Jonathan Burke was sitting at one of the round tables along the semicircular path that connected the east and west doors to the open yard. She hadn’t seen the man for months. He had been gone for almost a year, courtesy of the Russians and medical rehabilitation. Learning to walk again had been slow agony for him, made only marginally easier by the help of his new wife. His wedding to Kathryn Cooke, the former CIA director, had taken place in the hospital chapel and he had managed to stand out of his wheelchair long enough to exchange the vows, with Kyra holding him up on one side and Clark Barron on the other. Nine months later, he was still using a cane, no doubt as much for appearance as necessity. She was certain that he liked giving the impression that he could beat someone’s brains in if they dared to say something stupid in his presence.
Jon was hunched over, head down over an open notebook, pen in hand. The sleeves of his blue oxford shirt were rolled up, his only concession to the stickiness filling the air.
She sat down next to the former chief of the CIA Red Cell at the table. “I would have thought that spending a year in rehab would have cured you of masochism.”
Jon recognized her voice, his eyes flicking sideways toward her for a moment, but he didn’t look at her. “On the contrary, it taught me patience in pain.” He scrawled something in the notebook with a pen. His block-letter handwriting was disgustingly precise, like some font on a computer.
Kyra looked up at Jon’s opponent. Kryptos rose above them, four tall, curved sheets of aging green and gray copper connected to a pillar of petrified wood. James Sanborn, the artist, had carved hundreds of nonsensical letters into the metal of his masterwork. Half were arranged into a Vigenère cipher table, the other half into an encrypted message in four parts. The fourth of these, a string of ninety-seven characters, had never been solved. “Even the NSA doesn’t tilt at that windmill anymore,” she told him. “They tried to crack part four once. They worked on it for a whole day and decided they couldn’t break it without diverting resources from actual operations.”
