by Mark Henshaw
“I’d say the latter,” Fallon said, grabbing at what he obviously thought was a way out.
“And why would they set you up?” Rhodes asked.
Fallon waved his hands in the air. “I have no idea. Maybe I hurt somebody’s feelings, I don’t know—”
Kyra shook her head. “No. Someone isn’t going to commit treason and set you up for it just because you were rude—”
“It’s not me!”
Rhodes spoke carefully, trying to contain himself and choosing his words with precision. “Unfortunately for you, I can’t just take your word for it. So as of this moment, here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to recommend that the director place you on administrative leave. The SPOs outside will escort you from this room out of the building.”
“That’ll destroy my career—” Fallon protested.
“I’m sure that Sam Todd, sitting in her cell in Tehran somewhere, is just crying over how hard your life is right now,” Kyra spit out. “Your other choice is to tell us what really happened with Sam Todd. If you didn’t do anything wrong, that’ll help clear all this up a lot faster.”
Fallon gritted his teeth. “I have nothing more to say about it. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Then I must also ask you to surrender your passport,” Rhodes told him. “Please don’t leave Virginia and don’t leave Loudoun County without telling the Bureau first.” He passed the CIA officer a business card. “Please contact my office first if you need to travel.”
“And if I don’t?”
“We’re looking for a mole. I don’t think you want to give us more reasons to consider you a suspect,” Rhodes told him. “But if I find that you’ve tried to hide anything from me, I’ll have you charged with obstruction of justice.”
Fallon let out a snort of derision and took the card. “You’re wasting your time looking at me.”
“Go home, Mr. Fallon,” Rhodes said.
• • •
The door closed and Kyra and Rhodes let out a long, slow breath. “A shame that Jon wasn’t here,” Kyra said. “He would have enjoyed that.”
Rhodes nodded. “That man was rattled.”
“He was,” Kyra confirmed. “I didn’t see any signs of deception when you asked him about the dead drop . . . but when we mentioned Todd, his head went down, he hardly blinked when he talked, repeated phrases, pointed a lot,” she observed. “I reread the IG’s notes on his interview with Fallon a few years ago. He didn’t behave that way at all at the time. He probably knew that interview was coming and had time to rehearse himself. Today, you nailed him without any warning.”
“So he’s lying about Todd but not about the dead drop,” Rhodes concluded.
“We know Fallon has always been ambitious. He wants to reach the Seventh Floor and is willing to take risks to get there. So back when he was running the Iran shop, maybe he decided that whatever intel they were dredging up wasn’t sexy enough. So Fallon sent Todd out on risky ops, but Fallon didn’t enter her reports into the system because people would’ve come asking where they came from.”
Rhodes saw the direction of her thoughts. “Then Todd goes missing, and instead of coming clean, Fallon and his people hid the evidence and lied to the IG to save themselves, despite the fact it meant leaving Todd in Iran. But somebody involved had a conscience.”
“Or just really didn’t like Fallon,” Kyra said.
“I can believe that,” Rhodes agreed. “He’s very dislikable.”
Kyra smirked a bit at that. “Either way, Fallon gets framed for the dead drop using a report supposedly written by Todd. Now the Bureau has a reason to go dig into his life and reopen Todd’s case. They frame Fallon for a crime he didn’t commit so he might get nailed for the one he did, or at least fall under suspicion enough that we fire him. You’ve got surveillance on him?”
“As of this morning,” Rhodes said. “We also have a warrant to tap his phones and his Internet connection.”
Kyra nodded. “Who’s next on your interview list?” Rhodes handed her an index card, which the CIA officer scanned. She looked up, surprised. “Are you kidding me?”
“Again, do you think I’m playing?”
“The director of analysis. The director of operations. The chief of the Counterintelligence Mission Center. The head of Agency security. Director Barron,” Kyra read off the card. She stared at Rhodes, her eyes practically boring holes in the special agent’s face. “I thought for a minute that you were actually starting to play nice.”
“They all have access to the intel that we recovered, and you said yourself that it pays to be thorough,” Rhodes told her, smirking. “Have a good flight.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport
30 kilometers southwest of Tehran
Islamic Republic of Iran
Kyra was not an especially religious woman, but setting foot on Iranian soil was a moment for either prayer or a stiff drink, perhaps both if one’s religion allowed. Her grandfather had been a drinking man, a Scot for whom alcohol was an all-purpose solution to any problem. She’d inherited his eager taste for it and so had given it up. She never touched it now, and it was technically illegal in Iran anyway. Her options thus reduced, she tossed off a quick and silent prayer into the ether and hoped that anyone listening wouldn’t be too surprised to hear from her. Still, she didn’t put all of her faith in the supernatural. Kyra’s dirty-blond hair was now dyed black and hidden under a head scarf, and she wore glasses that she didn’t need. It was not a total disguise, but her British passport negated the need for more.
There were no direct flights to Iran from the United States, leaving her to fly to London and switch planes at Heathrow, which served to strengthen her cover story when the Iranian customs officer checked her passport and other papers. She had been practicing her British accent, binge-watching the BBC and talking to herself under her breath. More than a few Iranians had graduated from British schools and so could recognize a bad accent when they heard one. So she kept her mouth shut as much as possible, answering the customs officer’s questions with as few words as she could. The man stared at her, then at her passport photograph. He snapped his questions at her and she couldn’t tell whether his hostility was aimed generally at Westerners or whether he had some more personal reason to focus it on her. After five minutes, he finally stamped her passport and waved her through, and she passed out of the security area.
The embassy driver, really a British Senior Intelligence Service officer, had met her in the baggage reclaim area, as promised. She traveled light, nothing incriminating in her bags, and the man led her to his vehicle. Within an hour after landing, they were on the Tehran-Qom Freeway, driving north. She had expected to see barren terrain here and there were short stretches that matched her imagination, but more often there were cultivated fields and towns that were, by turns, modern and decrepit. She could read none of the signage, of course, all of it in Persian, which looked like children’s scribbles to her eye. Her driver was not using a GPS receiver and she wondered whether he could read the signs or had simply memorized the route by landmarks.
Tehran was enormous and dense, holding almost as many people as New York City in less space, and inducing claustrophobia like Kyra had never felt before. The streets were narrow and the alleyways between them seemed to form mazes that even the most experienced native would be hard-pressed to navigate if they strayed too far from home. There were almost no trees, nothing living but the people and animals in the streets.
The driver turned off the Ferdowsi Avenue into the British embassy compound and the world around her changed in an instant. The British government’s outpost here was an island of life in the middle of the city’s urban desert of buildings and asphalt. Trees taller than the buildings surrounded the complex, blocking out the world, letting Kyra imagine for a moment that she wasn’t in the middle of a city and a country that would arrest her just for being an American.
“They to
ok ours over, too, you know,” the driver told her.
“Excuse me?”
“The embassy, in 2011,” he said. “The Iranians took over our embassy, as they did yours in ’79. Disgraceful affair. The mullahs blamed it on excited students, of course, but here you can’t do such a thing without the government smiling down on you. They took no hostages, but we were shut down here for four years. The whole place was in a terrible state when we came back . . . ‘Death to Israel’ and whatnot sprayed on the walls, most of the electronics stolen. It was a right mess. So we’ve got that in common, your country and ours.”
“Not quite.” Kyra half smiled at him. “They gave your embassy back.”
• • •
“Our cousin from the colonies has arrived, I see.” Alun Grayling, the SIS station chief, was younger than Kyra had imagined, or at least he appeared to be. Time was being very kind to him if he was older than forty-five and it was only the gray at his temples that made him seem that old. He was medium height, in fit shape, and wore a blue tailored suit that implied he cared about his appearance. All of the British intelligence officers she had met exuded an air of sophistication so uniform that she wondered whether it wasn’t standard issue, somehow injected into all their recruits when they entered into the Vauxhall Cross for their first time.
“Kyra Stryker, sir.” She did not try her best British accent on the man. She was sure it would have offended his ears.
“A pleasure, Ms. Stryker,” Grayling welcomed her. He offered her the guest chair in front of his desk before returning to his own. “You must have some fine friends back home. Sir Ewan called me himself about your visit; it seems he received a call from your CIA director, asking for our assistance.”
“For which we’re very grateful,” she replied.
“It is our pleasure. A good number of us are still unhappy about the tiff we had with the locals here a few years back that shuttered the embassy. So any chance to have a bit of good fun at their expense is welcome.”
“I’m impressed at how quickly you got everything arranged.”
“Yes, well, normally there would be extensive talks about such an arrangement between our governments, but we tend to approve things rather more quickly when bombs are going off. It puts a bit of pressure on our forgers, though. You are here, so I trust your documents passed muster.”
“No problems coming through customs. But I promise not to abuse the Crown’s hospitality by waving them around.”
“Much appreciated,” Grayling said. “In what other way can we assist you?”
“I’m trying to contact an Iranian arms dealer,” Kyra told him. “Asqar Amiri.”
“Ah.”
“You’ve heard the name,” Kyra observed.
“Indeed. Mr. Amiri is not Iranian. He’s British by birth,” Grayling said. “His real name is Oscar Longstreet. Radicalized while at university back home. No idea why that life appealed to him . . . he came from a wealthy family, had every advantage, but he was a terrible student, expelled from several fine schools. His friends reported that he had no obvious religious leanings of any stripe until the Iraq War broke out in the early part of the century. Fifteen years ago, he assassinated an expatriate imam in Oxfordshire on orders of the Iranians and then fled to Tehran and changed his name. He decided that Iran wasn’t for him after a few years. The problem was that he couldn’t leave because Interpol had a notice out on him, so the civilized world was off-limits. The Iranians don’t trust him very much either. He’s useful to them as an intermediary for buying prohibited supplies, as he can pass for one of us, so they keep him. He is free to move about inside Iran so long as he doesn’t try to shake off his handlers. He did that once and they made him regret it, so he behaves himself. They only approve his departure from the country for specific missions and even then only when he has a Quds force escort with him.”
“And you haven’t tried to exfiltrate him?”
“Oh no,” Grayling said. “He’s both suffering and doing good for us much more here than he would be back home.”
The meaning of the man’s words was clear. “You did recruit him,” she realized.
“I wouldn’t say he’s an official asset, but he knows that we are the only way he might ever leave Iran, much less stand on British soil again without handcuffs. So it’s a long leash we’re holding, but I can require the occasional favor of him. What is your interest in him?”
Kyra rehearsed Sam Todd’s file for the man. “Amiri’s name came up in a report written by one of our officers who went missing a few years ago. I’m here to confirm it’s genuine.”
“Which means you need to be in a room with him,” Grayling noted. “I can arrange that, though the protocol for meeting him is somewhat unorthodox . . . but getting him to discuss anything related to the nuclear program will be another matter. He has helped his Iranian masters retrieve bits of banned nuclear technology from time to time and they take an exceedingly dim view of anyone sharing information regarding those operations. They’ve come to appreciate life without heavy sanctions and truly do not want them levied again. Amiri knows more than enough details about their past acquisitions to have all of those put in place again.”
“Where can I find him now?” Kyra asked.
“He’s on Kish Island, so far as I know. It’s a more liberal place than the mainland, a vacation spot for foreigners, so Amiri has much more liberty to indulge his vices there. Also, Tehran does not require a visa to visit there, so it’s the smuggling and black-market hub for Iran. Any illegal item you want, you can find it there or someone who will procure it for you, and the Khamenei family controls all of it.”
The name was familiar. “As in former Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei?”
“Yes, the same family,” the man confirmed. “His brothers built their wealth in no small part by running Kish like Mafia dons. I would try very hard not to draw the Khameneis’ attention or depend on a diplomatic passport to save you if you do. So please take great care. If you find yourself in trouble, there will be very little I can do to help. It would be quite fortunate, in fact, if I could even locate you.”
“I’ve worked some foreign streets before. I know how to be careful.”
“Very good. We will arrange the flight and the meeting. But I must ask that you not do anything to burn Mister Amiri,” Grayling replied. “We don’t use him often, but we do use him.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Grayling nodded. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Stryker. I do hope that things come out as you would like.”
“Thank you, sir, for everything.”
“Cheers, madam.”
Dariush Grand Hotel
Kish Island, Iran
Kish Island felt like a different world from Tehran, clean, bright, less Persian influence in the buildings. There was real money here. Kyra could feel it as much as she could see it in the architecture and lit signs, and she was sure the river of profit flowing through the island was not rolling downstream to the common people on the mainland. It was a vague impression, one she couldn’t articulate in words. She had felt it before, in Moscow, a city where the government and organized crime had become a single entity. Here, too, the modern neighborhoods and fine shops were a facade for something less honest. Kish seemed contrary to all of the values that the theocrats running Iran claimed to stand for and she imagined that they would have closed it down if they didn’t have their own self-serving reasons for letting such a place function.
No doubt money was not all that came through here either. Asqar Amiri operated from Kish, which meant that illegal weapons probably visited the island as often as the tourists. Illegal nuclear cargo almost certainly came here, though less frequently than more conventional black-market goods. There would be information brokers as well. At hubs like these, contacts willing to provide facts were as valuable as anything else and commanded their own market prices. The only question was who the prime dealers in such secrets were and to whom would they sell.
The flight from Tehran to Kish Island had taken a bit less than two hours, too short for Kyra to properly enjoy the business-class seat. The British like to travel in style, I’ll give them that, she thought. She could hardly criticize. The Directorate of Operations was not tight with a penny when it came to ops. Case officers traveling as businessmen stayed in the nicer suites offered by the nicer hotels, dressed in fine clothing, and carried the other amenities needed to pass as men and women of means. It was almost a universal truth that people contemplating treason felt more comfortable dealing with people who appeared wealthy. Kyra could only suppose it gave the traitors-in-waiting confidence that they would get paid, if nothing else. Some assets were willing to give up their countries for their beliefs, but most were only willing to sell them out.
Now she had arrived at her lodgings and she was unsure whether the hotel was merely magnificent or crossed the line into gaudiness. It was modeled after the ancient palace at Persepolis, one of the capitals of the empire when Persian kings had tangled with the Greeks until Alexander the Great reduced the city to a burned husk. A very long rectangular fountain stretched out in front of the structure, flanked by high pillars, each topped with two stone oxen, horned and facing in opposite directions. The entrance was a hollow square, with yet more pillars on either side, stretching the full length of the building. The inside confirmed the Iranians’ love of columns, which reached up from a marble floor covered in places with enormous Persian rugs. Guests coming or going waited in chairs that had intricate motifs carved in the arms and headrests. A long stone relief high on the wall depicted courtiers and foreign emissaries presenting tribute to the ancient kings.
One of the desk clerks spoke passable English and checked Kyra into her room . . . not one of the nicer suites, she noted; Grayling’s hospitality had its limits, apparently. She found her way to the room and let herself in, careful to lock the door with the deadbolt once in. The television offered fewer channels than she’d hoped, and most of the programming was in Farsi. The news program showed video clips from which she could discern the subject of the story, but little else. The reporting seemed fixated on the Haifa docks. The same video, weeks old now and cribbed from CNN International, kept repeating every few minutes, showing the black smoke rising from the half-sunken ship resting in pieces dockside.
