The Last Man in Tehran

by Mark Henshaw

  After today, Taleb thought, they would all leave on their own, running like rats, and he hoped it would be a hundred years before any of them could return. Allah’s obedient children would soon take it back. How soon he could not say, but he prayed none of the Jews would be left in a hundred years to stake any claim to it.

  Taleb gently pushed his foot down on the accelerator and the pickup truck rolled forward another few meters north on Golda Meir Highway. It was a four-lane road, far larger than this settlement needed, but the fact that the Israelis had built such an oversize street was proof that they planned for Ramot to grow, becoming maybe ten times its size. That would not happen, Taleb was certain, but for today the traffic backup would have been more fitting for Tel Aviv than this place. There must have been an accident ahead, a bad one slowing the traffic to a crawl, but he had been patient. He supposed it did not truly matter if he caused an accident and was discovered. He had no real destination, in fact, and could end his mission whenever and wherever he chose, and whose lives he wished to take. He had never felt liberty mixed with power like this. The Israelis had denied him both and now to have them mixed together was a potent drug, heady beyond all reason.

  Ha-Rav Elazar Square was a hundred meters ahead, one of the largest intersections in Ramot. Judging by the cars around him and the pedestrians clustered ahead, there were hundreds of people within range, possibly a thousand. He had not thought to end the matter here. He had planned to drive a bit farther north and east. There were two synagogues there, the Sha’agat ha-Arie and the Tiferet Yosef, sitting close together. He was certain that the device in the bed of his truck, covered by a hard shell, could destroy either, and perhaps damage whichever he didn’t target beyond repair. But perhaps he had been guided here instead, the crawling traffic giving him time to realize that it was a better place—more people, certainly . . . and more than that. The road here was actually a paved shallow valley between two berms rising east and west. That would contain the explosion, keep it from spreading out in those directions, concentrate the blast.

  The cars crept forward again, another few meters, and he saw the Israeli police standing in the intersection, directing the traffic around the accident. Someone had run the light and struck another vehicle. Both cars were destroyed, and surely the drivers and any passengers also from the look of the debris and the number of emergency vehicles in the crossroad. Taleb could hardly believe the blessing. A better spot to fire the device, more casualties. It was a blessing.

  It took another ten minutes to reach the front of the lineup. His lane was moving and the policeman was expecting him to rumble through over the shattered glass and plastic in a left turn like the other cars. Instead, Taleb stopped his truck at the stop line. The officer blew his whistle and waved furiously at him to continue.

  Taleb said his prayer, a conversation with Allah, pleading for his acceptance of the greatest sacrifice the young Palestinian could offer.

  The officer frowned and walked forward to see whether the stopped driver was suffering some mechanical problem. The beater truck certainly looked like one of those old models that rolled around Jerusalem, stalling out at every other stoplight. But if the engine was dead, the driver was not trying to turn it over . . .

  Taleb finished speaking to God. He reached down and pulled the cotter pin out of the side of the small black box screwed into the dashboard. Wires ran out of the little black cube down to the floor and under his seat through a PVC pipe that tunneled through a hole from the truck’s cab back into the cargo bed, which was filled almost completely with PVV-5A, a plastic explosive. Their detonators were all tied together in a long braid from the explosive blocks to the wires reaching back from the cab.

  Sure of his course, Taleb flipped the metal switch on the black box.

  • • •

  The PVV-5A ignited, all five hundred pounds of it, five for every person who died in the explosion, some crushed by the shock wave and flying cars, others shredded to death by the shrapnel, some burning. The bomb dug out a crater more than six meters deep before the earth itself ate enough of the destructive energy to stop its downward blast. The shock wave reached out to the sides, striking the berms as Taleb had foreseen they would, and riding the slopes upward, pulling the superheated air along in its wake as it reached for the sky. Mixed in the air was the dirt and burning soot, bits of bodies and pulverized metal.

  The residents of Ramot Alon heard the booming noise of the explosion that spread in a circle from the crater that was Taleb’s grave. They knew the sound. Many had previously lived elsewhere in Israel and had heard bombings and falling mortar shells before. Not again, they thought, almost as one. Not like Haifa. They hustled their children inside their homes to save them from inhaling the radioactive dust that surely would start to settle in their yards in a few moments.

  Inside the Israel police station in Ramot, technicians held their breath. The more religious among them prayed, the less devout muttering curses as they all waited for their computers to report that radiation sensors across the city were being tripped by the falling dust one after another in a pattern that followed the wind. Most tried to call their families to warn them to stay inside and all wondered where they would have to live for the winter months while the Israeli government reclaimed Ramot Alon from the contamination that was about to rain from the sky.

  The sensors never went off.

  The George Washington Parkway

  Washington, DC

  Barron stared down at the papers in his lap, trying to find the last sentence he’d read on the page. The pothole in the road had been deep enough to jostle the armored SUV, heavy as it was, and make him lose his place. The driver in the front had muttered an apology for the momentary violence and Barron had gone back to the book, that day’s copy of the President’s Daily Brief. He had twenty more minutes to read it through before he would have to discuss it in the Oval Office if the traffic patterns held steady—

  The secure phone sounded. He lifted the handset and checked the display on the back, then pressed a button, connecting the call. “Barron.”

  “This is the Operations Center,” said the senior duty officer. “Sir, there’s been an explosion in Israel in the last five minutes, in Ramot Alon, eastern Jerusalem. The location and blast radius suggest a car bomb. Casualties are unknown at this time, but they will be significant.”

  “Define ‘significant,’ ” Barron said.

  “We can only guess, sir, but at least several dozen, possibly a hundred or more.”

  “Any signs that it was radiological?” Barron asked.

  “It’s too early to tell. The National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency is deploying assets and the State Department is contacting Tel Aviv now. We might know more in the next half hour. We’ll forward those reports to the White House Watch Office as soon as they arrive.”

  “Tell the senior duty officer there to bring them straight to the Oval,” Barron told him. “And do the same if Israel starts moving military assets into Lebanon, the West Bank, or Gaza. I’m sure they’ll be moving units right up to the line, but I want to know if anything larger than a rifle squad crosses the border.” The orders were almost certainly redundant, but the CIA director wanted no misunderstanding. Worse mistakes had been made in the heat of events far less dangerous than these.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tehran

  A crosswind struck the plane as the wheels were inches above the tarmac and Kyra felt the tail yaw. It was a small aircraft and had been subject to every gust of wind on the flight from Kish, leaving a few passengers queasy. The pilot held the altitude, straightened out, then put the plane on the ground. The wheels screeched, smoke erupting as the captain in the cockpit applied the brakes hard enough to throw most of the passengers forward. The passengers around her gasped in surprise and muttered complaints, but Kyra said nothing. She’d landed on an aircraft carrier during a night storm and those sixty seconds of terror had cured her of any fears she’d ever had of flying.
If a navy pilot could land on a moving runway on a pitching sea, it would take more than a bit of high wind on a sunny day to excite her.

  The plane slowed to a near halt, then rolled slowly off the runway toward the terminal building. Kyra watched the ballet of the ground crew directing the aircraft toward its berth, then looked at the skyline beyond. By appearance alone, it could have been Denver, the Alborz Mountains rising behind like the Rockies sixty-five hundred miles away, or maybe Seattle, the Milad Tower looking for all the world like the Space Needle back home in the west. Tehran was larger than either, eight million souls living here, and she wondered how many of them truly hated Americans.

  The loudspeaker came on and the senior flight attendant spoke quickly in Farsi. The aircraft came to a stop, the seat-belt light turned off, and Kyra joined the rest of the passengers in standing and preparing to deplane. The forward door opened and within a minute she was marching forward down the aisle.

  She followed the line of people walking up the ramp until they reached the open space of the terminal. The small crowd parted ahead of her and she saw a man she did not know standing at the edge of the thoroughfare holding a card: STRYKER in block hand letters. He was shorter than she, compact build, bearded, with a serious look. She was sure she did not know him.

  No thanks, she thought. Not taking rides from strangers today.

  She walked past him, avoiding eye contact, and made her way into the rush of people moving toward the baggage claim. She waited until she had put some distance between herself and the gate, then cast a glance over her shoulder. The man was gone.

  She looked for him, but his appearance had been too common for this part of the world for her to pick him out among the other men. She bumped into a woman ahead of her, apologized in broken Farsi, and walked with the flow, looking forward. It was a crowd as large as any she had seen at any of the airports she had passed through over the years, too many people for her to get any sense of whether someone was following her—

  She felt something hard press into her side. “I would have preferred that you accepted our hospitality at the gate, Miss Stryker,” the man behind her said in clear English. “It would have made for a more enjoyable ride, but you will come with us. If you try to fight, we will leave your body in the desert and no one will ever know what happened to you.”

  She looked down at her waist. The man’s hand was covered with a jacket and she could not see the pistol he was holding against her ribs. “Who are you?” she asked.

  The man did not answer, instead nudging her with his weapon toward a service exit at the near end of the large room. She walked forward. Another man in civilian dress moved toward the door and opened it. “You’ve got friends,” she said.

  “Far more than you.” He directed her through the exit. She stepped through, heard the door close behind. She started to turn back to look at the man, but the bag came down over her head and the entire world disappeared.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CIA Red Cell

  “Please state your name,” Rhodes ordered.

  “Sally Ramseur.”

  “Miss Ramseur, you were William Fallon’s chief of staff?”

  “That’s correct,” she replied.

  “And you served in that position for how long?”

  “Three years.”

  “Did you know Mr. Fallon prior to that time?” Rhodes asked.

  “No. He recruited me for the position. A mutual friend told him that I was doing a good job in the same position for a different group chief and he talked me into transferring,” Ramseur replied.

  “Which friend told him that?”

  “Mackie Staunton.”

  Rhodes scribbled on a notepad before speaking again. “And you were serving in that position when Samantha Todd went missing in Iraq?”

  Ramseur stared down at the floor, a look of depression settling over her face. “Yes.”

  “You were interviewed by the inspector general regarding Miss Todd’s disappearance. I have the report. Do you have anything to add to that?”

  Ramseur didn’t look at the FBI officer and hesitated to answer. “No,” she said.

  “You’re certain?”

  Rhodes held up Salem’s photo. “Do you know this woman?”

  Ramseur looked at the photograph. “No, I don’t.”

  “Very well,” Rhodes told her. “We’re done for now, Ms. Ramseur. Please do not talk to anyone about this conversation.”

  Ramseur nodded without speaking, then stood and left the room. Rhodes followed after her and waited until she left the vault to talk to Fuller. “She was the last one of Fallon’s group on the list. She didn’t give up anything useful, but I didn’t press her hard. I think she might crack open if we push her. I’ll give her a few days to think about it and then bring her back. Where are we on getting the senior leaders down here.”

  “They’re not cooperating,” Fuller admitted. “Busy people, or so their assistants say.”

  “You tell their assistants that I’ll start charging people with obstruction if they don’t make themselves available.”

  “Happy to do it,” Fuller agreed. The man checked his watch. “Close of business.”

  “Not for us. You get on the phone and hammer those top-floor idiots until someone caves. I want their bosses in that conference room before the weekend,” Rhodes told him.

  “And what’re you going to do?”

  “Take a ride.”

  Ashburn, Virginia

  Rhodes opened the van door without waiting for the occupants to do it for him. He’d called ahead and they were expecting him. He checked the camera before opening the door. He climbed inside and pulled the door closed behind him. “Evening, boss,” the unit lead offered.

  “What’s happening?” Rhodes asked, nodding toward the house a hundred yards up the street. The team stuffed inside the vehicle was composed of grunt labor, junior officers whose names he hadn’t wasted time learning.

  “Nothing,” the man replied. It was true, but he worried that Rhodes might come unhinged at the answer. His friend had stopped trying to hide his impatience in recent days. “Hadfield’s doing what he does every night. Came home from work this morning, had breakfast, slept most of the day, and now he’s sitting in there playing online games and watching movies until it’s time to go to work again. Having more fun than we are.”

  “And you still haven’t tracked down his ex-wife?”

  “She wasn’t living at the address listed in the divorce papers, so we’re tracking her down through the bank where Hadfield sends his alimony. He hasn’t missed a payment since the divorce. Not one. Even sends a little extra every so often. He may be having financial trouble, but he sure looks like he’s trying to be a good guy.”

  Rhodes let out an exasperated breath. The frustration was rolling off him in waves that no one inside the van could miss. “He’s playing us. I don’t know how, but he is.”

  “We haven’t seen it.”

  “Then we’re missing something.”

  “Nothing I can think of,” the team lead assured his superior. “We’ve had eyes on him every second he’s outside Langley. We’ve combed over every place he’s gone and there’s nothing. If he’s running an op in front of our eyes, then he’s the best spy we’ve ever seen, ’cause he’s doing it flawless.”

  “He is not better than we are at this,” Rhodes said, slapping his open hand against the van wall, not trying to hide his anger. The younger agents kept their eyes focused on the monitor screens and other equipment in front of them, afraid to look at the man lest they become the targets of his wrath.

  Rhodes stared at the monitor showing one of the camera feeds pointing at the house where Matthew Hadfield lived. “We’ve got to take the initiative,” he said finally. “Make him react to us instead of us waiting for him to screw up.” He looked at the rest of the surveillance team, then pointed at one of the men. “You . . . what’s your name?”

  “Jackman, sir.”

  �
�Time to go undercover, Jackman.”

  • • •

  He’d missed Argo when it had been in the theaters, courtesy of his son’s cancer. Watching it now, he found it driving him to anger unlike any movie he’d ever seen. It wasn’t the opening scenes, the embassy in Tehran falling to a mob, the Americans taken prisoner, beaten and humiliated, that affected him. Hadfield felt nothing during that sequence, which didn’t surprise him. He’d felt precious little empathy for anyone since Aric had died.

  It was the scene where some State Department bureaucrats offered a truly moronic plan to rescue the hostages by giving them bicycles to ride three hundred miles to the border while posing as journalists or teachers or agricultural experts from some NGO. Rage had erupted inside him, the incompetence on display touching some nerve. Langley had its share of such men. He supposed every government agency did—

  There was a sudden banging on the door, hard enough to rattle it on the hinges. He tapped the space bar to pause the movie, then left the laptop on the couch and walked to the door. He threw it open.

  A young man was standing there, eyes wide, gasping for air. “Mr. Hadfield,” he said in some bizarre accent the CIA officer couldn’t place. “You must come with me. You have been compromised. They know you work for us . . . that you met with Salem. If you come with me now, we can get you out of the country.”

  “What? Who are you?” Hadfield asked.

  “My name is not important. You must come, now! The FBI is on its way here. We have assets in place, ready to get you to Tel Aviv, but we must go!”

  Hadfield reeled back. “Tel Aviv?”

  “Yes! You know who I work for! Come with me!”

  Hadfield stared at the man. “No. Leave now.”

  “Mr. Hadfield, they will arrest you for treason and you will spend your life in prison unless—”

  “Leave before I call the FBI.” He slammed the door and threw the dead bolt.

  • • •

  Inside the surveillance van, Rhodes hit the monitor with his palm and cursed. “All right, Jackman, come back in,” he said into the radio. He waited to curse until after he’d shut off the device and then thrown it against the wall.