The Last Man in Tehran

by Mark Henshaw

  “So much for a confession,” one of the junior officers muttered.

  CIA Director’s Office

  “What are the chances Mossad knows about the second warehouse?” Barron asked. He stared at the photograph on his desk.

  “I’m sure they do. I’m also pretty sure they won’t move on it,” Jon replied. “Security around it is brutal now, and if the RTGs are there, the Quds Force will move them, probably to the mainland. The question is where they’ll end up and whether Mossad will try something there.”

  “Is that why Stryker went back to Tehran?” Rhodes asked.

  “Agent Rhodes, I invited you here as a courtesy to keep you updated on relevant events,” Barron said. “But if you’re going to just throw around unfounded accusations at my people—”

  “They’re not unfounded.” Rhodes pulled a sealed, double-wrapped envelope from his satchel and handed it to Barron. “Stryker gets taken to a warehouse that Mossad raids a few hours later and she was the only one who walked out. Looks to me like she led them to it. My only question is whether someone here—”

  “Like me?” Barron asked. “I’m the one who approved the trip—”

  “After she asked you to send her,” Rhodes noted. “And you’ve got Hadfield, who worked for Fallon, getting pitched by Mossad—”

  “Speaking of Hadfield, what was that you tried to pull on him last night?” Barron asked, his voice calm.

  “Sir?”

  “He came to Security this morning and reported that someone posing as a Mossad officer came to his house last night and tried to convince him to exfiltrate to Israel. But it wasn’t Mossad, was it? It was your people. FBI Director Menard told me this morning that you’ve had Hadfield under surveillance since this all started and you didn’t report that anyone showed up at his house,” Barron explained. “Which means that either you’re completely incompetent or you tried to provoke Hadfield and failed.”

  “Those options aren’t mutually exclusive,” Jon added.

  “Menard isn’t going to recall you, but I’ve got that bug in his ear,” Barron said. “Don’t ever try anything stupid like that again.”

  “By the way,” Jon added, “Kyra’s never even met Fallon.”

  “So you say. Maybe I haven’t found a link yet,” Rhodes said.

  “And you won’t,” Jon assured him.

  “Don’t tell me that you can vouch for her,” Rhodes interrupted. “There were people ready to vouch for Aldrich Ames and Lee Howard—”

  “And Robert Hanssen,” Jon noted. “He was one of yours, or haven’t you read about that case?”

  “What’s your point?” Rhodes demanded.

  “My point is that Hanssen got to run rampant for years because the special agents hunting him wouldn’t stop to examine their own faulty thinking.”

  “You can’t deny the timing—”

  “Timing is a pathetic basis for a conclusion in the absence of other evidence,” Jon declared. “You jump from conclusion to conclusion every time something happens, latching on to the first theory that runs through your head each time and ignoring anything that doesn’t support your latest idea. It’s no wonder you’ve got so many suspects. You need a conspiracy to make it all work.”

  “I guess you’ve never heard of the Cambridge Five,” Rhodes observed.

  “A single counterexample of a real conspiracy doesn’t make a compelling case that one exists now,” Jon replied. He turned to Barron. “If you’ll excuse me, I have a plane to catch.”

  “Where are you going?” Rhodes demanded.

  “London,” Jon told him. “Vauxhall Station, if you must know, to find out something useful instead of thrashing around here.”

  “See you when you get back,” Barron told him.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Tehran

  There were men on both sides of her and there had to be a driver in the front. If there was another passenger forward, there would be four men in the car, enough to subdue her even without the gun still pushing into her side, so she sat still and focused on her senses instead. She tried to maintain some sense of direction as the vehicle worked its way through Tehran’s streets, but that proved impossible. She heard nothing but the men’s occasional voices, the sound of the motor, and her own breathing inside the black hood. Kyra had a decent sense of time and figured they had driven for almost forty-five minutes before they finally came to a stop, but that helped her not at all. The driver could have taken a convoluted route to whatever destination they had just reached simply to throw her off.

  The doors opened and one of the men pulled her from the car, not as rough as he could have been. Hands grabbed both of her arms and guided her as they walked. She could tell by the slight echoes that they’d parked inside a building, but she could not get a feel for the space from the sounds alone. She walked through hallways, turned corners, and then her escorts warned her of steps downward. She moved forward carefully and managed to descend a flight of stairs without falling.

  The men pushed her into a chair. She was surprised that they did not tie down her arms.

  “You may remove your hood.” It was a man’s voice, calm, speaking in practiced English. She pulled the bag off her head.

  The room was small, perhaps eight feet by ten. The floor was covered with thin linoleum, a hideous green color, and the walls were dirty white and covered with messages scratched into the fading paint, some in Farsi, one in English. No one stays here forever, she read. There was a small window on one side near the ceiling and Kyra could see daylight through the three layers of metal grating that ensured she would not crawl out. There was no bed, no toilet, no sink. The ceiling was very high, fifteen feet at least, and a light bulb hung from the ceiling with no switch she could discern on the walls to control it. The door was steel, no handle on the inside, with a slot at the bottom to pass trays of food in and out. The space reeked of mold and some pungent cologne that her interrogator was wearing.

  “Do you know where you are?” It was the same man who had caught her at the airport. Kyra looked around the room. It was all concrete floor and walls, metal chairs and table, nothing to identify the place. She shook her head. “We call it the Evin House of Detention. You would call it a prison.” He smiled. “Did you know the shah built it?” He looked around, appreciation on his features. “His secret police controlled it.”

  “I request that you contact my embassy immediately and advise the ambassador that you are holding a citizen of the United Kingdom,” Kyra said. She prayed the man hadn’t discerned her true nationality.

  “We will call the British embassy when you and I have finished our conversation, but only because the United States has no embassy here,” the man said.

  Kyra showed him no reaction. “What am I being charged with?”

  “You are not being detained. We have not even restrained you. On the contrary, you are a guest.”

  “Then Iranian hospitality is less refined than what I’m used to.”

  “I do hope you’ll forgive all of this, but it is necessary to maintain appearances. But I think that I am not the first man to say that to you in recent days.”

  “Appearances for who?” Kyra demanded.

  “That is the insightful question,” the man told her, surprised. “For certain elements within our government. I cannot give you names, of course.”

  “I’ll settle for yours.”

  “I am Eshaq Ebtekar, the director of the Ministry of Intelligence. And you are Kyra Stryker.”

  “If you will check my passport—” Kyra started.

  “The false British passport you are carrying?” he asked her. “You are an American. We knew who you were the moment you landed in Tehran a few days ago. We have good relations with the Russians and you have had dealings with them of late. They shared what information they had on you with us after they sent you home last year,” Ebtekar told her.

  Kyra kept her own expression fixed. Like so many English speakers here, Ebtekar’s accent sounded Brit
ish, which meant he’d either studied in the UK or had had a British tutor in Iran. Either way, she wondered whether he had dealt with Westerners enough to read her face. “If you believe I’m an American, why didn’t you arrest me?” she asked, choosing her words. “That is what you do to Americans.”

  Ebtekar smiled at the woman. “Not always, but often, yes. In your case, we hoped that you might help us,” he said.

  “Help you,” she said. “Why would you imagine that I would do that?”

  “You know who Majid Salehi was?”

  Kyra took several seconds trying to decide whether to reveal what she knew. If the Russians had shared their intelligence on her with Ebtekar, then pleading ignorance would likely annoy the man. She also doubted that the head of Iran’s Intelligence Ministry personally came to see every American detained on his country’s soil, so perhaps he was not lying when he was asking for her country’s help. Salehi had done the same.

  She decided to gamble. “He was the director of your nuclear program. Mossad killed him in London.”

  “Yes,” Ebtekar said. “He tried to pass a back-channel message to your government, but we do not know whether your president received it. If he did, he chose to disregard it, probably because he did not believe it.”

  “Chanting ‘death to America’ tends to undermine trust that way.”

  Ebtekar stared at her, then let out a short laugh, little more than an exaggerated breath. “It surely would, I agree,” he admitted. “You do understand that such language is, for the most part, hot rhetoric for the people. It helps to distract them from the failings of their own leaders.”

  “When you go around chanting, calling for genocide, you shouldn’t be surprised when people take you seriously.”

  “That is why I hope you will listen to me now,” Ebtekar told her. “What Salehi told your president was true. Our government did not order the bombing of Haifa and you must tell Mossad to stop these attacks. I have convinced our supreme leader to be patient, but his more conservative advisors are calling for blood. He has decided that we will retaliate if the Israelis attack again. We will strike back and then it will be beyond my power to stop whatever comes after. Already, some lone wolf has bombed Israel again, so I think we have little time before things move far beyond our control. That is why I gave the order to have you brought here . . . though I am grateful you came to Tehran of your own volition. Taking you from your hotel on Kish would have been far less convenient.”

  Kyra narrowed her eyes as she looked at the man, trying to figure out the game. “Your word carries no weight at all, sir, with us or with Israel. If you want President Rostow to make a serious effort to stop Mossad, you need to give me some evidence.”

  “Proof of our good faith?” Ebtekar asked.

  “More than that,” Kyra said. “You say you didn’t bomb Haifa? Then tell me who did.”

  Ebtekar exhaled, then stared into her eyes. “I told our leader that you would demand that, if you were going to listen at all. It took considerable discussion, but I convinced him it was necessary. He has given me his consent to show you such proof if you demanded it, but only with conditions. Please, come with me.”

  • • •

  She followed Ebtekar out into the hall, where several men were waiting. They surrounded her as she fell in behind the man, who led her through the corridor. There were metal doors on both sides and she did not bother trying to count the number. There was total silence except for their own footsteps and Kyra wondered whether the cells were empty or full of occupants simply too frightened to make any sound.

  Ebtekar opened a door and descended two flights of stairs, which creaked despite their metal construction. Another door at the bottom opened into a corridor that led off in both directions and ended in intersections. The basement of Evin Prison was a maze, she was sure.

  And then Kyra heard the screams, like nothing she had ever heard in her life, cries of agony beyond anything she had ever experienced. She felt rage welling up inside her and she was not sure that she wanted to control it.

  “Remain here,” Ebtekar ordered the other men. He held his arm out to direct Kyra to the left. “Follow.”

  She obeyed, anger rising as she walked and heard moans of despair mixing with the wails of pain. The basement was brightly lit, but every door was closed and it would have been very easy to get lost. The entire bottom floor was as close to a literal dungeon as Kyra thought she might ever see in her life. The Iranian led her on a winding route through the network of halls until they reached the dead end of one of the hallways.

  “This is Ward 209,” the man said, like a professor lecturing a student. “This is where we detain those we deem threats to our national security.” Ebtekar stopped at the last door on the right and unlocked the small window, sliding the metal grate to the side. “Look.” Kyra looked at the man, her expression a mix of anger and suspicion. She heard the sound of something striking flesh and then a scream of pure agony, a man wishing to die.

  “No,” Kyra told him. “I don’t want to see it.”

  “Inside is your proof—” Ebtekar started to tell her.

  “I will not watch you torture someone!” she said, nearly yelling at the man.

  “Do not get self-righteous with me!” Ebtekar hissed back. “Your country has tortured men before when it suited your purposes, and we are not making him suffer for no purpose. That man you hear inside is no dissident or prisoner of conscience. He is not in there because he angered some man of influence by sleeping with his daughter. That man is responsible for the bombing of Haifa and has put us on a path to war and economic desolation for years to come. There were others who followed, and they are here also, but he gave the order.”

  “He could be anyone and I wouldn’t know the difference. Just watching you torture a man isn’t evidence.”

  “Do not dismiss what I tell you so quickly,” Ebtekar hissed. “He is the supreme leader’s own brother.”

  Kyra reeled back, her mind racing. “Even if that’s true, why would he—”

  “Why would he order the bombing of Haifa?” Ebtekar asked. “Even the supreme leader did not know of it until the act was done. When I learned that strontium had been detected at the blast site, I convinced the ayatollah that the bombing could drive the Israelis to the edge of madness. I told him that having Salehi pass the message to your president in the hopes it would buy me time to find out who had ordered the attack. Only a few men had authority over the RTGs, so it did not take long.”

  “That doesn’t explain why his brother ordered the attack.”

  “The Khameneis control Kish Island. Do you understand what that means? The family has enriched itself from smuggling and the other criminal trades that flourish there. But lifting the UN sanctions started to hit their interests hard. So many items once available only through their black market became legal again. Our people became accustomed to a better economy and so had less of a stomach for the hard-line policies of our government.” Ebtekar pointed at the closed metal door. “A few years ago, that man had Amiri negotiate a deal with the Russian military to buy those radioactive generators.

  “And that man”—Ebtekar hit the door—“had his people remove the strontium core from one of them and fashion a dirty bomb with it. He believed that setting one off on Israel’s soil would make Mossad lash out, and he was right. He believed that his brother would respond, attacking Israel through our Hezbollah allies, and the turmoil would restore the black market and thus his income and influence with the hard-liners. He did this for his own gain and power.”

  “But that would hurt your people—” Kyra started.

  “What do our elites care for the people? Do you think our leaders go hungry or worry about money? We do not feel such pain,” Ebtekar said. He put his hand flat on the metal door to the torture cell. “They care for power and that comes from money and fear. He was sure that attacking Israel would replenish both. The black market would grow strong again, the hard-liners would have an exc
use to start another round of arrests of the dissidents and the moderates, and his brother would approve of the money and control it ceded to their family. But he misjudged his own brother. Our leader is a religious man, pious but not a fanatic. He does hate Israel but not enough to start a war that would destroy all our progress.”

  Ebtekar held up a thumb drive and pressed it into her hand. “On this you will find recordings of our interrogations. Your CIA can verify that the man in the video is the supreme leader’s brother and that his suffering is not staged. You must show this to your president and he must show it to Gavi Ronen. The men who attacked Israel are no longer a threat and Mossad must stop killing our people. The supreme leader has declared that if Mossad kills one more of our people, bombs one more of our facilities, our retaliation will begin and Hezbollah will send rockets down on Israel like rain from Lebanon.”

  Kyra furrowed her brow, confused. “Why Gavi Ronen? Why not the prime minister?”

  Ebtekar smiled, an expression that Kyra found entirely unnerving. “Gavi Ronen,” he said again, as though the man’s name explained everything. “I am not offering an ultimatum. I know my people. I am offering yours the only path that doesn’t lead to war. I cannot ask for your trust, but I must ask for your belief that I am not a liar.”

  Kyra took the thumb drive, looked at it, and closed her hands around it. She looked up at Ebtekar. “That’s not for me to decide,” she told him. “And I have a condition of my own.”

  “What is that?”

  “A few years ago, one of our officers went missing—Samantha Todd. Amiri said she ended up in Evin Prison. I want her released.”

  “I know of her detention. What you are demanding is not possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “I will show you.”

  • • •

  Ebtekar led her out of the building, up the winding staircases, and through a cell block. Kyra saw almost no one on the way. The silence was disturbing, more than any nightmare she could ever remember. Evin Prison was a monument to misery and cruelty and there was a dark spirit about the place that seemed to stain her soul just by standing inside it. She could not imagine how it must feel to be so cold inside, that one could visit such a place and not feel horrified. Just the sounds she had heard were trapped inside her mind and she couldn’t get them out.