Killer Instinct

by Patterson, James

  Something he didn’t want her to see.

  Elizabeth edged forward in her chair and dropped a hand to her side, slowly tucking her blazer back behind her Glock. Her fingertips tap-danced on the grip as if keeping time. Any sudden move. That’s all it would take.

  How long can someone go without blinking?

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  Gorgin had said something. She didn’t hear him.

  “I said, you’re awfully quiet over there, Agent Needham.”

  He began to turn. There was something in his hand.

  No. Both hands.

  CHAPTER 39

  TEACUPS. HE was holding the teacups.

  He walked over, casually placing them on the table. One for her and one for him. Elizabeth didn’t look down at hers. She wasn’t about to take her eyes off this guy, not for a second. Not until she knew what the hell was going on.

  The answer was right in front of her.

  “The water should be ready in a minute,” said Gorgin, returning to the stove. He was talking over his shoulder. “My uncle says it’s best to pour from the kettle directly onto the tea bag.”

  Again, there was nothing in Gorgin’s voice. Nor was there any head nodding this time or anything approaching a signal.

  Still, Elizabeth heard him loud and clear. His instructions. She looked down inside the cup and literally read the tea leaves.

  They’re listening.

  Gorgin had written the two words on the tea bag in her cup. That’s what he’d been doing when he turned his back to her. Clever. If she’d seen him taking a pen to a tea bag, she would’ve asked what on earth he was doing. Not a good thing if someone was listening in—someone who probably didn’t want Gorgin talking to an agent with the JTTF.

  Elizabeth looked up from the cup, locking eyes with him as he leaned against the counter next to the stove. She nodded. Message received.

  Only who’s listening? Why the hell is the house bugged?

  Elizabeth quickly replayed the last few minutes in her mind. She’d told Gorgin who she was, but that was outside on the steps. Still, he’d referred to her as Agent Needham once she was inside. That couldn’t have been by accident. He wasn’t trying to pass her off as the Avon lady or a neighbor looking to borrow a cup of sugar.

  So now what?

  Elizabeth was about to motion for the pen. She would write out her questions, hopefully on something bigger than a tea bag. She wanted to ask how to play this out—should she inquire about the Mudir as intended or instead make up an excuse for her being there?

  It was as if Gorgin could read her mind.

  “So let me guess,” he said. “In the wake of the Times Square bombings, every Muslim in the tristate area is getting a house call.”

  “That would be a lot of house calls,” said Elizabeth.

  “You’re right. Make that young single men of a certain age who just happen to be practicing Muslims. I believe the word is profiling.”

  “That’s your word, not mine. It’s also not a word that the JTTF would use.”

  Gorgin gave her a thumbs-up. They were ad-libbing the script, but she was sticking to it perfectly. So was he. Whoever was listening needed to think that Gorgin would never crack under pressure. That he could take the heat. It was only fitting they were in a kitchen.

  Elizabeth still had no idea who this guy was or even what information she could expect to get from him, but there was no doubting the sense that he was someone she could trust. That was the point, right? It was why she’d been sent his way. Gorgin could help her.

  For a moment, she even stopped watching his hands.

  Oh, shit. No!

  No-no-no-no-no!

  CHAPTER 40

  EVERYTHING HAPPENED at once. The worst things usually do.

  The sound of the kettle whistling suddenly pierced the room, drawing Elizabeth’s eyes to the stove just long enough that she didn’t immediately see Gorgin’s right hand reach under the dish towel by the sink. He was already whipping his arm around toward her before she could reach for her holster.

  There was no catching up; he’d outdrawn her. There was no getting out of the way; he was too close.

  This is how I die.

  Elizabeth watched the barrel of his gun line up with her chest. All that was left for him to do was pull the trigger.

  But the barrel kept moving.

  She hadn’t heard the front door opening down the hallway. She hadn’t heard the footsteps. And she definitely hadn’t seen the man with the thick black beard entering the kitchen with an AK-47 trained at her head. But Gorgin had.

  Now he pulled his trigger.

  He got off two rounds. Maybe three. He only needed the first. It was a perfect kill shot to the carotid artery.

  The bearded man spun from the impact, his neck wildly spurting blood as he shifted his aim off Elizabeth and onto Gorgin. He was falling to the ground, his legs collapsing underneath him. Maybe he squeezed his trigger. Or maybe his finger just twitched. Either way, his AK-47 sprayed a line across the kitchen as he came crashing down with a thud.

  Elizabeth looked at him by her feet and then up at Gorgin, their eyes locking as they’d done before. His stare said it all. She didn’t need to see the two holes in his chest, the dark redness oozing and spreading across the front of his hoodie. She knew how badly he was hurt.

  Elizabeth sprang from her chair as Gorgin fell to the floor, gasping for air as he rolled onto his back. He was losing too much blood, too quickly.

  Grabbing the dish towel from the counter, the one that had concealed his gun, she tried to clamp the entry wounds, only the blood kept coming. It wouldn’t stop.

  Gorgin could barely speak but he wanted to. He needed to.

  “The house,” he said, his lungs wheezing. There was more to the sentence, only he couldn’t finish it. He blinked a few times as if trying to gather his strength. “The house … it’s wired.”

  “I know,” said Elizabeth. “You told me. They’re listening.”

  Gorgin reached up, his hand flailing as he tried to grab her arm. “No,” he said. “The house is wired.”

  CHAPTER 41

  WHAT GORGIN meant hit Elizabeth almost as fast as the smell.

  She first thought a stray bullet had pierced the stove and somehow triggered the gas. Except the smell wasn’t coming from the stove.

  She looked up. Oh, Jesus. It was so thick she could literally see it. The gas was pouring out from the air duct in the ceiling.

  Chemistry 101. The bomb ignites the gas, which levels the house and everything in it. There’s no evidence to be had. Or witnesses.

  “We need to get the hell out of here,” said Elizabeth. She started to slide one hand under Gorgin’s back, another under his legs. Could she even lift him? She had to try.

  “Don’t,” he said. “There’s no time.”

  “I’m not leaving without—”

  “Go.”

  Elizabeth coughed, her lungs burning. She could barely breathe. It was now or never.

  He had saved her life. There was no way she wouldn’t try to save his.

  “Okay, here we go,” she said, steadying herself to lift him up. “We can do this. Just stay with me.”

  She was so focused on his body, so consumed with mustering the strength to carry him, that she didn’t see his eyes. They were still staring at her, but it wasn’t the same. There was nothing behind them. He was gone.

  “Go,” he’d told her. The last word he would ever speak. Go.

  Elizabeth pushed herself up off the floor, stumbling as she began to run. She sprinted from the kitchen, the front door straight ahead down the hallway. On a dime, though, she stopped and looked back behind her. There was no time, she told herself. She did it anyway.

  Are you crazy? Are you insane? What are you doing?

  Elizabeth raced back to the bearded man in the kitchen. His gun would have his fingerprints. Better yet, was he dumb enough to have ID on him?

  She riffled through h
is back pockets. He was wearing cargo pants. There was no wallet. There was no anything. One pocket, then the other, came up empty as she continued coughing from the gas, her eyes stinging and tearing so badly she could barely see.

  Flipping him over in a pool of his own blood, she tried both of his pockets in front. Still nothing. She was about to give up when she spied another pocket—a small one on his T-shirt—with the slightest hint of a folded piece of paper sticking out. She grabbed it, checking to see if there was anything else with it. There wasn’t.

  Instinctively, Elizabeth began to unfold the paper to see what it was when she caught herself. Now, you really are insane. Get the hell out of here!

  She scooped up the AK-47 and raced down the hallway again. She could hear a siren off in the distance. A neighbor probably called 911 after hearing all the gunshots.

  Oh, crap! The neighbors.

  Flinging the front door open, she bolted down the steps and out to the street before turning back to see which neighbor’s house was the closest. It was no contest. There was a split ranch to the right less than twenty feet away from Gorgin’s house. If anyone was inside, she had to get them out of there. She was about to run.

  “Freeze!” came the man’s voice. He was behind her.

  Elizabeth froze. She had to. She literally had blood on her hands and was wielding an AK-47 in the middle of the street on the heels of shots being fired.

  Still, she tried to explain. “I’m an agent with—”

  “I don’t give a fuck if you’re the pope,” he barked. “Lower your weapon and lie down on the ground!”

  “There’s no time,” she said, pointing. “That house is about to—”

  BOOM!

  And, like that, they were both flat on the ground.

  CHAPTER 42

  “I THOUGHT this only happened in the movies,” I said.

  “What’s that?” asked Landon Foxx.

  “A couple of operatives meeting secretly in a Chinese restaurant.”

  “First of all, I only count one operative, and it’s not you,” said Foxx. “Second, the Chinese know how to do something that Americans don’t. Mind their own damn business.”

  Sure enough, the CIA’s New York section chief and I were standing in the back of a crowded kitchen during lunchtime in Chinatown, and not a single cook, busboy, or any passing waiter or waitress even glanced our way. As for Foxx’s jab about my no longer being an operative, I sort of leaned in on that one. Best to just take it on the chin and get to the point of my wanting to meet with him.

  “Is this woman with the Agency?” I asked, holding up a picture of Sadira Yavari on my phone.

  Foxx stared at her for a moment. He shook his head. “Not that I know of.”

  “Would you actually tell me if she was?”

  “Probably not,” he said. “In any event, this is the part where you tell me what you know about this woman and, more importantly, why I should know it.”

  Fair enough. “Professor Jahan Darvish,” I said. “Ring a bell?”

  Foxx nodded. “The MIT guy who died with a liquor bottle up his ass.” He said it so matter-of-factly you would’ve thought Darvish had died from something typical, like cancer or a heart attack.

  “This woman—Sadira Yavari—was with Darvish when he came back to his hotel the night of his death,” I said.

  “Was she his girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Escort?”

  “Nope.”

  “How can you be sure?” asked Foxx.

  I swiped left on my phone to a screenshot from the hotel’s surveillance footage. “That’s how,” I said.

  Foxx blinked a few times, taking it all in. I could see the questions lining up in his mind like planes on a tarmac. “Let’s start with this,” he said. “How are you even involved in this, Reinhart?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  “They always are.” He stared at the picture again, the glow around Yavari’s face. “How were you able to identify her if she was using Halo?”

  “That’s an even longer story,” I said.

  “Is there anything you want to tell me about this woman?” he asked. “Besides her name?”

  Yes, there was. Plenty.

  “Sadira Yavari was born in Iran—parents also Iranian, both deceased. Now a US citizen. Lives in Manhattan. Pays her taxes, clean record, never even jaywalked. She’s a philosophy professor at NYU.”

  “How many years?”

  I knew that would be his very next question. On the surface, it confirmed that Yavari wasn’t CIA—at least as far as Foxx knew, and Foxx knew most everything within the Agency.

  “Seven,” I said. “She’s been teaching at NYU for seven years.”

  “Who else knows she was with Darvish at the hotel?” he asked.

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  I cocked my head and stared at Foxx without saying anything. For a moment it was as if the entire restaurant kitchen had gone silent, all the banging and clanking of pots and pans, all the sizzling of oil, just fading away.

  He got the hint.

  I never liked the official motto of the CIA. Few people even know what it is. The Work of a Nation. The Center of Intelligence. It reads like it came from a junior copywriter on Madison Avenue. For sure, it didn’t originate from anyone who actually worked in espionage. But mottos are for flags and plaques. If you ever really wanted to summarize the work of the Agency—how critical information is actually gathered—there’s a far better expression.

  To get trust you have to give trust.

  Foxx was holding back. He wasn’t telling me something, and until he decided to spit it out, I was keeping my mouth shut. There’d be no more information from me. No more intel. Hence my long stare at him and, ultimately, his nod in return.

  “Okay, here it is,” he said finally. “Professor Darvish was an asset.”

  CHAPTER 43

  I KNEW IT.

  Okay, maybe it was more like a gut feeling. It had to be something like that, though. Foxx tipped his hand with the regularity of a solar eclipse, but the questions he had been asking—the way he had been asking them—it was as if he’d intended all along to bring me into the fold regarding Darvish.

  The Iranian nuclear physicist from MIT was an informant for the CIA.

  “We had the same surveillance footage from the hotel, but Halo prevented us from identifying the woman, although we sure as hell still tried,” said Foxx. He nodded with what felt like begrudging respect for me. “Well done, Reinhart.”

  Forget a solar eclipse. Foxx complimenting me? That was hell freezing over.

  “When was Darvish recruited?” I asked.

  “The summer of 2015.”

  “During the Iranian nuclear deal, in other words.”

  “Exactly,” said Foxx. “Among the working theories was that the Iranians would try to further their program in our own backyard while we were busy snooping around in theirs. Sure enough, they leveraged Darvish by threatening his parents and brother back in Iran.”

  “What about money?” I asked. “Did they also pay him?”

  “Handsomely, from what I understand.”

  I literally scratched my head. “Safety for his family and financial security to boot,” I said. “Why would Darvish risk that to become an asset?”

  “Because the even bigger risk was running an underground nuclear lab in the middle of Cambridge, Massachusetts. That, and maybe he had a conscience,” said Foxx.

  “What did he want in return?” I asked. “His family out of Iran?”

  “We offered that, but he was smart enough to know it still wouldn’t guarantee their safety or his. Turns out, he had something else in mind.”

  That meant only one thing. “To be a double agent, right?”

  “For lack of a better term, yes,” said Foxx. “Darvish would make periodic progress in his lab, except not quite at the rate he was fully capable of. Tehran remained satisfied, and meanwhile we w
ere able to monitor his handlers and learn what else they were up to. It had been working extremely well for us.”

  “And then along came a pretty woman,” I said. “Sadira Yavari.”

  “Darvish must have thought he’d hit the jackpot at first,” said Foxx. “He didn’t exactly look like Brad Pitt, in case you didn’t notice.” He chuckled to himself before turning to me. “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Bullshit.”

  He was right. I was trying to get a read on him. Was Foxx telling me the whole truth? “I was just wondering,” I said.

  “I know. How did she have access to Halo? I’m telling you, though, it wasn’t an inside job. Halo has been around for over a decade. Word was the Russians had gotten their hands on one of the necklaces and reverse engineered it about three years ago, and as you know, the Iranians get all of Putin’s hand-me-downs.” Foxx paused as if to stress the point. “This Yavari woman is not one of our operatives.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” he said. “But don’t just take my word for it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I think you know.”

  Unfortunately, I did. In Tony Soprano terms, Sadira Yavari was about to get whacked. “When?” I asked.

  “As soon as possible,” he said. “Newton’s Third Law. It’s the only thing the Iranians are capable of understanding.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Only that’s the part that doesn’t make sense. The Iranians discover that Darvish is an informant and they try to make his death look like an accident? They’d want you to know it was them, loud and clear.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  Foxx shook his head. “You’re going to have to do better than that, Reinhart. Speak now or forever hold your peace.”

  CHAPTER 44

  YOU CAN never fully rely on what any operative tells you, even if he is the section chief of the entire New York region. The reason I know this is because I was once an operative, too. It was my job to lie.

  But in the words of the British philosopher John Stuart Mill, There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life.