Operation DOUBLEPAYBACK

by Jack Freeman

  Some hours later, Max and Lola left the train at Kings Cross station. Ali saw them emerge from the train and leave the station. But where was Finlay? Something had gone wrong.

  Max and Lola parted outside the station. Lola was over-nighting in the Ritz before taking the transatlantic flight to New York City and on to Los Angeles. Max returned to Azar with a suitably edited version of events and phoned Jack with the gist of the encounter with Finlay. Max tried a tiny portion of the concoction from Finlay’s syringe but disappointingly, it seemed to only have narcotic effects. Company boffins confirmed it was a powerful anaesthetic rather than a psychedelic agent. Again, he thought, they didn’t want to kill me right away, probably wanted to abduct me, then pump me for info and then, no doubt, get rid of me. Finlay must have had accomplices, maybe at the London end. Guess, they will come again. These guys don’t quit.

  Months later a badly mangled skeleton was found by a maintenance crew in the long Grantham tunnel on the East Coast Mail line.

  Chapter 19 Mohsan and the end of the world

  Early in September 1962, Jack called Max on the telephone.

  “Hi Max. Can you talk freely right now?”

  “Hey, Jack. That sounds ominous. But, yes, Azar is in the shop and out of earshot if that’s what you mean,” replied Max.

  “Ok. I need to meet you. Can you come to the gardens in front of the Embassy at noon today? Alone. This is not one for Azar and actually don’t even tell her we are meeting.”

  “Right. I’ll make up some bullshit excuse to go out and see you shortly. Needless to say, you’ve got me worried.”

  “Ha, that’s the idea, buddy. See you soon.”

  Max walked into the garden a few hours after the call, with some trepidation, as Jack’s calls nearly always meant serious trouble was on its way. He saw that Jack was already there on a bench on the south side of the gardens. Jack felt uneasy about seeing Max, following his one afternoon stand with Azar. Although he wanted badly to make love with her again, the opportunity had not arisen since that eventful day in August. Despite these complications, professional work had to go on and once more national security needed Jack to work jointly with Max and Azar.

  “Hi Jack,” said Max, “what is it this time? Its always bad news when you call, it seems.”

  “You’re right about that, this time anyway. It’s a tricky one. Basically, your young brother-in-law, Mohsan, has gone off the rails in New York City. Someone took a pot-shot at Kermit Roosevelt the other day and fortunately they missed. From the bullets though, we traced the gun to one owned by Mohsan.”

  “Shit. Well maybe somebody got hold of one of his guns. He had a big armoury in his place in LA. Maybe he took it with him to New York and some of it fell into the wrong hands.”

  “Well, he’s gone to ground and we can’t seem to track him down which isn’t a good sign. We have picked up whispers that there’s a new radical group forming called the New RPI that thinks the original RPI have gone soft and he may have got involved with them. Your old friend Ali Saeed is leading the new group and it seems he has forgiven Mohsan and taken him back in to the fold. Probably hoping to use him as a double against us.”

  “That could be. But there’s been a big clamp down in Iran and a lot of students, probably including friends of Mohsan have been rounded up, tortured and probably shot or hung. That could have re-radicalised him. He may have really gone back as a true believer once again.”

  “Yeah, maybe. Another factor is, we hear he had been getting more and more into serious drug use, cocaine and heroin, so that could affect his judgement and lead him into criminal ways on top of radical politics. What we are wondering is, if you and Azar could go and find him in New York, see if we can put him back on track? We can have you make a high profile visit. Give interviews on TV and radio. You got permission to prepare your memoirs a while ago. This could be a time to plug them and maybe Mohsan will make contact at least to see Azar.”

  “Well, that’s an idea and sounds worth a try. It maybe will force me to get some of the memoirs in order. I will focus on the earlier, more positive stuff, and not give too much away. I know someone in the movie biz who might be interested in picking up movie rights.”

  “Hah, the lovely Lola no doubt. I know all about that young lady. Better play things carefully there. I don’t think Azar would let you off penalty free if she finds out you’ve been playing away. There’s something I have to tell you about Lola. You won’t like it, but it’s for the greater good, so here goes. Lola is a long time Company asset. That time you met up after the Kidd case in Cuba was no accident. You were really shook up and we thought you might go amok and leak all over the place, so it was best that you were looked after with one of ours. It would have been bad if you got in trouble with a KGB hired beauty, say, and we felt you were vulnerable at that point. We’d used Lola for honey trap ops in LA and she had always done a good job there. By the way, she gave you high in-sack ratings first time round. The second time in Edinburgh was a set up, too. Oh, by the way, your ratings weren’t so high that time. Thing is, we wanted extra leverage on you, so we tried another honey trap with Lola again and it worked. If you stop being agreeable to our suggestions for little ways you can help your old Company, we have plenty pics of you in hard-core graphic action with Lola that we can show Azar, and I don’t think you’d want that. So, we are pretty sure you’ll go along with the current plan.”

  “Shit. Johnson, you are a bastard. I should have known it was all a bit too easy. I did get smitten with Lola, but you’re right, I don’t want to split from Azar. I am a weak vessel and that’s for sure. Ok. Warning taken. I will be very careful about the Lola cover up. Still, I just got to come up with a way of breaking this new Mohsan issue to Azar. I guess you are leaving that to me and that’s another reason you didn’t ask her along to this meeting.”

  On getting back to the Judd Street book store, Max explained the acceptable gist of Jack’s message to Azar.

  “Well,” said Azar, “it could work. Mohsan hasn’t been in touch for a long time and I was getting worried. Unfortunately, he has always been a bit erratic and impulsive. He may have flipped, as you say, after the recent crackdowns in Tehran. I can put some small ads asking him to contact us, in the New York papers, and hope he sees them and responds when we get there. He may see you on TV or hear you on radio there, pitching your memoirs, and be inspired to make contact by that too.”

  Two weeks later Max and Azar were staying at the Waldorf-Astoria courtesy of the Company and Max was lined up for a series of TV, radio and press interviews ostensibly to promote his forthcoming memoirs, Secret Cold War, and stimulate an auction for rights. Azar had put small advertisements in the New York Times, the New York Post and the Village Voice asking Mohsan Rumi to contact AB or MB care of the Waldorf-Astoria between Oct 20th and 31st, 1962.

  For the first two days, Max was tied up with interviews at the CBS Building on West 52nd Street. Inside the “Black Rock”, as the building was known, were many studios and offices in which he was interviewed by a range of media. Max promised listeners and viewers that the memoirs would be as exciting as any James Bond book, but crucially, would be real and would reflect well on their nation, in its epic struggle against the world wide Communist movement and other enemies of freedom. He gave out a very few carefully rationed anecdotes saying that most stories would have to await publication. Max’s agent, Ed Sloane, reported a good flow of serious inquiries and he was hopeful a bidding competition would get going in earnest by the end of the week.

  Meanwhile, Azar was mainly waiting by the phone in their suite for a message from Mohsan and checking frequently with Reception. She was trying not to think of Jack and what they had done together and to focus on the task in hand but found it difficult having little to do but wait. A thought occurred to her. If Max could write his memoirs maybe she should do the same one day. So she began making notes on what she could recall of her childhood in Iran, the birthday parties, the elegant soir
ees that her parents held, the riots in the streets, the fall of Mossadegh, the return of the Shah, her parents flight and her time with her aunt and uncle, then university, protest meetings, speeches, and falling for Max at the Peace Corps HQ. That was followed by her being jailed by Savak and Max’s rescue of her. Next, came their journey to London, the bookshop, the RPI business, her first killings, the island raid, then LA and more killing, her rescue of Max. That meant they were even. Now she could add the affair with Jack which was on hold but by no means over and new trouble with Mohsan. Forever, a boy and a burden as an old saying had it. Maybe she could add in her story with Max’s as a joint memoir? However, she was sure he wouldn’t want that, as he had more than enough with all his pre-Iran actions to fill a large tome.

  Azar jotted down details of these memories in a secret notebook while waiting by the phone over several days but she heard nothing until the morning of October 23rd when a message was left at Reception saying “Meet tonight, 9.30 pm on the sidewalk at the Manhattan end of Brooklyn Bridge , west side. Urgent. M.”

  Later that morning, Jack Johnson phoned urgently for Max who was at the hotel.

  “Max,” said a stressed sounding Jack, “Have you seen the news yet? The Sovs have loaded Cuba with nukes on missiles pointing right at us. It’s a massive intel failure and heads are gonna roll again, if we aren’t all fried in WW3 first. As you’ll see in today’s New York Times, Kennedy’s ready for a showdown and you know what that means.”

  “Shit. You guys have screwed up royally, again! You can’t pin this one on me. Not this time. Well, I don’t suppose you will be that interested in hearing that Mohsan has made contact. We will be trying to see him tonight.”

  “Ok, but you’re on your own totally with this from here on. I’m at our new HQ in Langley, VA, and every officer is on the Cuba case now, trying to get some sense out of our Cuban and Russki assets. What are those guys playing at? They’ve gone way over all the red lines. We always heard Krushchev was unstable, and I know some of our own leaders are definitely nuts, so I don’t know where it will all end. Meanwhile, you sort out Mohsan as you see fit. If you decide to terminate him, go ahead.”

  “Well, ok, you’ve got your hands full. We hope there will be a peaceful answer with Mohsan. We’ve got all the equipment we’ll need here. Your guys had put guns, ammo and cash in the room safe for our arrival and that’s usually all we need. You might be interested to hear my memoirs promo tour is going well. If we all come through this Cuba missiles business, I’ll buy you a drink, despite everything between us.”

  “Ok, buddy. Say a prayer for us all. Can’t do any harm and might do some good! Keep me posted. Over and out.”

  Max collected the day’s newspapers from outside the hotel room door and explained the sudden darkening of the international situation to Azar.

  “Oh well,” she said, “neither side wants to get blown to bits, so I am betting they will sort something out.”

  “You are a great optimist. But there’s nothing we personally can do about nuclear war. If it all goes wrong, then being here in New York will probably mean a quick end by blast and heat. If we run away to the hills now and it goes off in a couple of days, then we’d have a slow end by radiation and that would be worse, I would think. The paper has helpful diagrams of what direct hits on the city would mean, which I suggest we don’t dwell on.

  Let’s just focus on the meet with Mohsan tonight. Suppose we take a hire car. We stop near the meeting spot and I get out and go to the rendezvous while you wait in the car and keep an eye on the scene. If all seems ok, I’ll bring him over and we can talk in the car. If he does something crazy like plugging me, what then? You can flee and you’ll know he has definitely gone over to the other side.”

  “You’ll forgive me if I can’t shoot my own brother…but I will disown him and have nothing more to do with him if he harms you.”

  “Well, that’s some consolation I suppose and you have my understanding in advance.”

  Max arranged a hire car for delivery to the hotel by 8 pm and chose a black 1962 Chrysler Imperial LeBaron; this had a powerful V8 engine and an abundance of chrome and fins. It seemed an indulgence suitable for these possible end-times. At 8.45 pm they set out for the rendezvous a short way south down 5th Avenue, Broadway, the Bowery and then onto the Bridge by 9.15 pm. There seemed to have been an unusual number of minor accidents attributed to drivers being distracted by the worrying news from Cuba, Washington and Moscow. To make matters more difficult a heavy fog descended over the river and cut visibility on the Bridge sharply. Max pulled up at the start of the Bridge where stopping seemed permitted.

  “Ok,” he said to Azar, “I’ll just be over there under that street light about 20 yards away and in front. If visibility gets worse pull up closer. You come over to the driving seat and be ready to move off, fast if need be. Here’s tonight’s guns.”

  Max opened the spacious glove box and took out two M 1911-A1 Colt .45 automatic pistols and magazines and handed one set to Azar.

  “These are ultra reliable but a bit heavy. You might have accuracy problems at over 20 yards range,” said Max.

  “Why? Because I’m a feeble girl, huh? We’ll see about that. Now go on and get to the rendezvous point,” replied Azar.

  Max went to the meeting point and stood under the lamp looking all round continuously and keeping the gun in his hand but hidden under his open coat. The safety was off.

  Then Max heard a sound of wheels approaching on the sidewalk and suddenly a black clad figure glided out of the fog and came to a racing halt in front of him.

  “Hi man, it’s me, Mohsan.”

  “Shit! You’re on roller skates. Didn’t expect that I must say.”

  “Yeah, quickest way to get around. But never mind the skates, I’ve got important stuff, urgent stuff to talk about. Is that Azar over there? Why is she in the car? Don’t you trust me anymore?”

  “Well, one of your guns took a pop at Kermit Roosevelt recently, so that did make us wonder, yes. Care to explain that? We’ll go over to the car and you can tell us there. Hope you will understand, but I have a Colt .45 automatic trained on you, so please don’t make any sudden moves. Better take the skates off.”

  Mohsan did as asked and put the skates in a shoulder bag from which he extracted shoes to put on his feet and they went over and into the Chrysler. Max gestured Mohsan into the back seat and joined him there keeping the Colt aimed at Mohsan the whole time.

  “Hi sister. Max here doesn’t trust me, I can tell.”

  “Well, you can’t blame him. You disappear and your gun comes up in an assassination attempt,” replied Azar.

  “You’ve got to believe me. Ali approached me a few weeks ago. Well, he and a couple of his thugs seized me off the street. I thought I was done for. But they said I could be saved if I worked with them and re-joined the revolution through their break away group. They pointed out that the Shah and his goons had tortured and killed more of my old friends while I was dallying with the reformers. So, the revenge motive was something I could find very persuasive. I decided to go along with them and infiltrate this New RPI group and I had to show good faith somehow. So I found out Roosevelt was visiting Albany so went up and loosed of a couple at his hotel window. That seemed to keep the New RPI happy although there was no real danger to Roosevelt. Still don’t like that guy, but killing him won’t change anything now. I’ve got some real big info in the last few days so that’s why I decided I better get back in contact with you both. ”

  “Ok. So, you’re infiltrating the New RPI and needed to appear to make an attempt on Kermit R. I guess that could be. But you say you’ve got something very big to tell us, so lets hear it now,” said Max.

  “You may not believe this, but it’s connected to the Missile Crisis. The New RPI group, under your old pal Ali want to do their bit for their Soviet friends by a little freelance meddling. There’s a Nuclear Power Plant just 24 miles north of New York City, the Indian Point Energy Cente
r on the east bank of the Hudson. The New RPI hope to hit that and set off cascading power failures through the East Coast plus cause general panic and mayhem as radioactive pollution is set loose from the plant, but their main aim is to precipitate nuclear war as the US would assume it was a Soviet plot and retaliate. Its crazy, but they really think the Sovs will win a nuclear war. If there is no US superpower left to prop him up, then the Shah falls and that’s all they care about. The better news is there are only six of them in this operational group including Ali so we can probably neutralise them,” said Mohsan.

  “This certainly is one of the craziest schemes ever. How do they propose to attack and disable the power plant?” asked Azar who was shocked at the folly and stupidity of the scheme.

  “Well, they have hired two small planes that they have for today and tomorrow. Two of the group can fly and will pilot these planes filled with commercial explosives and will aim them at the coolant plant. The pilots plan to bail out on the way and rely on auto pilots to take the planes in to the right coordinates. If the coolant supply is knocked out there will be a meltdown in the reactor leading to an explosion of superheated steam and release of radioactive material into the atmosphere. Oh, and the electricity supply over a vast area will fail and stay down for days or weeks,” explained Mohsan.

  “When is it supposed to happen?” asked Max.

  “They aim to take of from a small strip near Newburgh, that’s about 50 miles from here up the Hudson River Valley in New York State tonight at about 3 a.m. I tried to alert the Company and FBI but nobody paid any attention. Basically, you guys are the last line of defence,” said Mohsan.