She can’t be VEVAK, he told himself. Harel and the Mossad would have sniffed her out years ago . . . unless she’s just that good.
“Elinor,” he said softly, slipping his left arm around her narrow waist.
“Yes?” she said, still not meeting his gaze.
“Look at me.”
She hesitated a beat, and when she finally turned to look at him, he saw her eyes were rimmed with tears. There was no point in mincing words; he had to know the truth, and he had to know it right fucking now.
“Elinor, whose side are you on?” he asked, his voice low, calm, and steady.
A strange detached expression washed over her face. Then she started to laugh with a bizarre manic quality he’d never seen from her before. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
He was no headshrinker. Hell, he was probably about as far from a psychologist as a guy could be, but he knew a thing or two about wrestling demons. He knew about the corrosive impact of managing the stress, guilt, and anxiety that came with this line of work. And he’d seen guys crack from the pressure . . . not many, but enough. Elinor was cracking, and the timing could not be worse.
He swallowed and then carefully, gently reached up and wiped a tear from her cheek with his thumb. “Last night, you said we were kindred spirits. Do you remember that?”
“Yes,” she said, sniffling.
“Do you believe in destiny?”
“I don’t know. I never did before, but now . . . maybe.”
“Well, I do,” he said, looking deep into her eyes, trying to coax her back from the emotional hell her mind was drowning inside. “We found each other for a reason. You said it yourself: you needed me for last night. To give your father peace before he died. Now I need you to fulfill your end of the bargain. I need you to help me execute this mission for the same reason. Can you do that?”
“I think so.”
“Are we still a team?”
She nodded.
“Good,” he said and pulled her in for a hug. As he held her, he looked over her shoulder, scanning the crowd. Amir Modiri stepped into his line of sight, not ten meters away. Time slowed to a crawl. Their eyes met. A chill chased down Dempsey’s spine.
Then, the bombs went off.
Chaos erupted. People started screaming and running in all directions. It took Dempsey’s mind only milliseconds to register that the explosions were the nonlethal concussion-grenade packages that his three roving accomplices had been tasked with detonating when “the package”—Modiri—moved inside the target zone.
He released Elinor and vectored straight toward Modiri. As he started to run, he couldn’t help but wonder if the next thing he felt would be a bullet slamming into his back, fired from his partner’s gun.
“Rome, Tripoli—Crusader One has eyes on the package. Stand by.”
“Copy, One,” came Farvad’s voice in his ear.
His right hand found the grip of the pistol he had been given that morning and pulled it from the holster concealed under his untucked shirt. He sighted Modiri fleeing and holding hands with a woman in a turquoise headscarf and clothes matching those Elinor was wearing. He glanced over his shoulder to see if Elinor was with him and, to his relief, saw her sprinting at his side, lagging behind by only the length of a stride. Modiri darted down a narrow passage that intersected the main corridor. To Dempsey’s amazement, this action was exactly what they had hoped he would do, as this passage eventually bisected an alley used by vendors to park delivery vehicles and unload goods for transport into the Bazaar. This alley was where Farvad was loitering with the delivery van. Modiri and his female companion, however, were not the only ones fleeing to the alley. Dozens and dozens of people, both patrons and vendors, were stampeding that direction as well. People were screaming behind him. A middle-aged man running beside him tripped, smashed into Dempsey’s right shoulder, and then tumbled to the ground. Dempsey’s reflexes took over; he maintained his balance, hurdled the tumbling pedestrian, and kept on running. He heard Elinor grunt to his left. He glanced over his shoulder just in time to see her falling, her legs having gotten swept out from underneath her by the tumbling man.
“Go,” she shouted. “I’ll catch up.”
He looked forward and kept sprinting. His gaze swept the scene ahead until he spied the turquoise headscarf of Modiri’s companion. He was closing, and a surge of anticipation gripped him. After everything he’d suffered, Amir Modiri was finally within his reach. Someone was shouting in Farsi behind him, a deep baritone voice, but he ignored it. A beat later, the shrill staccato pulse of a police whistle being blown in successive bursts overpowered all the other noise. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw he was being pursued by a green-shirted security guard, blowing a whistle and waving a pistol at Dempsey’s back. This guy was a problem, and if he kept blowing that damn whistle, Dempsey would soon have an army of green-shirts converging on him.
Dempsey whipped his head back around to reacquire Modiri and caught a fleeting glimpse of the turquoise headscarf disappearing around a corner to the left, twenty feet before the alley.
Shit! Where are they going?
A gunshot rang out, and a bullet whizzed past Dempsey’s head.
Dumb move. Very dumb . . .
He veered left, spun on his left foot, and put a single round in the forehead of the guard, spraying the crowd behind the man with blood and brains. A second later, his legs were churning again at full speed back on course. He quickly reached the passage where Modiri had turned and skidded to a halt. As he took a knee at the corner, Elinor pulled up beside him clutching her Jericho 941 PSL. Dempsey popped his head out low for a split second to sight around the corner and then pulled it back.
“Clear,” he barked.
They rounded the corner in unison, him hugging the wall to the left, her sweeping to the right. The passage was oriented parallel to the alley where Farvad was parked, but it was shorter, coming to a dead end twenty meters ahead. A metal door slammed somewhere in front of them. He pointed two fingers at his eyes and then gestured to the second-story windows lining the building on the right side. She nodded and shifted her gaze upward to watch for snipers as he remained focused on the passage ahead.
Crowd noise from the corridor behind them was beginning to fade as they advanced farther down the narrow passage. He slowed as they approached a doorway on the right. The door was shut, and the doorway was too shallow to conceal a shooter. He tried the knob and found it locked. He glanced over his shoulder to check their six o’clock and, finding it clear, chopped a hand forward. They advanced to the next and final doorway five meters away, also on the right. He halted them at the threshold, but unlike the last door, this one was unlocked and slightly ajar. With hand signals, he instructed Elinor to clear right and he’d go left. Then, he whispered, “Three . . . two . . . one . . . go.”
He pushed the door open with his left hand and crossed the threshold, leading with the pistol in his right. Instead of opening into a room, the door swung open onto a landing at the top of a flight of stairs. A steady plume of smoke billowed up from below, and a red neon sign glowed at the bottom of the otherwise dark stairwell, creating a strange otherworldly vibe. His mind christened this the “stairway to hell” as he sighted down into the gloom. A sweet, fruity smoke filled Dempsey’s nostrils as he began the descent.
“What is this place?” he whispered.
“A hookah bar,” she whispered back.
Although he’d never partaken, Dempsey was familiar with Middle Eastern water pipes from his time in Afghanistan, where some of the village elders he’d met relaxed by smoking shisha tobacco. The thought of infiltrating a dark, smoky lounge where a posse of armed undesirables and Persian mafia could be hanging out did not sit well with him. He wasn’t kitted up, he had no team, no assault rifle, and his only backup was a double agent on the verge of a mental breakdown.
Fucking wonderful.
At the bottom of the stairs, they st
epped onto another landing and were met by another metal door. He paused and gestured for Elinor to open the door. For this breach, it was imperative that he was unencumbered and could lead with both hands on his weapon. There was absolutely no telling what was waiting for them on the other side, no telling how many shooters had guns trained on this door.
He took a deep breath and nodded at her in cadence to his internal countdown.
Three . . . two . . . one . . . go!
Elinor pushed the door open, and Dempsey charged into the room sighting over his Sig Sauer. Instead of gunfire, he was met by a room full of wide-eyed stares. A beat later, fear and confusion spread like electricity through the lounge as he swept the muzzle of his weapon systematically across the room searching for threats. A middle-aged Persian man sitting on a stool behind a counter said something to them in Farsi. Elinor barked a reply, and the man pointed to the far side of the room.
“They went through there,” she said to Dempsey, nodding at the darkened doorway on the opposite wall.
“I’ll breach, but you’ll have to cover our six. I don’t trust any of these guys,” he said, his gaze fixed on a young, burly Persian in the far left corner with hate burning in his eyes.
“Roger,” she said.
Dempsey moved with purpose across the dim smoking lounge toward the doorway, scanning right and left. Elinor fell in behind him, turned, and backpedaled to keep pace, allowing her to keep an eye on the room. When he reached the doorway, he found a black curtain instead of a door. He took a tactical knee, shielding as much of his body as possible behind the door frame, and drew the curtain aside. Standing inside this back room, shoulder to shoulder, he saw a man and a woman, both pointing semiautomatic pistols at him. The man was Amir Modiri, and he could now see that the woman was Modiri’s wife. From their body language, demeanor, and firing stances, he knew that both of them had field experience and had fired weapons under duress.
Two decades of experience as a Tier One SEAL—hard earned from conducting hundreds of compound raids, capture/kill operations, and hostage rescue missions—meant Dempsey knew immediately how this standoff was going to play out. The capture option was off the table. There was no time for deliberation. No time for second-guessing. No time for marveling that Amir Modiri—the villain responsible for taking away everything and everyone he’d ever loved—was finally standing in front of him. Only one man was walking out of this room alive, and that man was going to be John Dempsey. And so without a second’s hesitation, he sighted and squeezed the trigger—dropping the VEVAK Foreign Operations Director with a round to the forehead.
At the same time, Modiri’s wife fired two rounds at Elinor, hitting her in the back and sending her pitching face forward onto the floor.
“You have thirty seconds to escape, Mr. Dempsey,” Modiri’s wife said, lowering her weapon. “After that, I cannot save you.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, then looked down at Elinor, who was lying in a growing puddle of blood.
“She’s a spy. She works for my husband,” the woman said. “You have twenty-five seconds before my husband’s capture team figures out what happened and finds us.”
“If she works for VEVAK, then why did you shoot her?”
“Because today, VEVAK needs to lose.”
Dempsey slowly rose to his feet, keeping the muzzle of his Sig Sauer trained on the woman’s chest and using every ounce of willpower not to look down at Elinor. In this moment, his feelings for Elinor were irrelevant. She was a conflicted, compromised double agent, and no amount of self-debate was going to solve the mystery of where her loyalties truly lay in the next five seconds. He forfeited absolute control of his mind to the operator inside. The operator would complete the mission. The operator would do what needed to be done. John Dempsey could sort out his feelings in the aftermath.
“The door behind me leads to the alley where your driver is waiting. Go now or you die.”
“Your husband was my mission. Nothing else matters now,” he said, walking toward her.
“That’s not true,” she said, all the color having completely drained from her face. “My husband has tasked VEVAK operatives to deliver a tactical nuclear warhead to Hezbollah. They are going to blow up Tel Aviv. You are the only one who can stop it, because you are the only one I can tell . . . Twenty seconds.”
He looked into her eyes, and he knew with certainty she was telling him the truth.
“How do I find it?”
She squatted next to Amir and retrieved a tablet the size of a mobile phone. “There’s a convoy transporting the weapon somewhere east of Tehran. The warhead will be transferred to a less conspicuous courier somewhere prior to reaching the Syrian border, and from there it will be driven to Lebanon. Each warhead has a tracking transceiver. I don’t know how it works or if it is even still pinging. Take this and go,” she said and handed him the device, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Fifteen seconds.”
Dempsey glanced back at Elinor, who was still writhing on the floor.
Soldier up, barked the voice inside his head. She’s a traitor, and you—you can die another day.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked, turning back to face the woman.
“Because the time has come for the vendettas of a few angry men to no longer determine the fate of millions of innocents. Now go—stop World War Three.”
Dempsey’s legs were already moving before he’d made the conscious decision about what he should do. He ran past Amir Modiri’s dead body and the sobbing widow to the back stairwell leading up to the alley. He took the stairs two at a time, sprinting toward the top. He reached the top landing and barreled out the door into the blinding light of day. Squinting, he scanned the alley and saw Farvad waving frantically at him from the driver’s seat of a white delivery van. The sliding side door of the van was open.
Gunfire popped behind him, reverberating up the stairwell.
Dempsey charged toward the van and dove headfirst into the rear cargo compartment as the van was already pulling away. He rolled and spun around, then slammed the slider door shut. He wanted desperately to look out the back window, but he resisted the compulsion, rolling onto his back to lie on the floor as they sped away.
“What happened?” Farvad yelled over his shoulder.
“It went bad,” Dempsey said, dropping the Irish accent and clutching his head with both hands. His heart burned with angst at his having abandoned Elinor bleeding to death on the floor. SEALs didn’t leave anyone behind. But spies and assassins—like the operator he had now become—did whatever the mission required. “They’re dead, Farvad . . . They’re all dead.”
CHAPTER 37
The Grand Bazaar
Cyrus stared down at the young woman in the turquoise hijab bleeding on the floor of the hookah bar.
“Help me,” she gasped, her eyes pleading.
He’d never seen this woman before. She might have been Persian, but also looked vaguely Jewish. It didn’t matter who she was; she’d be dead soon enough. He kicked what he assumed was her pistol well out of her reach and then stepped past her into the back room. Inside, he found his aunt Maheen standing over the fallen body of her husband, clutching a pistol with tears streaming down her face.
“Was it you? Did you kill Amir?” Cyrus asked.
“No. Despite everything, I loved him too much to pull the trigger,” she said.
“The American did this?”
She nodded.
“But you let him?”
She nodded.
“Why? I don’t understand.”
“Do you know why we never had children?” she asked, her voice catching in her throat.
“Because you were too busy with your careers.”
“No,” she said, laughing and crying at the same time. “It was my fault. Due to a genetic defect, my body was not able to conceive and carry children. But standing here, looking at you, the last Modiri, I’m grateful for my curse.”
Cyrus shook his head, staring perp
lexed at the woman he’d secretly adored his entire life and now felt nothing for but contempt. “What are you talking about, woman?”
“You and your brother were my surrogate children. Your mother was like a sister, your father like a brother, and I loved all of you. But Amir drafted every Modiri male into service—service of an agenda of hate, murder, and revenge. Amir destroyed your family . . . our family. If we’d had children of our own, he would have conscripted them and I would have lost them, too. I tried to stop him with you, but he wouldn’t listen. I tried to give you a way out before it was too late, but you’re just as stubborn and deluded as he is.”
She raised her pistol and leveled it at his chest.
He narrowed his eyes at her and then reciprocated. “You won’t shoot me . . . just like you couldn’t shoot your own husband.”
She was crying now, her shooting hand bobbing with each sob.
He heard the sound of tires squealing and an engine roaring to life. That’s when he noticed the staircase behind her. This entire conversation had been a ruse, a delay tactic to give the American time to escape.
Tricky, tricky bitch.
He squeezed the trigger twice and dropped her with a double-tap to the head. He walked over to her body, spat on her corpse, and said, “You’re a traitor. You’re not a Modiri in death, and you never were in life.”
He charged up the back staircase and burst through a door into a brightly lit alley, but the American was nowhere in sight. He lowered his head in defeat. Thanks to Maheen, the American had won, and there was nothing he could do now to settle the score.
Then he remembered his mission, the mission he was supposed to be executing right now.
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