The Natanz Directive

by Wayne Simmons

  The address I was looking for was a small market a half block farther on, located on the bottom floor of a forlorn two-story building. Long ago, that address had housed the Casbahye-Sorkh—the Red Casbah—one of the fanciest and hippest nightclubs this side of Bangkok. Now it was a freshly painted concrete shell with a colorful sign inviting locals to shop for the kind of things you might find in a 7-Eleven back home.

  I looped my backpack over my left shoulder, keeping my right hand free, and crossed the street. A woman in a head scarf with grocery bags dangling from each hand hustled out the market’s entrance, and I held the door open for her.

  I crossed the threshold and halted. I peaked over the rims of my sunglasses and kept my face hooded by the bill of my baseball cap. Rows of canned goods and bags of rice crowded the shelves. A cooler filled out the far wall and glass doors opened onto milk cartons, water bottles, and soda. Fresh vegetables and fruit were arranged on a center island across from the counter.

  A video camera faced the entrance and reminded me that there was always someone watching. It was virtually the same in every grocery store, train station, bank, coffee shop, and church in every major city in the world these days. All in the name of “national security,” two words whose definition had been manipulated to fit the call of a thousand politicians. How often I cringed when I heard people say they’d be willing to give up a “couple of freedoms” to feel more secure. Stupid, fearful sons-a-bitches didn’t realize that it was their freedoms that spelled out their security, not the other way around.

  I stepped up to the cash register. A swarthy-faced man about my age gave me a nod. He had flecks of gray in his curly hair, a broad nose, and even broader shoulders. Twenty years ago, he’d probably been a bouncer or a jackhammer operator.

  “May I help you?” He spoke Farsi, and I was only half sure I’d heard him correctly.

  “Leila Petrosian?”

  The man’s eyes widened when he heard Leila’s name, and he pinned me with the kind of glare that was one part suspicious and one part highly protective. “Who’s asking?”

  “A friend.”

  “A friend? I know all of Leila’s friends. You aren’t one of them.” He reached for the telephone.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” I warned in English.

  “No? And why not?” the man answered in English.

  “Because it would ruin his welcome,” a woman’s voice informed him. The owner of the voice stepped through a curtain that separated the front of the store from the back. As sleek as a dancer, as strong as an athlete. Blonde hair curled around brown eyes that stunned you with their radiance.

  Leila Petrosian.

  If anyone would know where Charlie Amadi was, it would be Leila.

  CHAPTER 14

  TEHRAN, IRAN—DAY SIX

  Leila Petrosian’s pillowy red lips curved into a where-have-you-been? smile. I took off my sunglasses, folded them into my shirt pocket, and tried my best to match her expression. It had been a long time. And our relationship was exactly the kind that made it as hard to be together as it was to be apart. I didn’t know how else to describe it.

  Life in Iran might not have been kind to Leila, but the years had. Her skin was as smooth and flawless as ever, and the voluptuous curves she had flaunted as a young cabaret dancer made a simple cotton dress look like a fashion statement in a magazine.

  “You look…” I paused, sifting through any number of adjectives that seemed inadequate.

  “Amazing?” She tried to help, and her smile told me she was teasing.

  “I was thinking sensational, but amazing works, too,” I said, smiling with genuine enthusiasm. This was the best I’d felt since leaving Washington, D.C.

  I had met Leila three decades earlier, when she worked the floor show at a club called Sitta Al Sa’if. She was married. So was I. Back then, the nightclub scene in Tehran had made it a mecca of entertainment. Leila had proved as agile with money as she was in dance slippers, and by the time she was twenty-two she was part owner of the Red Casbah. But when the shah was chased out, the mullahs took over and shuttered all the nightclubs for inciting immoral and dangerous behavior. Immoral? Yeah, well, that might depend on your perspective, I suppose. But dangerous? The most dangerous things to come out of a night at the Red Casbah were hangovers and regrets.

  The religious police raided Leila’s club—the pious hypocrites had been some of her best customers—and when the raids couldn’t shut her down, the government stepped in. They confiscated her bank accounts. They dumped her liquor stock down the sewer. They issued a warrant for her arrest. What kept Leila out of prison were her connections to the Armenian community. We tried staying in touch. I couldn’t get in back in those days, and she refused to leave. She once told me, “If I give up on my country, I give up on myself. The same way you feel about America.”

  After that, we met maybe a dozen times or so over the years. By then, she was a divorced woman. She wanted more from our relationship, but it wasn’t possible. We didn’t talk much about life under the heel of the Islamic regime, but every once in a while she’d tell me things. About the oppression. About the mood of the people. About the dwindling opportunities. It wasn’t pretty. A land of progress and prospects had spiraled into a land of tyranny and stagnation.

  I knew how risky it was meeting her like that. Risky for me, even more risky for her. But it was hard to resist. Here was a woman who made every day seem like a brush with spring. I hadn’t seen Leila for ten years, not since surviving an assassination attempt in Kazakhstan. After that, I was called home permanently. I sent letters for a year, but she never returned them. I didn’t hold it against her. There was no future. There never had been.

  And now she was three feet away, and all I could do was stare.

  The sparkle in Leila’s eyes burned as mischievously as ever. The dress she wore hardly accommodated the Islamic dress code—Leila had no patience for the sad attempt of men to hold women to some standard they would never tolerate for themselves—and the way the fabric clung to her was a three-alarm fire waiting to happen.

  “Rahim,” she said to the muscle-head attending the cash register. “If anyone comes looking for me, tell them I’m out running errands.”

  Rahim shot me a jealous glare. I didn’t need another enemy, so I said to him, “Relax. I’m just a guy visiting an old friend.”

  Leila held the curtain open and beckoned me through. I followed her down the hall, trying my best not to get distracted by the obvious distractions of her exceptional legs and firm, round bottom. The hall doglegged around the corner, and she glanced back at me, her grin just a bit mocking. “Just an old friend, huh?”

  “He didn’t look like the kind of guy you’d want to piss off,” I replied.

  “Rahim is very protective, that’s all.”

  We approached a shelf stocked with bags of rice and cans of mango juice. Leila grasped a bracket on the shelf and pulled. The bracket clicked and the rack of shelves swiveled, revealing a secret door. She passed through, and I followed.

  We entered a room furnished like a miniature Fifth Avenue lounge. A narrow wooden bar, polished within an inch of its life, ran across the far wall. It was backed by a beveled mirror, and bottles of top-shelf liquor were arranged in front of the mirror. A velvet love seat and leather chairs were positioned over a Persian carpet. Soft light spilled from wall sconces made of smoked glass. Leila swiveled the secret door closed again and turned a dead bolt.

  I took in the room and tried to make sense of it. “Side business?”

  “I supply beverages of the alcoholic kind for private entertaining,” she told me. “You don’t think running that little store pays the bills, I hope?”

  I dropped my backpack onto a chair. Leila glanced at it but knew me well enough not to ask. Instead, she stepped close and clasped my hands. Her eyes smoldered with a look that brought back memories of long, sleepless nights and sweaty bedsheets.

  “Jake, I missed you.”

  It wo
uld have been so easy, and so wrong. I had Cathy, kids, and a life that had taken me far from the world I had known for all those years. Still, I told Leila what she wanted to hear, and maybe what a part of me still felt. “I missed you, too.”

  She squeezed my hands and gave me a perceptive grin. “Thanks for saying that.”

  Then she let go and leaned against the bar. She studied me now with the eyes of a long-time survivor of turmoil and uncertainty. “Okay, now that we’ve got that out of the way, tell me what brings you to Tehran? Business?”

  “Business,” I said, gazing at the bar and the bottles. Liquor was contraband—strange for a city that had once been the cosmopolitan rage of the Middle East—so it was a safe bet that she was buying wholesale from someone with his hands deep in the smuggling business. And no one had his hands deeper in the rackets than Charlie. “I’m looking for Charlie Amadi, Leila.”

  “Charlie!” Leila chuckled. Then the chuckled faded, and her eyes flashed with an odd and enticing mix of concern and interest. “Why in the world would you have business with a man like Charlie Amadi?”

  “I need his help. It’s important.”

  “Important how?”

  “I’m back on the job.” She at least deserved a certain amount of honesty. “Where can I find him?”

  “You can’t. He finds you.”

  “I don’t have that kind of time. Make it easy on me and tell me where he is.”

  “Charlie doesn’t like surprises, Jake.”

  “He’ll make an exception for me. We go back a long time.”

  Curiosity and surprise fanned out around Leila’s eyes. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Back when we were both young and stupid.”

  Leila turned and stared at her reflection in the mirror. It was like she was trying to put together the pieces of a puzzle I had just scattered across her already difficult life. After a long moment, her gaze slid to mine, and I could see she’d made a decision.

  “He lives just east of Azad University on Malek. Very private. Very tight security,” she said. Then she raised her shoulders in a reluctant shrug. “But this time of day you might just find him at the Park of the Reluctant Martyrs.”

  “Why there?”

  She grinned. “There’s a playground there. And swing sets.”

  “Charlie has grandkids!” Now I was grinning.

  “I can drive you.”

  This brought me back to reality in no uncertain terms. “No,” I said firmly.

  She smiled at me, her head just slightly tilted to one side, like a statue filled with inspiration and sympathy. “I always liked your business, Jake. It was a business with a purpose. And I always liked the fact that you’d do whatever it took.”

  “Leila…”

  “I know why you’re here.”

  “No, you don’t.” I didn’t want her to know why I was here. I didn’t want her to know that my mission was to secure evidence worthy of an attack on her country. But then maybe it wasn’t her country anymore, not really, not the one she grew up loving.

  She touched my cheek. “I’ll get my wrap.”

  It wasn’t a wrap that she reached for but an abaya hanging behind the bar. It was black and gray and hung to the floor like a cloak. She made it look almost fashionable. It wouldn’t stop people from seeing her with a man who had been banned from Iran many years ago, however.

  “I have a car out back. It’s not much, but it’ll get us where we’re going.” She pointed to a door set against the opposite wall. “This way.”

  I picked up my backpack. The door led to a dimly lit hall that exited into a narrow alley. A gray Toyota Camry was crunched against the wall, leaving just enough room for another vehicle to slide by. There were five or six other cars parked exactly the same way up and down the alley. It was already hot and the air smelled of curry. I covered my head with my baseball cap and put on my sunglasses.

  “I’ll pull out,” she said, sliding into the driver’s seat. I watched her move with a light step and purpose. Then I searched the alley as far as my eyes would take me. I didn’t want this woman’s life in my hands. I didn’t want her anywhere near my business. I wanted her safe and sound in her run-down store with Rahim watching over her. But I also saw that there was no way to say no to her.

  She inched to the center of the alley. I opened the door and settled onto the passenger seat, the backpack on the floor between my cross-trainers.

  As we eased down the alley, I flashed back momentarily to the bar and the wall full of liquor that Leila called her primary source of income. Liquor was banned under Islamic law, which made it a profitable commodity. It was a numbers game. A good $750 million worth of booze was smuggled into the country every year, but the government managed to track down only a fraction of that. I had to wonder if an operation as open as Leila’s seemed to be benefiting from some type of protection. And if so, who was she beholden to?

  Leila glanced over at me. She shook her head, as if she knew what I was thinking. “You’re wondering about my place, aren’t you? I’m small potatoes, Jake. Just a lady trying to stay above water. Half of my clients work for the government, so I guess they could shut me down in a heartbeat.”

  “But why would they?” I said.

  “They’ve got a lot bigger problems than a renegade dancehall girl with a couple of bottles of whiskey behind the bar.” She steered the car out into a steady flow of traffic. “You trust me, don’t you, Jake?”

  “I don’t trust my own shadow, Leila,” I replied. “But you I trust.”

  She smiled, but it was a sad smile. “Buckle your seat belt,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I pulled out my iPhone and sent General Rutledge a quick text. Still alive and kicking. I sent the same message to DDO Wiseman. I wasn’t giving anything away. He would assume I was in Tehran, but Tehran was a very big city. I had no intention of mentioning Charlie Amadi to anyone, not even to Mr. Elliot. But then, Mr. Elliot would expect no less. “Need to know” was not just a cliché made famous by B-movies; it was a hard-and-fast rule in the world of black ops. Location was always a “need to know,” because the fewer people who knew your location, the less chance you had of getting dead.

  I changed apps. I used an NSA satellite app called Eyes to zero in on the Park of the Reluctant Martyrs. I didn’t get the name. Wouldn’t all martyrs be reluctant? Well, maybe not in a land of suicide bombers.

  Eyes gave me a bird’s-eye view of the park; it was real-time information, and the oblong terrain was filled with people. Too many. I don’t know what I was hoping for. Maybe Charlie and a couple of grandkids doing their thing on the swings, all alone and waiting with bated breath for Jake Conlan to make a much-anticipated appearance. It looked like Grand Central Station. How many of them were Charlie’s muscle only time would tell.

  “Busy place,” I said. “Don’t people have anything better to do on a Wednesday afternoon?”

  I zoomed in. Eyes allowed me to troll the park by using a series of walking paths to block out a manageable grid. It was obvious. Six guys standing like statues around the perimeter of a grassy knoll along the park’s west side, with a sizable lake protecting the knoll to the east. They were either bodyguards or trolls. I was betting on the former.

  Charlie hadn’t stayed long in the United States after I’d saved his life nearly thirty years earlier. But he’d stayed long enough for the two of us to forge a working relationship. I never intended to use Charlie for anything more challenging than being the occasional bagman. Not because he wasn’t capable. He was more than capable. The bag work was more or less my way of sending up a test balloon. I’d always wondered how light the satchels of cash would be after they passed through his hands. Every shipment came out to the dollar. He’d smuggled kilos of cocaine and heroin. Each and every time, every gram was accounted for at its destination. What I wanted from Charlie was intel. You get intel in small amounts just by being in the right place at the right time, but you can pile up the in
tel by the bushel if you get the right people to trust you.

  Charlie began to trust me. I was a good teacher. What I taught most effectively was the art of survival. He learned it quickly. He became an expert in how to watch his back and cover his tracks. For his part, Charlie was an accepted cog in the Iranian drug cartel. He knew people. He was the son of the Iranian prime minister, himself a rogue of some note, and so he’d landed in the States knowing people. No one questioned his loyalty because of his pedigree.

  After two years of milking Charlie of as much intel as possible, I suggested he return home. The operation targeting his people was coming to a head. When the shit hit the fan, he didn’t want to be anywhere near New York or D.C. or any other place on the East Coast.

  So he left with his very pretty wife and two beautiful kids and a serious knowledge of the streets. He used it to build a fortune in Iran. Drugs, alcohol, and arms. The big three. Then he diversified, smuggling in everything from electronics to foodstuffs. Then he learned to convert his profits into property on three continents.

  Now he had grandkids and spent his afternoons in the park. Fair enough. I figured he owed me for his good life, and now it was time to cash in.

  “How well do you know this Park of the Reluctant Martyrs?” I asked Leila as she steered the car into a commercial neighborhood crowded with shops, cafés, and streams of pedestrians.

  “Well enough,” she said. She glanced down at my iPhone. “Have you found him?”

  “West side. Near the lake.”

  “Then the west side near the lake it is,” she said.

  We rolled to a stop at a red light. Downtown Tehran could have been a major downtown in any metropolitan city except for the number of police. And you might have been able to overlook that had it not been for the soldiers. And if you were really willing to turn a blind eye, maybe you could even ignore the fifteen- and sixteen-year-old kids armed with batons and clubs and strutting through the streets with orders to attack anyone who looked even remotely like a demonstrator.