A Spy in the Shadows (Spy Noir Series Book 1)

by Randy Grigsby

  This is where she liked to end her day, at her desk in the villa office completing several phones calls demanding her immediate attention. Goli did her best thinking away from the stress of business, and prepared her papers for the next day’s work.

  Mahshid, her maid had prepared dinner. Bahbak, her beloved Anatolian Sheep Dog, lay on the steps waiting for her outside a double set of French doors looking out over a vast garden and swimming pool.

  She sat the papers on the desk and lit a cigarette, a habit she only entertained in private along with an occasional glass of wine. The papers contained numbers of all her vast financial holdings. The pipeline. Railways. Two newspapers. A staggering amount of wealth.

  But Goli found it hard to concentrate on business this afternoon.

  Going to the window, she held the cigarette close to her lips and stared across the lush garden and the gray mirror-still water of the enormous pool. She had received word that Booth Salinger was returning to Tehran . . . creating an anxious knot in her stomach. Goli never thought he’d come back. But she had never been able to predict the events of her life.

  Goli Hemmati was born in 1914 in Shiraz. Her mother was a soft-spoken woman who influenced her life more than anyone else, whose only demand on Goli was that she work hard in school. So, she was educated in a missionary school where she became fluent in English. Her father, a physician, whose first love was archaeology, died in 1939, the year she entered Tehran University and majored in Persian literature. After college, Goli took a job at Radio Tehran where her ability to speak English enabled her to become an assistant director of foreign news. And a brief stint with British Intelligence. Goli believed that she had found her life’s calling and concentrated on issues within Iranian society. Poverty versus wealth. Women’s rights. There were certainly enough issues to go around. It was during her research for one of those articles that her life changed unexpectedly and forever.

  She met Bozorg Faqiri.

  Fifteen years older than Goli, Faqiri was considered one of the richest men in Iran. He held controlling interest in railways, pipelines, in addition to owning a Tehran newspaper. It was rumored he had friends in both German and Soviet ranks as the war clouds gathered. There were also rumors that Faqiri was secretly involved in communist politics, and a strong influence in the underground movement preparing for a Soviet takeover of the country.

  He had spotted Goli in a staff meeting he attended one winter afternoon. Within six months, he promoted her to editor, for reasons she suspected even back then. There were the late meetings at the office, and then late dinners discussing the newspaper business. Gradually, the conversations turned to a more personal nature. It was then that Goli suspected he was in love with her.

  They married three months later, and he moved her out to his villa seven miles southwest of Tehran, giving her a luxurious lifestyle that she could have once only imagined. He also moved her mother out to the villa, where she lived until her death in January 1940. During the first year of their marriage Faqiri found that Goli had the natural ability of a leader. Her precise mind and straight-forward handling of situations impressed him so much that in the spring of 1940 Faqiri gave Goli the newspaper and under her leadership circulation and profits grew.

  Power and money gradually drew her away from her love for writing and literature. She felt the surge of power and authority as she worked with her husband controlling the destinies of the companies.

  Then events drastically changed her idyllic life. Her beloved husband was assassinated on the streets of Isafahan one morning in February 1942. He had been involved for weeks in the Soviet effort to encourage Kurdish separatists to join their movement. He had just returned from Baku where the Soviets had met with a group of thirty Kurdish tribal leaders when he made the fateful trip to Isfahan.

  Goli mourned for weeks.

  Then one day she decided that she had enough of self-pity and began working on a plan. She swore that the men who had killed her husband would pay, and she spent unlimited monies hiring investigators to find the murders. It was true that a man as powerful and rich as her husband had many friends and enemies, but who would go this far? It was reasonable for Goli to suspect the British and the Americans because of her husband’s Soviet involvement.

  Despite spending thousands, investigators found nothing.

  In an attempt to work through her loss, Goli threw herself into running the companies. It took her fourteen-hour days, learning whom among her managers she could trust. Gradually she took control of the vast financial empire. All the while, she waited patiently for that day when she could take out her revenge.

  ----

  At dusk, she had taken her customary walk in the cool desert air, accompanied by Bahbak at her every step, a stroll that always reinvigorated her. Then she took a swim in the pool and a hot shower before retiring once again to her office for some late night reading to prepare for the next day’s business meetings.

  ----

  Shortly after eleven a dull wash of headlights swung through the dark yard. Goli was still at her desk reviewing shipment figures involving her company in Isafahan. Bahbak barked until Goli opened the door and told him to be quiet. She stepped out into the cool night air and lit a cigarette.

  The headlights went out, and then the closing of a car door. Josef Shepilov walked up to her. “Am I too late for a nightcap?”

  Goli crossed her arms. ‘You must have important news to drive out here at this hour.”

  Shepilov shrugged, “Only information on the affair with the German commandos if you’re interested.”

  Goli opened the door. “Let’s get in out of the night air.”

  He was tall and thin with a strong smooth face and dark hair and dressed in a brown gabardine suit. A handsome man, Goli thought. And she was certain that he was in love with her. He took the chair opposite the fireplace.

  Somewhere in the Ural Mountains near a German colony, young Josef Shepilov learned to speak the language of Goli’s country at an early age. Once graduating from espionage school in Leningrad at the outbreak of the war, he became a Middle East specialist for the Soviet Secret Service. He was chosen to maintain surveillance of the German commandos almost from the moment they had parachuted into Iran, and reported directly to Stalin himself, ever since the Russian leader had arrived in Tehran. Shepilov had known Booth Salinger when they had worked together in the mountains rounding up fighters, but Salinger had no stomach for the brutal Soviet methods.

  For Goli, this man sitting in front of her fireplace—had promised her the one thing that had any meaning to her—he could provide the man who had ordered her husband’s death.

  Goli poured two glasses of wine and walked over to Shepilov. She handed him a glass then sat in the chair beside him.

  Shepilov took a sip, letting a moment pass. “There’s quite a stir about the murder of the British officer.”

  “I heard the rumors,” she said. “It would be a matter of time before they send Salinger back to investigate.”

  He cut a glance at her. “I would think you’d enjoy seeing him again.”

  “Only if it helps our cause, Josef, the past means nothing to me,” she said.

  “Should I really believe that?”

  Goli ignored his comment. “So, what have we learned of our German friends?”

  He balanced the wine glass on his knee. “Remarkable developments unfolding in your desert, seems the German parachutists did not use the airfields. The borders have been closed, along with telephone, telegraph, and postal communications, common tools utilized by German agents.”

  Goli had been aware of these measures taken by the Iranian government because they had affected the daily operational shipments of several of her companies. “Except for the most vital food supplies, all rail and road transports to Tehran have been stopped,” she said. “Also, air travel is detained, except for military and official aircraft.”

  He seemed surprised.

  “I own five companies ope
rating internationally,” she told him. “So where are our Germans?”

  “Between the twenty-second and the twenty-seventh, six German commando groups were dropped by parachute and landed safely near Qum. Another eight landed near Qazvin dressed in Russian uniforms, their task was to infiltrate among Soviet occupation forces and reach the city.”

  “So they have all been captured?”

  “Transported to Tabriz to be interrogated,” Shepilov said. Then he slowly smiled. “Except for the six . . .”

  “Is Heuss among the six?”

  “He is.”

  It was all she could do to hold the excitement in. “And you think—”

  “According to our intelligence reports, Heuss was in the group that attacked your husband’s party that morning. That’s exactly why he’s involved now . . . his experience in Iran.”

  Goli raised her glass in salute. ‘Your people have done an excellent job.”

  “There is one problem,” Shepilov said. “British Intelligence Service has been watching the German agents hidden in Tehran from the moment they arrived. If the British get their hands on them,” he said seriously, “that would defeat both of our purposes.”

  “You’re right of course, Josef, but give the German some credit, they’re good at these sorts of things. And there are certainly enough Iranians to give them assistance.”

  “But, if the British know where they are why haven’t they apprehended them?”

  “The British are good at this game, also,” Goli said. “They have wisely decided that if Berlin becomes suspicious in any way, their remaining agents disperse and evade capture.”

  “Where did they get that idea?”

  She smiled. “From me.”

  ----

  Later, when Shepilov had gone, Goli turned off the desk lamp, picked up a glass of wine and locked the French doors.

  She walked back through her office and went up a narrow set of stairs hidden behind the bookcases, and up to a cramped room, from which a small window overlooked the garden. She pulled a light cord hanging in the center of the room and sat in front of a radio set.

  She switched on the power button on the 301B Type 3 Mark V radio. SOE issue, British engineering. What a wonderful irony, she thought.

  Taking a sip of wine, Goli placed the headset over her ears, began adjusting the band wave knob. Static crackled over the headset, as she patiently swept the knob first right and then left. Voices came alive, and then faded away. In his own way, Shepilov underestimated her. He, along with others, couldn’t understand just how much she really knew.

  For Goli had learned patience in the mountains after her husband’s death. She had gone to the Kurdish tribal leader, a friend of her husband, and there she had stayed for two months. Adar, one of the best fighters, with piercing green eyes and coffee-colored skin, whose name meant ‘noble’, had taught her how to live off the land, how to kill one’s enemy, and yes, finally had taught her that love can come again even to a broken heart. Adar’s lesson on patience came later, when he told her that anything of value comes with those who set the trap and wait.

  How true, dear Adar, you taught me well. Patience was a virtue in the game she was playing. Goli smiled to herself. Patience and irony.

  NOVEMBER 27. SATURDAY

  -Ten-

  Tehran.

  Early Saturday morning, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt and their respective parties departed Cairo, a five-hour flight that took them directly over Jerusalem and Baghdad. Stalin waited for them having already arrived in Tehran two days before.

  With the arrival of the three most important leaders of the modern world converging on the city, security was a huge concern. Churchill himself had arrived among much fanfare, landing in Tehran met by the British Minister and driven from the airfield to the British Legation. As the party approached the city, Churchill was shocked to see that the road was lined with Persian cavalrymen making it obvious that an important person was passing through.

  However, after landing at Gale Morgbe, an obscure airport five miles out of the city, Roosevelt’s approach by armored car went mostly unnoticed through an unpredictable route to the American Legation. It was then that the true concern of security for the conference became completely evident.

  The British Legation and its vast garden lay adjourning to the Soviet Embassy meaning Churchill could walk over to the meetings in a short time. But the American Legation, guarded by United States forces, was more than half mile away creating a security nightmare as the President traveled along the narrow Tehran streets.

  ----

  As Graham Mayfield was driven through the city later that same afternoon, there were no Persian cavalry or throngs staring through the car windows. Just the major carrying out a mission as important as any he had undertaken since the war began.

  Mayfield had been a soldier for thirty-eight years; years filled with wars, without wars, with enemies, and without enemies. Then along came Hitler with his gang of thugs and villains as the new adversary, a role the Nazis had certainly filled with glaring adequacy over the last four years.

  As a young boy, Mayfield remembered the day his father carried him on his wide shoulders to that open and dark mine entrance not far from his childhood village. They nibbled on walnuts from his father’s pocket and waited until the miners, a line of exhausted grime-faced men, exited from the mine. It was an image that would stay with Mayfield forever. As the drawn line of workers passed, he and his father sat among chalk rocks scattered like giant mushrooms in the grass. ‘You’re a smart boy, Graham so don’t end up here. Don’t stay in the mountains. Do something . . . anything else. Make a career of the military service maybe; there are worse things in life than fighting wars for your country.’

  Two years later his father had gone down into the mine one morning and never came out. When he was old enough, Mayfield joined in the business of fighting wars and had never looked back.

  He had lost his son, Kirk, fighting with the Eighth Army in North Africa among the sand dunes of some far-off place he couldn’t remember the name of, or didn’t care to. But he would always remember his smiling, sun-blonde haired Kirk with Monty, chasing Rommel back across the desert. For Mayfield there would always be a hole in his soul, knowing he would never see his boy again, but he finally come to the realization that sacrifice was necessary because it was a solemn certainty that death sometimes comes to soldiers.

  Maggie’s death was entirely another matter. Losing her had taken something different out of Mayfield because wives weren’t supposed to die in war. At least in wars fought in the past before that maniac Goring had sent his bombers over London in the second year of the fighting. To keep his sanity, Mayfield reasoned it was fate placing Maggie in the wrong place when one of Hitler’s random armed robots fell from the sky and took her.

  To get through the tragedy he had turned strangely to the satisfaction of German engineering—the V-2 was a silent weapon, unlike its predecessor the V-1, nicknamed the ‘Buzz Bomb’ because of the noise it made falling from the sky. Maggie had never heard the robot, he had prayed, and had no idea that death approached.

  Now, as the conflict appeared to have turned against Hitler, a fear grew in Mayfield concerning when this war would be over. What was a soldier of fifty-six to do then? Sell stocks and bonds? Or suddenly find himself sitting in a chair on the front porch of a rest home in Surrey, overlooking the ocean, and tell stories about how gallant his life had been at one time?

  As the streets of Tehran slipped by his window, Mayfield stared into the darkness of an unknown future—this awful desert, these awful people . . . but he was no longer that little boy waiting outside the mine for his Father . . . he was MI6—Special Forces—exactly where he wanted to be at this moment. On another of his great adventures.

  ----

  The British Legation.

  In a side hallway, a leather-skinned, drawn shouldered butler, greeted Mayfield without a word, and then led him through a wide hallway.
His breathing was a struggle, a gasping noise forced through large nostrils, reminding Mayfield of a sickly Indian elephant approaching death in the jungle outside Jabalpur.

  He followed the butler through the hallway, flanked on either side with polished mirrors and low tables with pots of fresh flowers. He was led past several closed doorways. A Royal Marine orderly stood smartly at the double doors. He saluted as Mayfield approached, returned the salute, and then was ushered past the guard where he was left alone. He found the room cozy; green wood cracking like popcorn behind the fireplace’s iron grate. The fire logs gave off a sweet smell, reminding him of a cottage outside Colchester where he and Maggie always visited in the early spring, when the winds were damp and a fire warmed them after an afternoon walk.

  Book lined shelves along two walls, and a circular table with fresh flowers. A single chair was at the table, and a copy of The Times slightly disturbed at the table’s edge.

  A door opened. The Major straightened his stance as Churchill came through the side door. “Ah, Major Mayfield.”

  “I don’t think you’ll enjoy the news I have to convey, sir.”

  The Prime Minister’s face turned stern. “Is it worse than we suspected?”

  In another thirty minutes, Mayfield had informed Churchill of the situation, as he understood it. He told him his opinion on just how dangerous the approaching threat could be. Then he informed the Prime Minister that Booth Salinger had completed his investigation in Cairo and had arrived in Tehran in the afternoon.

  Churchill informed him, rather empathically, to utilize all resources necessary.

  ----

  Mayfield exited the British Legation over an hour later. He sat in the rear seat of his staff car and gave the driver an address. The Humber pulled away and passed through an ivy-covered brick gate, then passed onto the street, and sped down a tree-lined boulevard.

  He turned away from the fogged window. “You’ve turned into a hopeless old man, Graham Mayfield,” his half-whispered breath became a small white circle on the glass. But then after a moment of fleeting guilt, the major could only ponder the glorious opportunity afforded him. Yes. One glorious opportunity concerning a German spy codenamed Traveler.