The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller

by Andrew Britton

  “But you left that, too,” she said. “Because of men like—back there?”

  “Partly that, but partly the bloodshed,” he said. “You’re either watching someone or killing someone. There isn’t much gray. So I went up to Maine to teach and now I am guest lecturing at the University of Virginia—but they kept calling and I kept coming and here I am again.”

  “The killing—it’s to protect the country.”

  “It is. As Thomas Jefferson said, the tree of liberty does require occasional bloodshed. Making that call, though—it requires both intellectual certainty and emotional detachment. I never mastered the latter. You remember the massacres in Houla, Syria, last year?”

  “Of course.”

  “The group that did them, the Shabiha, were the government’s strong-arm mercenaries,” Kealey said. “I read the interviews with survivors. They went into homes and stabbed, face-to-face, men, then women, then children. Or they lined them up and put a bullet in the foreheads of each individual. The Shabiha ignored their pleas. Maybe they enjoyed them, I don’t know. But they did the job methodically and thoroughly—over one hundred times. That’s the kind of ruthlessness a killer needs.”

  “I heard many such stories growing up, listening from behind closed doors. It is sadism.”

  “That’s another word for it,” Kealey agreed. “Whatever you call it, it was never just a job to me—even when I was going after a killer, even when I was saving the life of one of my men. What was worse, though, was that part of me envied the guys who could kill.”

  She looked at Kealey the way Carlson had twenty minutes earlier. “They have no humanity.”

  “They don’t smell a barbecue and think of a hut they torched with someone inside. They don’t splatter soup or tomato paste and think of a knife opening someone’s heart or throat. They don’t have a normal conversation and find themselves looking at a person’s eyes and wonder what the technical difference is between a living eye and a dead one. They do their deeds and move on.”

  “But life without a soul . . .”

  “Not one I’d want,” Kealey agreed. “That said, I could do without the thoughts and visions and nightmares that won’t let you write over them. Somewhere in here”—he tapped his nose—“there’s always the tart smell of gunpowder or the almond smell of C-4 or the combination of iron-scented blood and landfill rot they left behind in a cave or village or sniper’s post in a lonely apartment. Desk jockeys like Carlson back there don’t understand that. They don’t understand that sometimes, men like my Uncle Largo don’t talk because if they did, this is what would come out. Bitter, unbidden disgust. Revulsion about what you do, however necessary, and what you had to overlook to do it.”

  “I understand,” she said. “But I would have pulled the trapdoor on Saddam Hussein without thinking, for what he did to the people of Iran during the war. I would do the same to those who oppress that nation now, hanging gay men from construction cranes. I do not think I would feel the anger you feel.”

  Kealey grinned. “It’s not anger, Rayhan. I’ve never said it wasn’t necessary, and I do it all very, very well. My shrink, Allison, thinks my id likes killing and my ego and superego team up to keep that desire in check.” He shrugged. “She’s probably right. She usually is. If I hated it the way I just described, why would I be back?”

  “You call your shrink by her first name?”

  Kealey laughed inside. The things that make an impression on people—

  “Yes. We have an unorthodox relationship.”

  Rayhan sat back. “I do not doubt that all of what you say goes on inside. But I believe you are a patriot. I believe one can kill justly, and that you have. Not liking it—that is what makes sure the cause is righteous.”

  Kealey was smiling to himself. What she had just told him was Psych 101. He knew all that even before he was ordered to see Allison.

  From the first, their sessions had not been what he was expecting. Unlike civilian psychologists who let the patient do the talking and tend mostly to guide the conversation, shrinks who work for law enforcement and intelligence have to determine, pretty quickly, whether patients, who were relatively few in number and trained at great expense, are fit for duty. That requires more pushing and harder probing than typical “real world” sessions.

  Also, Allison had a service file she had been able to review. Within minutes after they had started talking she had taken Kealey to what Rayhan had missed—perhaps because of her age, perhaps because of her limited experience. The psychological combat zone that Allison called “the gray areas.”

  “I don’t mean just the hazy areas between black and white,” she had said in one of their early sessions. “I’m talking about the aging of the individual. We play our own devil’s advocate. That fudges the clean, clear certainty of youth.”

  “But I am clearer about so many things,” he had replied.

  “Only politics,” she had said. Kealey had been about to protest. She held up a hand. “Religion? Movies? Romance? If you didn’t have money on a big game, would you care that much who won?”

  “No—”

  “Dating. Looks matter less, other qualities matter more. Your views are blended.”

  She was right. He was mellowing.

  “Why politics—and music?” he had asked.

  “Politics? Because the non-grays—not just the physically young but the emotionally immature—think they know everything. They support politicians who tell them they’re right. Music? A lot of it is inherently political,” she had gone on. “And loud. Your graying ears don’t like that.”

  What Allison had described was true about both combat and covert missions. The sliding scale didn’t slide so much. He tracked down mostly really bad men: warlords, ethnic cleansers, homicide bombers. Later, at the Company, he went after moderately bad men like paid assassins, arms dealers, drug traffickers, and only the occasional genocidal maniac. By his hand or by his efforts, they all got the same death. But the higher his security clearance climbed, the more apparent the gray areas became—like the impoverished villages that harvested opium to survive, the cartels who put money into local education and health care, the people who saved four children by selling one into slavery. If Americans and Europeans and Asians chose to stick powder up their noses or juice in their arms, if they went to Thailand and paid staggering amounts of money for young virgins, how did that merit a block of plastic explosive under the Humvee of the middleman?

  “I’m my own Stockholm Syndrome,” Kealey had admitted to Allison in one of their sessions. That was his parting comment and resulted in her suggesting they continue the session over dinner. Over a shared key lime pie, they both agreed that the gray areas of doctor-patient relationship were also worth exploring a bit.

  They were at Rayhan’s house before she realized she hadn’t given the driver the address. It was scary, even to Kealey, how much information was transmitted electronically. In the old days—less than a decade ago—the deputy chief of staff would have hand-delivered the destination typed on pink slips of paper. Those would be time-stamped in the vehicle and turned in after the pickup or drop-off.

  Before the young woman left, Kealey took careful note of her straight black hair, which reached to her jawline.

  While the young woman was gone, Kealey texted Allison that he was going out of town, probably for no more than a day. She wished him a pleasant trip. No details were expected or provided.

  Kealey sat back in the leather seat. There was a Plexiglas screen between the front and backseat. Kealey used to roll those down and talk to limo drivers whenever they stopped at a light or pickup. But these days the “dashboys” as they used to call them—White House drivers always faced front, like coachmen for the Queen of England—were texting or checking email about road and traffic conditions, security concerns, and schedules. This driver, a man of about thirty-five, dressed in a black suit, also wore a Bluetooth headset.

  Instead of chatting, Kealey looked out the smoky wi
ndow that turned afternoon to dusk and thought about Uncle Largo. He had to confess to some genuine excitement about the visit. Kealey never got to talk to many veteran field agents, let alone one who came from the same gene pool. He was optimistic—or at least cautiously hopeful—that Uncle Largo would consent to talk; the situation seemed to demand it. He was eager to learn not just about his uncle’s wartime experiences but also about the psychological issues they might have caused. What Kealey had told Rayhan about his experience wasn’t an understatement. It was taking more and more effort to saddle up; and perhaps worse, more and more effort to enjoy life when each day was finished. He would fall into bed, sleep the sleep of the just, then wake up looking for someplace useful and satisfying to put his energies. Uncle Largo’s insights from further down that road were a potential treasure.

  Rayhan returned with a thickly stuffed shoulder bag that she carried with her into the car. She seemed eager bordering on excited. That was good. More important, Kealey noted, she had not bothered to brush her hair. That was even better. He noted that with male agents, too—mostly about their ties or shirttails. Vanity raised a red flag that an operative was not fully engaged. It was a crude barometer, like sticking a wet thumb into the wind, but it never failed him.

  They sat in silence, each with their own private expectations, as the sedan got on 95 South for the forty-five-minute trip.

  CHAPTER 6

  TEHRAN, IRAN

  It was late at night and the lights of Tehran glittered proudly through the dark outside his window.

  Mahdavi Yazdi crushed out his cigarette and sat staring at them through the bulletproof window of his office. Cigarette smoking had recently been pronounced haram—forbidden—to followers of Islam. Yazdi was not a scholar but he knew that smoking had not been invented at the time of the Prophet and so there could be no true fatwa on its religious legality or illegality. It was one of those details he chose to overlook, and he did not believe it made him a bad Muslim. To the contrary. His life was about belief in the Word of God.

  Which is why he was thinking just now, with a sense of frustration, how he did not like the Majles-e Khobregan—the Council of Experts. He liked their religious beliefs enough. He shared most of them. He had a good relationship with some of the Experts and a very close personal relationship with their intelligence advisor, Farhad Salehi of the Bakhtiari tribe of the Bakhtiari province.

  What Yazdi resented was their arrogance.

  The body of eighty-six mujtahids—an assembly of Islamic clerics and scholars—represents the interests of every province with the sole official function of telling the actual leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran what they were doing wrong.

  As the director of Vezarat-e Ettela’at Jomhuri-ye Eslami-ye Iran, the Intelligence Ministry of Iran, Yazdi had no use for the so-called Experts. They were inexperienced outside their fields and knew nothing beyond the borders of their localities. Yet they spoke loudly, publicly, and often about how foreign influence was undermining youth, how foreign ideas were undermining Islam, how foreign powers were strangling the nation.

  They weren’t wrong, but they were like university professors: they didn’t understand how things worked in the real world. A non-nuclear Iran, an Iran with an infant navy, an Iran with no allies in the region—that was not an Iran that could do anything more than selectively harass enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan, root out agitators at home, and quietly continue to use oil revenue to develop both conventional and nuclear weapons. He wished the last of those were not so. He believed that the Hand of God was more than adequate to shield them and that He would punish those who did not trust in this. Yazdi was a radical in his fervor, in the strength of ideas—not in the weight of arms.

  Director Yazdi understood the desires and frustrations of the Council. He had spent thirty years rising through the ranks as an intelligence officer of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, the elite, theocratic warriors of the military. He began in the field, spying on Iraq in Iraq. Life was simpler then, more exciting, and he missed those days. What he learned there was that the Seph-e Psdrn-e En-qelb-e Eslmi had plenty of sabers and they knew how to rattle them. But an occasional skirmish, in the shadows or worked by proxy, was not a great victory.

  Which is why Mahdavi Yazdi was smiling as he sat at his desk in his fourth-floor office on Second Ne-garestan Street, Tehran. He turned back to the computer monitor on his desk. He had just read a decrypted report from field operative Qassam Pakravesh in Rabat. The events that had begun suddenly, startlingly, had been a gift and blessing from God. They started with the report from the heroic Nakhoda Yekom Elham about what had been discovered and then, incredibly, recovered in the Arctic. There would be repercussions among the military leaders about the price of that recovery, the loss of the Jamaran—but it had been the correct call. That crew was doomed. Other nations had to have picked up the anomaly and were surely en route to investigate. The evidence of what was uncovered had to be eliminated.

  I will see to it that the crew receives accolades on earth as they will in Paradise, Yazdi reflected.

  For now, however, he was considering his options for recovering the item. He had to make arrangements for Pakravesh to leave Morocco, as he had arranged the operative’s departure from so many other nations in the past. By land, through Algeria and across Africa, then east over the Mediterranean to Iraq or Saudi Arabia where money would guarantee safe passage. And then Iran would have a nearly functioning nuclear weapon armed with what appeared to be high-grade plutonium.

  The United States and Israel will know it is authentic because they will visit the recovery site, he thought. Then the vision of the Council and the other government ministries would align, finally and fully, with the patriotic heart that beat in every Iranian.

  Negotiations for a nuclear Iran, without the resistance of the international community, could begin in earnest.

  RABAT, MOROCCO

  Qassam Pakravesh usually slept well when he was in the field.

  Being asleep did not mean being dead to the world. He could fall asleep—or wake—in a heartbeat. There was no sound that didn’t rouse him, no draft, no smell. He had spent a year training himself to do that by riding the train from Bagher Shahr, where he lived with his parents, to Nabard, where he trained with Mahdavi Yazdi and his team at the Army of the Guardians facility. The rail trip was three-quarters of an hour and Pakravesh trained himself to go to sleep as soon as he boarded and snap awake at any sound or movement or smell out of the ordinary. Remaining alert was one of the four commandments of survival, in addition to: do not lie on the bed or bedroll; do not eat food you did not bring or capture; and in a room, do not sleep while exposed to the door or windows.

  Pakravesh typically slept in a bathtub, or if there wasn’t one, he curled himself—as now—on the floor in the closet.

  As he dreamt, Pakravesh became aware of the odor of garlic. His mind instantly snapped to arsine, a dense form of arsenic, one of the most toxic compounds on the planet.

  Someone knows who I am and where I would be asleep, he thought as he lay there double-checking his senses. He listened for a hiss, something that might be releasing the toxin; it was possible the smell was garlic, coming through the fan ventilator in the bathroom.

  He raised himself into a crouch position so that he would be above the heavy gas if it were being pumped under the door or through the ventilator—the only openings besides the windows, and he had checked those. There were locked. The drawn curtains were not moving; no one had cut through.

  He picked up the SIG P226 handgun that was never out of reach along with the belt-folder in which he kept his cash and passports. He sniffed. The odor was definitely coming from the area of the bathroom, which was on the other side of the closet. He drew his handkerchief from his pocket, put it across his mouth, and breathed through it as he waddled, duck-like, toward the short corridor that led to the front door and to the bathroom. He stopped when he saw the flat piece of rubber tube jamm
ed under the door of the hotel room.

  If he went to remove it, he would be gunned down.

  He dropped flat on his back and kicked his way back to the sleeping area, to the foot of the bed. He was being gassed. He had no choice but to go out the window.

  Pakravesh slept in his clothes, including his shoes. He went back to the closet to recover the parcel with which he’d been entrusted. Holding his breath, he crawled around the foot of the bed toward the window. He had disconnected the room telephone and left it there. He went to the edge of the drape, pulled it back with his left hand, and with his right hand he smashed the phone hard against the window. It broke with the second forceful crack.

  The Iranian ducked back; there was no gunfire. But there would be as soon as whoever was at the door heard him. Rolling to the break, he kicked out the shards of glass that stuck in the bottom of the frame. Crouching again, he stuck his head through the window to look both ways before going out—

  Two men were waiting for him on either side of the window. The one with the baseball bat swung it down on the middle of Pakravesh’s neck, shattering it and causing him to fall face forward onto the asphalt of the parking lot. He felt nothing anywhere in his body except for the insides of his skull, which seemed electrified. He knew he was resting on his right cheek but he had no idea that the rest of his body was still inside the room.

  The top of the baseball bat was pressed into his left cheek, pushing the Iranian’s face to the ground.

  The second man crouched beside his face, turning his head so that Pakravesh could see through tear-misted eyes. Pakravesh reached for him, clawed at his forehead before the man swatted his weak, clawed hand away.

  “I have been following you,” the man said, placing the barrel of a gun in the Iranian’s mouth. “You killed my brother in Yemen. This is for him.”