by Vince Flynn
LONDON
ENGLAND
KAMAL Safavi remained as still as possible, trying not to wake his wife in bed next to him. It was just after midnight and he’d been lying awake for almost two hours. The meeting at the Foreign Office that day had gone predictably badly. MI6 had reports—correct as far as he knew—that Iran had just accepted a delivery of advanced centrifuges from North Korea.
Based on his country’s history with America, he could understand and sympathize with his masters’ paranoia regarding the West. The affronts that so consumed them, though, now existed only in history books. They needed to be concerned the future. They needed to acknowledge that the nuclear program they believed would keep Iran safe was strangling the country’s economy. Paralyzed by their misguided fears of an American attack, Iran’s government was dooming its population to a death by a thousand cuts.
So much foolishness and hate served no purpose. Iran was a rational and stable island in a region that was in the process of tearing itself apart. Only the shortsightedness of their respective politicians prevented the two countries from laying the foundations for an era of cooperation.
It was a sentiment that Irene Kennedy shared. She was an eminently reasonable woman who saw the potential of normalizing relations between Tehran and Washington. She understood that Iran’s youth had little memory of the shah or the revolution. They wanted freedom and prosperity. They wanted to occupy a place of respect in the world.
There was a static-ridden cry from his nightstand, and he glanced over at the baby monitor as it went silent again. His young daughter was dreaming. But about what? A future of unbounded opportunity? A life in a society that treated her as an equal? Peace and security?
Probably not. That was his dream. For her. For all of his people.
A moment later, a more urgent sound emanated from the direction of his nightstand. For a few seconds he was disoriented by the shrillness, unable to remember what it meant. His confusion didn’t last long, though, and he snatched up his phone to scan the text on the screen.
“Get up!” he said, throwing the covers to the floor and leaping from bed.
In the dim glow of the alarm clock, he saw his wife’s eyes flutter open.
“What is it?” she said, reaching for the lamp by her side of the bed. “Is it Ava? Is she awake?”
He grabbed his wife’s wrist before she could get to the switch. “Don’t turn it on. Just get up and put your robe on. Quietly. We’re leaving.”
“Leaving?” she said, alarmed. “What are you talking about?”
He had never told her or anyone else about his relationship with Kennedy. He’d thought it was safe. That it was important. Now all he could feel was guilt for what he’d done. His family was in danger. And for what? The idealism that his father had warned him about so many times as a youth.
“There’s no time to explain,” he said in a harsh whisper. “We have to leave. Now!”
Safavi ran in bare feet to his daughter’s room, finding her fast asleep. He lifted her carefully. They had to be silent. Their staff consisted only of a woman who did the cooking and cleaning, and an aging security man who spent most of his time shuttling them around the city. He could afford to wake neither.
“Kamal, you’re scaring me,” his wife said, appearing in the doorway. “What’s happening?”
“I’ll tell you later,” he whispered. “Now we have to get to the car. It’s parked right out front.”
“But I need to get dressed. I don’t even have shoes. We—”
Fortunately, his daughter was still small enough to hold in one arm, and he clamped his free hand around his wife’s bicep. The apprehension on her face turned to fear when she felt the force of his grip.
“Kamal, you—”
“Silence!” he whispered as he dragged her toward the stairs.
Light from the courtyard filtered through the windows, providing enough illumination to navigate through the furniture arranged in the entryway. Kennedy had warned them in time. They were going to make it.
The door was suddenly thrown open with enough force to nearly rip it from its hinges. Safavi’s wife screamed as three men ran into their home, shouting in Persian.
A forearm hit him in the face and he held his daughter tight, trying to protect her as he was slammed to the floor.
“No!” he shouted as she was torn away from him.
His wife continued to scream and he turned his face toward her as his hands were secured behind his back. “Don’t hurt her! She doesn’t know anything!”
The man didn’t listen, grinding a knee into her back as she was bound with flex cuffs. Their driver appeared at the end of the hallway but stopped short when he recognized the intruders as being from the embassy’s security team.
Ava was wailing now, her shrieks echoing eerily through the house. Safavi couldn’t breathe with the weight of the man on top of him, but he barely noticed. His wife was sobbing, still having no idea what was happening. He had done this. He was responsible for the terror his wife and child felt.
An arm snaked around Safavi’s neck and he felt himself being dragged backward. Their maid appeared and ran instinctively toward the man holding Ava, but was hit in the side of the head with a pistol butt. She collapsed to the floor and went completely still.
The arm cutting off his air tightened as they exited into a light London rain. Only then did the man holding him speak. “The ayatollah is looking forward to seeing you and your family, Kamal.”
CHAPTER 38
LONDON
ENGLAND
PULL over.”
The traffic was almost nonexistent on the dark London high street. To his right, Rapp could see a narrow alleyway swirling with the blue flash of a police cruiser’s lights.
“Here?” the cabbie said. “But the address you gave me is another six blocks.”
Rapp had decided to take a taxi instead of getting someone from the CIA to pick him up at the airstrip. His goal was to slip in and out of Britain with as little fanfare as possible. The Istanbul operation was still bringing down a fair amount of heat, and the EU’s intelligence community was starting to suspect him in the death of an Islamic propagandist in Spain two months earlier. Entirely true, but proper protocols hadn’t been followed, so Kennedy was doing everything she could to shift the blame to the Mossad. Its director owed her and he seemed amenable to taking responsibility.
Rapp retrieved a hundred-pound note and held it out for the driver. “I’ll walk the rest of the way.”
The vehicle rolled to a stop near the sidewalk and Rapp got out without looking back. The dark overcoat he’d found on the plane was enough to keep the rain off, but not enough to hold back the damp cold. He flipped up the collar, partially for warmth, but mostly because London was the most videotaped city in the world. Constant adjustments to the angle of his head kept his face in shadow as he moved across the cobblestones.
The uneven surface ended at a street that ran through a posh neighborhood lined with turn-of-the-century buildings. Normally, it would have been quiet at such a late hour, but that night almost every light was on and he could see people standing at their windows looking down into a crowded street.
Rapp turned toward a set of yellow barriers blocking off the area in front of an especially impressive stone building. There were twenty or so civilians talking among themselves near the police line, and he kept his distance, skirting the far edge of the rain-soaked barricade.
“Sir!” a cop shouted, starting toward him with a nightstick in his hand. “This is a restricted area.”
“Shut up.”
The man paused for a moment, confused by Rapp’s reaction, but then started running at him. He got within five yards before one of the two men Rapp was striding toward waved him off.
“Charlie,” Rapp said, keeping his hands in his jacket pockets as he stopped in front of a man wearing an impeccable Burberry trench coat and bowler. Charles Plimpton was one of MI6’s top men, and he reveled in his
role as a British spy. When he’d started out, he’d been vaguely competent, but now political aspirations had set in. Apparently, his wife was the second cousin to King Arthur’s maid or something. She felt entitled to a higher station in life.
“I wish I could say that it’s good to see you, Mitch. But whenever you arrive in my country, disaster follows.”
The other man was Ken Barrett, the CIA’s London station chief. He had the more appropriately disheveled look of a man woken in the middle of the night: wrinkled jeans, a hooded parka, and waterproof boots.
“What happened?” Rapp said.
Barrett was the first to speak. “Irene called me a couple of hours ago and told me Safavi had been compromised. I got in the car and called Charlie. Unfortunately, we were too late.”
“Meaning what?” Rapp said.
“Safavi and his family were already gone when we got here.”
“For how long?”
“About fifteen minutes, according to the cameras.”
“Did you track the car? There’s no traffic and they’re either going to their embassy or an airport.”
“Their embassy,” Plimpton said.
“So you intercepted? Do we have them?”
Barrett cast his eyes down and Plimpton answered in his place.
“We didn’t, Mitch. He’s an Iranian diplomat being protected by a car full of Iranian security.”
“They’re not protecting him, Charlie. They’re fucking kidnapping him. They’re going to take him back to Tehran, throw him in a hole, and force him to watch while they cut his family apart.”
“I’m sympathetic to your viewpoint,” Plimpton said in an accent that seemed to get more posh every year. “But this is the CIA’s cockup. We aren’t going to create a diplomatic incident trying to set your problem to right.”
“Our problem?” Mitch said, struggling to keep his voice low enough not to be heard by the people rubbernecking near the police perimeter. “You think it’s going to help the U.K. if Iran builds a bomb?”
“I’ve spoken with the prime minister personally and we’ve agreed that getting dragged into this isn’t in the best interest of Her Majesty’s government.”
“I don’t give a shit what you’ve agreed,” Rapp said, grabbing the man by the front of his coat. “Quit thinking about using your ass to polish a chair in Parliament and do your fucking job. Safavi’s put everything on the line for us. Now you’re going to just turn your back on him because your wife doesn’t feel like she’s getting invited to the right parties?”
“Mitch,” he heard Barrett caution from behind.
“Shut up, Ken.”
“Cops, man . . .”
Three uniformed men were edging toward them, obviously not certain what to do. Rapp shoved Plimpton back hard enough that he nearly stumbled over his four-hundred-dollar shoes and grabbed Barrett by the arm.
“Where is Safavi now?” he said, dragging the London station chief into the shadows at the far end of the square. “The embassy?”
“Yeah. I have people out front. No activity.”
“They can’t keep him there forever. He and his family will have to be transported.”
“I know what you’re thinking, Mitch, but it can’t happen. Not here.”
Rapp locked eyes with Barrett, who took a hesitant step back. “Easy, man. You know I’d follow you through the gates of hell, but we’ve lost this round. Even if I wake up the FBI guys, we have no manpower. And the minute we make a move, Charlie’s going to have us thrown in jail.”
Rapp balled a fist, but managed not to slam it into Barrett’s face. He had always been a solid man. Given the chance, he would have pulled out every stop to rescue Safavi. But he wasn’t being given that chance. Rickman had nailed down every detail. Every contingency. Like he always did.
Rapp brushed past the man, dialing his phone as he walked across the street.
“I understand the situation has deteriorated,” Irene Kennedy said when she picked up.
“Safavi’s barricaded in the Iranian embassy.”
“It’s what we feared. Rickman is randomizing his methods to keep us off balance. This time he made sure we wouldn’t have time to intervene.”
“That piece of shit Charlie Plimpton’s not going to let us make a move as long as Safavi’s on British soil. The Iranians are going to have to get him back to Tehran, though. It’s possible that we could intercept the plane.”
“I’ve talked to the president and he says no. He’s been working to thaw the relationship between the U.S. and Iran since he took office, and this is a big enough setback as it is. Interfering with their flight would put us on a war footing.”
“So I’m just supposed to do nothing so we can make sure no one’s political career gets bruised?”
“I’m sorry, Mitch. There’s nothing I can do.”
“I don’t want to hear that, Irene. Rick’s just getting warmed up. He’s going to bleed us until there’s nothing left.”
“I might have some good news on that front. Can you get to Rome?”
“Why?”
“Mike’s already on the way. He can brief you.”
“I don’t like it, Irene. Istanbul. London. Now Rome. Rick’s leading us around on a leash. We can’t afford to keep reacting. We need to get ahead of this.”
“You ask me to trust you. Now I’m asking you to trust me.”
He glanced upward as the rain started coming down harder. “Italy.”
“I’ll let Mike know you’re on your way. Oh, and Mitch?”
“What?”
“Let him do the talking, okay?”
CHAPTER 39
ISLAMABAD
PAKISTAN
BUT, sir, I—”
“Shut up and listen!” Saad Chutani shouted.
Taj cradled the phone handset between his ear and shoulder as Pakistan’s president continued his rant. Of course it was necessary to provide the occasional frightened grunt or affirmation to indicate his rapt attention, but in reality he was scrolling through his email.
“I want this journalistic hack silenced, do you understand? I will not have distortions and lies spread by our newspapers.”
Four days ago, the Pakistani Taliban had attacked a girls’ school that Chutani heavily supported. In fact, he had personally attended its opening, hailing it as the foundation of a new Pakistan. There had even been champagne and an absurd Western-style ribbon cutting. Now it was a burned-out husk surrounded by the bullet-riddled bodies of young girls who should have been at home under the supervision of their fathers and brothers.
“Answer me, Ahmed!”
Taj frowned. He’d assumed the question was rhetorical and the fool would continue to shout endlessly while saying nothing of consequence. A gift all politicians had but that this one excelled at in particular.
“Sir, there was simply no question that the press was going to cover this incident. I have the article you’re concerned about in front of me and while it lays out the facts, I don’t find it disrespectful to you or your administration. It—”
“Not disrespectful? Can you read, Ahmed? It makes me look powerless. How could this have even happened? It’s your job and the job of the S Wing to control these events.”
It was an interesting choice of words. Not “prevent” but “control.” And indeed Taj did. He had personally planned and authorized the attack. It was all part of the delicate balance he was attempting to strike. While Chutani’s assassination—ostensibly by the Americans—needed to be an event that stoked Pakistan’s nationalism, the dead president couldn’t be too popular. He needed to be portrayed as a good man who wasn’t equal to the task. The people had to understand that Pakistan needed a stronger leader. Someone who could achieve the order that the democrats had so miserably failed to deliver.
“The death of Akhtar Durrani created a period of blindness, Mr. President. I assure you that his successor has now fully transitioned into his position. Making that transition completely seamless, though,
was impossible and the Taliban knew it. They took advantage of the brief period of weakness.”
“Excuses!”
“I’m sorry,” Taj said, conjuring a hint of fearfulness. “I’m doing the best—”
“We have to deal with the reporter, Ahmed. Now. There’s nothing we can do about your incompetence in letting the attack succeed, but we can certainly shape the aftermath.”
“The article has already been published, sir. There’s no way to—”
“It’s emboldening the other media outlets!” Chutani shouted. “In the last two days, there have been two articles critical of my involvement with the American drone attacks, and a newscaster has come out publicly against secular education. Without consequences, there is no way to know what they’ll say next.”
Chutani wanted to impress the West with a free press just so long as it was entirely supportive of his administration. And when it wasn’t, he called the man he’d hired for his weakness, expecting him to suddenly transform into an assassin.
“What kind of consequences are you talking about, sir?”
“We don’t need a press like the Americans have, Ahmed. One that spews lies and distortions twenty-four hours a day in search of profits. Pakistan needs fair and patriotic media outlets dedicated to moving the country forward. This recent activity sets a dangerous precedent.”
Taj smiled. Of course, the politician wouldn’t give a specific order. He had to have deniability. Should the coercion of Pakistan’s newspeople become public, he would need Taj and the ISI as a scapegoat.
“Private media is dependent on advertising dollars, Mr. President. I’ll have my people speak to the companies that support these outlets and ask them whether it’s in their best interest to encourage this kind of journalism.”
There was a long, disappointed silence. Chutani undoubtedly wanted the man dead and Taj completely understood. After he had closed his fist around Pakistan, a man like this would watch his entire family die before being exterminated like the animal he was. However, now wasn’t the time to be pulled into something this controversial. He would need the Americans’ unwitting support during his rise to power, and the assassination of a journalist could jeopardize that support.