Crusader One (Tier One Thrillers Book 3)

by Brian Andrews

  Dempsey nodded, not sure what to say. He glanced at Elinor, certain that she must have a strong opinion on the subject, but she kept her silence, legs crossed and holding his hand. Everything Ciamek explained made perfect sense to Dempsey and confirmed the age-old adage that “all politics is local.” Nonetheless, he had trouble swallowing the duplicity of the Iranian regime. Wasn’t compartmentalized anti-Semitism still anti-Semitism?

  With the soul baring complete and political-religious banter stalled, at least for the moment, Ciamek made a joke to break the ice. After that, he worked hard to turn the conversation toward the upbeat and make the most of what would—in all likelihood—be his final visit with his little girl. Dempsey let daughter and father do most of the talking, only jumping in to provide levity and tender imagined anecdotes from time to time. Eventually, Ciamek’s eyelids began to grow heavy; he apologized but said exhaustion was forcing him to bed. He showed them to the guest room, gave his daughter a hug and kiss good night, and retired for the night.

  Dempsey followed Elinor into the guest bedroom, and she shut and locked the door behind her. When she turned to face him, tears were streaming down her cheeks. She tried to speak, but the words caught in her throat, and all she was able to do was stand there, looking at him with her bottom lip quivering.

  He was so angry with her. He felt duped and betrayed and used. He wanted to seize her by the shoulders and yell at her, but he couldn’t. He just couldn’t . . .

  “Thank you,” she finally managed with a tight smile. “I know this was not what you were expecting. I know you feel betrayed, but I had to . . . I had to do it for him. Now, he can die in peace, having passed the mantle of responsibility for my care to you.”

  Dempsey screwed up his face at this last statement.

  “Don’t look at me that way,” she said. “He is from a different generation. A different culture than you. It’s a father’s responsibility to protect and provide for his daughter. Marriage lifts this yoke from his shoulders. You gave my father the ultimate gift tonight. Please don’t ruin it now.”

  His mind immediately went to Jake. He might not be a father to a daughter, but he was a father. He understood what parental obligation felt like. And he also understood the guilt and self-flagellation that came with believing one had failed to adequately shoulder that responsibility. “I understand,” he said at last, completely abandoning his Irish accent.

  She looked at him, vulnerable and with all her secrets laid out before him. “Do you hate me?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t hate you. I just feel foolish . . .”

  “For what?”

  “For wanting to believe the lie.”

  “You mean the lie that I could love you?”

  He nodded but immediately picked up on the nuance in her words.

  “It’s not a lie,” she said and took a tentative step toward him. “I’m already halfway there.”

  “You are?”

  She nodded.

  “In that case, I need to know—our day in Tel Aviv together, was any of that the real you, or was that just the woman you thought I wanted you to be?”

  “That was the real me, just the real me rushing things along at light speed,” she said.

  “So all of it, our NOCs, you and me as a couple, it had nothing to do with the op. It was all for this moment?”

  She nodded. “The op we probably could have executed as strangers. But not this. No way. This had to be real—for both of us. Otherwise my father would have seen it for a sham, and instead of making things better, I would have only made them worse.”

  “Why me? Why not pick Rouvin or Daniel?”

  “No, it had to be you.”

  “Because I’m a dumb, gullible American, is that it?”

  She took another step toward him and pressed her hand on his chest over his heart. “No, because we’re kindred spirits, you and me. Soldiers who’ve sacrificed everyone and everything we’ve ever loved to fight for a world where people don’t have to live under the shadow of tyranny. I saw it in your eyes the first time we met in Brussels. You’ve given everything for your country and asked for nothing in return. No one can appreciate John Dempsey better than I can. And the same is true in reverse.”

  Maybe her words were true; maybe they were bullshit, but he didn’t care. With this woman, all of his guilt and regret and pain served as a bridge rather than a wall. She had entrusted him with the most intimate and important responsibility imaginable, granting her father’s dying wish. He looked into her eyes and he longed for her.

  She took a step back, dropped her headscarf to the floor, and lifted her shirt up and over her head. Next, she unbuttoned her pants, pushed them down over her hips, and let them fall to the floor. She paused a beat, meeting his gaze as if reconsidering, before she undid her bra and stepped out of her bikini briefs. Then, she stood in front of him, naked, vulnerable, and beautiful.

  “My real name is Adina,” she said, her shapely breasts rising and falling as her respiration rate began to pick up with anticipation. “This is all of me . . . Is it enough for you?”

  “Yes, it is,” he whispered, gazing at her and battling the hurricane of emotions he felt. He repeated the ritual and undressed in front of her.

  She extended her hand.

  He took it, and she led him to the bed . . .

  Later, he lay on his side gazing at the exquisite naked woman beside him.

  “What?” she asked, with sultry half-closed eyes.

  “I’ve never been with a woman who looks like, well, you before.”

  “It’s just a body,” she said coyly.

  “Just a body,” he said, rolling his eyes and laughing. “Yeah, right.”

  They lay in afterglow for a long while, not talking, just touching. Eventually, he started to get sleepy. “Now what?” he asked, although not sure what answer he was hoping to hear from her.

  “Now, we sleep,” she said. “And tomorrow, we try not to die.”

  CHAPTER 34

  The Grand Bazaar

  Tehran, Iran

  June 2

  0935 Local Time

  In principle, the plan was simple enough. Grab Amir Modiri, shove him in the back of a delivery van, and drive away. But like all simple plans, the devil was in the details. The first problem immediately apparent to Dempsey was that the Grand Bazaar was nothing like the Midrachov in Jerusalem where they had trained. Yes, both were shopping markets and had merchants peddling their wares, but the similarities ended there. With two hundred thousand vendors spread across twenty square kilometers, the Grand Bazaar was the largest market on the planet. The sheer enormity of it, coupled with the hustle and bustle of the crowd, was enough to make anyone’s head spin, let alone a field agent trying to pull off a kidnapping in broad daylight.

  Dempsey glanced up. Intricately painted Persian vaults, with pointed arches and intersecting arrases, lined the ceiling in this corridor. In the middle of each vault was a round opening, creating the impression you were standing beneath a giant iris looking skyward. He lowered his gaze and inhaled, taking a primal measure of this place. The air carried a mélange of odors: the sweet tang of brewed tea, the miasma of stale cigarette smoke, the zest of fruits and vegetables, the aroma of cooking spices, and the musk of woolen blankets and carpets. Everywhere around him people bartered and bickered, laughed and lolled. Dempsey felt like he had been transported back in time. This was how commerce had been conducted for 99 percent of human history—before the days of mobile phones, online shopping at Amazon, and twenty-four-hour global delivery compliments of FedEx. Here, shoppers had to rely on their five senses to assess quality and value, and to suss truth from mercantile chicanery. Here, commerce was a tactile experience, where relationships and shrewd bartering ruled the day.

  “Have you ever seen anything like it?” Elinor asked as they walked across a particularly busy intersection.

  “Never,” he replied, remembering to use his Irish accent. “It just goes on and on and on.�
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  As they made their way through the crowd, Elinor casually picked over this and that, moving from booth to boutique and so on. If he didn’t know better, he’d have thought she was actually shopping; that’s how relaxed and expertly she was playing her role. She moved as if she were gliding, her tall, lithe frame as graceful as a figure skater on ice. The turquoise headscarf she wore was tied loosely about her head and neck—a subtle cultural recalcitrance from a modern woman dressing in compliance without the desire to do so. She must have felt his eyes on her because she turned and met his gaze with a smile—a lover’s smile—and it made his heart skip a beat. He smiled back, and then the SEAL in him woke up.

  What the fuck are you doing, dude? This is not fucking vacation—you’re on an op, Dempsey. Get your shit together.

  He ran his tongue between his lower lip and his teeth and suddenly, desperately, craved a pinch of wintergreen snuff. The SEAL was irritated. The SEAL wanted to be kitted up and clutching a SOPMOD M4. The SEAL wanted embedded snipers covering their six, a second team moving invisibly among the crowd, and QRF with help in hot standby fifteen mikes out. But the SEAL didn’t plan this op. The SEAL had been dragged on this mission without his team by the spook named John Dempsey who’d forfeited control to another spook whom he’d just met three days ago.

  What the hell had he been thinking?

  He hadn’t, and that was the problem. The thirst for vengeance had degraded his judgment. The thirst for sexual and emotional intimacy had snuck up on him—some dormant, forgotten part of his psyche that he’d gravely underestimated—and degraded what had been left.

  I shouldn’t have slept with her last night. That was fucking stupid.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid . . .

  The wireless earbud buried in his right ear canal crackled to life.

  “Crusader, this is Rome,” said Farvad, who was tasked as the primary driver. “In position.”

  A beat later, a second report came in: “Crusader, this is Tripoli,” said the voice of their decoy driver. “In position.”

  Elinor uttered a coded response in Farsi, acknowledging the reports.

  An Iranian security guard dressed in a light-green uniform shirt and black pants walked by Dempsey, eyeing him with suspicion. Dempsey pretended not to notice and just kept trailing after Elinor. This was the third security guard he’d seen since they began walking the Bazaar not ten minutes ago. Given the recent Israeli strikes, he was not surprised to see heightened security in public spaces such as this, but the extra scrutiny was going to make their job all the more difficult. The multiple diversions Elinor had planned to draw security away from their position would be all the more critical for their mission to succeed. Every member of their five-man support team was a Seventh Order asset, which meant he was placing his fate entirely in Elinor’s hands. The pre-op brief had been conducted entirely in cyberspace on Elinor’s computer, with all members logged in remotely to a dark-web chat room.

  This was a nerve-racking first for him. He’d run plenty of operations with strangers before, but in all of these cases, any concern he might have had about tactical competence was backstopped by the reputation of the training pipelines his teammates had matriculated from—be that the Teams, Delta, MARSOC, AFSOC, FBI HRT, CIA SAD, et cetera. Any concern he had about individual motive and loyalty was also backstopped by the operator’s affiliation with his command. Anyone with an American spec ops pedigree, even former operators now working as contractors, he knew he could depend on as a brother. But this was different. Everyone on his team was an unknown variable.

  In addition to Farvad—whom quite frankly he didn’t trust—and the other driver, they had three roving spotter assets moving in the crowd, none of whom he could identify by sight. Besides providing visual surveillance and tracking, the spotters were also responsible for executing the diversions with remotely detonated nonlethal charges designed to create chaos and draw Iranian security guards away from the objective.

  How do we know Modiri will show? Dempsey had asked during the drive over.

  Trust me; he’ll show, was all Elinor had said.

  Suddenly, that answer wasn’t good enough for him, and he didn’t know why. Something felt off about this whole thing, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He stepped up next to Elinor and took her right hand in his left. She gave his palm a little squeeze and then quickly released it. Elinor was right-handed, and that was her shooting hand, so he understood why holding hands was disadvantageous. But when she didn’t even look at him, he casually asked, “Are you sure your cousin is coming?” using the code word they had selected for Modiri.

  “Yes,” she said, picking through a pile of woven leather bracelets decorated with beads, silver trimmings, and semiprecious stones.

  “How do you know?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He waited until the shopkeeper struck up a conversation with another patron to say, “Why here? It’s a security nightmare.”

  At this she whispered, “Because it’s noisy and crowded. The Grand Bazaar is his preferred venue to meet deep-cover assets face-to-face.”

  Something in the timbre of her voice was off. A sudden wave of nausea washed over him. “You? You’re the asset?” he murmured.

  She looked at him with a tight-lipped smile that morphed into an apologetic frown . . .

  It seemed, to his great dismay, he had his answer.

  CHAPTER 35

  The Grand Bazaar

  Cyrus wasn’t supposed to be here.

  He was supposed to be en route to intercept a convoy carrying a twenty-kiloton nuclear warhead, one of six warheads that Iran had managed to hide from the world despite the nuclear treaty and IAEA inspections. But sometimes disobedience was obligatory. His uncle’s life was in danger, and only Cyrus could see it. Amir had already arranged a dedicated standby helicopter for his travel to intercept the convoy. By crashing this party, he’d simply elected to delay his departure by a few hours. If things went smoothly, no one would ever know he’d been here. If not, his uncle would be grateful for his intervention. The only other VEVAK operative with the skills to match the American was Rostami, and Rostami was dead. Cyrus was the last line of defense for his uncle. Amir would see that.

  On the outside, he appeared calm and collected as he moved through the crowd, but on the inside his nerves were on fire. Something insidious was afoot; he could feel it in his bones. The American operator was here. This he knew with certainty because they had received confirmation from the mole. Cyrus had successfully linked in to the capture team’s comm circuit on his arrival at the Bazaar; he knew VEVAK protocols and had his own transceiver, so it hadn’t been difficult. Comms had been smooth and professional from the outset, and he’d been feeling good about the operation, until one of the spotters reported that Amir and Maheen were not at the rally point and he’d not been able to make visual contact. A beat later, someone’s microphone transceiver started transmitting an ear-piercing squeal, rendering their comms useless. He couldn’t even call the others to change the channel. The only good sign was that everything in the market was subdued—no gunshots, no screaming, no stampede of civilians fleeing an attack.

  He was confident that his aunt and uncle had not slipped past him. Maheen would be difficult to miss with her brightly colored turquoise hijab. Cyrus wondered if the selection of the Grand Bazaar as the capture venue was Maheen’s idea. It was too big, too crowded, and too tangled a labyrinth to pull off an operation like this without complication and collaterals. He didn’t like it. Maheen had somehow managed to insert herself into the operation, but to what end he did not know. She was not a field operator, and her very presence jeopardized the mission. Someone who was not expecting to die would meet their end here today; the only mystery was who.

  His heart rate picked up.

  The mission clock in his mind was ticking down. He had to find his aunt and uncle before the American assassin did. He resisted the urge to pull the Strizh 9 mm pistol from the holster he
wore under his shirt.

  Patience, he told himself. Patience.

  The passageway he was walking soon intersected a corridor, forming an atrium of sorts where the ceiling was decorated with intricately painted tiles and carved wooden arch supports. Round skylights punctuated each vault, creating a line of blue-sky circles providing light and ventilation. He pulled his gaze down from the Persian architecture and looked left, scanning the crowd for his aunt and uncle. Not seeing them, he looked right. He let his gaze meander along and over hundreds of heads moving this way and that.

  Nothing.

  He scanned left . . .

  He scanned right . . .

  Just as he was about to look the other way, he glimpsed a flash of turquoise in the crowd. He stepped into the river of foot traffic, his gaze fixed on a turquoise hijab playing peekaboo with him thirty meters away. Was this Maheen? As he bobbed and weaved through the crush of people, he strained to spot his uncle—Amir would be easy to recognize . . .

  He sidestepped a merchant carrying a stack of boxes and a broad-shouldered figure came into view, standing beside the woman in the turquoise hijab. A shot of adrenaline dumped into his bloodstream.

  Not his uncle.

  This was the American.

  At last, he finally had acquired his target.

  CHAPTER 36