by JB Turner
He pressed on down Mulholland, the lights of Malibu away down the mountains in the distance.
Winding round bends that never seemed to end before they straightened up.
Meyerstein's voice came back through the cell. "Jon, the guys have been pulled over . . ."
The signal seemed to drop again and Reznick groaned.
"Shit . . ."
"What is it?" Reznick asked.
"Signal has dropped my end."
"It's happened twice already to me."
Reznick turned a bend and caught sight of the blue police lights. "Got them. They've pulled them over at an overlook."
"Copy that, Jon."
The signal cut out.
Reznick drove on hard, foot to the floor. A couple of minutes later he headed round another bend. Blue lights strafing the hills road, two BMW cop bikes at the side of the road.
Where were the cops?
He pulled over into the overlook beside overgrown shrubbery.
He got out of the car. Blood on the ground. Shit. The headlights showed the soles of a pair of black leather boots sticking out from the trees. He went over and kneeled down. The body of a dead cop. Two bullets drilled into the forehead head.
He felt a black fury grip him deep inside threatening to engulf him. He headed over to the cops' motorbikes. It was then he saw the second cop, lying face down. The same state. There was no sign of the guys who'd planted the bomb.
Reznick stood and contemplated his response. He bent down and took a gun from the dead cop's holster and climbed on one of the bikes.
He revved up hard.
A police controller came over the radio. "Echo Five Delta, respond."
Reznick picked up. "Two officers dead. My name is Reznick. Refer to Assistant Director Meyerstein of the FBI. I repeat two officers have been shot dead. I'm on it."
"Echo Five . . ."
"Shut the fuck up. Assailants on Ducati bike. I'm more than two miles behind heading south on Mulholland Highway. Silencer almost certainly used from 9mm handgun, point blank." Reznick kicked into first gear and sped away, clicking through the gears until he was hitting 90mph through the winding canyon road.
A crackle down the line. "Please identify yourself, officer."
Reznick switched off the radio. He headed down the winding canyon road, wind buffeting him as the bike weaved and accelerated down Mulholland. He saw a truck and overtook it at breakneck speed. He saw a sign for Calabasas. He revved harder. Rapidly changing gears through the winding highway. Powered through the small town. Then down the highway and through the hills.
He couldn't see them.
His mind raced. Had he lost them? Had they disappeared into a side street in Calabasas?
A few minutes later Reznick was snaking down Topanga Canyon Road back toward Malibu. The lights of the hillside houses and the communities of the canyon all around.
Reznick spotted the lights up ahead, half a mile or so down the canyon road, the bike had stopped at an overlook. He rounded a bend. He felt his heart race as he sped down the hillside highway, the smell of oaks and burnt vegetation hanging in the balmy air.
The lights of a truck heading up Topanga strafed the overlook. The bike was there. No passengers in sight.
Reznick slowed down, moving down the gears and edged the police bike beside the Ducati. He got off and stared out at a dirt road trail. Then he turned and saw something in the distance. Two silhouetted figures headed across the dark canyon. Ticks bit his arms and neck. He took his cell from his shirt pocket and punched in Meyerstein's number. "Listen up," he said, "overlook half way down Topanga, the two guys have dumped the Ducati. I'm in pursuit on foot."
He took out his Beretta from his waistband and headed down the hillside towards the silhouettes.
The sound of someone clearing their throat. "Jon." The voice of Meyerstein. "Jon . . . we've got your location."
Reznick headed through the undergrowth and fought his way through overhanging branches and shrubs and vegetation. He got onto the dirt trail and began to run. Heart pounding. Fast. All senses switched on. The full moon was shining on the two figures in the distance as they headed east and the lights of houses on the horizon.
He was getting closer. Two hundreds yards. Then one hundred and fifty. Then one hundred. He began to hear them panting.
Reznick trained his gun on them. "Freeze!"
The men stopped dead in their tracks.
"Hands on your head! Now!
Reznick moved closer, Beretta trained on them. "Do not fucking move or I will blow your fucking brains out!"
The whispers in Persian. Say nothing. Do you hear me? Tell the American nothing.
Reznick sensed something was wrong. He stepped forward, six or seven paces from them. The moonlight bathed the verdant canyon in an eerie light. "Very slowly, turn around, hands on head. One wrong move, you die."
The two men turned around and faced him. Young kids. Maybe Iranians. Dressed Western. The fuckers who had planted the sticky on Blaine's car.
Reznick stood and pointed the gun at them. He thought they seemed distracted, eyes darting this way and that. "Next move, and you die."
Suddenly a green tracer light was fixed on one of their foreheads.
Reznick spun around. He saw a spectral figure in the distance. Then two shots rang out.
TWENTY FIVE
FBI Assistant Director Martha Meyerstein was sitting in the back of a Command Post truck in the Nobu parking lot, watching real-time night vision footage from the police chopper circling over the two dead bodies. She watched as Reznick was cuffed by the FBI Swat team leader and looked up toward the chopper. Her heart sank as he was led back to Mulholland Highway.
Meyerstein sighed and looked over at Roy Stamper, her number two. "This whole thing is running away from us, Roy."
"Counter terrorism are running all the angles on this. The last thing we need is for Reznick to be in among it. Look at the results."
"That's enough!"
"We wanted to bring those guys in. We needed to speak to them. No goddamn use now, Martha."
"I said enough! Reznick is the one who managed to track down his old buddy, the one who witnessed them planting the bomb, alerted us, the one who warned us we were being watched. We don't know who took these guys out."
"Martha, we've had this chat before. But I'll say it again. This guy is whacked out. He's so far out there he doesn't know right from wrong."
"Are you kidding me, Roy? Are you seriously pointing the finger at Reznick for being the bad guy in this?"
"We don't execute people in cold blood."
"Okay, I've heard enough. They're going to be bringing Reznick here within the next half hour."
Meyerstein glanced at a screen, which showed an FBI bomb technician's truck had pulled up beside the Ferrari. Two technicians got out of the truck and were briefed by one of Stamper's men. Radio signals were blocked. The bomb disposal guys peeked under the Ferrari with flashlights and mirrors.
A couple of minutes later, Meyerstein's radio crackled into life. "Special Agent Lionel Farmer, LA field office bomb technician."
"Go ahead," Meyerstein said.
"Ma'am, it's a tilt trigger mechanism. Very neatly put together. But it was also cellphone activated, so glad we have that covered."
Meyerstein nodded. "What about timer?"
"No timer . . . we're sure of that."
"How long until you make it safe?"
"If you mean how long until we are able to extricate the actual device, probably the rest of the night. But as long as no one sits in the car, we'll be fine."
Meyerstein thought the tech sounded unduly confident. "Get to it." She ended the radio conversation. Her natural instinct was to err on the side of caution. She would much rather have doom laden predictions for an operation so plans could be made accordingly. She was suspicious of certainty. Her father, a leading Chicago litigator, had warned her of that many times. Just when you think you have it all figured out, somethi
ng comes out of the blue to wreck the best-laid plans. She could hear his brash voice now.
She turned to Stamper. "Where's Vincenza now?"
"He's in the staff rest room, through the back. Refusing to talk to us."
Meyerstein sighed.
"You want me to go in and sort it out?"
Meyerstein shook her head. "Leave him to me. I'll deal with him myself."
TWENTY SIX
Mohsen Sazegara stared through the powerful military binoculars he was holding in his right hand. In his left, a prototype handheld radio frequency meter. He looked at the readings and saw the spectrum that had been blanked out by the jammers. He smiled. Little did the Feds know that his team had the latest technology, designed specifically to evade the finest American counter surveillance methods available to the FBI. They also had the advantage of using a dummy trial-and-error firing circuit, which had pinpointed the precise part and size of the jammed spectrum. Mohsen had already switched to bandwidths beyond the jamming range of the three year old technology the Feds had in the field. It wasn't military grade, which was far tougher to counter.
Behzad was taking more photos. "Did we have to take out the motorbike guys, Mohsen, they were just kids?"
"Couldn't be helped."
Behzad said nothing.
Mohsen sensed his brother's distaste for the dirty war they were engaged in. He by contrast didn't share any qualms about the decision to take them out. The cell could not be compromised. Taking out the two young Iranian American kids meant that the Feds couldn't interrogate them, find out who had recruited them in America and how. Even tenuous links to elements within the network may lead to the Feds joining up the dots of the disparate groups who were operating at large.
The importance of attention to detail as well as the paramount importance of the mission had been drilled into all of them.
Mohsen would kill his own brother, Behzad, if it enabled the death of the target, or ensure the cell wasn't compromised. Needs must. The end justifies the means. He remembered the psychological tests he sat in Tehran. He had been confronted by the scenario. How would you feel if you had to kill your brother? He just smiled and said, whatever it takes, and that was that. His heart rate, he found out later, didn't spike at all when he said it. And that had impressed those higher up in Quds.
He didn't know if Behzad had done the same tests. But he assumed that he wouldn't be on the mission if he hadn't given a clear response.
The mission was king.
Mohsen reflected on how things were going and thought that it was getting a bit messy. The plan had been simple. Eliminate each of the Delta operatives one at a time. But something had gone wrong to have brought the heat of the FBI on their tail.
It complicated things. He would much rather keeping things simple. Simple is good.
The more he thought of the mission the more focused he became. Blinkered almost.
He remembered the day his team was told about the assassinations. And the identities of those involved. He felt as if his heart had been ripped out by its roots. For years he had nursed the hurt. Some nights, when he couldn't sleep, he thought about the bespectacled brilliant scientist. The quietest boy in his school. He always admired him. Protected him down the years growing up. Stood up to bullies who laughed at his bookishness.
Mohsen remembered the funeral. He remembered falling to his knees, crying, unashamedly. But the years hadn't healed his hurt. Now there was just emptiness in Mohsen's soul which couldn't be healed.
The sound of Behzad groaning loudly snapped him out of his thoughts. "The bomb technicians are well within range," his brother said.
"I'm not interested in them. This is about Vincenza."
Behzad said nothing.
Mohsen trained his binoculars on the restaurant windows and spotted Meyerstein inside. "She's speaking to Vincenza who's now sitting in staff rest room."
Behzad took more pictures. "Line of sight not perfect."
Mohsen stared at the image of Vincenza. The man who had been part of the team which had killed a brilliant scientist and whose children now grieved for him, night and day, as did his widow. He said a silent prayer when he took on the mission that he would not return until each and every member of the six-man American team had been wiped out.
"I don't like this Reznick running around," Behzad said. "He is going to be a problem."
"We'll deal with him in good time."
"What the hell are they talking about?"
"By all accounts, Vincenza is a stubborn son of a bitch. Pissed off every officer he ever encountered."
"What if Vincenza appears with Meyerstein?"
"We don't have the go ahead to kill her."
Behzad fired off more photos. "She's getting pretty animated with him."
Mohsen's earpiece buzzed. It had to be the handler. "Yes sir."
A deep breath. "The situation has been reappraised."
"Copy that."
"Code 429." It was the kill code to take out whoever was in their way, including Meyerstein.
Mohsen's heart skipped a beat. "Very good sir."
"Do not let us down."
Mohsen stared through the binoculars at Meyerstein and smiled.
TWENTY SEVEN
FBI Assistant Director Martha Meyerstein waited until Vincenza's girlfriend was escorted out of the rear of the restaurant. She pulled up a seat beside him in the staff rest room. She caught a whiff of booze and cigarettes on his breath. His eyes were glazed. "Here's how it's going to work, Mr. Vincenza. We're going to take you out of here, to a place of safety, just like Daisy."
"Do I look like the sort of guy who needs a babysitter?"
"Mr. Vincenza, I know all about you. I know about your role within Delta."
Vincenza said nothing.
"It was Jon Reznick who notified us about the bomb?"
"Reznick? Bullshit."
Meyerstein shook her head. "He tracked you down to warn you of a threat. It's all about your mission in Tehran."
Vincenza knocked back the glass of red wine.
"Two guys on a motorbike, one gets off and clips a magnetic bomb to the underside of your car. A matter of seconds and they were off."
Vincenza ran a hand through his hair. "Christ, you're serious . . ."
"Do you think this is a game? So . . . you have a choice. Either you exit the premises with my officers willingly, or we take you down here and now. Choice is yours."
Vincenza said, "Where's Reznick now?"
"Not far."
Meyerstein's cellphone rang. She recognized the Director's caller ID immediately.
"Martha," he said. "O'Donoghue."
"Sir, I was about to call in with an update."
"What's Reznick saying to what happened? That was our best chance of a lead?"
"Sir, I've not spoken to him. He's in transit to the command vehicle."
"He executed two American citizens, Martha, we've got a firestorm coming our way on this."
Meyerstein sighed as Vincenza got to his feet and began to pace the room, muttering to himself. "Sir, if you'll just let me . . ."
"Martha, he's crossed the line. He's blown the best lead we had. But I guess you know that already."
"Sir, I don't want to jump to conclusions until I know all the facts. Reznick was on this before anyone. He was the one who tracked down Vincenza."
"He's blown a chance to get vital intel. Do you know what counter terrorism are saying?"
"Sir, I deal in real intel. And facts. Fact number one, we don't know what happened up there. Only Reznick does."
"I don't give a damn . . ."
Out of the corner of her eye, a razor-thin red beam shone through the window.
Meyerstein turned. "Look out!" she shouted. A red dot locked on to Vincenza's head. Time seemed to slow down and then stop.
A bullet ripped through the windows, shattering the glass, and flooring Vincenza. He lay prostrate in a pool of blood as the shouting began and chaos ensued.
> Meyerstein was flung to the floor as the glass shattered. Her mind raced as Stamper ran into the room. She looked up and pointed to a position high up in the hills. "Forty five degree angle it came in at," she said. "I want Malibu shut down. Nothing goes in our out. Do you hear me?"
Stamper nodded and slipped on the bloody floor. "I'm on it, Martha." He got to his feet and scrambled across the restaurant to the rear exit.
Meyerstein was hauled through a side exit of the restaurant by her team and headed out onto the Pacific Highway and back to the safety of the command vehicle.
A young LA counterterrorism Fed said, "Ma'am, we've got countless agents and police now scouring the houses overlooking the Highway. Roadblocks set up north, south east and west."
Meyerstein looked through a window of the command vehicle up at the lights on the hill. "What are we talking about?"
"I'd suggest, military sniper."
"Reznick cautioned that they might be watching."
"This is a targeted assassination. The bomb attached to Vincenza's car. Pure chance that Reznick catches sight of this. But that didn't stop them. Like most pros they had a back up plan. They didn't come all this way to miss their man. They're not going to be satisfied until every member of the Delta team in Tehran is wiped out."
"Three are dead. We have one in a secure location and we're trying to track down a fifth in Arizona. That leaves Reznick. He must be protected. These Iranians can't win."
The counterterrorism guy nodded, but said nothing.
"What's the latest on the two guys killed up on the canyon."
"Update just came in. Reznick didn't kill them."
Meyerstein's insides knotted. "What?"
"Reznick didn't kill them."
"I don't follow."
"Reznick said the kids were taken out long-range, just like Vincenza was. From maybe half a mile, maybe more."
"Ballistics backs that up?"
"They will. First responders said it's clear it isn't 9mm slugs we're talking about. Shots darn near tore the kids' bodies apart."
Meyerstein picked up a black coffee sitting on the table. "This mine?"
"Yup."
Meyerstein took a couple of gulps of cold coffee and grimaced. "IDs on the two kids?"