The Last Refuge

by Ben Coes

  After a few minutes, the door opened and two soldiers entered. One of them gathered the tray, then turned to leave the room while the other soldier reached down and picked up the dropped bottle of water. As he stood up, his head passed near Meir’s waist.

  Meir lurched at the young soldier. He grabbed the man’s shirt at the starched collar with his manacled hands and pulled him down.

  The soldier, caught off guard, screamed. He tried to push Meir away, but Meir held the shirt collar tight. The other soldier, near the door now, yelled and ran back to help.

  Meir tried to move his fingers up toward the soldier’s neck. The soldier pulled back with all of his strength, but the Israeli commando was too powerful. Meir held firmly, clawing at the skin above the collar, clawing upward toward the man’s larynx.

  Meir heard footsteps behind him, then felt a sharp blow to his left side, a boot—the other soldier kicking him with a steel-toed boot.

  Meir pulled the soldier closer. His grasp was tightening. His fingers tore at the skin of the neck. The Iranian panicked as he tried desperately to pull backward and away from Meir’s hands. The soldier tried to yank Meir’s hands from his neck.

  But Meir clawed his fingers like spider legs up the soldier’s neck. His fingers, with barely room between his hands, encircled the soldier’s neck in a tight grip.

  More soldiers started pouring into the room, yelling and screaming at Meir to let go. The first soldier kicked relentlessly at Meir, his hard boot hitting Meir’s ribs and back. Meir absorbed the blows, as he had been trained to do. Compartmentalizing the pain, he focused on what he had to do. Another soldier soon joined him and Meir suddenly felt a sharp strike to the back of his head, the butt of a rifle.

  But still he held firm.

  “Stop, Meir!” came a scream, and he recognized the voice of Achabar, his attorney. “Stop! You’ll kill him!”

  Meir was surrounded by a phalanx of men, then tackled. The steel chair cascaded over as at least four men grabbed him and wrenched him to the ground. They pulled at his head, yanked at his hands, tried to snap his fingers, which were locked around the soldier’s neck like a vise.

  But it was too late. As Meir toppled over, he brought the soldier tumbling down with him. They landed under the scrum of Iranian soldiers. As they hit the ground, Meir turned his powerful hands counterclockwise in a sudden, violent motion. The soldier’s neck snapped, then he went limp, dead instantly on the hard, wet floor of the prison.

  11

  EITANIM GROVE

  SAVYON, ISRAEL

  Dewey was still dressed in the navy blue Brooks Brothers suit, now wrinkled from the overnight flight from New York. The cab dropped him off in a quiet, well-to-do residential neighborhood twenty minutes east of downtown Tel Aviv. It reminded him of Beverly Hills.

  Dewey glanced both ways and crossed a tree-shrouded sidewalk to a large iron gate. He pushed the gate in; behind it, a hundred feet ahead, at the end of a fieldstone sidewalk, a simple, rambling single-level home spread to the left, a large garden to the right. At the front door, a short, middle-aged woman in a green sundress was standing. Her straight gray hair was brushed neatly back. She smiled at Dewey as he entered.

  “Mrs. Meir?” asked Dewey as he walked to the woman and shook her hand. “I’m Dewey Andreas.”

  “Please call me Vered.”

  Dewey towered over Kohl Meir’s mother. She held his hand tightly.

  “How was your flight?”

  “Fine, thanks.”

  “Would you like something to drink? Coffee? Perhaps something to eat?”

  “No, thank you,” said Dewey. “I grabbed a sandwich when I landed.”

  “He’s waiting for you,” she said, nodding behind her. “The door.”

  Dewey walked down the hallway, through the living room. At the back of the living room, a door stood closed. He knocked.

  “Come in,” said a voice from inside the room.

  Dewey entered a small room lined with bookshelves. Two windows looked out on a flower garden behind the house. In the middle of the room, a large man sat in a wheelchair; he was in his sixties with a thick head of black and gray hair; his features were chiseled, a sharp nose, broad forehead, tanned and ruddy. His deeply creased face looked as if it had been cut by winds over a lifetime outdoors.

  “Hello, Dewey,” Tobias Meir said, his voice deep and gravelly. “Please, have a seat.”

  “It’s nice to meet you,” said Dewey as he sat down in the chair next to Meir.

  Meir stared at Dewey in silence.

  “Did someone explain what happened to Kohl?” asked Dewey.

  “Menachem Dayan called me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s the way things happen. You were a soldier, were you not? You can’t think like that.”

  Dewey nodded.

  “I need to know why he was coming to see me,” said Dewey.

  Meir stared for several seconds at Dewey.

  “Do you believe there are good Iranians?” Meir asked. “Perhaps a guard in the prison who’ll prevent Kohl from being tortured?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dewey. “I doubt it.”

  “You assassinated Khomeini’s brother,” said Meir. “In Bali, 1988.”

  Slowly, Dewey nodded. “How do you know that?”

  “We studied it,” said Meir, “in Shin Bet. Why did you kill him?”

  “It was an operation,” said Dewey. “I was ordered to do it. I didn’t ask why.”

  “Why kill Khomeini’s brother?”

  “He was the one charged with funding the different groups that were starting to sprout up. So, it was a message from us. A ‘fuck you’ to Tehran and the mullahs. A way of saying America doesn’t forget. Someone else stepped into his shoes, but there was a certain amount of value in having that person’s name not be Khomeini.”

  “It was a masterpiece,” said Meir.

  “No, it wasn’t a masterpiece,” said Dewey. “It succeeded, that’s all you can say. I’ve seen piss-poor designs that ended up achieving the objective of the operation, and I’ve seen brilliant designs that go very badly, very quickly.”

  Tobias Meir moved his wheelchair across the library’s oriental carpet to a dark mahogany rolltop desk in the corner of the room. He opened the top drawer of the desk, removing an envelope. He wheeled backward and stopped next to Dewey.

  “If I tell you something, are you obligated to tell your government?” asked Meir.

  “No,” said Dewey.

  “Not the CIA?” asked Meir.

  “I don’t work for them.”

  “So I can trust you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Dewey, “you can trust me.”

  “I’m going to show you why Kohl was visiting you,” said Meir.

  Meir clutched the white letter-sized envelope in his right hand. His hand tremored slightly as he held it. He extended the envelope to Dewey. Dewey took the envelope, but did nothing.

  “Iran’s president, Mahmoud Nava, has vowed to destroy Israel,” said Meir.

  “I know.”

  “They say he’s trying to build a nuclear weapon.”

  Dewey took the envelope and lifted the flap at the side. He pulled out a photograph. The photo showed a long, roundish object in the back of a semitruck; the object was oval, long, dark silver, with a shiny steel tip. A missile. On its side, in green lettering, something was written in Persian.

  “Is it—” Dewey started.

  “Iran’s first nuclear bomb,” said Meir.

  “Where did you get this?” asked Dewey.

  “From an Iranian high up in Mahmoud Nava’s staff. He stole the photo, then reached out to Kohl.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He works for Mahmoud Nava himself. So you see, there are good Iranians, Dewey.”

  “There might be,” said Dewey. “Or it was a trap. Who else have you told about this?”

  “Nobody,” said Meir.

  “Why not?”

  “According
to the Iranian, they have a mole inside Mossad,” said Meir. “Nava would launch the nuclear bomb immediately if he knew we had knowledge of it, before we have time to design and execute the operation to destroy it.”

  “Operation?” asked Dewey. “What operation? If Israel or the U.S. saw this photo, they would immediately blow it up.”

  “If they knew where it was.”

  “Natanz? Qum?”

  “It’s not at Natanz or Qum,” said Meir calmly. “They’ve hidden it. Only Nava knows. He and a few high up in the Revolutionary Guard and VEVAK. And, of course, Suleiman, their psychotic ruler.”

  Dewey paused, staring at the photo.

  “How did he get this to Kohl?” asked Dewey.

  “A woman. A reporter for Al Jazeera who came to Tel Aviv and found Kohl.”

  “You’re playing with fire,” said Dewey. “You have to tell someone. Dayan. Mossad. Or let me tell the CIA.”

  “No!” shouted Tobias Meir. “No. If you tell anyone, they’ll launch the bomb before we have time to react. He specifically warned Kohl. You must promise you won’t tell anyone.”

  “So what was your plan? What if I hadn’t called you?”

  Dewey looked into Tobias Meir’s eyes, encircled by dark crimson, the bruises left by the aftermath of what were undoubtedly too many sleepless nights.

  “That is a question I don’t know the answer to,” said Meir.

  “What’s written on the side of the bomb?” asked Dewey.

  “It says, ‘Goodbye, Tel Aviv,’” replied Meir.

  Dewey shut his eyes for a brief moment, then swallowed hard. He reached his hand into his pocket, looking for a cigarette. On the flight to Tel Aviv, he remembered thinking that rescuing Kohl Meir from an Iranian prison was going to be next to impossible. Now it looked easy in comparison.

  He felt the thin, sharp cardboard end of the cigarette pack. He pulled one out and lit it, not even asking Meir for permission.

  “Do you know how to reach this man?” asked Dewey.

  “His name is Qassou. I know how to get a message to him, through the woman.”

  Dewey held up the photo of the nuclear bomb.

  “I need to meet with him,” said Dewey, taking a drag on the cigarette. “Immediately.”

  12

  VALIASR AVENUE

  TEHRAN

  At four thirty in the morning, a small plastic alarm clock made an incessant beeping noise. But the man who it was intended for, Abu Paria, was already awake. He’d arisen a handful of minutes before, as if his subconscious knew something was about to happen. Paria stared at the alarm clock for more than half a minute as the noise pealed in the air and its small light went on and off. Finally, he reached out and hit the button to turn it off.

  Paria threw the sheets off and stood up, buck naked. He was a gorilla of a man, his chest, torso, and back covered in thick black hair. Paria’s powerful frame looked like that of a bodybuilder’s. He was a wall of muscle; big, hulking, with biceps the size of grapefruits and a barrel of a chest, legs like small trees. A lifetime’s worth of weight lifting, combined with a decade as a member of Quds Force, an elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard modeled on Britain’s SAS. Quds was Iran’s fiercest military weapon, a commando regiment attuned to the climate and exigencies of the Middle East, designed for deep covert strike capability inside the borders of other countries. Quds Force training had been brutal—miles and miles of daily running in weighted-down gear, mountain climbing, survival training, hand-to-hand combat, and always the weights. Recruited into Quds as a twenty-year-old college student, Paria had been named unit commander by the time he was twenty-six.

  Paria walked to the closet. On a hook inside the door, he removed a leather belt. He stepped into the middle of the bedroom. With the belt in his right hand, he whipped the belt across his left shoulder, so that the end of the leather smacked across his back, making a loud snapping noise. He whipped himself more than twenty times, each time the stroke became harder and more vicious. His back grew red, though after so many years, it had grown a thick, tough layer of callus. Paria repeated the exercise with his left hand, ripping the leather belt across his right shoulder until he nearly bled, all the time saying nothing, looking forward into a large floor-to-ceiling mirror, staring into his own eyes, without expression.

  Everyone knew Paria was tough. Among the people within Iran’s military and intelligence communities, he was widely considered the toughest man in Iran. But even those who considered him the toughest man in Iran, perhaps even the Middle East, had no idea how tough he really was.

  He’d begun this sadistic daily exercise long ago, to learn how much pain he could actually endure, how he would behave and react if he was ever captured and tortured. Now he looked forward to the feeling, the utter pain of it all. It allowed Paria to begin his day with the knowledge that he could survive almost anything. It made him remember that he was just another human being; the humiliation and degradation of the lashes transported him to a level of self-awareness that was ultimately degrading, and grounded him. Paria believed it made him hungry, desperate, and brutally effective.

  And these qualities were essential in the role he’d been chosen to play a decade ago: director of Iran’s Ministry of National Intelligence and National Security. VEVAK, as it was known, was Iran’s secret police. In theory, it was a combination of the FBI and CIA, focused both internally and externally, but rendered according to Iran’s particularly evil recipe; doing anything necessary to keep Iran’s ruling clergy in power. At the end of the day, it was this role more than anything that guided VEVAK.

  Over the years, it was reported that VEVAK had killed more than a million of its own citizens. The truth is, even Paria didn’t know how many they’d killed. He’d long ago outlawed the ministry from keeping such records.

  VEVAK was everywhere. As anonymous as the wind, but as powerful and unforgiving as a hurricane. Paria had been chosen by Ali Suleiman, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor, and it was to Suleiman that Paria reported, not Nava. Once a week, Paria walked to the central Tehran mosque where Suleiman lived and worked. There, he sat in Suleiman’s office and updated him on important developments within VEVAK, both inside Iran and abroad. VEVAK was the most important weapon in the Iranian clergy’s fascist-like control over the country.

  Suleiman had the ear and instincts of a politician. As such, Suleiman tended to focus his questions to Paria on political developments inside Iran, especially in relation to Iran’s president, Mahmoud Nava. Suleiman despised Nava, thought him volatile, ignorant, and often irrational; yet Suleiman had learned to appreciate the very considerable shield that Nava’s mercurial reputation in international circles allowed him, as Supreme Leader, inside Iran.

  It was Suleiman himself who had ordered the dramatic escalation in financial support for Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas. It was Suleiman who asked on a weekly basis how many IEDs had been trucked to the front lines in Iraq, as if keeping a mental count of the tens of thousands of bombs sent by Iran made him sleep better at night. And it was Suleiman who, early on, pushed for the development of a nuclear bomb.

  But if Suleiman was the one who controlled the levers, it was Paria who was the lever itself.

  After waking himself up with precisely four minutes of whipping, Paria did seventy-five push-ups and one hundred sit-ups. He dressed in shorts, a T-shirt, and running shoes. By 6:00 A.M., he was in the elevator that took him down to the lobby of his apartment building. He passed the security desk, manned with a pair of handpicked ex–Revolutionary Guards.

  “Good morning, General Paria,” said one of the men.

  “General,” said the other, nodding.

  Paria nodded at the two guards, but said nothing.

  “The usual run, sir?” asked one of them.

  But Paria didn’t answer the soldier.

  He left the building and ran to the right, down the residential street, toward Sorkheh Hesar Park. Paria didn’t reveal information, to anyo
ne, if he didn’t have to. As innocent as the guard’s question was, there was always the infinitesimally small chance that the guard was working for someone, reporting to someone, and that his question could be soon followed up by the appearance of a stranger along his running route, who, from a few hundred yards away, would blow a hole in the back of Paria’s head.

  Paria had ordered many such executions over the years. It was a VEVAK trademark. Use informants to learn the daily routine, then penetrate that daily routine, interrupt it, cleanly, efficiently. Kill with one well-aimed bullet. Leave without a trace.

  Even though both guards had worked in Paria’s building for more than two years, and even though he knew their backgrounds going all the way back to childhood, Paria entered Sorkheh Hesar Park and ran in the opposite direction, taking a different route around the large, now deserted park.

  Paria ran a relaxed five miles, seeing nary a soul on his route.

  Back at his apartment, he did seventy-five more push-ups, a hundred more sit-ups, showered, then dressed in his usual attire—steel-toed black military boots, khakis, a short-sleeve button-down khaki shirt.

  At 8:30 A.M., he climbed into the back of an idling black Range Rover, parked in front of his building. Waiting inside the SUV was a plainclothed man, who handed Paria a Ziploc bag. Paria took it and poured it out on the seat between them as the driver sped away from the building.

  “This is everything Meir had on him?”

  “Yes, General.”

  Inside the bag was a wad of cash, U.S. dollars and Israeli shekels, a car key with a Porsche logo emblazoned on it, a brown leather wallet, and an Israeli passport. Paria reached in and removed the wallet, inspecting it quickly, removing credit cards and examining both sides, then putting the wallet back in the bag. He opened the passport and stared for a few seconds at the photograph of Meir.

  “Run the credit cards,” said Paria. “See if they’re dummies.”