The Last Run

by Greg Rucka

  He closed the papers, slid them off his desk and into his trashcan. His head hurt, the same headache that had nagged him since the crash, and Caleb put his face in his hands, closed his eyes, gingerly rubbed at his bruised temple with a fingertip.

  Maybe, just maybe, he was right, Caleb thought. Maybe the reason that he had seen no signs that he was under surveillance was because there were no signs to be found. But why? Why would Youness Shirazi, having positively identified him as SIS in Iran, leave him room to run? Was he baiting another trap, the way Caleb now understood he had done with Falcon? To what end?

  It made no sense, none at all, unless Shirazi wanted SIS to have room to run.

  Caleb lowered his hands, opened his eyes, entirely uncomfortable with his conclusion. “Sir?”

  “Caleb?” Barnett answered.

  “What if Falcon never intended to defect?”

  “Think that’s given, at this point.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. If he was the wrong defector. If Falcon was just bait, to get us to put everything right, to put the operation in motion.”

  “You mean Minder One was meant to take someone else at the last minute? London would’ve told us, even if not in the first instance, once it all went tits, they’d have said.”

  “I don’t think they knew,” Caleb said. “I think it was Shirazi.”

  Barnett’s cigarette, stuck in the corner of his mouth, jerked towards the ceiling as the man grinned. “You think Youness Shirazi set Falcon up to run, planning to take his place at the last minute?”

  “Yes.”

  The grin got bigger, became a laugh.

  “I think that knock to your head did more hurt than we thought,” Barnett told him.

  Caleb frowned, embarrassed, then nodded. That must be it, he thought, I’m just not thinking straight. Then the telephone by his elbow rang, jarring him, and Caleb fumbled the handset to his ear. The embassy switchboard, there was a call for him, asking for him by name.

  “This is Lewis,” he said.

  “Caleb,” Tara Chace said. “I need you to get a message to London.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  LONDON—HYDE PARK, LOVERS WALK, PARK LANE ENTRANCE

  12 DECEMBER 1111 HOURS (GMT)

  Crocker found Seale waiting in the usual place, by the statue of Achilles that had been cast from captured cannons won by Wellington from the French. The day was dreary, cold and damp, not quite committed to rain, and the CIA Station Chief stood in his overcoat and gloves, a watch cap on his head. He tracked Crocker’s approach, moving to meet him, and together the two men began walking deeper into the park.

  They stayed in silence, each of them paying careful attention to their surroundings, more out of habit than necessity. Once upon a time, a walk in the park had been a very safe way to share information, and then had come the age of laser directional ears and parabolic microphones and Internet firewalls and secure phone lines, and it was thought that such rendezvous were passé. But, as with so many things, the wheel had turned, and face-to-face meetings had come, once again, to be recognized for their value. Information shared in person between two men, after all, could not be intercepted, even if there was a risk it would be overheard.

  “No news?” Seale asked after a minute.

  “Nothing.” It was a question asked out of politeness, rather than curiosity, Crocker thought. Seale damn well knew that there’d been nothing out of Tehran since the previous evening.

  “You guys formulated your response yet?”

  Crocker shook his head. “C’s still at Downing Street. According to Rayburn, there’s an argument in the Cabinet as to what the response should be.”

  “I’d think a flat denial.”

  “The problem with that is there’s no way to know what Chace has given them. If they have a confession, and they air it after the Government issues a denial, it’ll make us look even worse.”

  Seale grunted in agreement, fell silent, and they continued walking, listening to nothing but the traffic running past in the distance, the crunch of their shoes on the gravel. After another minute, Crocker realized that Seale wasn’t going to ask, and so he reached into his overcoat and withdrew a sheaf of papers, clipped at the corner and folded lengthwise, and handed them over without a word. They walked for almost another fifty yards as Seale went through them, sheet by sheet, then again, before slowing to stop. Crocker continued another couple feet, steeling himself, then turned back to face him. Seale looked genuinely stunned.

  “Tell me this is wrong.”

  “I can’t,” Crocker said.

  “Jesus Christ, Paul, this has to be wrong!”

  “It’s not.”

  “This is everything she had access to?”

  Crocker shook his head. “That’s the preliminary list. D-Int is still compiling a master document, but I wanted to get that into your hands as soon as possible. She had nine years as a Minder, five as Head of Section. There’s no telling how much operational data she’s retained.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Seale repeated.

  Crocker said nothing. That Chace would be interrogated, was being interrogated even as they spoke, was assumed, just as it was assumed that, eventually, she’d break. It wasn’t held as a reflection of the woman she was, or the spy, and it wasn’t viewed as a failing; it was simply true. Everyone, eventually, broke, and she would, too. When that happened, she’d begin talking, and when that happened, there was every reason to believe she wouldn’t stop until there was nothing left. She would give them everything she had, or, more correctly, they would take everything she had.

  Which meant that steps needed to be made now to protect what could be lost. Hence the list, a frighteningly long list of names and operations and networks and contacts and protocols and secrets, so many secrets, most of them belonging to SIS, but not all. Some of them were marked “US-UK EYES ONLY,” information shared with or learned from the CIA. That was what Seale held now, the itemization of how Tara Chace could hurt them.

  She could hurt them quite badly.

  “You showed this to C?” Seale asked, after a second. “She knows?”

  “It was on her desk this morning, before she returned to Downing Street.”

  Seale looked at the papers in his hand, then offered them back to Crocker. “I haven’t seen this.”

  “Julian, you can’t do that.”

  “Paul, if I report this to Langley, there’ll be hell to pay. And if I have to bring them a second list, of the things you guys might’ve missed in the first one, it’ll only make matters worse. Take it back, sit on it for twenty-four hours, at least. Give me the master document. If you’re going to cut the throat of the Special Relationship, at least do it in one slice.”

  “Twenty-four hours.” Crocker scowled, then reached out and took the papers, adding, “It won’t help.”

  “Maybe, but it won’t hurt, not at this point.”

  There was more to it, Crocker knew, but Seale had the good grace, unlike C, not to say it. If Chace died, she wouldn’t be able to tell the Iranians anything, after all.

  “You had lunch?” Seale asked. “Let the Company buy you lunch.”

  “I should get back to the office. I appreciate the offer, however.”

  “You know where I am.”

  “If we hear anything, I’ll let you know.”

  “Do something about that list, Paul. You’re going to kill us with that list.”

  Seale turned away, heading northeast, towards Grosvenor Square.

  It started to rain.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Kate demanded when Crocker stepped into the outer office. He was wet and cold and depressed, and from her words, he immediately assumed the worst, that the news about Chace had broken while he’d been talking with Seale.

  Then Kate shoved a signal into his hand, from Tehran Station, flash precedence, immediate for D-Ops.

  STATION NUMBER TWO REPORTS CONTACT WITH MINDER ONE VIA TELEPHONE AT 1449 LOCAL, DURATION OF CALL 87 S
ECONDS …

  Crocker read the rest of the signal in a rush, then almost threw the paper back at her, sprinting into his office, for the red phone, shouting, “Find C! Get D-Int and DC, tell them I need them to meet me in her office.”

  “She’s still at Downing Street!”

  “Then tell DC to get her out of the meeting, we need her here.” He stabbed at his phone, wedging the handset between his neck and shoulder as he tried to remove his sodden overcoat.

  “Duty Ops Officer.”

  “D-Ops, for MCO, get me the Tehran Number Two, secure voice, immediately. I’m coming down.”

  Crocker used a finger to kill the connection, jabbed another key, transferring the phone to his opposite shoulder, letting the coat dump onto his chair, where it then slid to the floor. He kicked it out of his way, looked up as Kate stuck her head into the office.

  “DC needs a reason to pull C from the Cabinet meeting. What can I tell him?”

  “The first part, that Minder One’s in the open again.”

  “That should do it.”

  “I’d fucking well hope so.”

  “Minder Two,” Poole said in his ear.

  “Ops Room, I’ll explain when I get there,” Crocker said, then hung up and rounded his desk, heading for the door. He stopped at Kate’s desk long enough to point back to his overcoat, lying on the floor. “The list for Seale is still in my pocket.”

  “What should I do with it?”

  “Destroy it,” Crocker said, and then he was out of the office, racing down the halls, making for the Ops Room. Hoping that he hadn’t been premature; praying that he wouldn’t need a new copy of the list to hand to Seale anyway.

  “I need a name and an operation,” Crocker shouted, as soon as he hit the Ops Room floor, on a straight line for the MCO Desk. Poole had just beat him in, was at Duty Ops with Arthur Grey, and grabbed the clipboard before Grey himself could.

  “Name: Cougar,” Poole called back. “Operation: Icecrown.”

  “It’s a Special Op, put it up on the board, Minder Two allocated, and bring in a control.” Crocker reached the MCO Desk, took the headset Lex was offering him, closed his fist around the mike. “And find out the status on Bagboy, if Lankford is free to move.”

  “Yes, sir,” Grey said.

  Crocker pulled on the headset, his eyes checking the clocks on the wall. “Caleb, D-Ops. Confirm, please, time elapsed since contact, sixty-seven minutes.”

  There was a pause, the static chatter of the scrambler filling the void, before Caleb Lewis answered, “I have sixty-seven minutes, yes, sir.”

  “Her location was south of Natanz at that time.” Crocker snapped his fingers, pointing at the map, and someone knew what he meant, because almost immediately a callout appeared on the Iran map, marking Natanz, some one hundred and twenty miles southeast of Tehran. “Heading which direction, did she say?”

  “No, she didn’t, sir.”

  “We are designating her package as Cougar, do you understand?”

  “Cougar, yes, sir.”

  “Do the locals know that Cougar has gone walkabout?”

  “Think so, yes, sir.”

  “Explain.”

  “Station Number One has been making inquiries, sir, he’s out of the office at the moment, still pursuing, but he called in twenty minutes ago to say that there’s been a hell of a lot of Sepah activity around the MOIS. Mission Security is reporting active surveillance of the embassy, as well.”

  Crocker swore. He’d hoped for more of a lead, but if the embassy was being watched, then there was no question that VEVAK knew what was up. If the pursuit of Chace prior to her capture had been intense in the face of Hossein Khamenei’s death, the effort to keep her leaving the country with the now-former Chief of Counterintelligence would be monstrous. In the first, it had been an issue of political value; this time, the value was far more concrete, a target with direct strategic and tactical knowledge that the Iranians could, under no account, allow to escape.

  For a moment, Crocker wondered who would have to prepare the list of operations compromised by the defection of Youness Shirazi. He shut down the thought as grossly premature.

  “Sir?”

  “Just thinking, Caleb. There was nothing in your signal about her health.”

  “She said, and I quote, ‘no exfil by air.’ ”

  “And Cougar didn’t have an exfil plan of his own?”

  “My impression was that he had been relying on us to provide one, that he had believed the Caspian route was still viable.”

  “It isn’t,” Crocker said.

  “No, sir, Minder One had already determined that. She didn’t say which way they were headed. I think she was concerned the call might be intercepted.”

  “It probably was. All right, inform immediately if anything else develops. We’ll be in touch.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Crocker pulled the headset free, tossed it back to Lex, staring up at the board. Poole came in at his shoulder, mimicking his pose, both of them staring at Iran.

  “So who’s Cougar when he’s at home?” Poole asked.

  “Right now?” Crocker said. “He’s the man who’s saved Chace’s life.”

  Gordon-Palmer, Rayburn, and Szurko were all in their regular seats in the sitting area of C’s office, and each of them stared at Crocker as if he had dropped, naked, from the womb, in front of them.

  Then Szurko began to laugh, a hearty, gleeful roar that had the merciful effect of pulling both C’s and the DC’s attention from Crocker to D-Int for the moment. “Oh, that’s brilliant,” Szurko managed. “That’s just—that’s bloody brilliant, that’s what it is.”

  C glared at him for a second longer, then pulled her attention away, placing it on Crocker. “Clearly Daniel sees something I don’t.”

  “It worked, though,” Szurko said, trying to control himself. “The problem was she was too good, don’t you see? If she’d been worse, if she’d been slower or stupider, if she hadn’t realized Falcon was wrong, it’d have come off perfectly!”

  “I still don’t—”

  Crocker opened his mouth, but Szurko beat him to it, leaning forward on the couch, holding out his hands, index fingers pointing at C as a visual aid. He wiggled the left one, said, “Falcon,” then the right, “Shirazi,” and then crossed their positions, saying, “Just say Shirazi everywhere you would say Falcon, makes perfect sense.”

  “We thought we were lifting Hossein Khamenei,” Rayburn said. “When in reality we were lifting Youness Shirazi.”

  “That must have been his initial plan,” Crocker said. “It went wrong in Noshahr, when the shooting started. My suspicion is that Shirazi had intended for Chace to be captured unharmed, at which point he would have freed her and taken Falcon’s place in the RHIB for the rendezvous.”

  “But it went wrong,” C insisted.

  “Bullets,” Szurko supplied, unhelpfully.

  “Chace was shot, and she did what she was trained to do,” Crocker said. “She ran, and she ran exceptionally well, well enough that Shirazi had to hit the embassy car. Even if he had only been considering defection before that point, as soon as Hossein died, he had to know it was all or nothing, that he wouldn’t be able to stay.”

  “Did Chace actually kill Falcon?” C asked.

  “I doubt it, but we’ve no way to be certain,” Crocker told her. “I suspect it was accidental. It certainly would have been the last thing Shirazi would have wanted, because it would have drawn attention to the operation. Again, if everything had gone to plan, he’d have been on board a Coast Guard ship before his own people even began to suspect he’d left the country. He could’ve been at the Farm, being debriefed, before they’d been able to confirm it.”

  “Clever for another reason.” Szurko was smiling, eyes closed, as if admiring the plan in his mind’s eye the way a jeweler examined a particularly well-cut diamond. “Dangling Falcon guaranteed CIA support, it guaranteed that we would send our best possible agent to execute the li
ft, it guaranteed that we would give that agent the best possible cover and exfil possible, and that we would do everything within our power to support the operation should something go wrong. Which we did.”

  The room went silent again, broken only by another giggle from Szurko, who then opened his eyes, and seemed surprised to find he wasn’t alone. C sank back in her chair, clearly sorting her thoughts, and Rayburn likewise was lost in his own, the tip of his tongue just visible between his lips.

  “I have to ask this,” C said, finally. “Is it possible this is just another dangle, a means of getting us to further expose ourselves in Iran?”

  “No,” Crocker said, firmly. “Tehran Station confirms that VEVAK has pulled out the stops, they’ve actually put surveillance on the embassy itself at this point. I’m certain the next report we get from Barnett or Lewis will tell us that the Republican Guards are out in force, and that there’s a nationwide manhunt under way. Pursuing Chace was one thing—if she got away, they materially lost nothing, because all she was to them was a gain. But losing Shirazi, that would be devastating. They will do everything they can to prevent that. They’ll mobilize every asset, they’ll put up jets, they’ll roll tanks if they need to. They absolutely cannot allow him to leave the country alive.”

  “And by that same logic, there’s no going back for Shirazi? He won’t turn around and betray Chace?”

  “It would be suicide.”

  She nodded. “Then the real question is this: can we get them out of the country?”