by Marc Cameron
The twenty-seven-year-old Iranian had spent four years at Georgetown earning a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and had no difficulty navigating in Washington, D.C. He’d certainly been here long enough to know that there were spies and, more important, counterspies behind every tree and under every stone.
At just under six feet tall, with olive skin and a full head of dark, wavy hair, Kazem did not stand out in a crowd in Iran or Washington—until one looked at his eyes. Deep green, the color of the sea in a gale, they’d garnered him plenty of female attention during his time at Georgetown. A dreamer at heart, he often forgot to eat—especially now, with so much on the line. This gave him a gaunt appearance, which American girls also appeared to like. He enjoyed football—what the Americans called soccer—and ran two miles every morning to stay in shape. He was not particularly strong in a physical sense, but that didn’t matter. People didn’t bend to his will because he muscled them. He simply told them what he wanted, looked at them with his stormy-sea eyes—and they did it.
Kazem had taken a cab from his hotel to the Metro station at Tysons Corner, where he boarded the Silver train toward Largo Town Center. As instructed, he got off the train at Rosslyn, taking the impossibly long escalator up to street level, where he walked two blocks east to a Starbucks. It was early, and he had to wait in line with all the other morning commuters to buy a cup of coffee and a slice of lemon cake, which he ate outside the doors on the street. The sidewalks teemed with people wearing earbuds, carrying newspapers, drinking coffee, but no one looked anything like an intelligence operative, Russian or otherwise. Whoever was out there must have been highly skilled. Kazem finished the lemon cake—which was moist and as good as anything he’d ever had in Iran, though he hated to admit it—and retraced his steps to the Metro station. This time he took the Orange train that ran parallel to the Silver. At L’Enfant Plaza, he changed to the Blue Line, where he retraced his journey yet again, this train turning south as it sped across the Potomac, through Foggy Bottom—where the State Department was headquartered—and bypassing Rosslyn altogether. Above ground now, Kazem stood, holding on to a steel bar above his head, the train packed shoulder to shoulder. He caught a glimpse of the endless rows of white stones on the hillside at Arlington Cemetery, and the expansive parking lot of the Pentagon. He was indeed in the belly of the beast.
Kazem exited the train at the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City, returning again to ground level and walking east on 15th until he reached the Crystal Gateway Marriott. He made his way through the hotel lobby and down a long, sterile-looking tile hallway into the Crystal City Underground shopping area, redolent with odors of starched shirts and polished shoes—where he was finally supposed to meet his contact.
He pushed his way through the crowds of freshly showered government workers and uniformed military personnel arriving via Virginia transit trains on their way to the Pentagon or one of the myriad other offices in this little corner inside the Beltway.
Kazem found who he was looking for outside yet another Starbucks across from a restaurant called King Street Blues.
She sat at a small, black metal table, situated among a half-dozen other identical tables. Even though she was seated, he could tell the woman was tall, and willowy thin—a long-distance runner often seen jogging on the paved trail along the Potomac between Arlington and Mount Vernon. Amber hair curled slightly at her shoulders, framing high cheekbones and a prominent, but still attractive, Slavic nose. Her charcoal-gray business suit looked expensive, though Reza had never concerned himself with things like women’s fashion. Contrary to the rules of tradecraft, he knew his contact’s name—or at least the name under which she’d registered at the embassy—Elizaveta Bobkova, first assistant to the Russian economics attaché in Washington. Reza also knew Bobkova worked for SVR, Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation. More specifically, she was assigned to SVR’s Political Intelligence Directorate, Iran Department.
He had met her face-to-face once before, at the national zoo, after going through a similar surveillance-detection run. This morning, two cups of coffee and two slices of lemon cake sat on the table in front of her—exactly what he’d ordered in Rosslyn, the signal that all was well.
Bobkova waved Reza over with a flick of her long fingers, the nails painted bright red. She certainly wasn’t trying to remain unnoticed. She smiled broadly and gestured to the chair opposite her.
“I trust your journey went well,” she said as he sat down.
Kazem slid his backpack between his feet.
“It did,” he said. He eyed the lemon cake. The brisk spring weather had made him ravenous. “May I eat this?”
Elizaveta nodded, and then took a sip from her cup, smudging the dark plastic lid with a darker half-moon of lipstick. “You are remarkably beautiful,” she said. “Do you know that.”
Kazem took a bite of lemon cake, just as moist as the one in Rosslyn, and let the comment slip by. He needed this woman, so he decided not to say what he was thinking. “Thank you for meeting me,” he said.
“Did you see anyone behind you?”
Kazem shook his head. “I did not.”
“I thought you might have noticed some of the men who work for me,” the Russian said. “They are bumbling imbeciles, all of them.”
Kazem knew different.
He said, “Am I to infer from this meeting that your superiors have agreed to help our cause?”
“In a way,” Bobkova said. She took another drink of coffee, then swirled the cup around, sizing him up. “As I am sure you are aware, my country has been a remarkable ally of the present regime, but we are certainly not averse to what is happening now. This insurgency, this . . . Persian Spring, as it has been called, is quite . . . remarkable.”
Kazem stifled a smile. He’d lived in the United States long enough to know that she was overusing the word.
“Our cause has a groundswell of support,” Kazem said. “Demonstrations beyond Tehran—Qom, Isfahan, east to Mashhad and as far south as Bandar Abbas, and countless other cities. Facebook, Twitter, Telegram—the government blocks them all, but we find ways around.” He waved his hand as if that were old news. “But you do not care about this. Will Russia provide what we need?”
“This is proving to be . . . remarkably difficult . . .” Bobkova looked up as she spoke, flashing her toothsome smile at a passerby to her left.
Kazem followed her eyes to see a young man in a beige trench coat—like something out of a Humphrey Bogart movie—stumble over his own feet. The man came to a full stop for a brief moment. A new flood of commuters coming in from a recent train outside across Crystal Drive, loosed mumbled curses at the man’s stupidity, flowing around him toward the Metro station as a river flows around a boulder. The man, likely a few years younger than Kazem, had pink skin that looked as if it had been rubbed with salt. His hair was slicked with pomade. An impeccable navy-blue pinstripe suit was visible beneath the open trench coat.
The pink man licked full, carpish lips as he shot a furtive look back and forth from Kazem to Bobkova. An instant later the spell was broken and he disappeared into the crowd toward the Metro station.
“I think he recognized you,” Kazem said. This odd-looking man with scrubbed skin set his teeth on edge.
“Indeed he did,” Elizaveta Bobkova said.
“What?” Kazem said, astounded at the flippancy of this woman. “You have me spend two hours avoiding surveillance, when all the while you planned for us to be seen together?”
Bobkova patted the table and gave a knowing smile. “My job is one of intricate masquerades. The measures you took this morning were absolutely necessary. If you did not try to lose your tail, the FBI would believe our meeting was of no consequence.”
Kazem shot a worried glance over his shoulder. “That man was FBI?”
“Hardly,” Bobkova scoffed. “I met him
at an embassy dinner a few nights ago. But he is the talkative sort. That serves our purpose well enough. You should be happy. This way the United States will want a piece of the action. I would not be surprised if they begin to airdrop suitcases of money to you at once. That is the way Americans handle things.” A mischievous grin perked her lips. “And anyway, it will drive them crazy trying to figure out the why of it all.”
Kazem shook his head as if to clear it. “I do not understand any of this,” he said. “But you are the expert. As to the other matter, what do you mean by ‘in a way’? We have been specific enough in our requests. Iranian intelligence is bad enough, but the Revolutionary Guard is ruthless. There are things we will need to combat their effectiveness. Technical equipment that is imperative to the movement. What does this mean that you cannot help us directly?”
“I can see why people attach themselves to your cause.” She was staring into his eyes again. “So very remarkable . . .” She whispered to herself, dreamily, before snapping out of the stupor. She coughed, sitting up a little straighter. “Anyway, I mean just what I say. The government of Russia can provide you nothing directly.” Kazem started to protest, but she raised her hand. “But I will send you the contact information for the men who can.”
Bobkova was obviously intelligent and wanted him to think she had more information than she actually did. The masquerade of which he was a part made her little games look silly by comparison. He pushed away the uneaten half of his lemon cake and looked hard at the woman. The poor thing had no idea what she was up against, what she had become a part of. Her arrogance was . . . well, remarkable, and it would be her undoing.
* * *
—
“This is just plain weird,” an FBI counterintelligence agent named Murphy said, taking a sip from his coffee cup at a table sixty feet up the corridor from Bobkova.
“’Tis indeed, Grasshopper,” the senior of the two agents muttered. This one’s name was Coyne. He’d been with the Bureau for seventeen years, eleven of those with the Counterintelligence Division. Hailing from Tennessee, he counted his southern roots as a badge of honor and an outward sign of his savvy as a hunter of men.
The two agents watched the Iranian and the Russian with their peripheral vision while they drank their coffees and chatted. They wore neck lanyards with color-coded badges that allowed them access to the Pentagon, like half the other people in the underground shopping mall.
“The Russians have always played patty-cake with Tehran,” Murphy said. “I don’t get it. Why would Elizaveta Bobkova be meeting with the leader of a group trying to topple the present regime?”
“And better yet,” Coyne said, “why did she park herself right where Corey Fite would see her during his morning commute?”
“Corey Fite?”
“Guy with the puffy lips,” Coyne said. “He’s Senator Michelle Chadwick’s top adviser and boy toy. No, Elizaveta’s a smart lady. A certified no-shit brainiac. She’s the queen of the maskirovka, the big show. Crystal City is the Serengeti Plain of counterintel officers. This place has more spooks per square foot than anywhere in the nation. We’re everywhere, either training or running real ops. There’s no way Bobkova holds a meeting down here if she wants to keep it secret. She wanted to be seen—for sure by Fite, probably by us.”
“Why?” Murphy asked. “What’s the angle?”
“Skullduggery and shenanigans, Grasshopper.” Coyne set his coffee down hard enough that some of it geysered out of the little hole in the plastic lid. “We got the apparent leader of what’s shaking out to be a viable Iranian coup sharing cake with a known Russian spymaster—who wants Senator Chadwick to be aware of the meeting. I don’t know if they taught you this at Quantico, but if the Iranians and Russians are involved, they are up to their treacherous asses in no good.”
3
United States Air Force Captain Will Hyatt pulled his red VW Passat into the parking lot of the twenty-four-hour Walmart just west of Highway 95. People assigned to Creech Air Force Base tended to designate where they lived by the zip code alone rather than saying North Las Vegas. He’d just scored a house nearby in 89149. The kids were loving the new pool. The Walmart was just around the corner, so he’d offered to stop by “on his way into battle” to grab a few things for the twins’ birthday party.
Hyatt was sweating by the time he got out of the car, thinking he should have done a few laps himself just to cool off before work. It was early, not even seven in the morning, but heat already shimmered up from the asphalt.
He was in and out in a half-hour—mainly because he couldn’t buy anything that melted or went bad during his twelve-hour shift, which was pretty much everything on his wife’s list except paper plates and napkins. He’d grabbed a couple of bags of water balloons even if Shannon hadn’t told him to. All seven-year-olds liked water balloons, didn’t they? Will was only thirty, but it seemed like it was half a century since he’d been seven years old.
Flying drones aged you—and not for the reasons one might think. It wasn’t particularly physical. He wasn’t pulling any G’s. Hell, the MQ-9 would suffer catastrophic failure if it had to pull two G’s. He wasn’t sweating his ass off in some bunker in Kandahar, or trying in vain to keep his kids’ attention over an iffy Skype connection. He got to sit in a comfortable leather chair in a temperature-controlled trailer, and then go home at the end of his shift. He even had the day off tomorrow for the party.
It sounded like he was whining when he said it out loud, but therein was the problem.
Captain Hyatt was home, and yet he wasn’t. Not really. How could you loiter over some ISIS shithole for weeks, watching for signs of some high-value target—and then blow that same HVT to hell and then jump into the family Volkswagen and make the hour drive back to zip code 89149 to kiss your kids and try to screw your head on straight enough to keep the wife happy. He wondered if the guys downrange missed the endless list of honey-dos that seemed so mundane, if not downright pointless, next to hunting terrorist assholes.
Shannon didn’t understand. To be fair, she probably would have if he’d confided in her, but how do you tell your wife that not actually having to be eight thousand miles away from her makes you sad? “Honey, this coming home at night in between war fighting is about to make me crazy.” That was the lamest of all lames. He would suck it up, kill who needed to be killed, and then replace the water heater—or whatever stupid shit happened to break around the house—and he’d be happy about it.
He unlocked his car, feeling the blast of superheated air roll out when he opened the door. This Nevada heat was killing his new Passat. He’d bought it with the retention bonus the Air Force gave him to keep him from jumping ship. He knew guys that were making double his O-3 salary flying for private contractors in the same facilities at Creech.
He waited a few seconds so the car would cool down to what the twins called “subvolcanic,” and then threw the flimsy plastic bag onto the passenger-side floor. This shift was 0700 to 1900, the most volcanic part of the day. Hopefully the balloons wouldn’t melt into a ball of goo in the parking lot. Balloons. He started the car and backed out, shaking his head. Who gave a shit about balloons, anyway? Hyatt was suddenly sorry for the internal fit of anger. He’d schedule a meeting with the chaplain as soon as he arrived on base. One part minister and two parts listening ear, Captain Willis was a godsend when it came to negotiating the dynamic of war fighting and yardwork.
Traffic seemed lighter this morning—which was weird, because it was the same group that went into shift every day. No one lived on Creech—less affectionately known as Crotch—so the cars coming from North Las Vegas to Indian Springs formed a slow-moving line that stretched for two miles from the gate.
Hyatt parked, leaving his window cracked to protect the balloons, and then, having second thoughts, returned to get the bag and took them inside with him. He wrote himself a note on the palm of his hand so he would
n’t forget to grab them at the end of shift.
His workspace, like those of the five hundred other drone pilots flying from Creech, was a desert-tan air-conditioned trailer tucked in with dozens of other air-conditioned trailers. A sign on the metal door said You Ain’t in Kansas Anymore, reminding all who entered that they were operating in a theater more than seven thousand miles away when they sat at their consoles.
He wore a flight suit—a bag, they called it—and a green David Clark headset, and sat in the left of two beige leatherette seats in front of six screens and video monitors that displayed the specifics of his MQ-9 Reaper UAV, located over Helmand Province in Afghanistan at that precise moment. The cameras offered Hyatt a remarkably clear view of the target from twelve thousand feet.
Sensor Operator Staff Sergeant Ray Deatherage sat in the right seat. The workstations were remarkably similar, but where Hyatt flew the aircraft and fired the missiles, Deatherage’s job was to operate the onboard cameras and fix the laser on target to provide the missiles with an aiming point. The irony of his name was not lost, but the CO expressly ordered that no one was to refer to him as Death Rage, or Death Ray Deatherage, his skill with the laser targeting system notwithstanding.
The new guy was there, too, sitting in the back of the cramped trailer with his embossed leather notebook that said Oreo on the front—like the damned cookie. It was a weird cover for a CIA drone guy, but whatever. Hyatt got paid to fly the Reaper, not second-guess the intel weenies. The movies always made the spooks out to be more sinister somehow than the military, but they were just people. Weird bastards to be sure, but still just people. Brian, if that was even his real name, had been with them ever since Hyatt had sent up a report on Faisal al-Zamil’s location. Brian seemed like a nice enough guy, even with his Connecticut accent. But Hyatt knew he was there for only one reason.
A cell-phone number belonging to one of Zamil’s wives had been pinging off a tower near Nad Ali for the past month. Hyatt and another MQ-9 had taken turns loitering for days above the compound believed to be her residence. At twelve thousand feet, the woman never even knew they were there. Hyatt thought it weird that he, Deatherage, Brian, and the other Reaper crew were probably six of maybe eight or nine men in the world who saw her without her veil. They watched her hang out her laundry, shake her fist at the kids, or hustle out to the car to go to the market, always escorted by three dudes who were not Zamil, damn it. Sometimes, though, she went to another house some six klicks away. It was thin, but higher thought it worth the time and effort. Zamil was a known supplier of weapons to ISIS, and as such, the high-value target du jour. And this was their only real lead.