by Marc Cameron
“A GSM mic would come in handy right now,” the former Delta officer said, snapping photos of the notebook pages for future reference.
“No kidding,” Ryan said. There were lots of things that would have been nice—but pockets fill up quickly in tactical intelligence work. Often the only lockpick was a penknife and the only weapon little more than a steel pipe. Next to a flashlight, the item that got the most use was a credit card.
“A GSM mic,” Biery said. “Are you kidding me? Did you guys even come to the meeting? This malware is a thing of beauty, a phone-home masterpiece that hides as an innocuous system file and then calls us the moment he logs in and pops up on the network. You don’t need a GSM bug in the room. You’ll be able to take over the mic and camera in his computer. We’ll have keystrokes in real time, see what he’s seeing, read what he’s writing . . . You can even do things to his files when he’s not watching.”
“In the lobby!” Caruso said. “Heading to the elevator.”
Midas moved toward the door. “Time to haul ass, Jack.”
“I called both elevators to stall,” Ding said. “But that’s not going to buy you much more than a few seconds.”
“Thanks, Gav,” Ryan said. “Gotta go.” He slipped the phone into his pocket and then wiped a droplet of the Frenchman’s blood off the laptop as he watched the loading bar fill completely. “This room is full of intel,” he said.
“No time,” Midas said.
Midas pitched Ryan the notebook, and Ryan returned it to the aluminum briefcase, spinning the locks to the same numbers they’d been on before he tampered with them. Like Clark said, when it came to security it was all in the details. Overkill kept you alive. Ryan made a habit of noting where his combinations were when he left a briefcase unaccompanied, so he assumed everyone else was just as suspicious.
Ryan held up both hands, giving the workspace one last scan before ejecting the thumb drive and then closing the computer.
“Good to go,” he said.
“I hope we put it back in the right place,” Midas said. The door shut behind them and they turned to trot for the stairs.
“It was a best guess,” Jack said. “If we didn’t, maybe he’ll second-guess himself.”
Midas pulled open the door at the same moment the elevator chimed down the hall and the doors slid open with an audible rumble.
They’d just stepped over the bodies of Gaspard’s men when Ryan’s cell phone buzzed in his pocket. It was Gavin.
“Don’t forget to clear the ‘last device’ list.”
Jack kept his voice to a whisper, still moving down the stairs. “The what?”
“The computer keeps a record of devices and peripherals that are connected to it—video cameras, DVD players, thumb drives. He’ll be able to see you were on unless you delete it.”
“That ship has sailed, Gav,” Ryan said. “He’s already in the room and we’re out of there. How likely is he to notice it?”
Gavin was silent for a long time. “Depends,” he finally said. “On whether he’s more like you or more like me.”
“Okay,” Ryan said. “What does he have to do to see it?”
“Right-click the mouse,” Gavin said.
* * *
—
“Everyone good to go?” Clark said half an hour later, sitting at a sidewalk café on Avenida del Cid, approximately three blocks away from the Hotel Alfonso XIII. The thousands of people who’d attended the bullfights, mostly locals, had returned home but the streets around the Royal Alcázar park were still modestly crowded with tourists not quite wanting to give up on the vibrant Spanish nightlife.
Adara and Caruso sat at the table with Clark, while the others loitered at various points outside the hotel itself, making it a virtual meeting over comms. Adara had a view of the Russians’ rooms over her webcam. Gavin Biery was patched in via radio link.
By “good to go,” Clark meant physically. He knew Ryan and Midas had been in a scrap but he’d yet to lay eyes on them. They’d already told him they were fine—good to go—but Clark knew all too well that debilitating injuries had a way of showing up after the adrenaline of the incident wore off. Lucile Fournier had proven she was wicked good at killing people. He wanted everyone on their toes.
Midas said, “My nose is toast, but it’s been toasted before. I can still breathe with my mouth shut, and I can’t really get any uglier.” His tone was light, but they’d all been hurt before, and badly. The entire team took these reports seriously. If someone was operating at half speed, everyone needed to know.
“I’m good,” Jack said. “A couple of bruised ribs and some ringing in my ear, but I don’t think anything’s broken.”
“Roger that.” Clark moved on, taking them at their word. “So we’ll know when da Rocha opens his computer?”
“When he pops up on a network,” Gavin says. “His computer will send us a notification. The malware is designed to phone home to my system as well as whoever used their device to insert the program. In this case, it was Jack. I’ll contact you when I get an alert, just in case Jack happens to be otherwise occupied chasing some piece of tail through the streets of . . . wherever you are in the world.”
“Geez,” Ryan said. “Is that what you think we do?”
“Well,” Gavin said, chuckling, “not all of you.”
“Enough of that,” Clark said. “Good to have the redundancy. The point is that we’ve had no phone home from da Rocha’s computer as of yet. Maybe there’s a problem with the malware.”
“I doubt that, boss,” Midas said. “Gavin designed it to be robust as well as stealthy. It’s late. Maybe da Rocha just went to bed.”
Contrary to the public image of the knuckle-dragging Tier One military operator often imagined by the public, Midas and most of the guys in his cohort had advanced degrees, spoke at least two languages, and possessed a depth of knowledge and experience with phone traps, computer forensics, and other surveillance tech. Every Campus operator was accustomed to working with a variety of technical means, but of all of them, Midas was the most likely to trust it.
“Midas is right,” Caruso said. “From my vantage point through the window, it looked like the Russians were hanging plastic sheeting. Hindsight allows us to say they put it up to defeat any attempted surveillance, but it must have scared the shit out of da Rocha when he walked in and saw a kill room. Near-death experiences tend to spool up the drive to leave a little posterity on the planet, if you know what I mean. Good chance da Rocha and Fournier are just in there exploring their own mortality.”
Adara’s mic picked up her scoff.
“What?” Caruso said. “You know it’s true.”
Ding spoke next, bringing the conversation back on point. “We have some choices to make. Like you said, Mr. C., everybody we’ve got eyes on is involved in some kind of shit.”
“I’m not comfortable splitting up the team,” Clark said.
A good long-term surveillance operation on either da Rocha or the man they’d marked as the lead Russian would require double the number of people he had. The relatively small size of the tight-knit team offered the ability to change direction quickly, to lift and shift, but it brought limitations as well.
“Hard to tell if the Russians or da Rocha have the ball here,” Ding offered. “We need to follow whoever runs with it.”
“Agreed,” Clark said. “This da Rocha guy keeps showing up like a bad penny, and it’s always bloody when he does. We’re looking at the tip of the iceberg here. I want to know what we’re not seeing.”
29
The morgue was tucked down in the basement at the end of a long hallway—a good place, Sassani thought, for handling the dead, especially dead traitors.
Maryam Farhad’s body stayed where it had fallen until the IRGC officer and his men completed a thorough search of her apartment. Ali—the most pious member
of Sassani’s team—had covered the obscenity, but someone else had pulled back the bloody sheet, leaving her exposed during the search. Sassani thought it better that way. It would incense the men, show them what kind of whore she was, inspire them to work harder to discover her co-conspirators.
After two and a half hours of photographing and fingerprinting, Sassani had ordered the body transported to a small hospital, less than five kilometers north of where he’d supervised the hanging of the three students. He was no monster, but they were, after all, traitors, and their plaintive choking when the cranes made them fly skyward brought him no sadness.
Sassani had come alone to the hospital, glad to be rid of the constant weight of the rest of his team. They were good men, but sometimes he felt as if he were dragging them along. In truth, he preferred his own company over that of anyone else, even his wife, who was always angry about one thing or another.
The smell of paint and disinfectant hit him in the face as the doors to the freight elevator slid open. The fluorescent lighting in the hall had seen happier days. Several bulbs flickered off and on at irregular intervals—something Sassani used to great effect in the isolation cells at Evin. Some were burned out entirely, giving the place a ghostly feel.
Sassani walked slowly down the hallway. Pondering the day before him.
This business with the Russian was puzzling. Dovzhenko had surely known the dead woman. The signs were clearly there—the hollow look in his jowls, the fleeting, not-quite-concealed flash of anger in his eyes. And where had he gone? The Russian was a spy, and spies traded in information. Some of the men had gone out for tea after they’d wrapped up the death investigation. Any spy worth his salt knew that the chatter around tea was as good a place as any to glean intelligence. But Dovzhenko had vanished, to lick his wounds, or perhaps to conceive a clever lie for his superiors to extricate himself from this mess. Sassani was willing to bet that this man was Maryam Farhad’s lover. He’d gotten there too quickly, flushed, agitated. Where did a heartbroken spy go in a city that was not his own? He’d not gone home. Sassani had men watching both his apartment and the Russian embassy. No matter, he would turn up soon, and when he did, Sassani would have the necessary evidence to have the Russians turn him over to the IRGC or recall him home to deal with the issue themselves. A delicious thought made Sassani smile. Perhaps he could persuade the Russians to send one of their interrogators to Iran and they could work on Dovzhenko together.
Reaching the end of the hallway, Sassani pushed open the double doors. He did not knock, which drew an irritated look from the woman hunched over Maryam Farhad’s body. There were fewer than five hundred forensic medical examiners in Iran, and only a handful with the implicit trust of the IRGC. The number of female doctors in this already small group could be counted on one hand. Sassani knew Dr. Nuri, and realized the necessity of her position. Nuri recognized her importance as well, and pushed Sassani further than he was accustomed, certainly by a woman.
The examination room was well lit compared to the hallway, and felt cramped, with long, stainless-steel sinks, and tables forming an L along the back and left-hand walls. Metal doors, like small refrigerators, checkered the wall to Sassani’s right. The bodies of the traitors would be behind three of them, awaiting a cursory glance by a male doctor and a quick burial.
Maryam Farhad was laid out on the metal exam table—more of a large tray, really, with a sort of metal gutter around the edges to catch any fluids or bits of evidence that overran the paper sheet. A white towel covered her ashen body from just below the navel to the middle of her thigh. She had bled a great deal after being shot, but what little blood remained was already pooling at the lowest points, giving her buttocks and shoulders a bluish hue in contrast to the chalky white of her face and belly. A paper tag hung from her toe on a piece of string. The bullet holes—and there were many of them—were cleaner than they were the last time he’d seen her, the effects of the swabs Dr. Nuri had used on the external examination. A rolled towel propped up her head, lifting her chin. The lid of her right eye was half open, as if she were peeking to see who’d just come into the room. Sassani took an involuntary step backward. It was an odd thing, even to him, that he could eat a sandwich while walking the dungeons of Evin Prison, but here in this place, death crawled up his shoes.
The scalpel in Dr. Nuri’s right hand caught a glint of light as she hovered over the dead woman’s chest. Nuri was a small woman and looked somewhat like a child, standing over Maryam Farhad, who was at least five and a half feet tall, with the touch of extra weight of a woman in her late thirties who chose convenience over nutrition when it came to diet.
The paper cap and shield covered more of Dr. Nuri’s face than a rusari, which was good, because she made Sassani uncomfortable enough. The blue surgical gown and dark rubberized apron obscured the shape of her body. But a wicked tongue more than made up for her modest appearance.
“You should not be here,” she snapped.
“This is a matter of great urgency,” Sassani said, unhappy at having to explain himself to anyone, least of all a woman. The fact that she had at least twice his education was of no consequence.
“Have you no shame? Surely the Sepah-e Pasdaran have a female operative they could send to oversee the autopsy of a woman.”
Sassani took a deep breath, death and disinfectant and all. “As I said, a matter of great urgency.”
Long-handled scalpel poised over the body, Nuri looked up to peer at Sassani, as if to say something else. In the end, she returned to her work, the blade sinking into the bloodless flesh at the left shoulder to begin the large Y incision that would open Farhad’s chest.
Sassani coughed. “The cause of her death is more than obvious,” he said. “Is that really necessary?”
Dr. Nuri paused her cutting at the top of the sternum. “A postmortem examination can tell the entire story.” She glanced at the doors along the far wall, where the other bodies were held. There were twenty of them, five across and four high, with pull handles like the deep freeze in the market near Sassani’s home.
The doctor continued. “We may believe we know that the manner of death was, say, hanging. An internal examination can tell us the exact mechanism of death. Did the rope cause the decedent to suffocate, or did a lack of blood flow to his brain cause a stroke first? Such an examination could tell us if forty-one of the fifty-two bones in this person’s feet were cracked and broken. If he simply died from heart failure, at least two days before his body was hanged. It is written that even the bones of the living or the dead unbeliever should not be broken.”
Sassani glanced at the rib cutters and steel saw in the tray beside Nuri. “And yet here you are, about to break the bones of the dead—for the security of the revolution. I ask again. Is an internal examination of Maryam Farhad necessary?”
Nuri dropped her scalpel into the tray. “If I am not mistaken, you are the one who ordered the postmortem.”
“Tell me your findings up to this point,” Sassani said, happy to gain back at least some bit of control.
Dr. Nuri stepped away from the body to look at an open folder on the counter behind her, by the sink.
“I have photographed the body from all angles.” She looked up at Sassani. “I will tell you, she was quite beautiful in life. You can print them over there if you want to carry photographs of a nude dead woman with you—for evidence. I should say, that might scandalize even a major of the Sepah.”
Sassani ignored her. “What else?”
“X-ray findings of four projectiles still in the body are consistent with twelve entry and seven exit wounds—”
“Seven?”
“Yes,” Nuri said. “Two of the projectiles likely left the body through the same wound.” She pointed to two small holes in the side of Farhad’s neck. “See how these may be covered with the tip of my finger?” She cradled the head with both hands, lifting slightly to e
xpose a gaping hole just below the base of the woman’s skull. “And this could not be covered with my fist. Your bullets do a tremendous amount of damage as they exit.”
“Yes,” Sassani said. “That is the purpose of bullets. Is it not? Do you have any information of value?”
“She engaged in sexual intercourse shortly before her death.”
Sassani did not try to hide his smile. “So there is . . . evidence?”
“Of course,” the doctor said. “That is how I know.” She nodded to several test tubes in a metal stand on the counter. Each contained a cotton swab. “There is no bruising, or anything else to indicate that she fought. But I must tell you that does not mean it was consensual.”
“Oh,” Sassani said, “I am sure that it was consensual. She was naked and smoking a cigarette when we found her.”
“A capital crime, to be sure,” Dr. Nuri sniped.
“The DNA evidence,” Sassani said. He was not about to explain himself to this woman. “I need it now.”
“That will take time,” Nuri said.
Sassani clenched his jaw. “I tell you again,” he said. “This is a matter of great urgency. I must know the ethnicity of the man.”
“That can be done.”
“Then do it.”
“I will begin as soon as I complete the internal examination.”
“There is no time,” he said. “I need the information at once.”
“Major . . .” Nuri cocked her head to the side, as if explaining to a child why he could not have an ice cream. “The science dictates otherwise. Contrary to what you have seen in the cinema, a DNA test simply cannot be accomplished in the space of one hour, or even two. Extraction, the removal of salts and other contaminants, quantification, and then amplification through polymerase chain reaction will re—”
“Spare me the jargon,” Sassani snapped. “How much time to you require?”
Nuri’s lips pursed behind the clear plastic face shield. She drew a deep breath in through her nose. “I will keep my explanation simple so you can understand what we are talking about. After a number of necessary scientific steps, which cannot be rushed without ruining the entire process, I will be able to separate copies of enough DNA to extract the information you need. These steps will require approximately twelve hours.”