The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller (21 page)

That meant Rayhan’s function could go either way. She could learn something about the man by what he knew or said; or she could run interference if Kealey found the bomb. In any case, being around a potential enemy, listening to what he said, and restricting what she said for an hour or so would be good for her. Though there was another option, which he tried not to think about. There was always the possibility that Yazdi could take her hostage. In which case, like Kealey himself she was expendable. The device was the goal, not a one-hundred-percent survival rate. That was the nature of the business. Every field agent knew that. If they didn’t, they learned it fast. And learning it, the fact of that grotesque disposability was never far from the surface. If you allowed it to, it poisoned everything. Kealey remembered a reception where he met the quarterback for the Washington Redskins. The guy was telling a small group what an awful emotional wrench it was getting close to players who ended up being traded and playing against you. And how it was a tactical pain, since the squad all knew the playbook. Kealey would have been content to stick a shrimp fork in one of the man’s vaunted scrambling knees. An officer he did not know saved him the effort. He glared at the quarterback and said, “
When I was in ’Nam, behind enemy lines doing recon with a buddy, he fell in a ditch and broke something big. Made him moan like a sonofabitch. The Cong were coming and I couldn’t get him out. He shot himself so he wouldn’t talk about what we learned. It’s like that, right
?”

Kealey didn’t think it would come to the Iranian threatening Rayhan. No doubt Yazdi had sized Kealey up—at least enough to know that he wouldn’t have left them alone if he were concerned about what the woman knew. But if it came to a worst-case scenario, the recovery of the device, not Rayhan, not Kealey, was the mission.

He paused to text the man’s name and title to Clarke. He did not want to complicate matters by letting on they were all together, but he wanted photo confirmation of the man’s identity. He got it within five minutes of a steady, elevated radioactive reading.

Clarke texted:

Kealey wrote back:

Kealey followed the straight roadway, looking at the students, the shoppers, making sure that no one was watching him, wondering what he was doing—and, more important, that whoever took the device had not stationed a lookout. If they were dealing with a physicist who was sympathetic to jihad, someone with a little experience, he might not count on a hidden lab as his only means of protection.

He or his agents might also recognize what I’m carrying,
Kealey thought. That was fine; his job was not to alarm civilians. ID’ing him would make his job easier: they’d come to him or they’d run. A good deal of intelligence work was getting close to the hornet’s nest with a big, swinging stick.

He got a slight uptick as he approached a mosque. It was a squat structure about three stories high with a green, white-bordered minaret that was about sixty feet high. Attached to the minaret, on the other side, was a brick building with a trio of satellite dishes on top. It could be a civic hall of some kind—or possibly a school. The latter seemed likely the nearer Kealey got. There appeared to be a playground on the other side.

It was a school. Kealey saw young children arriving for afternoon classes. They were boys, about eight to ten years old. Something in or around the building—possibly in one of the cars parked in the narrow street—was causing the Geiger counter to hover around eight millisieverts. Kealey had a good idea what it was. Those levels were acceptable for incidental exposure, maybe two or three hours. Kealey hoped that whoever had it intended to get the device out of there before then. Which also raised the question: if the container had been opened, what the hell was Kealey going to do with it?

The first thing he needed to do was pinpoint the location. He moved past the school. There was a slight uptick between the school and the playground; there was also a bump from a circa mid-1980s Volkswagen van parked in the street. That was probably what had been used to bring the device here. Kealey took a picture with his cell phone and asked Clarke for an ID. He thought about disabling it, but he wasn’t sure that leaving a man with a suitcase nuclear weapon stranded and desperate was the best tactic.

He walked past the playground and the needle dipped slightly. The bomb was in the building. Kealey noted that there was an electrical room on the side and it was the only place where—at least from the street—there did not appear to be any windows. The location certainly fit the terrorist mentality: an underground bunker protected from an assault by the presence of children.

Clarke texted back that the plates were Yemeni but it would take a while to attach an owner. Even then, both men knew, it could well have been stolen.

Kealey could not see behind the structure, but that didn’t matter right now. As long as the needle remained steady the device was inside. And as long as he remained near the van, it was likely to remain inside.

There were times when the best strategy was to have none. That wasn’t the same as being inactive; it was letting events dictate your response, in much the same way as
jujitsu-ka
let the actions of others determine your own defense or offense. The one thing he did need was a plan to follow the van in case it left. The van was parked on a very narrow two-way street. There was no room to turn around. Kealey walked ahead: it was tight and congested in that direction as cars moved slowly around parked vehicles. He calculated that he would have more than enough time to walk back to his car and follow the van. Even if he didn’t, Clarke had a photo. INTERPOL could follow from the air if they had to.

But with all the preparations made, with his instincts on alert, with his options generally mapped out, Kealey knew there was still room for the unexpected.

Which was exactly what he got.

 

 

“What should I call you?”

Yazdi asked the question as they were nearing the front of the hospital. His question was practical, not impertinent.

“What is your mother’s name?” she asked.

“Afshan.”

“That will do.”

“All right, Afshan.” He began to limp. “We’re going in to inquire about my foot. We will require X-rays.”

She nodded as Yazdi’s phone vibrated. She took it from her back pocket. After leaving the motorcycle, she had put her passport there as well. She could not remember a time when she had traveled so light

“It’s an email,” she said.

Yazdi stopped. “Let me see it, please.”

“Open it so I can see.”

“Fine, fine,” he said impatiently. It was from Sanjar, his deputy. It was a file of photographs with a covering email. Sanjar said he had opened channels with Russian intelligence on this matter. In addition to data, they were making regional satellite surveillance available to them. That was part of program in which Russian electronic intelligence—ELINT—was swapped for Iranian human intelligence—HUMINT—in places like Chechnya, Azerbaijan, and other areas where Muslim infiltrators were needed.

It took long, agonizing seconds to download the images, during which time Yazdi thought of a dozen ways he could have hurt or killed the woman standing next to him. How did the American know he wouldn’t?

That was a man who understood the heart of this awful business.

Yazdi enlarged the images as they finished downloading. They showed blurry images of a man, creased and obviously scanned from printed photographs. There were scans of the back as well. The writing was in Farsi.

 

 

The men looked alike. Yazdi had a vague recollection of these two. Though his ministry was financing their group, one of them disobeyed an assassination order and had been executed. When he came to the fourth image, Yazdi started. The killing in Rabat had been vengeance—but, by chance, it had become something much greater.

“We’ve got to go,” he said urgently.

“Where?”

“Back to where we began.” He tapped the screen. “I’ve seen this van. Here. Down the street.”

He started off at a brisk walk with Rayhan hurrying behind. She put his phone away, took out her own.

“Don’t text your partner,” Yazdi said. He was staring ahead, craning to see past the other pedestrians.

“Why?”

“You’ll distract him. I see the van—there’s someone opening the door.”

“How will we distract him if he doesn’t know—?”

“He knows. That van has to be hot. He just didn’t tell us.”

Rayhan held off texting. She peered ahead as they hurried along. There was a figure, a slender man with a beard. He opened the door of the van, put something inside, and shut the door.

“He didn’t look around,” Yazdi said. “He didn’t want to appear suspicious. But he still may have been checking to see if anyone was outside, watching.”

The man started back toward the schoolhouse, down a passage along the side of the building. He opened a door in the side of the building. Yazdi was slightly ahead. He slowed, held up his hand.

“I don’t like this,” he said.

Rayhan didn’t have the intuition or experience of the Iranian, but there was something strange about what they’d just witnessed. The man had placed something inside but she hadn’t noticed that he was carrying anything—

The van exploded.

The blast actually happened in two stages, as far as Rayhan could tell. The first was the muted pop inside the van that blew out the windows and poured cottony black smoke from the openings and dented the front doors with fist-like blows from inside. The second stage, which occurred roughly one second later—an eternity in the slow-motion horror of terrorist time—occurred when the fuel tank exploded. The car flipped up onto its front end, then fell forward onto the roof, while every piece of metal in the undercarriage flew outward in every direction. For an instant, the exposed bottom of the van resembled a flaming pinwheel.

The force wave and sound arrived a moment after the first and second explosions. The first was barely felt but the second was like a wave from passing a tar truck: hot, malodorous, and oily. The air stung her eyes and she had to look away.

She turned back quickly, realizing she shouldn’t let Yazdi out of her sight. He was still there, taking in the situation. The car had settled into a barely recognizable mound of misshapen metal and flame, puffing ugly plumes of inky smoke into the air. It lay just ahead of where it had been parked; in a circle around it, bodies lay in ugly little lines—straight this way and that and charred black. In a larger circle were other bodies that had been dismembered, not burned. The street clothes and head scarves, the dismembered limbs and scattered, burning backpacks were splattered bright red under the shifting shadows of the smoke.

A few car alarms had been roused to activity by the explosion. Rayhan heard their muted sounds through the ringing deafness caused by the blast.

As the scene settled and the uninjured came to life in starts and jerks, Rayhan looked around for Kealey. She didn’t see him. She texted. There was no answer.

“Let’s go,” she yelled to Yazdi, motioning in case he couldn’t hear.

The Iranian followed, not because the woman told him to but because he recognized the explosion for what it was: a cover. Somehow, the Yemeni and his associate must have known—or at least suspected—they were being watched. Or they may have feared that the van had been identified or followed. They created the explosion in order to get out another way—with the device.

“I don’t see him,” Rayhan said as she ran. She covered her mouth with her sleeve and pushed through people who were moving from the choking fumes. Her eyes scanned the burned bodies as they neared. It was impossible to identify the bodies.

Sirens broke through her muffled hearing. Within minutes the area would be roped off. She slowed as she neared the destroyed van.

“No!” Yazdi said, pulling her along. “We must keep going! The bomb is this way!”

K
ealey was standing near the playground, behind a tree, when the man emerged from the side door of the schoolhouse. He was holding something; Kealey decided to move closer to see.

It was a laptop, tucked under his arm.

The American ran toward the playground. There was no time to get to his car and, if he were correct, it wouldn’t do him much good: the road was about to be effectively blocked. He considered trying to get to the phone but couldn’t be sure whether the terrorist was watching. He might detonate it to prevent Kealey from stopping him.

Kealey entered the playground. He dropped to the asphalt, low beneath a bench that afforded him some protection as well as a view of the side door. He protected the Geiger counter by putting it on his left side, wrapped his handkerchief around the lower half of his face, pressed two fingers against his right ear and, with his left hand—the hand away from the van—had his cell phone ready to take pictures.

The blast arrived before the terrorists did. Kealey tried not to think of the people in the streets or on the sidewalk who had been killed. If he had attempted to warn them, the bomb might have been detonated prematurely. If he were on one side of the building, warning people away, he might miss the bomber leaving by another exit. There is no way to win in a situation like this except to be among the survivors and apprehend the people responsible.

This close to the explosion, Kealey felt the heat. He shut his eyes but he felt it through his lids. Pinpricks of sand and grit, lifted from the street, were thrown against his right side like hundreds of pins jabbing his cheek, bare hand, and ankle. Larger shards of the van clanged all around him without syncopation, like dissonant cymbals. A piece of rusted fender hit hard against the leg of the bench, wrapping around it and missing his face by inches. The dust cloud that followed was expected, and Kealey had held his breath despite the protective handkerchief. After the explosion, he pulled his fingers from his ears and used his right hand to shield his eyes on that side. The cloud obscured details, but it couldn’t hide shapes moving straight ahead of him. Kealey snapped a series of images. Computer enhancement might find a detail the human eye missed.

He saw them. Amid the churning wall of dusty gray he saw two dark shapes moving toward the back of the school. He didn’t think they were from the school: the figures were outside within seconds when the air was thickest with the residue of the blast. Kealey waited until they had passed to the left, away from the street, before he slid from under the bench, grabbed the Geiger counter, and went after them. There was a secondary explosion, much smaller, from inside the room under the school.

There goes any traceable evidence
, Kealey thought.

The only exit from the playground was on the street side. He ran back, leaping over and around the shapes that had once been swings and seesaws. The golden sands of a sandbox were still sprinkling down, glittering in the now misty sunlight. He got to the side of the building, reached the door, and continued running in the direction the two shapes had gone. There was a zigzagging street that went around the backs of old brick structures, painted white. The shouts of people at the far end made it impossible for him to hear footsteps retreating along the narrow cobbled path. Kealey wasn’t concerned about losing them in a crowd. Not as long as they were carrying an eighty-or-so-pound container with an atom bomb inside.

But they won’t let themselves be hobbled for long
, he told himself. Which was why he was hurrying. The van could not have been their only way out.

Kealey found himself navigating against a thickening mob. He couldn’t tell whether they were running to investigate the blast or to get off another main street in case there was another one. The Geiger counter was still ticking its steady beat—and then, as he was just about to emerge from the jagged passage, it slowed.

The reading was residual
, he thought.
From behind me. They were working in the school
.

There was no point going there. He continued ahead.

He emerged on a street that looked like it belonged to another century. It was a large courtyard filled with vats. There were at least one hundred of them, ranging in size from bathtubs to hot tubs. The smaller ones were hewn from white stone, the larger ones formed from clay or adobe. They sat side by side by side and were full of colored liquid that smelled like freshly dyed Easter eggs. The few people who hadn’t run were balanced on the edges with large wooden poles churning the contents. It was an ancient leather tannery, and the only way through it was around the periphery. That perimeter was surrounded by equally ancient white stone structures, one or two stories high, that were the shops and manufacturing facilities and homes of the workers. There were more than two dozen structures that formed the enclosed courtyard. Each had one or two doors. The terrorists could have gone through any of them.

Smoke had filtered over the rooftops of the buildings to the south, forming a misty veil over that side of the courtyard. Kealey followed the Geiger counter but it was losing the trail.

He slowed as the needle returned to normal. He swung it back, toward the vats, around in a full circle. He got nothing.

Angry and frustrated, he called Rayhan. She picked up at once.

“Thank God—” she blurted.

“Where are you?”—he cut her off.

“We’re just coming behind the school—people rushing through.”

“Knock them over. I’m in the courtyard at the other end. I need you here now.”

He hung up. He texted Valigorsky. He asked for an APHID reading at his current location. The APHID was the Atomic Perigee–High Intelligence Drone, a robot space shuttle program activated in 2010. The two drones were on permanent deployment now, in low geosynchronous earth orbit, their uppermost range exactly matching the lowest reach of existing intelligence satellites. Drone A-1 kept an eye on radioactivity in the Middle East; Drone A-2 watched North Korea. They could detect, analyze, and track any radiation source above the level and duration of a medical X-ray. If any rogue nation transported fissionable matter to a bomb-testing site or attempted to sneak raw nuclear materials across their borders, the APHID would find it in whatever millisecond it was exposed. High-definition cameras would simultaneously record images of the scientists, receptacles, and conveyances used in the operation so they could be hunted and retrieved—or terminated, as the Israelis had done with Iranian nuclear scientists. Clarke had “borrowed” the A-1 for this mission.

The problems with the current situation were twofold. The millisieverts he’d picked up were on the lowest end of the APHID’s detection capabilities; and it required an unvarying exposure of at least ninety seconds. It was like an old photographic plate in which the subject had to be still and sufficiently well lit. Otherwise, background radiation from the planet and outer space diluted the signal.

During the active part of any mission, Valigorsky or her deputy, Dick Levy, were at their desk in twelve-hour shifts. Valigorsky was on now and was texting back as Rayhan arrived.

Kealey shot her an enquiring look.

“Yazdi is checking the schoolhouse for clues,” she said.

That made sense. It was the right call.

“All right. Talk to these workers,” Kealey said. “Find out which way the men with the case went. They had to have come through here.”

Tightening her head scarf, Rayhan ran off to talk to the men working the vats. Kealey was angry because he hadn’t known where the zigzag street led, didn’t know the area, didn’t know to go around it. Neither did Yazdi, but if the three of them had been in the playground together—

It still would have gone the same way
, Kealey told himself. There was only one Geiger counter. And there might be a clue in the schoolhouse.
And you don’t get to give up
, he thought angrily. He looked around. They went in
some
direction. His chances of finding it were better if he
moved.

He looked at the doors near the back of the courtyard, the way he’d come. The figures had been carrying something heavy. They wouldn’t have wanted to negotiate the narrow perimeter. He walked briskly in that direction. He looked for a door without a knob or latch. Saloon doors, perhaps. Something they could have backed into and opened. There was nothing like that, but there were two doors on the same side that were propped open. He started to run toward them. The nearest door was the larger of the two. He stepped in, got no reading. He went to the next one.

There was the faintest uptick. The device was probably not inside, but it almost certainly had gone this way. The room inside was dark, made darker because Kealey’s eyes were adjusted to the bright light outside. The two men had been inside the schoolhouse, able to see better than he.

Kealey turned to Rayhan, who was on the other side of the vats. He whistled. She looked over. He motioned toward the door. She nodded.

Kealey crouched low in case one of them had stayed behind with a gun. He turned on the flashlight app of his phone, shined it inside. The room was full of racks loaded with hanging leather goods, drying in the ventilated room—which is why the door was open. Kealey rose and made his way through. The Geiger beats were slightly elevated and steady.

He moved sideways through the narrow spaces between the hides. They were moving slightly, probably because of the gentle breeze. He was looking ahead, watching the leather from the corner of his eye—there was a whitish scrape mark on one. Something sharp had rubbed against it
after
it had been dyed.

Kealey took off toward the door on the opposite end. He swung around a table that had leatherworking tools. His phone beeped. He ignored it. He was out the door, on a market street where there were still vendors, still consumers, and a lot of animated discussion—probably about the blast. Kealey looked down the one side street. Cars were parked facing away from the market. The bomber would have had an escape vehicle as near to the school as possible.

A silvery Daewoo Lanos pulled from a spot at the end of the street and sped away. Kealey took pictures of the car, sent them to Clarke as he started after it. He thought he saw just one man inside
—

A voice, hard and taunting, came from Kealey’s right. The American stopped, looked over as a clean-cut older man rose from between two cars. The Geiger counter clicked a little louder. That was what he had been picking up. The man had a gun pointed at the American. Kealey lifted his free hand.

“I don’t speak Arabic,” Kealey said.

The man snatched the Geiger counter and threw it against a stone wall. It shattered. The audio bud hung stupidly from Kealey’s ear. Then he reached for Kealey’s phone. Kealey stepped back and shook his head. He made sure his eyes remained on the enemy and the enemy’s eyes on him.

The man lowered his gun at Kealey’s chest. Watching his adversary, Kealey jumped to one side, between the cars, as Rayhan used two hands to bring an awl down hard into the back of the man’s neck. She stabbed him with a force strange to her limbs, with a cry she probably did not think she possessed, with an urgency unlike anything she had ever experienced. The man went down without a sound. It was doubtful anyone behind Rayhan had seen what had happened. Kealey quickly drew the man between the cars. He snapped a photo of his face in the shadow of the fender.

Rayhan was standing in the street, breathing heavily from the run—and from what she had done. Her dark hair framed her face, which was looking out from hunched shoulders with a kind of animal ferocity. Kealey examined the shattered Geiger counter, wiped his prints from the handle, and scooped up the gun. He searched the man. He had a billfold, which Kealey took. There was no money; of course not. He had likely given it to the man who drove away. The only other item he carried were keys, which Kealey also pocketed. Then he stepped in front of Rayhan and bent a little. He lifted her downturned eyes with his.

“He was a killer,” Kealey told her. “You saved my life.”

“I know. I’ll be all right. We—we need to get Yazdi,” she said distractedly.

Kealey looked ahead. Traffic was moving slowly. “You go back the way you came and hook up with him. We’ll meet at my car. I want to see if I can spot the vehicle, see which way it’s going.”

Kealey ran off along the street. He half turned, shouted, “Don’t let Yazdi get his phone from you.”

“Not a chance,” she promised.

Kealey believed her.

He checked the text he’d received as he jogged in the direction of the car. It was from Valigorsky:

Kealey continued to race ahead, but the car was out of sight. He slowed on a street where police cars and ambulances were racing by. The terrorist had gotten out before they had gotten in. This was not a careless, casually improvised escape. Kealey was angry at how it had unfolded.

He did not want to go back the way he’d come. He did not want to be anywhere near the body when it was found. He would follow the road the official vehicles had taken. Before turning to go, he took out the man’s wallet and tapped out an email sending the key information to Clarke.

Ryan Kealey wasn’t accustomed to having things go wrong. Even though he couldn’t think of a damn thing that he could have done differently—and he was mentally bashing himself, trying to come up with something—he was supposed to be the best at what he did. At the moment, there was only one thing he was sure of: that he was the guy who’d let a suitcase bomb, possibly armed, slip from his hands. And though he didn’t blame her, the only man who could have helped them had a leatherworker’s tool in his spine.