The White House: A Flynn Carroll Thriller (10 page)

“Wait for me.”

“You got it.”

He went up in the elevator, walked down a long corridor lined with black doors, and stopped before his own. This was hard. It was always very hard. So he hesitated, and at a moment when seconds might count. He smelled the odor of steak cooking in a nearby apartment, heard people laughing, music, then the shouts of children, faint and poignant.

He entered the darkness of his foyer. He didn't turn on any lights. He didn't need to, and showing light in here right now would be a bad idea.

He went into his bedroom and opened the wall safe in the closet. He pulled out nine thousand “cured” dollars—cured in the sense that they had been gotten from his bank in return for a cashier's check, and had now been out of circulation for more than a year. He kept a hundred grand in cash handy, and twenty thousand in gold coins. You didn't need gold in Iran; dollars there were as desirable and easier to use. Despite the treaty, Western credit cards didn't work, and the ATMs would be useless to what to all appearances he would be: a Swiss arms dealer. But it didn't matter. The Iranians were famished for hard currency, and the nine grand—as much as he could carry without questions being asked—would go more than far enough.

He hadn't been planning to go into the second bedroom. In fact, he'd told himself he would not, absolutely not, do that.

He crossed it, drew the drapes, and then turned on a single lamp, but not enough to reveal any light through an unnoticed gap in the curtains.

Not even Diana was invited here, and had she come, she would have been horrified by the number of pictures of Abby on the walls. He'd taken down the “Abby Room” in his house back in Texas, telling Mac and his other friends that he was putting her behind him. But it wasn't true. He had moved her here. He had tried and tried to leave her behind, but nothing worked. When he needed her so badly that he could bear it no longer, he would come to this room, which was his secret home.

“I love you,” he'd said to Diana. He wanted to love her, that was the truth of it. He wanted to accept his grief for Abby and the baby. He looked from one photo to another, Abby on her front porch back in the depths of time and happiness, Abby on Serena, her hilarious, wonderful horse with the improbable Roman nose, he and Abby drinking at Scholz Beer Garten in Austin. Then the harder one: their wedding picture—two nervous Texas kids grinning hard, hand in hand, knuckles white. Then the worst one of all, the one he told himself never to look at again every time he did: the sonogram. Tiny image, hands fisted, eyes open, the sense of amazement that lives in the faces of babies.

He changed into a business suit, grabbed a pouch with the deepest, most solid identity he possessed in it, and got the hell out of there.

He got into the cab and slammed the door. “Reagan,” he said. The driver responded with a grunt.

He was going to the one place on Earth that mattered the most in all this, the place that was the unexpected and most certainly deadly center of the operation. He was going to Tehran.

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

AS FAR
as the world was concerned, Flynn was now Stephan Grauerholtz, a Swiss citizen. The alias was deep enough to stand up to all but the most intensive analysis, right down to Stephan's boyhood years at the exclusive Le Rosey prep school in Rolle, Switzerland. He'd been a decent kid and now he was a decent arms dealer, unless that's an oxymoron. Swiss arms dealers are among the most welcome of all travelers in countries like Iran. He had read that their visa on arrival system could be difficult to use, but he expected that Mr. Grauerholtz would sail through.

The identity was far deeper than most he'd used in the past. For example, social media was thoroughly covered and kept up to date by CIA specialists who managed such identities—without, of course, having any idea who was using them. At least in theory. Stephan's Facebook page went back three years, chronicling his life of travels and his appreciation of beautiful women, cultural events, and fine dining. His Twitter feed, mostly sports (he was a Man United fan), went back a year and a half. A search further into his background would reveal the reason that a Swiss would be the fan of an English football team. His mother had been born and raised in Manchester, and was a lifelong follower of the team. His father, a professor of linguistics, was indifferent to sports.

Rather than go to Dulles, Flynn—or now, Grauerholtz—took the Delta shuttle from Reagan to LaGuardia, then grabbed a cab over to JFK. At Reagan, he'd bought only the ticket to LaGuardia, using cash.

Riding through Queens on his way from LaGuardia to JFK, he watched the surge of the city around him, glimpsed the lights of Manhattan and the vast Mount Zion graveyard, a huge gray shadow at their feet.

Should he really do this? Should he leave the White House behind? If Cissy was hurt, he'd never forgive himself—hurt, or worse, taken like Abby. It would be all but unbearable. More than that, though, he should be protecting the president.

And yet, wasn't that what this was? Until he understood what was happening, the truth was that he couldn't really protect anybody. All he could do was stand guard, and that was not going to be enough. He had to do this and get back as fast as possible. A quick, clean penetration, gather the needed information, return. Three days, four at the most.

What information, though? And how did he gather it? His only real plan was to bull his way into the foreign ministry on a pretext and take it from there.

Even buried in a new identity and with his plans known only to his own mind, he kept watch, but not in such a way that it would be obvious to the cabdriver that he was uneasy about being followed. When cabbies noticed such things, they remembered. He needed to be just another uninteresting, commonplace fare. He used the rearview and outside mirrors to watch for lights, and leaned against the window as if tired. From this position he could scan the sky for trouble from above. Over the long battle that was his career, there had been many times that menace had dropped down on him out of the sky. He was very good at spotting the star that should not be there, or was too bright, or moving strangely. This time, though he didn't see anything, it didn't mean that he was in the clear. At no time, under no circumstances, would anybody experienced in this particular conflict ever assume that Aeon wasn't nearby. Drop your guard and die.

A flock of European flights took off between nine and eleven at night, so Terminal 7 was reassuringly busy. Flynn, buried in the crowd, moved with the assurance of a businessman who flew a lot. He crossed to the ticket counter, and got in the first-class line, behind an elderly couple speaking brisk, annoyed German. He was decent in the language but hadn't spoken it in some time, so listening to them was useful.

He got a first-class ticket at the British Airways counter. Rather than pay cash, which would raise flags, he used one of the Grauerholtz credit cards. Should MISIRI become suspicious at some point, their investigation would begin with his route into the country. If it turned out that his tickets were cash purchases, they would probably arrest him first and investigate later. It wasn't a place where you wanted to be arrested, Iran.

Through the large window overlooking the flight line, he watched operations, looking for anything that struck him as unusual, just letting his instincts work. Nothing stood out, though, nobody seemed out of place, and operations continued with fluid precision.

There were storms muttering to the north, and as he sat in the first-class lounge waiting for the flight to be called, he watched blue flickers of lightning reflected on runways where planes moved like ghostly sea creatures, coming and going in the dark.

His flight was called on time, and he filed on with the other first- and business-class passengers. He was now deep in the character of Grauerholtz, right down to the German accent and the courtly manners of an upper-class Swiss.

The plane was an older 747 with a recently refurbished interior. If Aeon knew he was on it, they would cause it to crash, but not before coming aboard and capturing him. His fellow passengers would find a great secret revealed to them … as they died.

They went after him when he was at his most vulnerable, on lonely roads sometimes, but more often in planes, where he was, essentially, trapped. They didn't try for public places like airports and train stations or, usually, city streets. They knew from experience that he would elude them unless he had no place to go. And even then, he had escaped—so far.

Once the meal service was over, he turned out his light and flattened the bed, not to sleep but to think through events in microscopic detail. It was this method that had, in the past, enabled him to overcome impossible odds, and he was convinced that this situation was no different. A weapon was pointed at the White House, but who was going to pull the trigger? Above all, when that was done, what would happen?

He slept, then, an uneasy sleep, although never deep enough for dream. It took him into the glow of dawn over the Irish Sea. He woke up and drank coffee and worried. Had the thing—whatever it was—already happened?

The flight landed at eleven. His next plane left Gatwick at one forty-five, and he spent most of the time between airports getting through customs, finding a cab, and sitting out the London traffic.

Another seven-hour flight, this time on Emirates, then a five-hour layover in Dubai. Most of his work was done in the U.S., so he wasn't all that familiar with places like this. The airport was a gleaming extravaganza, as luxurious as first class had been on the Emirates plane. On the flight, he'd had what amounted to a private room. He'd even been able to take a shower in a small bathroom reserved for first class.

A U.S. agent masquerading as an arms dealer might give himself away by flying coach. Arms dealers didn't fly coach. In fact, the big ones used their own planes. By traveling commercial, Grauerholtz was saying that he was prosperous, but not yet a major player.

Not knowing how long it might be until his next meal, he ate again in the airport, at an Indian place called Gazebo. He ate everything—the meltingly tender
paya yakhni shorba,
lamb trotters simmered in curry; a fluffy saffroned
biryani tikka bahar;
vegetables grilled on a skewer with pineapple. He could have used a beer, but not in Dubai.

He noticed, on boarding the Tehran flight, that the general atmosphere of the airport was far less tense than what one found in the United States. And why not? It was doubtful that terrorists would target Arab airlines.

He watched the world from the window, first the bright blue of the Persian Gulf, then the brown emptiness of the Iranian hinterland.

He reviewed his approach to the foreign ministry. He would be seeking an end-user certificate for imports from the European Union. The goods he intended to offer would be of the most intense interest.

As they had never seen him before, they would be suspicious. He trusted that his curriculum vitae would be convincing. If it wasn't, he was in trouble, because he couldn't arrange to carry his weapons on international flights without drawing official attention to himself. The result was that he was unarmed. He wouldn't try to buy a gun in Iran, and in any case, he'd never attempt to enter the foreign ministry heavy.

Khomeini International Airport was a mixture of sparkling new and what appeared to be abandoned construction. Flynn immediately noticed the odor of the air, which was a mix of burning coal, engine exhaust, grease, and dust. Even inside the terminal, the air was dense.

The passport control line moved slowly. Very slowly. Ahead of him there was a woman dressed in a Chanel original worth easily five thousand dollars, her head covered by a scarf of sheer, floating silk. She was perhaps forty-five. Her face, with its large, questing eyes and tight-set lips, expressed a regal calm that reminded Flynn that you don't approach customs looking uneasy, or, for that matter, too relaxed.

She spoke Farsi, so he was able to pick up only a few words, but it soon became clear that she expected to get an on-arrival visa. The customs officer appeared for a moment concerned, then indifferent. He picked up a telephone, spoke a few words, and put it down. A moment later, another man appeared, this one in the weary business suit of a police official, and began escorting the woman away. He stopped, then turned back. His face opened into a smile that lifted his broad mustache almost comically.

He said, “Oh, and Mr. Grauerholtz, too, right here. Come, also, please.” He gestured grandly, like a pretentious maître' d.

As Flynn followed the woman's sweeping silks, he thought that Iran's foreign ministry must be very damned efficient to not only expect him, but to send somebody who knew him by sight. As he walked, another man fell in beside them, this one in an expensive Italian suit. Ahead of them, the woman was drawn into a hallway. The door closed and she disappeared.

The man said, in German, “I am Davood Ghorbani, vice minister of armaments in charge of acquisitions. We'll pass the formalities and go directly to the ministry.”

“Yes, I think that's best.” Flynn's German had better be as serviceable as he imagined it to be.

Ghorbani's suit was an excellent cut, which put him far up in the ministerial hierarchy. Flynn had signaled almost nothing about the purpose of his visit, but Grauerholtz's manufactured reputation must have preceded him. His specialty was rocket parts, most specifically highly machined nozzles for rocket engines—in other words, one of the items highest on the Iranian wish list.

The engine was not just the power source of an intercontinental missile, it was the basis of its accuracy. Without an engine capable of producing a clean burn, no guidance system could achieve enough accuracy to hit a city at a distance of five thousand kilometers. In addition, the engine had to have far more lifting power than anything presently in Iran's arsenal. The current state-of-Iranian-art missile was the Saji-3, which was capable of throwing a modest payload as far as four thousand miles. But to make a nuclear warhead small enough to be lifted by that system was going to take a major technological effort on Iran's part. And so far, anybody who was working in that direction was almost certain to be assassinated by the Israelis and the West. No doubt that was what had happened to Dr. Josefi.