A Spy in the Shadows (Spy Noir Series Book 1) (15 page)

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Security measures in Tehran were handled by the British in cooperation with the Iranian authorities, such as Chubok, chief of Gendarmes, who was unofficially assisting Salinger in his investigation.  This created a situation where officially the Russians had no authority concerning police matters in the city.

Despite that fact, there existed a house on Syroos Street in the eastern part of the city.  A labyrinth of rooms, some complete with tables and chairs and banks of radio systems; other tables accompanied with only two chairs where severe interrogations took place.  Here, in the cellar of this house is where those suspected of assisting Nazis, were quietly executed.

On the south side of the house, facing a narrow alleyway was a heavily guarded rear entrance.  It was through this door that Goli Faqiri entered Soviet Intelligence Headquarters.  At three-thirty Sunday evening Goli was escorted to a room on the second floor where Joseph Shepilov listened in on the movement of the German commandos. 

The Russian sat at a small wooden table.  A typewriter sat in front of him, a stack of white paper at this elbow.  He looked up when she entered and his face turned from one of serious concentration to delight.  “Goli, I have wonderful news,” he said standing and dragging a chair from beneath a window and placing it at the table.  Once she sat, then Shepilov returned to his seat behind the table.

“Of the two teams of men the Germans sent in, one has been picked up near the holy city of Qom within hours of their landing.  Another forty men have been surrounded at a house in Kakh Street but chose to shoot it out.  There were no survivors.”

Goli leaned forward. 
“But the others?   The six?”

“Unaccounted for, officially.”

“And Heuss?”  She asked.  “He is here?”

“He arrived in Tehran last night along with five other commandoes.”  Shepilov leaned over the typewriter.  “They are staying at a safe house.  According to the radio transmissions we’ve intercepted they realize their situation has turned desperate.”

“And the British—they are onto them also?”

“From the moment of their arrival they have been watched by no less than a dozen British Intelligence Service agents,” he said.  “Our surveillance has been a little more discreet.”

“You’re certain?”

“Heuss has attempted to use his contacts now that they are aware that the German operation is blown,” Shepilov said.  He seeks assistance from the Kashgai fighters to provide an avenue of escape.”

Goli sat back and took it all in.  She honestly never believed that she’d be this close to finding the men responsible for husband’s death.  And now the man who could tell them . . . was coming to them.  “I want to know everything about him, Joseph.”

Shepilov opened the table drawer and removed a folder.  “Paul Heuss. 
From Darmstadt, the first of his family to join the military in 1937.  Promoted to the position of SS Hauptsturmfuhrer in the Brandenburg Division.  Once he proved to be a fast learner of languages, he was trained as a Persian interpreter.  Our young captain has lived a bloody past.  He was in Lithuania when the Germans were organizing the liquidation of the Jews.  He participated in the execution of Soviet partisans in the Ukrainian when he was only seventeen.”

“Train them young to hate,” Goli interrupted.  “And when was he in Tehran?”

Shepilov removed a single sheet of paper from the file.  “Arrived in Tehran March 1942 as an interpreter.  Participated in patrols in the mountains outside of the city where in many cases the Germans were as brutal as their reputation elsewhere.”

“And the Soviets are totally innocent of such actions,” she said mockingly.  “I’ve heard of such.”

Shepilov sat the paper down.  “Then why do you work for us, Goli?”

Goli didn’t answer.  She had long ago accepted the premise that every purpose demands appropriate action, no matter how repulsive at times.  “Where was he on February 6, 1942?”

“Assigned to a secret unit in Isafahan.”

“Then he was there,” she half whispered.

Shepilov placed a photograph in front of her.  “He was in the vicinity.  The odds are we have our man.”  It was a black and white grained photograph.  A young man, still a boy really, stared calmly into the camera.  So handsome in his uniform.  Someone’s hero.  “He’s so young,” she said.

“He won’t tell us what he knows very easily when the time comes to question him.  Not a seventeen-year-old-boy who lined up old women and children against a wall in the Ukraine and shot them without remorse.”

“How do you know he and others don’t regret what they did?”

“Look at the eyes, Goli, a smile in his young face—but the eyes are stone cold.”

Goli stared at the photograph.

“You have another decision to make, Goli,” Shepilov said.  “These commandoes know their operation is blown, but they are dedicated to succeed for their Fuhrer.  With help from Pro-German Iranians they have designed a last desperate plan to breach the British Embassy through a water supply channel and assassinate Churchill.”

“Churchill?  When?”

“November 30. 
On his birthday no less.”

“What are the odds such an attempt would succeed?”

“British Intelligence isn’t aware of this.”

Goli considered what Shepilov had told her.  “So, if we do nothing and give up my mission to find out who ordered my husband’s death, then Churchill could be in great danger?”  Goli thought back on all the sleepless nights, when she cried herself to sleep; the terror of waking up alone in the dark, and when she did there was the stinging hollowness aching in her stomach because her beloved Bozorg would no longer lie beside her.  “No, I have to know for certain, Joseph.  Nothing else really matters.”

“I thought you’d say as much,” Shepilov said.  “I’ll have the pleasure of introducing you to Captain Paul Heuss within twenty four hours.”

When Goli walked to the door, Shepilov followed and took her elbow.  “What about Salinger?”

“He is my concern, and I’ve given it a lot of thought,” she said.  “In fact, if events turn as we think they will, he could be of use to us.”

-Fifteen-

Dustan Tappeh.  

It was the grounds of a former military barracks of the Iranian Air Force outside Tehran and the scene of the one cause that gave Julia and Goli an opportunity to reconcile their differences.

Living in the camp were the Tehran Children, the name that referred to a group of Polish Jewish children, mostly orphans, who had escaped the German occupation.  In 1941 among the chaos of war many of these children were displaced and relocated to the Soviet Union.  In the spring of 1942 they were evacuated from temporary orphanages and shelters in Russia to Tehran by train and then by ship to the port of Pahlavi on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea.

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When Goli drove into the camp, the sun was at a bank of clouds anchored to the horizon.  She walked through the tent camp and toward the barracks serving as the operation headquarters.

On the porch, shielded from the sun by a striped awning, several young girls sat around the table coloring in notebooks as Julia poured lemonade from a glass pitcher and smiled down at the children.  When Julia noticed her, she stood upright holding the pitcher close to her.

Goli walked up on the porch.  “They tell me that Anna has departed.” 

“Let’s walk away from the children,” Julia said leading her back toward the porch steps.

“Is it true?”

“I tried to phone you, but you were out of your office.”

Goli placed her hand at her forehead.  “I didn’t get to tell her goodbye.”

“It all happened rather quickly when a truck caravan was assembled last night.  It seems negotiations between the Jewish agency and the British administration in Palestine reached an agreement.  Some of the children received certificates permitting them their immigration to Palestine.”

“But I didn’t get to tell her goodbye.”

“We were aware, weren’t we one day they would leave us?  I know you were attracted to Anna, but there are others who need your love until they are gone.”

“That’s the nasty part of this business,” Goli said. “We become attached to the children knowing all the while they’ll be out of our lives.  Is . . . is Penina still here in the camp?”

Penina was special, a cute girl of eight from Lublin, Poland who had escaped with twelve other girls across the eastern border into Russia.  “She is,” Julia said.  “But you should know another group will soon depart for the gulf by truck in several nights.  There is a list posted on the board inside the main door.  The last group of the children will be gone by the end of the week.”

“Thank you, Julia.”

Goli walked off several steps and then came back.  “Soon all the children will be gone and that will be sad.  But, I’m glad we found this opportunity to work together and be friends again.”

“Me too, Goli.”
 

Goli hesitated.  “I want to let you know Booth will eventually want to talk to me.”

“It’s really no business of mine, is it?  Not any longer.”

“Yes it is, Julia,” she said.  “We’ll discuss business and he’ll want to know why I’m working for the Russians.  And that’s all.  I thought you should know that.”

She watched Goli walk down the long porch and inside the main door.  As Julia turned back to the girls sitting at the table, she noticed a blue convertible pulling out of the camp.  Several of the children ran through the dust boiling up behind the Chevrolet.  From the driver’s seat the woman waved and laughed at the children.

Julia knew that it was Colonel Boland’s wife. 
Leni.  Another woman who, in the midst of war, found time to comfort lost and hurting children.

----

Mayfield drove to Qolhak Street and parked at the south side of the large semi-park courtyard flanking the British Embassy summerhouses.

The sky was gray-metal with clouds as he rounded the thick hedge boundary along the walkway.  He wore a suit of expensive Donegal tweed with hints of brown and black and walked by the cemetery. 

Mayfield paused at a wrought-iron fence beneath a large fir tree and stared at the gravestones . . . Britons killed in Iran during the First World War and now the ongoing conflicts

. . .
his past suddenly echoed toward him . . . the rumbling sounds of bugles over the rough hills of India.  And as if by the lifting of a fog, he remembered the names of comrades left behind there in the Argonne Forest a many years ago.  They came to him in white clicks, all the names.  All the faces.

The sun slipped through the clouds as he walked down the path through the garden and glanced through the trees toward the homes.  A blonde woman stood at a balcony staring out toward the cemetery.

He thought of how sad she appeared, supposing that the cemetery haunted her as much as it did him.

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Ten minutes later, a gray sedan picked him up on the boulevard on the other side of the cemetery.  They drove west, then pulled off the main road and continued down a narrow driveway finally stopping in a circular drive.

He exited the sedan and made his way through the maple trees to a large white house overlooking a river.  A balcony ran along the entire length where rows of flowers fronted the porch.  In front of converted stables, a man polished a British Austin Vitesse Phaeton.

At the front door, an elderly gentleman with a kind face met him.  He led Mayfield through a spacious living room that smelled of wood polish.  Past walls lined with books.  At the center of the room was a stone fireplace flanked by two high back chairs.  “I’ve been told that you should wait in the study, sir,” and took him through a white-framed door.

The room was a smaller space with several worn leather chairs.  Across the room was a wide desk, cluttered with books and writing pads.

In another moment, Frederick Gifford guided his wheelchair through the doorway; a blanket lay neatly across his lap, his white shirt starched and open at the throat.  Hazel gray eyes beneath thick brows stared at Mayfield.  “Ah, Major, it’s been too long,” his voice worn and folded. 

Mayfield came over and shook hands with the one man who knew as much about British Intelligence as Winston Churchill.  Distinguished Foreign Service to the Queen of India, and then in the Boer War received his crippling wound and battlefield honors in the South African Republic.  It was there that he began to dabble in intelligence work through diplomatic channels after returning to England.

Gifford smiled.  “You still owe me for that last card game in London, you know that.”

“That’s not exactly the way I remember it.”

Gifford laughed.  “I thought you’d say that.”

At that moment the door opened and a large man entered with gray hair and mustache, dressed in a British officer’s uniform.