A Spy in the Shadows (Spy Noir Series Book 1) (21 page)

Leni sat on the bed.  “Aren’t you curious about who killed him?”

“No, we let the proper authorities handle those sorts of affairs.  You are up to something terrible and I believe I’m beginning to understand what it is.”

She placed the papers in her lap.  She should have known it would come to this.  “Are you worried about your reputation, Robert?  Is that it?”

He grunted.  “How dare you bring that up?”  He sat beside her and roughly took the papers from her.  He leaned over and turned on the lamp on the side table.

Leni slowly reached inside her purse.  “Leave things as they are, Robert.”

He stared at her in disbelief, and then turned back to the papers.  After several moments, he whispered, “How could you, Leni?”

Quickly her left arm came up and curled around Boland’s throat, her fingers at his lips to stop him from crying out.  The knife was instantly positioned at his coat.  In one swift motion, she slid the blade through his chest, aimed at his heart.

He began to shake.  His eyes widened with surprise.  Leni embraced him, held on tightly until the punctured heart drowned him in his own blood.  Boland trembled, and then let a sickening sob.  She removed the knife, letting her husband’s body sag back onto the bed.  She tossed the knife in a trash basket beside her and looked around. 

Leni stood and waited, her heart pounding in her ears.

Then she went into the bathroom and became violently ill in the toilet.

-Twenty-

The yard was dark except for a light shining out over the glass-surfaced swimming pool when Shepilov pulled up at Goli’s villa shortly before four a.m.  By pulling strings through his comrades he had secured a four-year-old model Bedford truck.  It was a short wheelbase vehicle, used to transport supplies over short distances.  On both doors was stenciled ‘RAF’ in large white letters, reducing the chances of them being detained on their
journey.  He pulled up and killed the motor and waited in the silent darkness.

A few minutes later Goli came out of the French doors.  At first, Shepilov coiled as she walked through the headlight beam.  If the Russian hadn’t known for certain it was she, then he would have thought it was a man.  She wore a white cotton shirt, baggy black trousers and a long blue cotton coat.  Around her waist was a Kamarband, a wide belt.  And on her head was the traditional Sarband, wrapped with one end folded in a fan-shape at the top of her head, with a trailing piece of clothing thrown over the shoulder.

She came around, opened the door, and took the passenger’s seat. “So, where are you taking me, Joseph?”

Shepilov started the truck motor. 
“A hundred kilometers northwest toward Lake Urmia.”

“Is there any chance that he won’t show?”

Shifting the truck into gear now that he was out on the road, the Russian said, “He’ll be there.  He was handsomely paid for the information he has.”  Shepilov nodded to the back.  “Dobyrin is asleep in the back.”

The road became a narrow band of light once they were out in the desert.  Goli sat back, her arms crossed and she tried to imagine how many times she had traveled this road with her husband.

Watching the road, Goli twisted restlessly in the truck seat.  But gradually the continuous dark road hypnotized her.  Then she slept. 
And dreamed.  The reoccurring dream that sometimes haunted her late in the night . . .

.  .  .
              it was image from an adventure book—the type boys read, that came to her—she was staggering under the attack of a sand-swept desert . . . forcing herself toward a gathering of trees . . . then there was a catacomb beneath the desert floor with dried bodies, eyeless, desiccated faces, lined against the cold stonewalls like billets of wood.  A demon guarded the entrance with hot hungry eyes, his breath of eaten flesh; of the ancient carnage of years ago; of death howling a warning to uninvited travelers.  She wandered along the line of dead staring at their faces . . . until . . . she stopped suddenly recognizing her beloved Bozorg . . . his mummified face staring at her with dead eyes . . .

An hour before they reached the rendezvous point, Shepilov woke her.  He stopped the truck and from behind the seat he pulled out two sacks.  One had a container of black coffee.  From the other sack, he gave her a sweet roll.

Then they were back on the road.  By now the sun was a pink rim of false dawn.  Off the right was a rams’ horn next to a tree branch driven into the ground.  The Iranian signal that someone had been killed on that spot.

----

Six twenty. 

Goli awoke when Shepilov geared down the transmission.  She sat up as he pulled the truck beside two large locust trees.  Off to their right was a tomb, a series of gray mud brick structures that had withstood the elements of time.

“Is he here?”  She asked, wiping the sleep from her eyes.

Shepilov opened the door and jumped out.  “Let’s show ourselves.”  

When Goli stepped out, Dobyrin was already out of the back and leaning his thick frame against the truck.  Goli found the bulge of the revolver in her waistband, and then walked up the hill.

The morning wind was cool and the sun had just come up over the round top of the mud citadel when the man appeared at the ridge.  He was dressed as a Kashgai fighter.  Another man came over the rise with a rifle in his hand.  He moved off twenty meters and squatted never taking his eyes off Goli.  She knew the man standing above them as Aly.

He glanced slowly at Shepilov who stayed at the truck.  “I thought it was a woman who wanted to talk to me.” 

Goli let her headdress fall away. 

He studied her with a long stare.  “Your husband who was killed in the mountains beyond Isafahan, was he a good man?”

The question struck Goli as odd.  “Whatever purpose he believed in, he fought for it with all the passion he could.  In the end that’s what cost him his life.”

The fighter turned to his squatting comrade and spoke to him rapidly.  Then he looked back to her.  “I was there when the deal was struck.  Your husband with his wealth and influence had become too dangerous for men who believed in the other side.”

“Like your brother?”  Goli asked. 

Aly smiled thinly.  “Who knows why God allows such things to happen.  All I know is a deal was struck with men who wanted your husband dead.  That was carried out in the mountains.”

Goli took another step toward him.  “But who ordered the killing of my husband?”

The fighter smiled.

“Who, Aly?
  Who was behind this?”

When he told her the words froze in her mind.  The name she had been searching for.

“Are you certain?”

He nodded.

“Thank you,” she said and turned away.  When she twirled back, the revolver was drawn and she quickly pulled it up and aimed.  The shot hit him squarely in the chest and drove him back onto the sand.  She shifted to her right and the first shot hit the guard in the right leg.  He fell back crawling, yelping in pain.  The second shot struck him in the back breaking his spine and he fell face down in the sand.

Goli walked to the fighter and stood over him.  He was on his
back, his eyes turned skyward blinking from surprise and fear.  She shot him in the face.

She came down the hill and walked past Shepilov.  Dobyrin had lit a cigarette hanging from his smiling lips.

“Was that necessary?”  Shepilov asked.

She aimed at Dobyrin and shot him twice in his thick chest.  He fell back against the truck and crumbled his legs at an odd angle.  Goli sat in the passenger’s side and slammed the door.  “Get in the truck, Josef.  I have what I want.”

Shepilov was frozen, hands at his side.  “I gave him my word on his safety.”  Finally, he walked around the front of the truck and got in.  His hands rested on the steering wheel. 

“Get me away from here,” she said.  When she lit a cigarette from the tin lying on the seat, her hands were trembling.  “I’ve waited too long for this . . . too long to let anything, or anyone to interfere.”

----

Shepilov drove her back to her villa.  They spoke very little on the drive.

Goli cleaned up after the Russian went away, and she drove into the city.  By now it was noon.  At her office she closed the door, phoned the Palace Hotel and asked for Salinger’s room.

He answered on the second ring.

Goli went right to the point.  “I’m ready to make a deal.”

“What sort of deal?”

“Booth, this is good for both of us in that we get what we want.  Tonight at six o’clock go to the airport.  There you will find an airplane that will take you to Isafahan.  Check into the Safir Hotel where a room will be reserved for you.  It will be too late for us to meet then.  Ask nothing of the people because they know nothing other than your itinerary.  In the morning go the café overlooking the Hasht Behesht Garden at the end of the street from the hotel.  I will meet you there and it is then we can bargain.”

“What sort of deal, Goli?”

“I wish to find a man in Isafahan, Booth.  A man you can assist in finding because you know all about him.”

“You said a deal.  And what is in it for me?”

“Give me this man I want . . . and I will give you the German spy codenamed Traveler.”  She could hear his breathing over the line.  “Who are we looking for in Isafahan?”  He asked.

“Walter Bredow.”

----

Salinger hung up and leaned back in his chair.  He didn’t know how much to trust Goli, but despite all that had happened between them she had never lied to him.

Then he thought of the man she had mentioned, Walter Bredow, of early successes before the tragedy in the mountains. 

In Tehran, within the first six months of Salinger’s arrival, he and Mayfield had turned Bredow, a German agent, who had performed as promised.  To prove his worth he had dropped off at Mayfield’s apartment a thick bundle of papers stamped with official-looking German codes.  Salinger and Mayfield stayed up most of the night, like children with shiny new toys on Christmas morning filing through the documents.  Sheaves of secret German Foreign Office papers stamped with red eagles: details of a spy network in Portuguese Mozambique, the location of German submarines, memos of conversations with a foreign minister discussing the pressing situation in Persia.  It was then they both realized scattered out on Mayfield’s apartment floor, they possessed information intelligence officers could only dream of having.

Twenty minutes later Salinger phoned Mayfield and asked him about the German.  “We have information that Bredow had turned again,” Mayfield said.  “I personally think this makes it too dangerous.”

“We trusted Bredow at one time.”

“But from a distance.  That’s different.”

Then Salinger told him, “That’s why I’m going out.”

“Out where, Booth?”

“Out of the city.  I’m meeting Goli in Isafahan.”

“Why would you do that?”

“She wants me to find Bredow for her.  And, she’s offered me a deal.  If I help her, then she’ll give us Traveler.”

The other end of the line fell silent.  “Booth, I don’t think she can do that no matter what you once thought of her.”

“Then we’ll have to find out, won’t we?”

Salinger hung up and dialed a telephone number in Italy, a villa—a safe house—on the banks of Lake Como.  He remembered the number after all these years, supposing that one didn’t forget those sorts of things.  He tried his codename when someone answered.

“I don’t know you, do I?”  The voice challenged.

“You wouldn’t,” Salinger said.

“Then how can I help you?”

“Is there a man named Hilbert there?”

“Hilbert is retired.  Can anyone else help you?”

Salinger gave him several names without any response until he asked about Coulter.  Then the voice hesitated.
  “Coulter?”  Salinger repeated.

“Hold on a moment.”  Through the line he heard footsteps, a distant conversation.  A door closed. 
“Coulter here.”

“Peter, this is Booth Salinger.”

“Booth, where are you?  Are you in Rome?  You have to come by, of course.”

“I’m not in Italy, I’m in Tehran.  Peter, I need some answers.”

Coulter’s voice instinctively lowered.  “What?”

“Do you know where Bredow is?”

“What is this about, Booth?  I’m not telling you anything until you tell me why you’re in Tehran.”

“I need to know where I can find Bredow.”

A moment.  “It’s really over, you know that,” Coulter said.  When Salinger didn’t respond, he said, “Bredow?  You’re going to Isafahan, of course.”  Coulter was old school.  At some point he would stop asking questions.  “If you’re in Isafahan all you have to do is ask for the old soldier.  You remember him, don’t you?”