The Last Refuge (14 page)

Paria stared down at Massood. Her cheek was bright red. Her hijab had fallen off and was on the ground, and her long black hair was now a mess.

Finally, the woman looked up at Paria.

“There was a man,” she whispered. “At the restaurant. A large man.”

“What about him?” asked Paria. “Did they speak?”

“No,” said Massood. “But they exchanged a look. A knowing look. I swear by it.”

“What did he look like?” asked Paria.

“I don’t remember exactly,” she said. “Just that he was mean-looking, and American.”

Turning, Paria signaled to the one-way mirror, waving. A moment later, the door opened and Salim poked his head in.

“Get the sketch artist in here,” he commanded Salim, “
immediately!”

18

KHOMEINI LUXURY CONDOMINIUMS

TEHRAN

On the thirty-third floor of a high-rise in downtown Tehran, a man named Ahmet Garwal wrapped a soft, navy blue bathrobe around his shoulders. Garwal, Iran’s minister of housing, looked down at the huge king-sized bed of his twenty-eight-year-old mistress, Paisa. Slightly overweight with a cute face and short black hair, she lay sprawled across the bed, naked.

“Champagne, Ahmet,” she said.

“Your wish is my command, my dear.”

Garwal leaned down and picked up the two empty champagne glasses. He walked from the bedroom through the big, open living room to the kitchen. He took the open bottle of Veuve Clicquot from the refrigerator and filled the glasses.

*   *   *

In a half-constructed office building across the street from Garwal’s building, a space on the thirty-fourth floor sat empty. It consisted of steel beams, concrete floors, piping, and clusters of wires dangling from the ceiling and walls, stacks of sheetrock, all cloaked within the darkness of a Tehran evening.

A lone man lay on his stomach on the concrete floor, near the edge of the building. Positioned on the floor in front of him was a long-barreled weapon with a wooden stock and a distinctive square muzzle brake: a PGM Hecate II heavy sniper rifle. The front of the weapon was supported by a small bipod, the back by a small monopod, steadying the high-powered weapon. The man lay still and quiet. His right eye was pressed against a SCROME LTE 10x telescope, customized with thermal-imaging technology. His right index finger lightly touched the trigger.

Through the telescope, he watched as Garwal put the bottle back inside the refrigerator.

Across the dark Tehran evening and the wide city block that separated the half-built office building from Garwal’s luxury apartment building, the air was humid and blisteringly hot, nearly a hundred degrees. The humidity would affect the flight of the slug as it coursed across the sky. But the Israeli gunman had already made the precise countercalibration to accommodate for what would be a slightly altered, a slightly lower, trajectory.

As Garwal shut the refrigerator door and then reached for the champagne glasses atop the counter, the gunman pulled the trigger. A low boom like a bass drum sounded, but no one except the gunman heard it. A split second later, there was the sound of shattering glass. Garwal was kicked violently backward through the kitchen and slammed hard into the stove, glasses dropping to the floor, the walls beyond him suddenly ruined in a miasma of red. The gunman removed his finger from the trigger as he watched Garwal fall in a contorted heap to the ground.

19

EVIN PRISON

A pair of Iranian soldiers dragged Meir down the hallway, pulling him along like a slab of beef by the shackles at his feet. His head scraped against the concrete floor.

The guards spoke Persian, which Meir understood, but the dialect was rough. They were angry; he had killed one of their friends.

“Cell block one,” said one of the men, dragging him down the corridor.

“Yes, sir.”

“Where is Achabar?” the first one asked.

“He left.”

“Get him back here, now.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

A latch on a door ahead unbolted. They stopped. Upside down, he turned his head and saw a small cell, empty except for a steel bed frame jutting from the right-hand wall and a toilet. A bright light hung from the ceiling.

“Get the machine,” ordered one of them. “When Achabar gets back, keep him in the waiting area. Until I’m done.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

The soldiers lifted Meir, each grabbing him at the shoulder and along his pants leg. The guards threw him face-first into the cell. Instinctively, he tried to shield the coming crash with his hands, but then felt his shackles at his wrists behind his back; reflexively he tried to kick, but his feet were bound tight by the flex-cuffs. As his head was about to strike the concrete floor, he wrenched himself sideways, avoiding the direct hit to the head, his shoulder striking the ground first, a hard, painful crash into the concrete.

“Fucking Jew,” barked the colonel.

Meir felt sharp pain in his shoulder. He looked right and watched as the cell door slammed shut.

Meir closed his eyes and didn’t move. He had to gather his thoughts now. It was likely the last time for some time he would be able to find the calm place inside where he could steel himself.

He pictured his father, Tobias. It was always the same image: his father arriving at the playground at the elementary school in Savyon. Meir was five, in kindergarten. His father had on his military uniform. A broad smile was on his face. All of the other children looked over at him: Meir had been playing with a yellow toy dump truck on the pile of dirt. He pictured his father as he suddenly spotted him, their eyes meeting across the playground. His father’s mouth moved; what had he said? He stood up and ran from the mound of sandy dirt. He ran across the lot to his father, kneeling, arms out. He’d run into his father’s arms, who had lifted him up, then swung him around through the air.

It was always the same memory. It brought warmth to him. The images ran through his mind like a movie. At his hardest times, it was this clip that brought him back to the core of who he was.

Son of a soldier.

Meir knew why he held the memory so close. It was the day before it all changed. The day before someone from Hamas ended it all—a homemade IED put his papa in a wheelchair forever. That was okay. He had survived. He didn’t understand it yet, not at that point. But at age five, Kohl Meir had suddenly felt the responsibility being moved from his father’s to his shoulders. Like all Israeli sons, his time had come. That memory, of his father walking across the playground, was his last day as a boy.

The latch on the cell door creaked. The loud scraping of steel against steel as someone unbolted it. Then there was a noise of wheels turning, squeaking.

“They say I’m not to kill you.” Again, the voice of the colonel. It was a deep voice, chilling. “I’ll do my best. But I never was very good at following orders.”

The door slammed shut.

Meir didn’t move his head. He remained still, on his back, staring up at the bottom of the filthy steel toilet. He felt the wet of blood dribbling down from his forehead. The colonel’s hand suddenly grabbed the shackles at his ankles. He pulled him into the middle of the cell.

Meir was on his side now. He opened his eyes. Blood had pooled in his eyes and he blinked to see.

The colonel was a short, obese man. His black hair was shaved close to his head and he had a beard and mustache. He wore glasses. He knelt down so that he was next to Meir. He pulled a knife from a sheath at his waist belt. He took the blade and moved it slowly across the air, toward Meir’s face. He rubbed the side of it on the tip of his nose, pressed it against the flesh just not quite hard enough to break the skin, but close. Then he moved the blade down to his neck. He put it inside the neckline of the shirt, then quickly sliced the blade down toward Meir’s waist, ripping the shirt wide open.

The colonel stood. He turned. Meir watched as he stepped toward a trolley, atop which stood a machine which Meir recognized; a red and black box with dials, and electronic cables crisscrossed at the back. The colonel took a pair of the cables and moved back toward him. On the ends of the red wire cables, Meir recognized small clips. The colonel bent down. He attached one of the cables to Meir’s left nipple. The other clip the Iranian attached to Meir’s right ear.

Meir concentrated, as he’d been trained to do. He forced his mind to compartmentalize what was coming, to mark off a mental border around the coming seconds and minutes. To seal it off and trick the mind into thinking that somehow it was happening to someone else. The barrier, he knew, was only in his mind, and it didn’t make it hurt any less, but it would let him absorb the pain until he was unconscious.

The colonel stood. He stepped to the trolley. He turned a dial and a low hum could be heard. Then, the first bolt of electricity shot like fire into Meir’s nipple, his ear, wrenching him sideways, his head jerking up, then slamming against the hard concrete. The pain shot through him for five seconds, and he felt himself urinating as his body lost control. After too long, the electricity suddenly stopped.

“I would ask you how that felt, but I already know,” said the colonel. “Hussein tortured me during the war. The worst part is still coming.”

The charge surged yet again, this time searing through his nipple like lightning. His ear took the electricity and it made an inhuman screaming noise in his ear, which, after a few seconds, he recognized was his own voice screaming.

“The worst part is when your body remembers the pain,” said the colonel. “It will be at odd times. You’re lying in bed. Maybe you’re driving or at a restaurant. Your mind will suddenly replay the pain. You’ll jump. Or turn suddenly, like a madman. Everyone will wonder why. That’s the worst part.”

Meir heard the torturer’s words, vague, far-off sounds, like the tinkling of glass breaking in a distant room somewhere.

“Of course, you’ll never know any of those situations again,” said the colonel, laughing. “I have a feeling you won’t be eating at too many restaurants.”

In the pause before the next pulse of electricity, Meir smelled his own flesh, burning.

“Would I have done this had you not killed my man?” asked the colonel. “The answer is no. So don’t blame me.”

Then the pain began yet again, and his body, now resigned after only a few turns of the torture, shut down and he slipped into unconsciousness.

20

EMBASSY OF THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN

BEIJING

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

In downtown Beijing, the sun was setting.

Inside the Iranian embassy, Tariq Ghassani, Iran’s ambassador to China, loosened his tie. Inside his office, he stared down from the second floor of the embassy through a large, floor-to-ceiling bulletproof window. Outside, the streets were crowded with people. In his hand was a glass half filled with vodka and lime juice.

After two years in Beijing, Ghassani and his wife, Sacha, were starting to like the city. Ghassani spent time here when he was younger, as a spy, working for SAVAMA, VEVAK’s predecessor. It was in China that Ghassani had brokered the deal to purchase several pounds of medium-enriched uranium from a rogue within the Chinese Ministry of Defense. Now Ghassani was too old for the work and sacrifices necessary for VEVAK. Paria had offered Ghassani a posting anywhere and he’d chosen China.

The phone on his desk buzzed.

Drinking the last of his gimlet, he walked across the large room and pressed a small white button on the phone console.

“Yes,” said Ghassani.

“Mrs. Ghassani called, Mr. Ambassador,” said his secretary. “She’ll meet you at the theater.”

“Fine, fine,” said Ghassani. “Is she on the phone?”

“No, she said she had to get ready. Seven thirty.”

Ghassani pressed the console button and stepped around to the front of his desk. He grabbed a stack of papers and placed them in his leather briefcase. The top sheet was the day’s press clippings, which showed a photograph of Nava, sitting in front of the Iranian flag, announcing the capture of Kohl Meir. Ghassani shut the briefcase, buckled the two locks on the side, then left his office.

Ghassani stepped through the massive front door of the embassy and down the steps to the street. Reflexively, he glanced around, paranoid.

In front of the embassy, a long, black Mercedes had its red parking lights on. He opened the back door and climbed inside.

“Good evening, Ling,” said Ghassani, shutting the door behind him.

“Good evening, Mr. Ambassador,” said Ling from the front driver’s seat. A low thud echoed in the luxurious car as Ling locked the doors with a button on the car’s console.

*   *   *

As he greeted his boss, Ambassador Ghassani, then locked the doors, Ling felt the sweat drips on his forehead, wetting the inside of his black cap. He glanced to his right. Crouched on the floor, out of sight to anyone but him, was a man. The man wore black jeans, a black shirt, and a thin ski mask pulled down over his face. He had a handgun with a long black suppressor screwed into its muzzle, aimed at Ling’s skull.

The man nodded, flicking the muzzle of the weapon forward, silently ordering Ling to drive.

The Iranian ambassador’s driver pushed the gas pedal and moved the Mercedes forward, lurching into traffic. He drove for several blocks, taking a left at Xin Dong Lu, and then rushing through central Beijing.

“Penghao Theater,” said Ghassani from the back. “I forgot to tell you.”

“Yes, of course, sir,” said Ling nervously, watching the gunman out of the corner of his eye.

Ling had been at the light, several blocks away, after refueling the limousine. The blond woman had approached him. She looked like a student; young, jeans, backpack, carrying a fold-out map of the city.

“Do you speak English?” she had asked as he lowered the window. When he lowered the window, she reached out, placing the map in front of Ling. “I’m trying to find the Marriott Hotel.”

“That is easy,” he had said, flipping on the switch for the hazard lights, taking the map, orienting himself. He found the location on the map, then looked up. When he did, the young woman had the suppressor of a handgun an inch from his left eyeball, cloaking the view by covering the window with her frame.