The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller (11 page)

Qassam Pakravesh usually slept well when he was in the field.

Being asleep did not mean being dead to the world. He could fall asleep—or wake—in a heartbeat. There was no sound that didn’t rouse him, no draft, no smell. He had spent a year training himself to do that by riding the train from Bagher Shahr, where he lived with his parents, to Nabard, where he trained with Mahdavi Yazdi and his team at the Army of the Guardians facility. The rail trip was three-quarters of an hour and Pakravesh trained himself to go to sleep as soon as he boarded and snap awake at any sound or movement or smell out of the ordinary. Remaining alert was one of the four commandments of survival, in addition to: do not lie on the bed or bedroll; do not eat food you did not bring or capture; and in a room, do not sleep while exposed to the door or windows.

Pakravesh typically slept in a bathtub, or if there wasn’t one, he curled himself—as now—on the floor in the closet.

As he dreamt, Pakravesh became aware of the odor of garlic. His mind instantly snapped to arsine, a dense form of arsenic, one of the most toxic compounds on the planet.

Someone knows who I am and where I would be asleep,
he thought as he lay there double-checking his senses. He listened for a hiss, something that might be releasing the toxin; it was possible the smell
was
garlic, coming through the fan ventilator in the bathroom.

He raised himself into a crouch position so that he would be above the heavy gas if it were being pumped under the door or through the ventilator—the only openings besides the windows, and he had checked those. There were locked. The drawn curtains were not moving; no one had cut through.

He picked up the SIG P226 handgun that was never out of reach along with the belt-folder in which he kept his cash and passports. He sniffed. The odor was definitely coming from the area of the bathroom, which was on the other side of the closet. He drew his handkerchief from his pocket, put it across his mouth, and breathed through it as he waddled, duck-like, toward the short corridor that led to the front door and to the bathroom. He stopped when he saw the flat piece of rubber tube jammed under the door of the hotel room.

If he went to remove it, he would be gunned down.

He dropped flat on his back and kicked his way back to the sleeping area, to the foot of the bed. He was being gassed. He had no choice but to go out the window.

Pakravesh slept in his clothes, including his shoes. He went back to the closet to recover the parcel with which he’d been entrusted. Holding his breath, he crawled around the foot of the bed toward the window. He had disconnected the room telephone and left it there. He went to the edge of the drape, pulled it back with his left hand, and with his right hand he smashed the phone hard against the window. It broke with the second forceful crack.

The Iranian ducked back; there was no gunfire. But there would be as soon as whoever was at the door heard him. Rolling to the break, he kicked out the shards of glass that stuck in the bottom of the frame. Crouching again, he stuck his head through the window to look both ways before going out—

Two men were waiting for him on either side of the window. The one with the baseball bat swung it down on the middle of Pakravesh’s neck, shattering it and causing him to fall face forward onto the asphalt of the parking lot. He felt nothing anywhere in his body except for the insides of his skull, which seemed electrified. He knew he was resting on his right cheek but he had no idea that the rest of his body was still inside the room.

The top of the baseball bat was pressed into his left cheek, pushing the Iranian’s face to the ground.

The second man crouched beside his face, turning his head so that Pakravesh could see through tear-misted eyes. Pakravesh reached for him, clawed at his forehead before the man swatted his weak, clawed hand away.

“I have been following you,” the man said, placing the barrel of a gun in the Iranian’s mouth. “You killed my brother in Yemen. This is for him.”

The man with the bat stepped aside an instant before the back of Pakravesh’s head and most of his brain were sprayed across the asphalt.

The suburban community a half hour outside New York City was more than just a snapshot of an era. For those who knew where to look, it was a time capsule of the birth of a generation.

The village was now called Millbrook. But when it was established within greater Valley Stream in 1939, the enclave was called Green Acres. Built largely on what was once the Curtiss Airfield beside Sunrise Highway and the Long Island Railroad—home of Amelia Earhart and other early aviatrixes—it was one of the early nests of the Northeast’s baby boom generation. Soldiers, mustered out after the war and helped by the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the G.I. Bill, married and went to work or school in New York City and bought homes built new, fast, and inexpensively. The houses cost between five and ten thousand dollars for a small plot of land and a couple of bedrooms on streets that were described as “crime-free”: there was only one way in and one way out of sprawling Green Acres, and the cops could get there faster than the bad guys could leave.

The growth of Green Acres produced a strong school system, surrounding houses of worship, offices for war-trained doctors, a boom in movie theaters, clean new chain supermarkets, chain gas stations, car mega-dealers, a shopping center that became a shopping mall that, by the 1970s, had become a magnet for shoppers and then crime. That was the reason the community changed its name: Green Acres became synonymous with the gangs that roamed the same-named mall.

But the moment when the new homes first went on the market and the air was fresh with postwar promise—and TV antennas; that brief period encapsulated what was best in the 1950s. It was a haven free from bias against Jews or the few blacks who could afford to live there.

That security layout was one of two reasons Largo Kealey purchased his home on Forest Road in 1954. He knew he’d sleep easier. The second reason was the new school up the road, Forest Road Elementary. He and his wife, May, never had the children they expected would go there, and that was a surprising hole in their lives. It was difficult being surrounded as they were by children who played in the streets and on the curbs and in backyards and at the schoolyard. But Largo coached Little League and May taught piano, and they managed to live a little through the families of others.

Largo had stayed in government service for a number of years but not enough to receive a pension from the OSS. So he worked for a milk delivery company. He liked the predawn hours, the hours he had felt safe in France. He would drive to nearby Hewlett to pick up the bottles and truck and then went door-to-door throughout Green Acres and also several streets in the older adjoining section of Valley Stream.

That left Largo’s late mornings and afternoons free. Three months of the year, he sat outside on a chaise lounge or on his hammock and read—mostly classics he had missed as a youth.
A Tale of Two Cities. The Great Gatsby. Moby-Dick.
He tended the poplar trees he’d planted. He grew roses. In the summer, he put up a three-foot-deep pool and relaxed on an inflatable raft.

Sometimes, lying there, he relived snatches of his own violent handiwork. The hearts he had punctured with his knife. The men he had strangled. The weight of a dying man was always more than he expected, and he had learned quickly to go down to the ground with them. He had never bothered to look up whether that was where the term “deadweight” had originated. It was bad enough thinking that a milkman had once been a killer. The idea that some coiner of phrases had also murdered and found words to describe it was too much.

Maybe that was how some other tortured soul came to terms with what he had done
, Largo thought.
By making it impersonal. An improper noun
.

He fought the improper sense of power he had felt at those times. Not that he killed but that he knew something a mother or wife did not: that her loved one was gone. It was strange, he thought, that both perpetrator and victim were probably thinking the same thing at that very moment. It was a bond unlike any other on earth. Returning stateside, he felt pride in the victory of the Allies but none in his own achievements. It was constant, daily torture.

And that was just the half of it.

Largo spent about a dozen years getting over the constant, low-burn sense that he was in danger. The first thing he had to overcome was associating the moon with danger. That
had
been his life, moving cautiously and ever alert through the darkness. He could only do useful reconnaissance during a full moon, but that also meant he could be seen. He literally had to say aloud, so he could hear the words, “It is not your life now.”

But it wasn’t just the moon. There was never anything that was a threat or even resembled one, except superficially. The sounds he heard were the grinding of a hand mower, the sound of a bird or rustling leaves, a telephone worker climbing a pole, a car shifting gears. Sudden sounds did not startle him. Even the low-flying prop planes passing directly overhead on their way to Idlewild Airport—before there were jets, before the field was JFK—became part of the accepted background noise. In France, aircraft had never impacted him much. They were usually
Luftwaffe
squadrons on patrol for other aircraft . . . or, later, single planes sneaking some high-ranking German to safety.

What troubled Largo were what he called the “danger sounds.” These had burrowed into his muscles and mind and nerve endings. Slowly, as he made his delivery rounds each morning, he allowed himself—permission was a big part of it—to get used to the idea that barking dogs didn’t mean he had been discovered, that men leaving home to go to work in dark suits were not Nazis, that there wasn’t a Partisan hidden in his truck to be smuggled through a German checkpoint. There was only milk and he was safe in this young American community. One of the last danger sounds to go was the involuntary fear, a little flinch, when he turned on the radio. No one was going to overhear. And he was listening to music, not waiting for a hidden message from London. He would never—could never—forget the two messages to the Resistance that came before the D-Day invasion:

Les des sontsur le tapis
followed by
Il fait chaud a Suez.

“The dice are down” meant it was time to risk everyone and everything in order to destroy cables and telegraph wires. “It is hot in Suez” told them to go after the phone and all other methods of communication.

Even lying in a hammock in his backyard, as he did now—looking up at the high swaying treetops of dusk, right before the mosquitoes came out to play—he could still hear every static scratch in those lines, the inflection in each syllable, the reactions and breathing and smell of the three men and two women gathered around him outside the outhouse in Brest.

And he heard the inner sounds as well. The sounds that never left. His own doubts and struggles arguing without words. He had often thought that he enjoyed good health because he never stopped feeling, even if it was pain. That caused his nerves and cells to constantly renew and refresh themselves.

To keep him alive. And to punish him, too.

To what purpose?
he often wondered. He would do it again if he had to. Others would do it despite the horrendous body count of this war. There was no collective learning, no evolution of the species.

It was a double-edged sword, all of those memories: accolades and medals, nightmares and fear. But he did not think about them now. Because among the few sounds that still made his eighty-nine-year-old ears perk up, there was one he did not hear often. One that he heard now.

The sound of an automobile stopping at the curb in front of his home.

 

 

While Kealey and Rayhan were en route, the CH-46
Sea Knight
received a secure transmission from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency based in Springfield, Virginia. On command from the President, the two pages were printed out and delivered to Kealey in the nominal passenger section of the aging tandem-rotor aircraft. He studied the two photographs, then snickered.

“I love it,” he said to a pale-looking Rayhan.

The woman was seated beside him in one of the thinly padded bucket seats that lined the vibrating cabin. Her eyes were tightly shut, her lips pressed together. She was not having a good ride on the bucking, forty-two-year-old transport.

Kealey had to lean toward her to be heard over the slamming hum of the engines. “This thing was picked up by Naval Space Command but it was the NGIA that carried the ball across the finish line.”

“I . . . don’t follow,” she said weakly.

“Agency that found the object isn’t the one that got to deliver the last word,” he said. “Everything got ‘cooperative’ under the Department of Homeland Security, but I guarantee you there are wounded feelings and bruised egos over at the NSC.”

“Mmm-hmmm.”

“Anyway, here’s what we’ve got.” Kealey showed her the top images.

She glanced at them, then looked away, shut her eyes. “A black mass inside the ice.”

“Not all of it’s inside the ice,” Kealey told her. Rayhan opened her eyes and he showed her the second picture. “Here’s a higher magnification. Part of the hull came through. The ice calved. You can see how it flipped over from the way the water is dropping—then the side cracked off. Looks like it just twisted off the top part of the object and carried it who knows where.”

“They should be able to find the other part,” she said. “Radiation traces. But not from the air. It would have to be on the sea.”

“I’m sure they’re on the way,” Kealey said. “But this is what the Iranian frigate found. It’ll be something if my Uncle Largo can positively identify it.”

“It will rewrite history,” she said.

Kealey examined the two photographs. The woman was right, and that was the part of the job that always thrilled him—how history was fluid. If the object in the ice were a U-boat and its backstory were true, the Nazis were close to an atom bomb and the Allies had been on the precipice of a very different outcome than the textbooks described. And that was just from what they surmised. He wondered what else about this they did not know.

The helicopter landed at the shuttered Terminal 5 at JFK. A black sedan from the New York FBI Field Office was waiting on the tarmac to hurry the passengers to their destination. The driver was an eager man in his late twenties, standing by the back door, leaning into the strong rotor backwash as he tried to hold his tie and gray blazer in place. Kealey and Rayhan hurried over, jumping through the open door as the driver slammed it and scooted around the other side.

The agent turned and showed them his ID, then confirmed their identities by snapping their pictures with his iPad. Facial recognition software gave him the go-ahead. Only then did he pull away.

Kealey offered Rayhan a stubby bottle of water that was slung in the black mesh behind the front seats. She accepted and took several short swallows.

“Better?” Kealey asked.

She nodded.

It was a quick drive along the Belt Parkway. In less than twenty minutes they pulled up to the small colonial. The curtains were drawn but somewhere inside a light was on. The car, a Camry, was in the driveway.

“Your man did a nice job on the lawn,” Kealey told the driver. “Even edged it. Pulled the weeds.”

“I’ll tell him you commended him, sir.”

It was their first exchange since leaving the airport.

Kealey didn’t say that the man had probably spent more time here than any working landscaper. If Largo were paying attention, he could not have missed that.

Kealey was on the street side of the car. He checked for traffic, then got out. Rayhan exited at the curb. She seemed steadier than she had at the airport. Kealey gave her space as he went up the concrete walk that looped around a slender black lamppost. The light was off, but the number of the house was visible in the glow of the streetlight. It was burned into an old wooden board. Suspended from an arm on the post, it creaked slightly, a lonely sound in the gentle night air. Or maybe that was just Kealey’s empathetic side talking. It had been about a dozen years since his Aunt May died of throat cancer. He knew how he felt in that situation. Confused. Did you stay to savor those wisps of memories or did those same memories drive you out?

Or maybe you reached a point where you were just too tired to move
, Kealey thought. For an intelligence officer, he was often surprised how little he truly
knew
.

Kealey hadn’t spent a lot of time here as a kid. As was always the case with childhood memories, the place seemed smaller than it had then. He remembered playing stickball in the street with neighborhood kids and, once, going with Uncle Largo to make his early morning rounds. That was a fond memory. It was the only time he could remember his uncle being truly open and relaxed.

The tiny front porch was dark but Kealey found the lighted doorbell. He pressed it once.

He heard slow steps on a carpeted staircase, then a high, whispery voice. “Who is it?”

“Uncle Largo, it’s your nephew Ryan.”

The outdoor light came on and the dead bolt slid back. The door opened slowly and a narrow, deeply wrinkled face looked out from beneath a short-cropped brush of white hair. Pale gray eyes squinted out as shaky hands slipped on eyeglasses.

“What was my wife’s name?”

Kealey smiled. He wanted a password. For fun or was he serious? “May,” Kealey said.

“She taught piano. I learned how to play ‘Anchors Aweigh.’ It was difficult. Made me swear off ever going to sea.”

The white head bowed a little in thought—in memory? —and the man stepped back. He opened the door. Largo was wearing light gray sweatpants, white socks, and a Little League sweatshirt that read “Royal Card Shoppe.” It was torn in at least five places. The nearly colorless eyes shifted to the woman.