The Last Run (20 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

IRAN—ISFAHAN PROVINCE, NATANZ
12 DECEMBER 0600 HOURS (GMT +3.30)

She was alone
when she awoke, the room small, pale yellow walls lit by sunlight slanting through the narrow grate of the window high above her head. Her neck was sore and her chest ached, but it seemed to her that it was less acute than before, more diffused, a muscle pain. The taste in her mouth made her think of rotten fruit.

With great care, Chace tried to sit up, pushing away the blanket covering her, hearing the metal-frame cot creaking as she moved. Her feet were cold, bare, became colder as she set them on the concrete floor. Her boots were gone, and her top, but she was still wearing her bra and jeans. There was a mark near the inside of her elbow on her left arm, a fresh bruise spreading, and she looked around for the IV, but didn’t see one. There wasn’t much to see, truth to tell, aside from the cot and the blanket and herself. Only a plastic pitcher, set on the floor nearby, and a plastic cup beside it.

There was also a surveillance camera, high in the corner.

Chace reached for the pitcher, making new muscles ache. Along her back, where she’d been shot, she felt a momentary stab of pain, stopped her movement cold, checking her breathing. No change. There was something on her back, a new bandage, perhaps; she could feel it pulling on her skin when she moved. She extended a hand again for the pitcher, more carefully, discovered there was water inside. She drank, ignoring the cup, washing the paste out of her mouth. Metal rasped over metal, and she lowered the pitcher to see the door, painted the same yellow as the walls, swinging open, inward.

Three men entered, two of them younger, clean-shaven Persians, following after the first, slightly older, with a neatly trimmed beard and mustache. The two split, each taking the corners by the door, and the third closed it behind him, then turned back to stare at her. For a moment, no one said anything, Chace looking at them, they looking at her. The scent of soap reached her, slight, and she noticed their clothes were fresh.

The one with the beard, she remembered him, or thought she did, from when Falcon had died. It seemed a distant memory, hazy, weeks old, but she doubted if it had been more than a day, perhaps two since fleeing Noshahr.

“It will save us time, and you distress, if you confess now,” the man with the beard said, speaking English. He spoke it with a slight British accent, as if he’d practiced the language using the BBC World Service.

“Je ne vous comprends pas,”
Chace told him.

“Vous me comprenez très bien.”
His French, like his English, was practiced, the accent almost perfect.

“Je m’appelle Pia Gadient, je suis professeur à l’université de Fribourg,”
Chace said earnestly, doing her best to look bewildered.
“On est où? Comment je suis arrivée là?”

“Non. Vous vous appelez Tara Chace,”
the man answered.
“Vous êtes une espionne, une espionne britannique. Vous êtes un agent des Opérations Spéciales des Services Secrets, vous êtes même à la tête de cette section. Vous êtes responsable des meurtres de trois hommes: deux policiers à Chalus et Hossein Khamenei, le neveu de notre Leader Suprême, à Noshahr.”

His expression remained placid, even patient, as he let his words sink in. The two men by the door were staring at her, their expressions betraying nothing.

“Je ne comprends pas!”
Chace cried, plaintive.
“Je suis Suisse, je suis le professeur Pia Gadient. Je fais de la recherche sur les poissons, j’étudie les esturgeons—”

The man snapped something in Farsi, and the two others immediately moved towards Chace, reaching for her.

“Laissez-moi!”
she shouted.

They didn’t, each one taking hold of her by the arms, grasping her at the wrist and elbow, and the man gave them another order. Chace was pulled to her feet, found herself being pressed face-first against the concrete wall, her arms stretched out at her sides.

“You have been shot,” she heard the man say, switching back to English.

His fingers touched her back, dug into the skin at the top edge of the bandage. She realized what he was about to do, cried out, struggling, and the men holding her arms slammed her back into the wall, harder this time. A nail scraped her skin, and she felt the adhesive pulling away, and again the pain rushed into her chest, crushing her from within, choking her.

“The bullet is still inside of you,” the man told her. “The wound is still open. We can save your life, we would
like
to save your life, but you must give us something first. You must give us your confession. You must admit to the murder of Hossein Khamenei.”

Chace shook her head, or tried to, but the pain in her neck made it impossible. She managed a gasp, barely able to draw the air to replace it, her vision already swirling. Panic was rising with the swelling pressure in her chest, and this was different from when she’d had to treat herself, this was worse, infinitely worse, the sadism of it making her feel powerless and weak and ashamed, and she felt that she would tell them anything if they would just make it stop.

Then the agent’s voice, the one in the back of her mind, the one that always sounded, to her, like Tom Wallace, asserted itself.
They’re not going to let you die
, it told her.
This is only pain. You can endure pain
.

She stopped struggling, sucking at the air instead, feeling her nostrils flaring. Her vision was swimming once more, the lights returning at the edges of her vision, white dots that danced and sparkled. The man was speaking again, but she couldn’t hear him.

Then the pressure stabilized, stopped increasing, and she saw the ceiling, felt the rough blanket on the cot beneath her back. The man was shouting at her, then turning away. Movement, someone joining them, another face above hers, and she saw the needle, a proper tool, the tip of the catheter, and fingers pressing along her ribs, then the stabbing pain, making her eyes water. Air hissed out of her chest once more, and she wondered how many more times they would do this to her, how many more times before her lungs would collapse altogether.

The needle withdrew, leaving the catheter in place, and the new face moved out of her vision, and the man was looking down at her again. Something pierced her right arm, near the shoulder, spreading warm lead through her body, and she felt herself cooling, becoming heavy, knew she’d been drugged. The man spoke in Farsi, turned away, and she heard footsteps, the room emptying of everything but echoes. The door rang closed, sang to her as it locked.

Chace lay still, blinking the tears out of her eyes, feeling her breathing slow, the pain rolling through her body becoming fainter.

They would do it again, she realized languidly. They would keep doing it until she confessed, until she confessed to everything.

She didn’t know how much of this she would be able to take.

Drowsy
half-images and broken conversations snuck back to her, rambling through her head. Crocker and C and Caleb Lewis, arguing about what to do with her, saying they had to inform the Minister in Tehran that she had been taken. It was what was required, yes, they understood, no, no one was to leave, not yet, but it had to be done. There was no rush. She wasn’t going anywhere, no one was coming for her.

The door was opening again, and she saw the same two men who had accompanied the one who’d hurt her, but this time only them, alone. Once more, they took her by the arms, brought her to her feet carefully, keeping hold of her, walking her out of the room. She shook her head, trying to clear it, felt the concrete beneath her feet turn to carpet, saw that this room, unlike the other, was not a cell, that she was in a house of some sort. The sunlight had changed, coming through windows opposite where it had before. There was a chair, and there were two more men, one of them young, like the others, but the other one middle-aged, balding, beard and mustache, glasses.

He was holding a pistol in his hand.

They put her in the chair, released her arms, and the man with the glasses spoke to her, speaking English. “Tara Chace, my name is Youness Shirazi. I am the Director of Counterintelligence for VEVAK.”

Chace heard the hammer on the pistol lock back, felt the barrel against her temple, and that didn’t make sense to her at all. If they needed her alive, why were they going to execute her in this chair, in this room?

Then the barrel swung away from her skull, and Chace flinched as the gun went off, two shots, two more, then three, and the men standing all around her fell, one after the other, their blood soaking quickly into the carpet. She watched as the man with the glasses, Youness Shirazi, stepped forward, moving from body to body, and at each one he fired again, another round, into the brain.

He turned to her, the pistol held at his side, speaking, and Chace stared at him dumbly, the gunshots still echoing in her head. She wondered if she was still hallucinating, hearing voices, seeing things, because she was certain she hadn’t heard him correctly.

“What?” Chace asked. “What did you say?”

“I am the Director of Counterintelligence for VEVAK.” The man tucked the gun away at his waist, and stepping forward, helped her to stand. He met her eyes, smiled weakly.

“I wish to defect,” Youness Shirazi told her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

IRAN—TEHRAN, 198 FERDOWSI AVENUE, BRITISH EMBASSY
12 DECEMBER 1429 HOURS (GMT +3.30)

His head still hurt
, and Caleb Lewis knew it wasn’t from the knock he’d taken when they’d been ambushed. No, that had been seen to already, Barnett insisting that he and MacIntyre go to the hospital and get X-rayed as soon as Caleb had finished delivering his report the night before, as soon as he’d told his Number One that they had lost Chace.

“Go get checked out, the both of you,” Barnett had said, already unlocking the coms cabinet. “I’ll handle London.”

“I’d rather stay here, sir,” Caleb had said.

Barnett had just given him a look, paternal and stern and sad, then gone back to activating the deck, switching on the phone.

Some
three hours later, Caleb returned to the office alone, he and MacIntyre having parted company after each receiving their clean bills of health. The coms cabinet was locked and cold, all the office lights off but for the one by Barnett’s desk. Barnett himself sat chain-smoking in the near-dark, listening to the State-run radio playing softly on the shelf behind him.

Caleb stood in the center of the tiny office, feeling overheated in his winter coat, at first confused, and then, ultimately, defeated.

“No orders?” he asked.

Barnett’s answer was in two forms. The first was to lean out and take one of the mugs from the tea tray, and then to fill it with whiskey from the bottle Barnett kept in his desk. He offered it to Caleb, waited until he took it.

“From D-Ops, to Tehran Station,” Barnett said. “ ‘Action as normal.’ ”

Caleb smelled the vapor rising from the mug, stared into the alcohol. “Have they announced it?”

“Not yet.”

“I had her.” He looked from the mug to Barnett. “I had her, I had my arms around her, she was in the car, next to me. And then there they were, and they just … I just let them take her.”

Barnett crushed out his cigarette, then took a mug for himself, fixed a drink of his own. “You didn’t let them do anything, lad.”

“I didn’t do anything at all.”

“You weren’t supposed to. They made it so you couldn’t.”

“I know. I know. I do. They’d have shot us, I recognize that.”

“Then don’t go beating yourself up over it.”

Caleb shook his head, set down his drink long enough to get out of his coat. His arm caught in the sleeve, and he pulled at it, then again, until finally, furious with it, he yanked it free, swearing. He sat at his desk, took the mug in his hands.

Barnett lit another cigarette, blew smoke, watching him. The radio murmured notes, soft music, designed to soothe any rebellious tendencies. “You’re angry.”

“I am.” Caleb said it quickly, glared at Barnett, challenging him to argue, to invalidate what he was feeling.

Barnett sipped at his mug, took another drag from his smoke. “I am, too.”

“But I wasn’t before.”

“What were you, then?”

“I was scared. I was fucking terrified. The whole time I’ve been here, I’ve been terrified, just … always afraid.”

Barnett started to respond, then stopped as a voice came over the radio, marking the hour, giving the news. They both listened. Hossein’s death led, followed by word of the search for his killer-slash-killers. Then they heard about tomorrow’s weather.

“That’s normal, lad,” Barnett said.

“Was it?” Caleb asked him. “Then what is it now? I sat, some doctor shining a light in my eyes, and all I could think was how angry I was. How I’d go out and shoot Shirazi now if I could do it. She was supposed to be safe, Lee, I told her she was safe.”

Barnett drained his mug, set it down on the desk.

“I told her she was safe.”

“No one is ever safe, Caleb,” Lee Barnett said. “Especially not in Iran.”

He
turned the radio on as soon as he returned to his apartment, kept it on while he showered and shaved, listening to it as he stared at himself in the bathroom mirror and peeled the bandage from his forehead. The collision had thrown him against the side of the Benz, bounced his head against the window frame, and now uncovered, he could see the bruise, yellow and green, the skin angry, shining, where it had torn.

Before climbing into bed, Caleb made his checks of the apartment, doing everything they had taught him to do at the School, and more. VEVAK had identified him now, and it was certain he would be at the head of their surveillance list, that he had graduated to being a priority target. They would try to bug the apartment, monitor his movements, document everything he did, everywhere he went, everyone he talked to. He knew it, and that drove his search, and the fact that he found nothing out of place, nothing altered, no signs of tampering or invasion or search was infuriating, and only stoked the anger he was feeling.

He brought the anger with him to bed, still listening to the radio, and it kept him awake in the dark for over an hour longer, despite his enormous fatigue. He heard the news five more times, and not once was Tara Chace mentioned. No word of an arrest.

That would change come the morning, Caleb was sure.

On
his way to the embassy the next morning, Caleb stopped for his usual cup of coffee at the café near the Tehran Bazaar, then stepped next door to pick up copies of the day’s newspapers. It was nearly noon, and the streets were busy, despite a new, cold rain that had begun falling sometime after he’d finally managed to go to sleep. He bought copies of the
Iran Daily
, as well as the hard-line
Kayhan International
, and the government mouthpiece
Tehran Times
. Then, instead of turning north, towards the embassy, he continued heading west, to the Park-e Shahr.

There were no signals marked at the entrance, and Caleb continued on, walking steadily, the bundle of papers tucked under his arm. It was too cold and too wet for a lunchtime in the park, and there were very few people around. He made his circuit, trying new turns, and it was on his way out of the park again that it struck him as odd, very odd, that he had seen nothing at all to indicate he was being followed. While he didn’t hold great faith in his own skills as an agent, he was certain that he wasn’t that incompetent, that useless.

Either whoever Shirazi had put on him was very, very good, or there was no one on him at all.

Of the two possible conclusions, only the first made sense. What had they called it at the School, the system the CIA claimed they had created? The Moscow Rules? Number One, Assume Nothing; but it was Number Four that Caleb kept thinking of as he started towards the embassy: Don’t Look Back, You Are Never Completely Alone.

Fair enough, then, but shouldn’t he have seen
something
by now?

MacIntyre
was on duty at the door into the Security wing when Caleb arrived, greeted him with a noncommittal, “Good afternoon, sir.” Caleb asked how he was feeling.

“Sore,” MacIntyre replied, and Caleb didn’t think the man meant physically.

In the office, Barnett was at paperwork, the coms cabinet closed. Caleb greeted him, dropped the newspapers on his desk, took his seat.

“Anything?”

“Nothing,” Barnett said. “Not a crumb.”

“I’d have thought they’d have said something by now. Made some announcement.”

“As would I. Given the state she was in, I can’t imagine she’d be able to hold out for long.”

Caleb looked at him, Barnett head-down to his work. It wasn’t something he had wanted to think about, what VEVAK might do to Chace to get her to talk, and he felt a jagged, sudden anger at his Number One for making such a mention so casually. Misplaced anger, he admitted, turning his attention to the papers. He gave them the better part of an hour, reading each one carefully, and there were the expected stories about Hossein’s murder and the ongoing search for his killer, including a long quote from the Supreme Leader himself about the outrage, the injustice, of the crime. But nothing else, nothing substantive, and even the details in the
Tehran Times
, which by all logic should have had the most accurate information, were vague.

He closed the papers, slid them off his desk and into his trashcan. His head hurt, the same headache that had nagged him since the crash, and Caleb put his face in his hands, closed his eyes, gingerly rubbed at his bruised temple with a fingertip.

Maybe, just maybe, he was right, Caleb thought. Maybe the reason that he had seen no signs that he was under surveillance was because there were no signs to be found. But why? Why would Youness Shirazi, having positively identified him as SIS in Iran, leave him room to run? Was he baiting another trap, the way Caleb now understood he had done with Falcon? To what end?

It made no sense, none at all, unless Shirazi
wanted
SIS to have room to run.

Caleb lowered his hands, opened his eyes, entirely uncomfortable with his conclusion. “Sir?”

“Caleb?” Barnett answered.

“What if Falcon never intended to defect?”

“Think that’s given, at this point.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. If he was the
wrong
defector. If Falcon was just bait, to get us to put everything right, to put the operation in motion.”

“You mean Minder One was meant to take someone else at the last minute? London would’ve told us, even if not in the first instance, once it all went tits, they’d have said.”

“I don’t think they knew,” Caleb said. “I think it was Shirazi.”

Barnett’s cigarette, stuck in the corner of his mouth, jerked towards the ceiling as the man grinned. “You think Youness Shirazi set Falcon up to run, planning to take his place at the last minute?”

“Yes.”

The grin got bigger, became a laugh.

“I think that knock to your head did more hurt than we thought,” Barnett told him.

Caleb frowned, embarrassed, then nodded.
That must be it
, he thought,
I’m just not thinking straight
. Then the telephone by his elbow rang, jarring him, and Caleb fumbled the handset to his ear. The embassy switchboard, there was a call for him, asking for him by name.

“This is Lewis,” he said.

“Caleb,”
Tara Chace said.
“I need you to get a message to London.”