The Last Man in Tehran Page 5

  Jon nodded. “You’re in a tough spot, I’ll give you that.”

  “Understatement if I ever heard it,” Ronen remarked. “Please have Kathryn tell your president this: Israel will not leave its survival in the hands of other countries. We have been at the mercy of others for centuries and it led to the Reich’s Final Solution. Never again. I ask your president to remember who is your country’s ally and who is not, but whether he chooses to help us or not, there are some issues on which we must be stubborn.”

  The Israeli finally stopped speaking. Jon looked down at him. Ronen looked back, unblinking. “I’ll tell her,” Jon said. “But even if she tells someone at the White House, I don’t think it will help you.”

  Ronen shrugged, started to button his coat, then stopped himself short. “If your president chooses to be uncooperative, I hope that Kathryn at least will recognize that whatever we do from this point forward does not mean that I am not her friend,” Ronen finished. “It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Burke. Perhaps another time we can speak of friendlier things.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Ronen tried to smile and failed, then walked away into the crowd.

  • • •

  Jon moved back to the Rosetta Stone and stood there, looking but not seeing, for another ten minutes until he felt a pair of arms reach around him from behind. Kathryn Cooke rested her head on his shoulder. As tall as her husband, she had short black hair and a fit body that make her look ten years younger. He had spent the day wandering through the museum staring at ancient works of art, but she was, by far, the most beautiful work that he’d seen all day.

  “How’s the museum?” she asked, her voice quiet.

  “Enormous . . . bigger when you have one of these.” He tapped his metal knee with the cane.

  “When you owned most of the world for a few decades, you need a big place to keep it all,” Kathy observed.

  “No doubt. I’m pretty sure the Greeks would like to have their temples back,” he said, pointing down the hall. He took her hand and led her away from the Rosetta stone, and the crowd again filled the space he vacated. There were more people behind him now than had been there when Ronen had first announced himself. Kathy must have had to fight her way through to reach him.

  “I’d love to see it all. I’ve been to London a dozen times, but I never had time to see much outside of Vauxhall Cross or Thames House. Downing Street once. Now I’m stuck in a room all day with grandstanding Iranians.”

  “What’s the point of being a spy if you can’t actually see the world?” Jon asked, keeping his voice low.

  Kathy’s laugh was short and quiet. Jonathan’s sense of humor had improved since they’d married earlier in the year, largely because he now had one. “The Russians must’ve worked your head over more than your knee if you think the CIA director is an actual spy. But I’m a free woman for the first time in years and I’m going to enjoy it, for a while anyway,” she assured him. “As for the talks, I’m an observer, happy to be sitting along the wall and not at the table. Leaves my evenings free, mostly.”

  “Mostly?”

  She smiled. “The Iranians overheard me telling one of the British delegates that I was coming here to meet you, and they wanted to accompany me. They want to ‘see the cultural treasures the imperial British stole from their homeland during their occupation after the First World War.’ ”

  “I’m sure Downing Street will appreciate your role in whatever diplomatic scandal comes out of that,” Jon mused.

  “I’ll be persona non grata, I’m sure,” Kathy replied. She looked around. They were alone, but she stepped in close to him anyway and spoke, keeping her voice low. “I was pulled into a side meeting before I left . . . one of the Iranian delegation, Majid Salehi.”

  “What did he want?”

  “For me to pass a back-channel message to the White House,” she told her husband. She recounted the Lancaster House conversation with him.

  “That’s interesting,” Jon observed. “I had my own visitor here, just before you arrived.”

  “Who?”

  “Gavi Ronen.”

  Kathy frowned. “Ewan told me he was in the city. What did he want?”

  “The same as Salehi, to deliver a back-channel message. Israel’s not happy about the talks, especially about not being invited, and they’re not going to take Haifa lying down, whether the US helps them smack Iran down or not.”

  Kathy cursed quietly. “I’ll need to swing by the embassy in the morning and pass this along.”

  “You don’t want to do it tonight?”

  “No. I don’t think Iran and Israel will go to war tonight, and I’m going to have a night out with my husband,” she said. Her years as a Navy officer had left her with a fine command voice that she rarely used, and then only when she was refusing to be dissuaded. “We’ve been married for nine months now and this is as close as we’ve come to a proper honeymoon, so I’m not going to let anyone sour the trip.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jon said, a weak imitation of a soldier taking an order from a senior officer.

  “Where are we going for dinner?”

  “Wagamama at Leicester Square. I picked up some theater tickets for after,” he told her. “I hope you approve.”

  “Very much so. But even if I didn’t, anything would be better than an evening listening to the Iranians accuse our hosts of cultural robbery,” she said. “Lead on.”

  Jon led her to the exit. Kathy saw that her husband was leaning more heavily on the cane than usual. He’d likely been on his feet too long wandering around the museum, leaving his knee sore, but she said nothing. He wasn’t one to complain. Kathy still reached into her bag, pulled out a small tube of ibuprofen, and discreetly used a brush pass to put it into his hand. He smiled and held the exit door for his wife, and she stepped out.

  • • •

  They had watched Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart perform No Man’s Land at the Wyndham after dinner, which Jon had found depressing despite the impressive performances from the knighted actors. The streets were mostly empty as they walked back to their hotel. Kathy had suggested they hail one of London’s black cabs, but Jon chose to stay on foot. He was as stubborn about his leg as everything else, but the West End was one of London’s safer neighborhoods and a quiet walk with him was a happy thought. The hotel was only eight blocks south and they would pass Trafalgar Square and the Old War Office Building before ending at the Conrad London St. James near Westminster Abbey. The US delegation was quartered there, as were the Iranians. Jon had wondered which British officer had thought himself clever by putting them up in the same building.

  A long line of cars had formed in front of the hotel. The vehicle at the front was stopped and suffering from a dead engine. Two of the cars in the line, waiting their turns to pull forward and unload their human cargo, were black sedans, both flying a pair of Iranian flags off the hoods—the delegation Kathy had escaped a few hours before. “I guess some of your friends went out for a show, too,” Jon observed. “Or they’ve been pub-crawling.”

  “I’m not sure they have friends, and I think they like it that way,” Kathy said.

  Several other cars blocked the Iranians’ way, black cabs and rentals both, hotel patrons also returning for the night. Another line of taxis sat parked on the far side of the road, the drivers hoping that some foreigners might decide the night really was still young. Diplomatic immunity saved the Iranians from parking fines and congestion charges, but they still had to creep through London’s endless crawl of traffic like the locals. The cars rolled forward, slower than Jon moved with his cane. Judging by the length of the “queue,” as the Brits called it, they must have been waiting for a half hour at least to reach the front.

  The sedans pulled forward, still four car lengths from the hotel entryway. Jon and Kathy were a block from the front door. They crossed the street and Jon stepped up onto the sidewalk, pushing down on the cane to support his weight as he stepped onto
the curb. Kathy saw one of the Iranians open a front passenger door and step out. The man was built heavy for an Iranian, with short hair and a trimmed beard, and a wire running to his ear. “Diplomatic security,” Kathy observed.

  “I guess he got tired of sitting,” Jon added.

  “Or afraid to be sitting still in traffic,” his wife corrected him.

  The bodyguard walked over to the hotel doorman who was directing traffic and began to gesture wildly. The doorman spoke to him, shaking his head, refusing to open up a special path for the Iranian delegation. Diplomatic credentials clearly carried no weight with the hotel staff or the stranded car at the head of the queue. “He’d have more luck slipping him some cash,” Jon observed.

  “The doorman couldn’t move the line faster if the queen herself was asking,” Kathy replied.

  The Iranian’s pleas were accompanied with exaggerated waves of his arms, and Jon could almost hear the argument half a block away. “He’s giving it the college try anyway,” he said. “I wonder how they would like it if you told them they had chutzpah?”

  “You’re terrible,” Kathy chided him.

  “And you wonder why I never became a diplomat.”

  “No, not really.”

  The Iranian tried to argue with the doorman for another ten seconds, then gave up making demands. He turned back to the car and made more gestures at his comrades, some Iranian sign language showing disgust for Westerners. He spoke into the transmitter in his hand. Another of the Iranians, a second bodyguard, apparently, began to crawl out of the rear seat to abandon the line of cars.

  Four cars behind them in line, a van door opened and two people stepped out, a man and a woman, both young and fit, dressed in jeans and hoodies. “Looks like the rest of the line has the same idea,” Kathy said.

  Jon looked at the new pedestrians, trying to discern their nationalities. The blue van they had stepped from closed its side door and began to pull out of the line. The couple started to walk up the line of cars.

  The Iranians were all exiting their cars now, eight men total. One of the men lit up a cigarette while the bodyguard turned back to the doorman and resumed his argument. His comrades laughed, enjoying the show of their friend still trying to bully a concierge, who was having none of it. He directed the foreigner to lead his gaggle off the street so the other cars could move up now that the Iranian fleet was pulling out.

  “Jon, that’s Ebtekar, the Intelligence Minister . . . and that’s Salehi,” Kathy said. The Iranian chief of delegation was the last man out of the car. He took a lit cigarette from another of the men, put it in his mouth, and drew in a deep breath, the end of the tobacco roll flaring in the darkness.

  Jon didn’t answer. His attention was fixed on the young couple less than twenty feet away from the group and closing the gap. The blue van passed its former passengers, then slowed to a stop three cars down, now blocking an active lane of traffic. The car behind it sounded its horn.

  The man and woman both moved their hands to their waistbands, grabbing their windbreakers and pulling them up.

  Jon saw it and grabbed his wife by the arm. “Kathy, get down!”

  “What is—” she started, then gasped as he pulled her down behind a parked truck, the weight of his body covering hers.

  The Mossad officers pulled their weapons from hiding, .22lr pistols, with suppressors threaded onto the barrels. They never broke stride as they raised their side arms. Ebtekar saw it, then dove for cover behind another car. The woman fired twice, putting two shots into Salehi’s head. The suppressors swallowed most of the report of the shots, turning the usually loud crack of the small-caliber weapons into popping noises that were almost inaudible over the cars’ engines. The Iranian collapsed in a sprawl, his cigarette snuffed on the concrete by the blood spurting from two small holes in his head.

  The other Israeli fired his weapon into another Iranian’s face from a distance of six inches, putting a pair of small bullets through the bodyguard’s left eye. The bullets smashed through the thin bone behind the man’s ocular cavity and ripped through his brain, coming to rest at the back of his head, flattening out against the inside of his skull. The dead man dropped, hitting the black street a second after his countryman.

  The crack of the weapons, four shots, hung in the night air, and the other Iranians turned in shock, their minds unable to process the murders that were in motion among them. The Israeli woman fired again, the second Iranian bodyguard taking two bullets above his ear. He fell against the hood of a waiting car, his corpse then sliding to the ground.

  Her companion pulled the trigger on another target, one of the diplomats, before his partner’s dead target reached the pavement. This one fielded the first round with his forehead. The man had been turning, trying to grasp what had happened to his colleague and security escorts as the first bullet struck his skull. His head still turning, the second bullet also punched through him, this round striking his temple, going through thin bone, and pulverizing his brain as the hollow-point round expanded inside his cerebrum. The man’s legs buckled and he went down on his knees, then his face.

  Someone screamed, the people milling around realized that four murders had just occurred on the open street. The crowd finally understood that the young couple were carrying guns, and the bystanders clustered in groups near the hotel doors exploded into reaction, yells and cries everywhere, people running. The concierge, a veteran of the British army himself, ran for the front of the hotel and held the door for the panicked crowd trying to escape for the cover of the building. The four living Iranians abandoned their dead on the street, three running for the hotel, the last sprinting down the street toward Jon and Kathy, ducking low before turning into the hotel garage.

  The Israelis showed no interest in making a clean sweep of the diplomats. They kept walking, their pace a little faster now, returning the guns to their waistbands under their jackets. The blue van’s door opened for them, they clambered inside, and the van pulled away, slow and deliberate, then accelerated into traffic. The screams and yells of the bystanders were loud enough to mask the sound of the van’s engine as it pulled away.

  The Mossad officers had been on the street for thirty seconds; the murders had taken less than five.

  Jon pushed himself up, scanning the street for signs of anyone left who might threaten his wife. Kathy stood up beside him. Even with her husband covering her, she had gotten a clean view of the executions. “Jon . . . the Iranians—”

  “It’s over. Four down,” he told her. “Four of them ran.” Jon hobbled forward as quickly as his knee allowed, not using the cane. He reached the first body. Salehi’s face was scraped open by the asphalt, his eyes unfocused, going dull in color as the blood drained out. His head was surrounded by an expanding red pool.

  Jon moved on to the next, then to the third and fourth man. Two shots to the head in each, the aim precise except for the last corpse, where the entry wounds were spaced more than an inch apart, the only sign that one of the victims hadn’t been taken by complete surprise.

  “Jon?” Kathy asked.

  He looked up and shook his head. “They’re gone,” he said.

  Kathy looked around. Bystanders were starting to come back out of the hotel, cries and curses getting louder as the crowd grew. She looked for the blue van, but it was lost in the dark.

  Gavi, she thought.

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Virginia

  “You think it was Mossad?” Clark Barron hoped that his former superior would not take the disbelief in his voice for a lack of trust in her. The Ops Center had called him two hours before with the news of the London murders, ending a meeting with his senior staff prematurely. Among all of the Agency’s sources, public and covert, there had been nothing to identify the guilty party, but Barron hadn’t expected any such clues for at least several hours. So the call from Kathy Cooke had been a blessing, albeit a mixed one—a plus that she had been a witness to the event and a terrifying minus tha
t his friend and her husband had been so close to four men executed with precision on an otherwise safe London street.

  The acting CIA director touched the volume control on the speakerphone, turning it up so he could hear the woman’s voice more clearly. “Gavi shows up in London and twelve hours later half the Iranian delegation is taken out in a professional hit,” Kathy said, her voice a bit scratchy from the digital decryption. “It would have to be one impressive coincidence if Mossad didn’t do it, but I still hope it wasn’t Gavi’s people. I’d hate to think they see London as fair game for hunting. The UK is an ally.”

  “That’ll be an open question after tonight. You told Sir Ewan what you saw?”

  “I called him before I called you. Sorry, but I figured that would be a professional courtesy given that we’re standing on their soil,” Kathy advised. “He’s probably at Downing Street right now. You might want to warn the White House. I’m sure the president will be getting a call.”

  “If he hasn’t gotten one already. How are the Brits taking it?”

  “They’re freaked out,” Kathy assured him. “They don’t have mass shootings over here. They’re trying to be stoic about it. Ewan would say they’ve been ‘gobsmacked,’ but that’s understating it. They’re in shock. He was the one who told me that Gavi was in town. At the time, he discounted the idea that Mossad would do anything so ugly in downtown London, so this most definitely caught him off guard.”