Between Two Scorpions Page 12

  Then the chyron at the bottom of the screen changed: warning: graphic. “We’re going to show you what that link will take you to—and we warn you, the video you’re about to see may not be appropriate for some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised.”

  Katrina threw her hands in the air. “I can’t believe these idiots are broadcasting the video of the attacks,” she fumed. “Just go ahead and save them the trouble of hijacking any signal, just show it for all of us to see.”

  “If it bleeds, it leads,” Alec said, quoting an old journalism adage.

  “They know our media culture,” Katrina said. “They’ve studied us.”

  ***

  Katrina wanted to go straight to Liberty Campus, but Raquel had told them to go home, sleep, eat, and report the next morning to Dee; Raquel herself would be out of town. The entire intelligence community was working around the clock after the night’s attacks. So far, the clues to the identity to Angra Druj, Akoman, or anyone else associated with Atarsa—beyond Juan Lopez—were few and far between.

  ***

  FRIDAY, MARCH 26

  When Alec arrived at Liberty Campus in the morning, Ward was waiting for him, eager to complain about how his hotel wanted two forms of ID to check in the previous evening.

  “Cops are out everywhere, people are calling 911 because they see people in their backyard, two Metro stops shut down over abandoned packages,” Ward shook his head. “And now this guy wants a passport and a driver’s license to check in to my room. I’m friggin’ exhausted. Yeah, pal, I’m a terrorist.”

  “In the clerk’s defense, with that beard, you’re either Taliban or Amish,” Dee pointed out.

  “You notice there was way less traffic here this morning? Marie’s a teacher, and she said a third of the kids aren’t in her class this morning,” Ward continued griping. “It’s Williamsburg, not someplace dangerous like Damascus or Kandahar or Camden. The whole country’s in a Category Five freak-out.”

  Katrina had managed to pull some of the morning’s traffic. The attacks in Manhattan, Detroit, Cleveland, Beverly Hills, and Charlotte had global repercussions. No less than three Islamist groups insisted the Atarsa attack had really been their work. All embassies and consulates abroad had been urged to take additional security precautions. The French embassy had inquired about postponing a visit by their president in the coming weeks.

  The CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force had launched an extensive search for additional clues to any remaining Atarsa members, but their managers were already offering a grim assessment. Atarsa clearly had been planning this series of attacks for a long time. So far no common link had been found among Calvin Smith, Ezra Johnson, Zed Williams, Reginald Brown, or Nathaniel Jones; there was no indication they had ever met each other. None of the men had been on any watch list or with any known links to terror groups; all were American citizens. Four of them had minor juvenile records, for petty theft, fighting, and threatening teachers in their high school years, but all of those charges had been dropped and were long ago. The men had few friends, but no recent histories of violence or indications of extremist views.

  Some analysts contended the fact that all five Atarsa members had been killed in the attacks indicated that this was the grand finale of the group’s plan, but others argued this suggested that Atarsa had multiple American-born members willing to die, and that these could be sacrificed in high-profile attacks. What’s more, the use of the GoPro cameras and fake DHS text messages suggested a technological sophistication that was rare for a terror group.

  Alec turned his attention to the pile of evidence grabbed from Jaguar’s apartment; he began with the postcards from Turkmenistan.

  “Jaguar was talking to somebody in Turkmenistan. Do we know anybody who’s a threat in Turkmenistan?” He looked around to the doorway out of habit and realized he hadn’t heard from Raquel yet that morning.

  “Hey, where is Raquel today, anyway?”

  “Up in New York.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Each day, thousands of New Yorkers crossed the intersection of Third Avenue and Fortieth Street without knowing they were walking by the location of the lone representation of the Iranian government within United States territory.

  The US severed diplomatic relations with Iran in 1980 during the hostage crisis. All diplomats were expelled from the Iranian Embassy, at 3003 Massachusetts Avenue on Embassy Row in Washington; the embassy and separate residence of the military attaché and cultural attaché spent the next generation empty, being maintained by the US State Department. When the Iranians absolutely needed to talk to the United States, they sent the message through the Pakistani embassy; when the US government absolutely needed to speak to the Iranians, they sent the message through the Swiss. For a short time during negotiations of the Iranian nuclear deal, American and Iranian officials met and negotiated face-to-face regularly, but any discussion of reestablishing ties ended with the next presidential election.

  The Iranian consulate to the United Nations provided Tehran with their only venue for spies with diplomatic cover. When an older, distinguished gentleman and a large, beefy colleague departed the consulate building to approach a black BMW with diplomatic plates, Raquel lowered her newspaper and stood in their path.

  “Mr. Karroubi?”

  To most of the world, Hossein Karroubi was just another diplomatic bureaucrat in Iran’s consulate. Raquel knew he was the New York station chief for Iran’s foreign intelligence service, VEVAK.

  “If you want to spare your country an enormous amount of sorrow, you and I need to have a conversation. Right now,” she said, with the directness of an arrow in flight.

  He frowned. “And you are?”

  “In your line of work,” she said, knowingly. “There’s a Shake Shack across the street. Let’s sit and talk. Ten minutes.”

  He looked around uncomfortably, presuming he was under surveillance—from America and, perhaps, his own country.

  Karroubi’s beefy comrade stepped significantly closer to Raquel. The top of her head came to his pectorals. He leaned in, with more than a little menace and declared, “Where he goes, I go.”

  Raquel almost laughed at him. “Sure, bring the goon. I understand how intimidating I can be.”

  They crossed the street, entered, and sat in a booth, skipping the line to order. When no one objected, Karroubi presumed everyone in the entire restaurant was undercover FBI counterintelligence personnel. He was prepared to scream bloody murder, showcase his diplomatic credentials and, if need be, sprint back to the Iranian soil of the consulate.

  “I know you saw that threatening message broadcast out to the city a two weeks ago,” Raquel began.

  Karroubi stared back. “And?”

  “The woman in the video spoke with an accent that was Persian,” Raquel stated. “Indisputably.”

  Karroubi shrugged. “Possibly. I don’t know who she is.”

  Raquel leaned forward. “I think you do.”

  Karroubi frowned. “This is the sort of paranoid demonization of foreign cultures that have made your country so hated around the world.”

  Raquel was undeterred. “She’s Iranian.”

  Karroubi was an old pro, and not easily intimidated. “If you have evidence of that, I would very much like to see it.”

  “Does the name Akoman mean anything to you?” she inquired.

  Karroubi made a show of rubbing his chin. “That is the name of a demon from Zoroastrian mythology. Is the CIA preparing a strike against ghosts and goblins?”

  Raquel ignored his mockery. “Do you realize what an enormous favor I’m doing for you and, by extension, your country right now?”

  His confusion was not feigned. “I do not understand.”

  “Hossein,” she used his first name here, a deliberately presumptuous gesture. “There’s an Iranian woman running around directing maniacs to kill Americans and making videos of it. A lot of people are going to conclude your government is
behind it, whether or not they actually are. The only thing that’s going to stop it is if we show evidence you helped us catch the bastards.”

  The Iranian scoffed, nodded to his beefy compatriot, and started to slide out of the booth.

  “I don’t jump at the first threat from the CIA,” he said tersely.

  Raquel raised her voice a little. “If you think this woman isn’t your problem, you’re sorely mistaken. If these attacks continue, you will get the blame!” She pointed directly at him. “There are going to be a lot of cries for revenge.”

  “Any attack on my country would be—”

  Raquel cut him off, showing a bit of frightening fury in the middle of the burger shop, loud enough to get patrons turning around. “Take a good look at Tehran next time you’re there, because if you don’t help us, it means war, and your hometown’s gonna look real different, real quick. Don’t think your not-so-secret nuclear program is going to save you. Throw a nuke at us, we’ll throw a lot more back at you. We’ve got about five thousand warheads. You’ll run out of people long before we run out of nukes.”

  Raquel’s casual suggestion of nuclear war genuinely shocked Karroubi. He looked around, and saw the other patrons were staring and frowning. What was she thinking? What had he been thinking when he agreed to an unscheduled meeting with an American claiming to be with its intelligence agency? He and his bodyguard shook their heads in exasperated surprise and quickly headed for the restaurant’s front door, dreading an FBI team that never appeared.

  CHAPTER 38

  About fifteen minutes later, Raquel was in a seemingly nondescript office a few blocks away, behind a series of extremely imposing and complicated steel-frame locked doors. This was one of the National Security Agency’s most important facilities in New York, the one that managed the thorough electronic surveillance of all of the UN consulates in the city.

  Raquel hadn’t expected Hossein Karroubi to say much or be cooperative. If he had offered anything useful on Atarsa, Akoman, or the woman in the video, it would be a pleasant surprise.

  But the public meeting with Raquel and her bold accusations and not-so-veiled threat had instantly given him something he needed to communicate to his superiors as soon as possible. Raquel had watched Karroubi and his bodyguard quickly return to the consulate.

  At the NSA, they had confirmed he had gone to the consulate’s SCIF, which had the allegedly secure electronic, phone, and other data lines to Tehran.

  Those lines of communication weren’t quite as secure as the Iranians thought. And when the NSA teams knew that communications would be coming and had advance warning to focus all of their technologically advanced surveillance equipment on one building, one room, one set of cables, one set of satellite dishes, and so on, the Iranians would have been better off using carrier pigeons.

  Karroubi was genuinely rattled by Raquel’s suggestion that the US suspected the Iranians were behind the Atarsa attacks, and that all-out war, including nuclear weapons, were being discussed. It seemed wildly disproportional and completely unlike anything he had seen in the American government since—well, the bad old days, when the city had been devastated by terror. Yes, the American president periodically furiously denounced Iran with for its aggression in foreign policy, but in Karroubi’s experience, those storms blew over quickly. His messages back to VEVAK headquarters weren’t quite panicked, but he emphasized that he needed further guidance and, ideally, any indication of whether the Americans could have really determined that the woman in the video was Iranian. Her accent was, indeed, distinctively Persian.

  Running VEVAK’s operations in the Great Satan was a big responsibility, and Karroubi’s ties to the top level of VEVAK went back years. His bosses communicated to him with trust.

  VEVAK had indeed identified the woman calling herself Angra Druj in the video: Sarvar Rashin, an Iranian citizen who dropped off the grid several years ago. Not much was known about her, other than the fact that she wasn’t Muslim; she practiced the Zoroastrian faith.

  It was the second part of the response from Tehran that made Karroubi gasp for the first time in so long that he couldn’t remember.

  According to VEVAK, Sarvar Rashin had been the lover of Gholam Gul, who up until seven years ago had worked in VEVAK’s Department of Disinformation, in charge of creating and waging psychological warfare against the enemies of the Islamic Republic. Gul ran into official disapproval of his relationship with Rashin—a non-Muslim woman—and left VEVAK on cordial terms, promising to join Hezbollah. Gul, too, had dropped off the grid after a short stint of work for Hezbollah. VEVAK believed he operated out of Turkmenistan and Cyprus, but had no current bead on him, beyond his alias.

  “Akoman.”

  Tehran hadn’t ordered this, but they had trained the man who was running the attacks against Americans. Would the US government blame Iran for the attacks? Would the populace? Would some unscrupulous voices within the American government try to turn the Iranian regime into a politically convenient scapegoat? If he were in their shoes, he might, Karroubi thought.

  Suddenly a war between the United States and Iran didn’t seem quite so unthinkable.

  Despite the shudder-inducing thought, Karroubi noticed that his superiors hadn’t even considered telling the Americans about Rashin and Gul.

  CHAPTER 39

  SATURDAY, MARCH 27

  In the Friday afternoon intercept of the Iranian communications, the names “Gholam Gul” and “Sarvar Rashin” rocketed around the intelligence community—not just to the relevant offices of the NSA and CIA, but throughout the fourteen other American agencies, and then overseas to the other four partners of the “Five Eyes.” Long-forgotten colleagues sent Raquel messages of congratulations. Within a few hours, MI6 sent word that British travel systems had a record of a woman with a Lebanese passport passing through Heathrow on her way from Beirut to New York five years ago. Her passport photo matched the eyes and other visible parts of her face from the Atarsa videos.

  Facial recognition software, previously hindered by Rashin’s veil, finally had a better image to work with, and overnight, a second passport with the same face and the name “Zahra Amadi” popped up in the database searches. This woman had traveled to the United States several times. Then the same search yielded a Jordanian passport under the name “Zahra Amadir,” and, shortly thereafter, a Moroccan passport under the name “Fatima Zahra Amadi,” and a Turkish passport under “Zara Ahmadi.” In each picture, she had a slightly different haircut, makeup, even just-barely-noticeable weight changes. Altogether, the four faces on the screens looked like they could be sisters.

  By Saturday morning, the good news was that American intelligence knew four of Sarvar Rashin’s aliases. The bad news was that they had no idea how many more she had, meaning she could have slipped into almost any country under any name.

  Raquel had driven back from New York, because LaGuardia, JFK, and the Acela to Washington had all been delayed with various security scares. She got in late and wanted to sleep late.

  She awoke to a text from Katrina. The message asked her to meet at J. Gilbert’s around lunch. Katrina knew Raquel was likely to have to go to either Liberty Crossing in Tysons Corner or the actual headquarters building in Langley, and the restaurant was roughly halfway from either of them.

  Raquel at least got to have coffee with her husband, Vaughn, and then hopped in her car again, hoping the traffic wouldn’t be so bad on the weekend. She saw Katrina waiting for her in the parking lot, leaning on her deep blue Nissan 370Z Coupe. It was a slight splurge that Katrina justified by telling herself she never knew when she might need to practice evasive driving with a top speed of 102 miles per hour. Raquel could tell from Katrina’s face that something was terribly wrong.

  “What’s up?” Raquel said, as soon as she opened the door. “What’s wrong?”

  Katrina stared back for an uncomfortably long time.

  “I want to resign.”

  CHAPTER 40

  J. GILBE
RT’S

  They didn’t dare go into the restaurant; the place’s probably overhyped reputation as a spy hangout meant you never knew who was listening, from a tourist to a blogger to a Russian agent.

  Raquel stood for a moment, struggling to think of the least harmful reaction.

  “I would hate to see that happen,” she began.

  “I said I want to resign, not that I will resign,” Katrina said, almost too softly to be heard over the passing traffic. She folded her arms and leaned on the roof of her car.

  “Is this because of Mexico?” Raquel probed gently.

  Katrina exhaled. “Mexico, and Germany, and Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and all of the other places I’ve gone over the years.” She inhaled, and Raquel wondered if Katrina was fighting the urge to cry. “It’s not because I can’t handle it.”

  Raquel took her spot, right next to her, leaning over the roof of the car like it was a back fence.

  “I know that,” she began. “I don’t ever want you feeling like I or anybody else take you for granted.”

  “Coming over here as a kid, not speaking the language. Stuck in New York before it got cleaned up. Living in a tenement with my parents, watching them clean houses. My Jewish father chopping pork all day because it’s the best job he can find. You learn as an immigrant that nothing is given to you. You have to earn everything. Go to school, run into bullies. Gangs. People forget what New York was like before. People thought I was crazy, a teenage girl, walking around alone at night.”

  She wiped an eye.

  “And it just kept going. Get into Stuyvesant. Take karate. Guys get handsy. Break some fingers. Full ride to Georgetown. School of Foreign Service. Professor wants to hook up with me. Trust fund frat boys. And then there’s this one guy who’s an accounting major who keeps making me laugh.”

  Raquel smiled. Whatever crisis Katrina was experiencing at the moment, remembering the good times represented a glide path.