A Spy in the Shadows (Spy Noir Series Book 1) (23 page)

“I’m working for Mayfield again.”  How much to let her know?  

With that Eva seemed satisfied, picked up her coat and placed the pouch in the pocket.  She came to the couch and sat beside him, and placed her head on his shoulder.  She was silent for a moment.  She started to say something and then caught herself.

“Where is he?”

“Who?
  Yousef?”

“You’ve always been the smart one, Eva.”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you do.”

Her eyes glinted.  “You don’t remember, do you?  Or is it that you just refused to remember?  I wasn’t ten feet away in the shadows that night when the Germans broke into the apartment.  I should have been arrested that night also if not for the twenty seconds it took me to get down the stairs.  Twenty seconds the others didn’t have.  Twenty seconds between life and death.  Because of that night, danger doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

“I understand,” Salinger said.

“I realize how important this is to you, Booth,” she said.  “Enough so that you would return to a place where there are only bad memories for you.”

She stood, walked to the door.  “Walter will tell me where Yousef is.  He won’t tell you because he doesn’t owe you that—but he’ll tell me.  But this is the easy part, Booth . . . my helping you and telling you everything I know,” she said.  “They’ll try to stop you, and that will be hard on you.”

“Listen, Eva, about tonight, it stays here.”

“I think my son would appreciate that.”
  She left quietly.  Salinger pulled aside the curtains at the window and watched below in the street as Eva walked away along the bank, then disappeared in the cloak of river fog. 

----

“Who is she?”

Salinger had told Goli about the conversation with Bredow and about Eva being there.  “We lost good friends the night the Germans came.  Eva Vermeer was a Dutch journalist.  After being trained by the British, she was sent into Persia.”
  He told her all of this remembering that Eva was not a beautiful woman, but there was a unique intelligence in her face, no discussion beyond her grasp, and her strength was analyzing situations rapidly.

“The night the Germans came I was supposed to be with her.  But I was sent for, something about an American pilot shot down.  Eva had a transceiver set up in an apartment.  She listened to bulletins from the French-language service coded with messages for field agents.  Then she would type them up, and several runners would get the information to the partisan camps.  It was just luck that she had stepped out for some fresh air.

“When I returned at dawn, Eva met me in the streets and told me everything.  The others had been dragged out into the streets and thrown into a sedan.  Eva was hysterical, told me that she found the transceiver splintered into pieces on the floor.  The tubes were still warm, meaning they had bravely sat there sending messages until the last.”

“Do you know what happened to them?” Goli asked.

“The Germans have effective ways of making people disappear.”

-Twenty-Two-

Bandar Shahpour.  On the Persian Gulf.

The port was a saucer-shaped railhead consisting of a few warehouses and the terminus of a railroad that crisscrossed Iran from the Persian Gulf.  Surrounded by an embankment that kept high tides from flooding the buildings and the train tracks, the port consisted of two berths and a jetty.  It was here cargo was unloaded directly onto railroad cars for shipment to the Caspian Sea.

At 4:36 in the afternoon, a truck convey from Tehran arrived with a different cargo than the men were familiar with unloading . . . the Tehran Children.

----

David Goode, dutiful employee of British Intelligence, sat at a small table facing the port under the shade, and dreamed of the overcast coal-gray Dublin streets and those days when he kept a watchful eye on the good boys of Sinn Fein; of the end of those workdays when he was relieved of his duties and he could visit his mother.  Sometimes he could still smell his mother’s breakfast.  But that wasn’t the case now, was it David, old boy?  Because he was hopelessly stuck in such a desolate place.

When Goode had first arrived in Bandar Shahpour the men hadn’t warned him about the vodka he purchased from the Iranian stevedores.  He should have listened because he almost died from the poisonous mess.  Finally, Goode found a bountiful supply of good whiskey when an American ordinance company opened a bar in the mess hall.  That had probably saved his life.

During the next two days, once he felt better, he began his assigned task that of trailing suspects as they crossed through Bandar Shahpour.  And there were plenty of shady characters to deal with.

It was on the third day when he received instructions directly from Operational Headquarters in Cairo that he realized the importance of him being assigned to the port.  It all impressed even an old veteran like Goode.

Beside him two Iranian men sat on benches and smoked water-cooled pipes.  Across the street a scribe sat at his ‘office’ on the sidewalk, which consisted of a wooden table and chair.  Their income was derived from writing letters and other documents for people unable to write.  Goode knew him as Jamshid.  He also knew he was a German agent.

----

Goode didn’t have to wait long.

From down the street, several men led the children who had departed from the trucks, taking them to a building where they would be sheltered until the cargo was unloaded.  Goode was aware later tonight they would be loaded onto the freighter Dunera destined for Karachi, Pakistan.  From there they would
sail around the Arabian Peninsula and through the Red Sea to the Egyptian city of Suez.

As the children came closer, Goode removed a piece of paper from his coat pocket, the description of his target scrawled out. 
A small girl with bags in each hand, a checkered dress and white stockings.  Jamshid, the German agent, should lead him right to her.

Goode looked across the street, nodding to a thick-chested man leaning against a lamppost.  Jack was his name.  A good man to have one’s back covered in a matter such as this.  Then the crowd of children was between Goode and Jamshid, who had stood from his office chair and ventured close to street.  There she was third from the end. 
The checkered dress and white stockings.  The white hat hid her face.

Jamshid moved out into the children patting them on the head.  He bent down and whispered to the girl, and she looked up at him from beneath her hat. 

Goode took several quick strides toward them.  Jamshid glanced up, and produced a knife from under his coat.  Goode froze and Jamshid swirled the knife in air.

From behind, Jack leaped at the Iranian, pinning his arms at his side and the knife fell into the mud.  “That’s enough of that,” Jack ordered.  Jamshid growled out and then finally lowered his head.  Moments later he was led away by Goode’s confederate.

The children stood frozen in the middle of the street.

“It’s over boys and girls,” Goode told them.  He leaned over the girl.  “Is your name Penina?”

She stared at him for a long moment with large brown eyes.  “It is,” she said softly.

Goode held out a bag of candy.  “Well, Penina, I’m to give you this for the envelope the lady back in camp gave you?”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Yes I’m sure, Penina.”

The little girl methodically sat the leather case down, reached in her pocket and handed him the envelope.

Goode handed her the candy, turned and walked away.  Once he was some distance from the street, he removed the envelope, held the unrolled film up to the light studying the images.

All of his doubts over the last several days rushed back at him.  Why did they send a man with his experience to a place like this?  Why the secrecy and the flight in the middle of the night?

He put the envelope back in his coat pocket.  Now he understood.

----

“Who is it?” Mayfield asked.  He was in the thick of a meeting with the Prime Minister’s people discussing security for the last two days of the conference.

The officer leaned in the door of the meeting room.  “He said it is very important, sir.” 

Mayfield put the pencil down on the map of Tehran.  “But you don’t know who it is?  I’m terribly busy at the moment.”

“He didn’t give his name, but he said to tell you he was calling from Bandar Shahpour, I believe he said.”

Mayfield was instantly at his feet, brushing through the door—rather rudely as the officer remembered later.

----

Isafahan.

They took the Fiat out of the city.  Once it became dark, Salinger switched on the headlights and followed the road. 

He turned south toward the river and parked the sedan on a side street.  It would be several days before it was found, and by then this would all be over.  He phoned the number Eva had given him.  On a narrow street they waited.  The streets were dull gray, but Salinger could see the river and it was like he remembered full of boats and sails.

Twenty minutes later, their contact walked up to them at the café terrace and introduced himself.  He was a small-framed man, as Eva said, well groomed and wearing a gray suit, a newspaper tucked under his arm. 

“I have a place for you to stay.  And transportation.”  His smile was disarming.  “It is a favor for Eva.”  He gave a mock shrug.  “And besides . . .  I don’t care much for the Russians.  This is my job to wait and help whenever I can.”

They walked down the street until they stopped at a yellow French-built Citroen.  “This is for you,” he said proudly.  “Get in and I will drive.”  He pulled the Citroen out onto the narrow street.  Salinger noticed a blue sedan slip in behind them.

“Friends,” he said.

He drove through the dark mountains until he came to the farmhouse.  It had a large yard and looked European.  “Wait here,” he said, and walked to the front door, knocked, and disappeared inside.  After several moments, he came back followed by a medium built, thin-haired man who walked away to a white cottage behind a row of trees at the side of the large house.  He came to the sedan and leaned in the window.

“He will take care of you.  Do not ask his name.  He doesn’t like the Russians either.  That’s all you need to know.”

Salinger thanked him.

The Iranian
said, “Abbosi goes for a walk every morning at around eight o’clock after his breakfast and on the road that follows north along the river.  He returns in one hour give or take a few minutes.  One man accompanies him and follows perhaps twenty meters behind.”

He walked to the road where the sedan waited.  In the distance, yellow lightning cracked an indigo sky.
  The other man came up and said, “Stay as long as you like,” he said.  “If you come to the house, I will give you some food.”

“We’ll need to stay here only tonight,” Salinger said.

The man nodded.  “As long as you like,” he said and walked away.

Salinger and Goli walked to the cottage.  It was a large room and smelled of green wood.  Two cane chairs faced a fireplace where the man had built a fire.  There was a narrow kitchen off to the side.  On the table were two rifles and two handguns.  In the bedroom a large farmhouse bed
set on a redbrick floor under whitewashed rafters.  In the corner an enamel washbowl and pitcher sat on a table.  The bathroom was off a side hallway where a steel-framed mirror hung on the far wall.  Beneath was a table where towels were folded and carefully placed. 

Goli collapsed in one of the chairs.  “Why are people helping you so much?”  She asked.

Salinger came by the fire.  “It’s the Communists.  At first they were friends.  Maybe even liberators.  Now, they don’t like them.”

A shadow crossed her face.

----

Later Salinger left Goli and went through the trees between the cottage and the farmhouse.  At the kitchen door, the man handed him a plate of cheese and bread, and a bottle of wine.

When he returned, Goli was sitting at the window smoking a cigarette.  He placed the plate on the table.  “I think he feels nervous with an American around,” Salinger said. Goli came to the table and broke of a piece of bread.  Then she took a bite of cheese while Salinger poured two glasses of wine.  “I’ll sleep on the couch, you take the bed.  The old man said he would come and wake us before daylight.”

“You have a plan?”

Salinger stared out the window.  What did it really matter?  Tomorrow this was going to end badly anyway.  Regardless, Abbosi probably wouldn’t be taken alive.  “Men like that seldom allow themselves to be prisoners.”

After another moment she turned back to him and drew deeply on the cigarette.  She drank wine he had placed in front of her.  Salinger placed one of the revolvers the Iranian had given them and placed it on the table.  “How good are you going to be at this?”