Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (11 page)

“I saw schematics for the system once, decades ago, while working a source in Kinshasa. I don’t tend to forget such things,” Gideon said, “As for the Syrians, who knows? My job isn’t to dig up old mysteries. My job is to predict the future and force it to cooperate at gunpoint. But if you insist on an explanation, Soviet quartermasters were notorious for lining their own pockets, and these things likely just fell off the back of the proverbial truck. I doubt the Syrians even knew what they’d accidentally bought, until very recently.”

“And who could have told them that?”

Gideon lit another Gauloises cigarette and said, “I mentioned that the message from Iran was only two words. The first, ‘Tuva.’ The second: ‘
Jadugaar
.’”

The damaged nerves in Ambrose’s left hand came alive, spasming. “That’s the Farsi word for ‘sorcerer,’” He observed. He whipped his head to confront Wayne Shenzo so quickly that his neck was sore. “Why didn’t you lead with this, instead of spending five minutes babbling about fucking Soviet relics? Why didn’t you warn me what this was really about?” He asked.

Wayne tossed a manila dossier folder onto the table. It fell open to a full-sized photo of a handsome Persian man with a strong chin, perfectly curly black hair, and a controlled five o’clock shadow that seemed standard issue for Persians worldwide. He was sitting behind a white baby grand piano, smiling as he played. The other photo showed a boy that couldn’t have been more than ten years old holding a Kalashnikov, standing atop the body of a dead Iraqi soldier, wearing a crimson headband proclaiming “God is great” in big yellow letters. It was Jamsheed Mashhadi, colonel in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a weapons specialist attached to the shadowy Quds Force, codenamed Sorcerer. Ambrose recognized the folder’s contents well.

Wayne replied, “I didn’t tell you about Mashhadi immediately because I needed your head clear for a minute before I let loose your bloodlust.”

Gideon blew a big cloud of smoke out of his nose, wreathing his face in deadly mist as he said, “This twitchy fool doesn’t know bloodlust.”

Chapter Sixteen

Gideon stood on the balcony making phone calls in Hebrew as he burned through every Gauloises cigarette in Cyprus. Wayne and Ambrose still sat at the table, where Wayne was finally sharing the scotch with Ambrose, who cared even less about drinking and time zone etiquette than his boss did. Ambrose couldn’t take his eyes off the pictures of Mashhadi, both of which he’d discovered and added to the folder that included his original Baghdad notes on Sorcerer from 2005-6.

The photograph of Mashhadi sitting behind his piano was the cover of the DVD that captured his 2007 Christmas show in Paris. Ambrose had glimpsed the concert’s aftershow live in that bar in Jakarta, then gone back and watched the DVD of the actual performance. Jamsheed played western classical composers for almost three hours, then spent another two hours of bonus DVD answering questions about the sorry state of Iranian human rights posed to him by Parisian socialites.

Based on Ambrose’s reconstructed chronology, that meant Jamsheed gassed Ambrose in mid-2006, escaped to Iran unscathed, and within eighteen months he was back on the international concert circuit. From Paris, Jamsheed left on a plane bound for Algiers. He wasn’t seen again until March 2008, sitting in a Nigerian café with known Hezbollah affiliates in broad daylight. CIA hadn’t caught it, and neither had Mossad. Ambrose only saw the photos in connection with some unrelated Arabic translating he’d done for Wayne as a side project.

To anyone other than Ambrose, the fuzzy photo of a handsome Middle Eastern man sitting in a café with a hard-looking bearded counterpart must have looked as conclusive as a Bigfoot sighting. To Ambrose, it reinforced just how good Jamsheed’s cover really was. He played on the institutional fears that discouraged intelligence agents everywhere from casting their nets too widely when hunting for enemies: be paranoid, but don’t be paranoid schizophrenic. If anyone had suggested that a human rights activist and adult contemporary piano player was actually a high ranking Iranian Revolutionary Guard weapons engineer, they would’ve been canned immediately. Jamsheed thrived on the improbable.

The other photo that caught his eye was Jamsheed Mashhadi, fourteen year old child soldier, standing atop the body of a dead Iraqi in 1986. Even though Ambrose had wheedled the photo out of Oman’s ambassador to Thailand with no illusions that it would amount to anything more than a footnote in his file on Sorcerer, it was precious to him. It was the only photo of Jamsheed in military uniform, and that made it the only proof that Ambrose wasn’t insane. There was nothing else like it in existence—nothing to prove Jamsheed was affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard, other than some innuendos from Iranian military defectors that Ambrose had collected over the years. Those rumors and innuendos confirmed that “Sorcerer” was indeed a field agent, but none of them could place his identity. Only Ambrose and his file had made that connection, and Ambrose had grown too jaded to trust anyone other than Wayne Shenzo with the information. To his knowledge, Wayne had never acted on it.

Ambrose knew Wayne was looking at him, but he couldn’t reciprocate. “Wayne, you know how bad I’ve wanted this, but now that you’re actually giving me the chance…I died the last time I met this guy. He lured me into a trap, then he killed me with nerve gas. My heart stopped. I still don’t remember the doctors injecting me with atropine. I don’t know why I’m alive, but I know I shouldn’t be,” Ambrose said wearily.

“You look alive enough to me, Ambrose,” Wayne said.

Ambrose held up his twitching left hand and sneered, “Yeah, look at me, the picture of health. We both know Mashhadi left me a fucking shell. I wasn’t good enough to stop him then, I’m sure as hell not good enough to face him now.”

Wayne poured himself another glass of whiskey and grunted. “That’s why you’ve spent most of a decade learning martial arts and getting firearm training wherever it’s available?” Wayne shook his head as though he didn’t like his own argument, then resumed with a hearty swig of whiskey, “You know the best part about this job, Ambrose?”

“It makes my skin crawl when you use my first name.”

“The best part about my job is that, ultimately,” he downed the whiskey, “I don’t have to give a shit about my underlings’ opinions. You’re the guy. You’re ready. If you weren’t, you never would have gotten on that plane in Jakarta.”

Ambrose poured some Dewar’s into his glass and downed it before responding, “Wasn’t I doing good work for you in Indonesia, Wayne? Didn’t you call my intel on Southeast Asian jihadists the best you’ve ever seen? Didn’t you
promise me
that I’d never have to come back to the Middle East? That I’d earned some relief?”

Wayne refilled Ambrose’s empty glass and slid it into his calm right hand. Then he said, just as calmly, “Hayes, what do you do in Indonesia each day? You wake up hungover at noon, then you study kung fu for three hours at a dingy gym, then you go out with that ridiculous cover-story about being a travel writer, and you root out low-grade American-hating Muslims for me. That isn’t value added, and that sure as hell isn’t what you were made for.”

Ambrose stabbed a finger towards his boss and replied, “It’s not ‘kung fu,’ it’s
Pencak Silat
. Kung fu is Chinese, Silat is Indonesian. Huge difference, and since you’ve obviously had me followed, you already knew that. And
since
you’ve been following me, maybe you’ve noticed that I
was
made for sleazing around an Asian megalopolis, drinking shitty beer and following dumbass kids with Bin Laden fantasies.”

Wayne slammed down his empty glass, leaving a big wet ring across central Syria. “When you were a thirty year old kid in a white suit, you covertly assembled a death squad and hunted an undercover Revolutionary Guard commander across the world’s hottest urban warzone. You tracked down and nearly captured a man who the international intelligence community didn’t even believe existed.
That’s
who you are: a man who vowed to hunt his enemy to the ends of the fucking earth. Now I’m telling you that for the first time in seven years we know
exactly
where he is, and you’re babbling about fucking
atropine
?!” Wayne leaned his face in close, daring Ambrose to make contact with that pointing fingertip of his.

Ambrose’s electric blue eyes scanned Wayne Shenzo’s face. “You’re not telling me something, Wayne. Me or somebody else like me could have tried for Mashhadi a hundred times before now, whether we knew exactly where he was or not. You didn’t care enough to do that before now, and I doubt you’ve had a change of heart. That means you’ve given me
half
a mission, and you’re dancing around the part of it that involves why you told me about the chemical weapons. I may find the Iranian, and I may kill the Iranian,” he instinctively took a pointless drag off his unlit cigarette, “But that doesn’t take care of your weapons. I’ve studied the hell out of chemical weapons, but that doesn’t mean I know anything about how to destroy them.”

“Agreed,” Gideon said. He had snuck back into the room and within three yards of them without either Wayne or Ambrose noticing. His black eye searched Ambrose up and down, seeming to read every crack in his face and red vein in his exhausted eyes. “That’s why we’re giving you a partner who does.”

Wayne talked over Ambrose just as the man got out the first syllables of what would have become an ill-advised anti-Mossad tirade. Wayne said, “But rendezvousing with her is going to take a bit of doing, on your part. She’s the one who gave us our last twenty on Tuva, based on intel she received as part of an undercover team traveling with UN doctors in northern Syria near the Turkish border—“

Gideon cut in “—And the last part of that radio message read: ‘Under attack. Trucks have black flag, white writing. JAN.’”

“J-A-N.
Jabhat al-Nusra
, the Support Front.” Ambrose said as he flexed and released his left hand. Sometimes it helped stop the twitching. He actually laughed a bit as he said, “Your agent got kidnapped by the Syrian branch of al-Qaida.”

“So it seems. But all isn’t lost,” Gideon said.

“Yes it is. They killed her the moment they discovered she was Israeli.”

Gideon shook his bald head, never unfixing his single black eye from Ambrose’s haggard face. He elaborated, “That would be difficult to do. Her mother was an Algerian Sephardi, and her father is straight French, with some North African ancestry on his side as well. She speaks Algerian Arabic fluently, her name isn’t a giveaway, and she doesn’t look Israeli.” He tossed a dossier onto the table. In it was a picture of a handsome, sharp featured young woman with unruly crow feathers for hair and piercing eyes magnified by owlish glasses. Her eyes were fixed on some point right out of the picture field. Whatever she saw, it had given her a feral, defiant look that Ambrose didn’t ever want to see staring in his direction. The name written under the picture was “Celestine Lemark,” which didn’t have a drop of Hebrew in it. She didn’t look Israeli, either—Gideon was right, she could have passed as French North African.

He nodded, doing some calculations in his head. “Alright…alright, there could be something to work with here. Jabhat al-Nusra might ransom off a captive if they thought she was low value, especially since France is staying neutral in Syria.”

Wayne shook his head. “Maybe, but we’re not operating on that type of time frame. You’re going to go get her, with no ransom in hand.”

Ambrose jerked his thumb towards the Israeli and asked, “Is that my mission talking, or the Israeli?”

Wayne answered, “That’s your mission. Let’s spare the banter and cut to it: Jamsheed Mashhadi is the stuff of nightmares, but first and foremost he’s a weapons engineer. Regardless of whether you can outthink him, outfight him, and kill him—which I think you can—this whole threat comes down to a bunch of weapons components being shuttled from one group of assholes to an even worse group of assholes,” he shrugged his broad shoulders, “So my field agent—
you,
motherfucker—are gonna take your own engineer along with you.”

“And Celestine Lemark is a trained explosives engineer who is already in western Syria,” Gideon added quietly. Ambrose pegged him as one of those guys whose voice got quieter and more treacherous the more you pissed him off. Gideon continued, “We won’t be able to sneak two people into the country, so your ability to neutralize the chemical weapons threat will depend on freeing Lemark and getting her access to the Tuva canisters. She’ll be able to destroy them and whatever rocket components are being shuttled along with them as a delivery mechanism.”

Ambrose curled his lip a bit. “And maybe it also just so happens that somebody,” he looked at Wayne, “Owes somebody,” he looked at Gideon, “a favor from the Jurassic days of super spying, and now that favor is being called in when a field agent has gone missing.”

Wayne seemed to pick up on Gideon’s quiet menace, and gave a crisp hand wave that cut Ambrose off like he was doing his agent a favor. “Call it however you want; you know it makes sense. So you’re gonna get the girl, then you’re going to intercept Mashhadi and deal with him so Lemark can neutralize the weaponry.”

“You said she’s in western Syria,” Ambrose looked at Gideon, “care to be any more specific?”

Gideon answered, “There is a fixer in the Syrian port of Latakia named Muhammad Zubair. He works for Assad, but he has no love for Hezbollah or Iran, and very little happens in western Syria without his knowledge. My agents say he had proven trustworthy in the past, so long as information is all you need.”

“And if your sparkling personality doesn’t work, I’ve given you the wiring number for a fifty thousand Euro credit line. That should move a guy like Zubair just enough to keep from putting a bullet in your head,” Wayne said. Then he held up a thick file. “Here’s your radio frequencies, the account number, pertinent information on Zubair, Mashhadi, Lemark, and Tuva, along with a grid map of Syria that we’ll be using when we communicate. Commit the big stuff to memory and write down everything else in that adorable red notebook of yours. You’re on a Cypriot civilian ferry bound for Latakia in three hours. That’ll put you in the Syrian port by sunset.”

* * *

Wayne led Ambrose to a small bedroom and ordered him to get some sleep, like he was a kid up past his bedtime. Sunlight crept through the windows, but Ambrose was exhausted from his sleepless transoceanic cargo flight, so he didn’t argue. He just fell face first onto the bed like a drunk who had been tazed.

As his eyes shut, Ambrose whispered, “Really Wayne, why me?”

“Because you don’t just hate the enemy; you love the game. Gideon’s men might find the Iranian, but they would only kill him, and maybe start a war in the process. You won’t just kill him: you’re going to beat him. You’re going to humble him. Why you? Because you’re our Jamsheed Mashhadi, and you’re better than he is, and I want the ayatollahs to know that. Even if they win in Syria, I want them to lie awake knowing that you exist, and you’re ours.
That
’s why you. So get some sleep and dream in Arabic.”

His hand twitched like a half-crushed bug as he tried to fall asleep. When darkness finally swallowed him, Ambrose dreamed in Farsi.