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CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE
Torture was unreliable. They had tried it in the past and found that the subject didn’t necessarily tell the truth.
He said whatever he thought would stop the pain.
CIA Agent Wes Donaldson watched the man at the table through the one-way mirror. Shuaib Marfazda sat passively on the other side of the glass, seated in a straight-backed wooden chair. He hadn’t been tied to the chair, or in any other way restrained. Yet he sat as if his arms and legs had been immobilized. The only parts of his body that moved were his fingers as they tapped out some unrecognizable drumroll on the tabletop. His eyes stared straight ahead as if they’d been welded into place.
Donaldson glanced at his wristwatch, then looked through the glass at the door leading from the interrogation room into the hall. Marfazda assumed it was locked. It wasn’t. They had long ago passed the point where it was necessary to lock him in. Or use any other physical bonds, for that matter. Marfazda’s mind had become its own restraint.
No, Donaldson thought, Shuaib Marfazda, now lived in a CIA-created reality that was no more real than a child’s bedtime story. They had, in many ways, convinced him that down was up and up was down, red stop lights meant go and green meant stop. And it had all been accomplished without ever once touching the Hamas terrorist.
The door to the observation room opened suddenly. Donaldson turned to his side to see Jed Coffman’s broad, six-five frame block the light from the hallway. Coffman closed the door behind him, then moved to Donaldson’s side at the mirror. The big CIA operative frowned. “He ready?”
“Probably.” Donaldson nodded. “He’s showing most of the signs. If you wanted to compare his brain to spaghetti, I’d say it’s been boiled to a point somewhere between medium and soft.”
“I think of them more as little men made out of modeling clay,” Coffman said seriously. “We take them, smash them flat, then rebuild them the way we want them.” The tall man’s hand rose to his chin where he scratched a week’s worth of stubble. “Of course we leave enough between their ears for them to tell us everything they know.” He turned toward Donaldson. “What say we give him another few more minutes? It can’t hurt, and I could use a cup. Want some?”
Donaldson shook his head as Coffman crossed the room to the coffee machine. In the reflection of the glass, he saw the tall man lift the carafe and pour coffee into a cup. Peering through the reflection he continued to watch the terrorist on the other side of the one-way mirror. Again, Marfazda’s fingers began to drum out some unknown rhythm on the table. The finger taps had begun a few hours before, but in the past ninety minutes they’d started coming at regular five-minute intervals. Now they occurred every few seconds.
Donaldson knew every subject reacted differently to the preinterrogation process, but it had been his experience that they each showed some outward sign when they neared the breaking point.
Marfazda’s just happened to be tapping. It meant he was on the verge of that point now.
The CIA man let his mind drift back over the past few months. Shuaib Marfazda had been captured during an attempt to blow up a Beirut café frequented by Americans. A U.S. Department of State representative—a retired army colonel—had spotted several wires of his “suicide bomb” sticking out of his shirt collar as he opened the café door. Thinking quickly, the colonel had smashed the brass handle of his walking stick into the back of the man’s head.
Coffman had happened to be in the café himself at the time. Trained as an explosives expert, he had dismantled the bomb before Marfazda had regained consciousness or the Israeli authorities could arrive. The terrorist was then quickly transported to a CIA safehouse in Beirut.
Marfazda’s first few weeks had been spent in solitary confinement, in a bedroom stripped of furniture, with barred windows whose panes were painted black. The only human contact he’d had was watching an unidentified hand slide a food tray through the slot in his door twice a day. Unknown to him, a tiny microcam had been hidden in the bare lightbulb at the top of his room, which put out the same dull, monotonous half-light twenty-four hours a day. The Hamas terrorist’s every movement and facial expression—practically every thought—had been monitored ’round the clock by CIA psychiatrists and psychologists. And while Marfazda was slowly being broken down—or “smashed like clay” to use Coffman’s metaphor—CIA investigators had conducted an extensive background check.
While the café was to have been his final act, Marfazda already had plenty of blood on his hands. Bits and pieces of information had linked him to other atrocities in Israel, Afghanistan and Iraq.
When the time seemed right Marfazda had suddenly, and without explanation, been transferred to a larger, brighter cell with five beds and four cell mates. All four of them had been CIA operatives of Arabic descent. Some intelligence had been gained that way as Marfazda—starved for human contact—had let his guard down partially among these men who presented themselves as fellow political prisoners. Through them Donaldson and Coffman had learned of the Soviet mole.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, a man calling himself Russell James had held on to his job as an American biochemical weapons research scientist, waited for the dust to settle around the world, then found more lucrative work among the various terrorist organizations of the Middle East.
Marfazda had been taken back to solitary confinement when the intelligence information he’d unwittingly passed on finally dried up, and he had been there for nearly six months. He was now what the psychologists monitoring him called “ripe.” It was an expression they used to describe the dangerously short period between the time when he’d give up his last bits of information in return for a promise of freedom, and the time when his mind turned into the overcooked spaghetti to which Donaldson had compared it.
“Let’s go,” Donaldson said to Coffman, and the two men opened the door, stepped out into the hall, then entered the interrogation room next to it. “Marhaba,” he said to the confused man who stared at him from the other side of the table. He and Coffman sat across the table from the terrorist.
“We have a proposition for you,” Coffman said.
Marfazda didn’t answer. His mind had slowed, and was still processing the fact that he was no longer alone. Donaldson waited; he had seen it all many times before. The brain was like a muscle—use it, and it got stronger. But put it in a position where it deals only with simple things and it atrophies and drops to that pace.
“What is the proposition?” Marfazda finally asked in slurred Arabic.
Donaldson smiled in a fatherly way. There was an art to what he was about to do, and that art was staying only a half step ahead of the sluggish brain across the table from him. It was a fine line to walk. Go too fast and the subject became confused. But take things too slow and even a torpid mind like Marfazda’s might figure out what was going on.
“We have no further use for you,” Donaldson said, also in Arabic. He paused to let it sink in and saw a flicker of fear enter the broken terrorist’s eyes. It was obvious he thought that meant he was about to be killed.
“Please,” Donaldson said, the smile still on his face. “Forget your fears. We are Americans. We do not kill people such as you. Surely you know that.” Again he waited, knowing the terrorist’s own indoctrination was working against him now.
Relief entered Marfazda’s brain and Donaldson saw it on his face. Yes, Shuaib, the CIA man thought. Think back to what you have been taught. Americans aren’t only evil, we’re weak. We want only to use drugs, drink and fornicate, and we’re afraid to kill our enemies because we have no Allah behind us.
A few seconds after the terrorist’s face had changed from fear to relief, it took on an expression of superior smugness. Again, Donaldson knew what the man was thinking.
Had Marfazda been on the other side of the table, he wouldn’t have been so weak.
“We want only one thing from you,” Donaldson said in Arabic. “And it’s something we already know. We just need confirmation. Give it to us, and you go free.” He sat back away from the table, crossed his legs and folded his hands in his lap. Closing his eyes, he switched to English when he said, “That is another flaw in our system. We must have all intelligence confirmed by at least two sources before we send it back to Washington.” He kept his eyes closed as he continued to speak. “Even then the sons of bitches take ages to make a decision.”
Beneath the table, Donaldson felt the toe of Coffman’s shoe nudge his calf. It meant that while his eyes were closed, Marfazda had responded to Donaldson’s English. From the time of his capture, the terrorist had maintained a complete ignorance of the language. But the agents posing as prisoners had relayed back to them that he often seemed to understand them when they spoke among themselves in broken dialect.
Donaldson opened his eyes. It was time to go for the kill.
What he was about to ask would be said in an off-the-hand way. But getting the answer to this one question had been the actual goal of all the months of subtle psychological attack. A lot of time, effort and money had been spent setting the Hamas man up for this question, and if Marfazda refused to answer or lied to them now, it would have all been in vain.
Donaldson covered his mouth and yawned. “We know Russell James is somewhere in the Middle East,” he said, still speaking in English. “And we know he’s no longer using that name. What we need confirmation on is his exact whereabouts and the name he’s using now.” The CIA man yawned again as he waited for Marfazda’s dulled brain to respond. Watching the man out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the terrorist hadn’t picked up on the fact that the question was considerably different than the mere confirmation he had mentioned earlier. And all of the hints that the American bureaucracy moved with maddening slowness had told Marfazda that he could give Donaldson what he asked for, be released and still have time to get a warning to James before they closed in on him.
In Marfazda’s eyes, Wes Donaldson saw the exact moment the man decided to answer the question. A brightness flickered into the heretofore glazed eyes as the terrorist suddenly came to believe that he had both outlasted and outsmarted the weak Americans.
“Russell James is using his real name again,” Marfazda said, forgetting himself and answering in English. “It is Anton Sobor. I cannot tell you where he is now. But before I was captured, he was working out of Tehran. He had been there for almost a year.”
To his side, Donaldson saw Coffman make a show of taking a business card out of the inside pocket of his jacket. With a frown on his face, he studied the back of the card. A moment later he looked up at Donaldson, nodded, and said, “Checks out. So far, at least.”
Donaldson kept the smile off his face. He’d seen that same business card of Coffman’s earlier in the day when his fellow CIA agent had used it to write down the name and phone number of a beautiful Lebanese woman who had served them breakfast at a nearby café.
“I believe you are telling me the truth,” Donaldson said, turning his attention back to Marfazda. “One last bit of confirmation, and I will have a driver drop you off any place in Beirut you would like to go.” Again, giving the terrorist time to process the thought but not think beyond it, he said, “Confirm the address in Tehran and you will be free to go.”
Shuaib Marfazda recited a street address and smiled.
Donaldson smiled back as he drew a tiny, sound-suppressed .22-caliber Beretta pistol from under his coat. Without ceremony he leaned across the table, pressed the muzzle into Marfazda’s forehead and pulled the trigger.
Rays of crimson shot out of the terrorist’s forehead like red sun rays. But the small bore bullet didn’t exit the skull. Shuaib Marfazda sat back against the chair, his eyes still open, as Donaldson pulled the gun back to reveal the solitary star-shaped hole between the man’s eyes.
Donaldson stood. “Let’s get that information back to Langley,” he said as he and Coffman left the room. “According to them, the Man himself has been on their butts to get it.”
CHAPTER ONE
There was simply no way he could pass himself off as an Iranian.
First off, he was far too tall. He might claim to have come from one of the Elburz Mountain tribes; their men often grew to well over six feet. But he would still be noticed, and it would require explanation. And the fact that he didn’t speak the language pretty much put a damper on explanations of kind.
Besides, his size wasn’t the only discrepancy that would acquire justification. While he was dark-skinned, he wasn’t dark enough, and he had no other Arabic or Persian features to offset that fact. What it boiled down to was that he looked exactly like what he was—an American of mixed descent, primarily Eastern European. So if he intended to operate in Tehran, he would have to play on that theme, and the best cover story he could come up with was that he was one of the many Russians who had found their way to Iran after the iron curtain ceased to exist. His size and face would suggest such a background. And the long gray overcoat and black Russian rabbit hat he wore would aid him.
Mack Bolan, a.k.a. the Executioner, kept his eyes in front of him as he walked casually down the sidewalk of Iran’s capital city. No, he thought as he neared a stand where a bearded man was hawking pottery, trying to infiltrate Tehran, especially Tehran’s underground, as a native would have been a big mistake. As he passed the stand, the man called out to him.
The Executioner smiled, shrugged, pointed to his lips and shook his head. “Nyet Farsi,” he said in a Russian accent.
The thick odor of curried rice and boiled lamb drifted out from a doorway just past the pottery stand and Bolan glanced inside as he passed. Two men stood behind a counter spooning food into white cardboard containers. One had the dark hair and skin that was common to the natives. But the other looked as Caucasian as Bolan did.
The Executioner smiled as he moved away from the small restaurant. Up and down the street, in any direction he looked, he saw men and women of obvious Persian and Arabic descent. But scattered among the brown faces and raven hair were others of lighter skin. Some, Bolan knew, were Persians themselves—exhibiting the Aryan genes that had mixed with Turks and Arabs to create a new race long ago. He had considered trying to pass as one of these men, but the fact that he had no knowledge of the language had stopped him once again.
The Executioner walked on. Far more often than the last time he’d been in Iran, he saw men and women in more Western dresses. The women wore no veils, and here and there even a baseball cap and T-shirt could be seen. While the country had hardly returned to the openness of free trade and travel it had enjoyed before the Islamic revolution of the late 1970s, the country was beginning to emerge from the shroud of oppression.
As long as he kept pretending to be Russian, a part he had played many times over the years—he should have no problem locating the address circled on the map of the city in his overcoat pocket.
As Bolan stepped around several children playing on the sidewalk a light snow began to fall. Ahead of him, above the buildings, he could see the white-capped mountains that seemed to stand guard over the city. At their peak was the cone—shaped Mount Demavend, a mysterious sight that seemed to appear in the distant corner of his vision no matter where he looked.
Stopping at the next corner, the Executioner pulled the map from inside his coat. He glanced down at it, then up at the street signs. The apartment he was looking for should be in the next block. Returning the map to his coat, he stuck his left hand into the hand-warmer pocket at his side. His right slipped into the other coat pocket, the fingers curling around the grip of a Smith & Wesson 625-10.
Bolan walked on, his index finger slipping inside the guard but staying away from the trigger for the moment. He had chosen the Scandium .45 ACP revolver to accompany his usual pistols for two reasons. First, it was so light it could be carried in a pocket without creating a telltale sag. But the other reason was just as important. Half of the two-inch barrel was inside the frame, leaving only one inch sticking out of the front. Not just a snub nose, the 625-10 was almost a no-nose. It fit neatly in the pocket and could be gripped, aimed and even shot through the coat if necessary without an adversary even knowing it was there.
The Executioner’s thumb ran along the smooth back of the hammer where the spur had been ground off. The 625-10 had been altered to double-action only. There would be no cocking it to single action for precise shooting. But precise shooting wasn’t why the big-bore wheelgun had accompanied the Executioner to Iran. He was far more concerned with the weapon snagging on the draw or the hammer getting caught in the lining if he had to fire with the gun still in his coat.
Bolan crossed the street and walked on, passing another sidewalk stand selling miniature paintings. Yet another peddled intricately inlaid wood crafts. Like so many other housing areas in Iran’s capital city, a brownstone wall ran along the sidewalks. Behind the wall, villas and apartment houses were jammed together so tightly that they practically became one giant, sprawling building.
Periodically he passed a numbered entryway through the wall. Most of the well-worn wooden doors were closed. A few stood open and through them he saw large flat areas of muddy earth. Come spring these mud patches would turn into flower gardens, sprouting a wide variety of exotic plants in a multitude of colors. But at the moment, only a few dead stalks from last summer’s crops remained, and here and there a thin tree sapling that had shed its leaves weeks earlier.
The Executioner came to the number 11637 and stopped. The door was closed, which didn’t surprise him. Set into the wall was an intercom. Keeping his right hand on the revolver in his pocket, he lifted his left and pushed the button next to the speaker.
A moment later a voice answered with words he didn’t recognize.
“Please accept my apologies,” Bolan said in Russian. “I do not speak your language.”
The man on the other end of the intercom evidently spoke no Russian, and had to guess at Bolan’s words as the Executioner had guessed at his. “Do you speak French?” he asked in French.
“Oui.” Bolan answered in that language. But he made sure to do so with a thick Russian accent.
“What do you want?” asked the voice, now that they had found a common means of communication. “Identify yourself.”
“Rotislavsky,” said the Executioner. “Leon Rotislavsky.” He paused, waiting, remembering the lightning-like events of the past few hours. Two CIA agents had finally learned the identity and last known address of Anton Sobor—a.k.a. Russell James—the former Soviet mole who had left the United States and begun selling his expertise in biochemical warfare to terrorist groups in the Mideast. Further investigation through an informant in Tehran had confirmed the address as a safehouse for the Muslim extremist group, Hezbollah. The snitch had also insinuated that Sobor would know where various weapons of mass destruction—WMDs—were hidden. These weapons were biological and chemical agents Sobor himself had developed for various countries. As far as the CIA knew, no nuclear or “dirty bombs” were involved.
But that didn’t make the situation any less urgent. Sarin, Tabun, VX, or even the older mustard gas of World War I fame could be sprayed from crop-dusting planes and kill hundreds of thousands of people. Biological cultures such as anthrax, small pox or even bubonic plague were even more deadly, and easily spread if released in large metropolitan areas. Another problem was the size of the weapons, particularly those of the biological nature. The cultures could be transported in small, airtight containers that could be hidden almost anywhere.
The CIA informant had also informed his interrogators that there was a rumor going around that many of the hidden WMDs had come from Saddam Hussein himself just before the U.S. and Great Britain took over Iraq. But now, the surrounding countries had grown fearful that they might be invaded next. And they were adding their own mass-murder mediums to the mix.
The CIA agents had reported to their superiors at Langley, who in turn had told the President, as the Man had ordered them to do. But the President had then surprised the Central Intelligence Agency by ordering them to hold off acting on the tip.
Then the Man had called on America’s top-secret counter-terrorist organization, the sensitive Operations Group, based at Stony Man Farm.
The Farm, in turn, had called in the Executioner.
After a long pause, the voice somewhere inside the wall said, “We know no Rotislavsky.”
“Perhaps you do not,” Bolan replied, again in heavily accented French. “But Anton Sobor does.” His hand tightened slightly around the grip of the .45.
“One moment,” came back over the speaker.
Again, Bolan waited. The real Leon Rotislavsky had been another Soviet mole implanted in the U.S. banking industry to assist in sabotaging the economy. He had recently come forward one step ahead of being discovered, and in return for total amnesty spilled all he knew. Rotislavsky hadn’t mentioned Sobor, but he had had little time to do so. Before the name Russell James even came up the Russian had suffered a massive coronary and died.
Until yesterday, there had been no reason to link him to James. And there was still no proof that the two men knew each other. But a hurried background investigation of the Sobor identity had suggested that Sobor and Rotislavsky had graduated together from the university in Moscow. Russian Intelligence—only slightly more cooperative than the KGB had once been—had confirmed that the two men had gone to school together. But they would admit to no more.
So, the Executioner realized as he continued to wait, maybe Anton Sobor knew Leon Rotislavsky and maybe he didn’t. For that matter, the man who had masqueraded as Russell James might not even still be in Tehran. But if he was, and if he had known Rotislavsky, maybe he would open the door to his old friend. If he didn’t, the Executioner would have to hope the name would at least arouse his curiosity enough to open the door anyway. If the latter was the case, however, the Hezbollah men he was hiding out with here in Tehran were likely to greet him with guns blazing.
Bolan took a deep breath and began unbuttoning his overcoat. No one had ever promised him this mission would be easy. In fact if it had been easy, it would have been given to somebody else.
A few minutes later the voice came back. “Tell us more about yourself,” it said. “Tell us how you know Anton.”
Keeping the Russian accent, Bolan said, “Look, it is cold out here.” Then, with an audible sigh of exasperation, he went on. “We went to school together in Moscow. I graduated in business. He studied the sciences. Then we both moved to America.” He paused again, then finally added, “Do I have to spell out the rest for you? Can you not figure it out for yourself?” He looked nervously over both shoulders in case surveillance cameras were trained on him, then finished with, “Who knows who may be listening to us at this very moment?”
After another long pause, a new voice came on. And this one spoke flawless Russian. “Leon, is that really you?” it asked.
Bolan felt the adrenaline start to build in his chest. The voice had the timbre of a native-born Russian. But was it Sobor? Maybe, maybe not. There were hundreds of former Soviets in Iran—ex-KGB officers, Spetsnaz and others. The man on the other end of the intercom could be anyone. Or it could be Sobor. And the former American mole might not know Leon Rotislavsky, and be setting a trap for him by pretending he did.
The Executioner stood where he was, still aware that a hidden surveillance camera could be aimed at him even now. He knew only one thing for sure: whoever the new voice belonged to, the man was interested, which meant Bolan already had one foot in the door.
“Yes, Anton,” Bolan said. “It is me. Now let me in, please, before I freeze my ass off out here!”
The door buzzed and the Executioner pushed it open. Stepping across the threshold, he found himself in another of the dead-winter flower gardens. A cracked concrete sidewalk led through the mud to the front door of a two-story dwelling, and as he started along it a burly man stepped out and walked toward him. A Soviet-made AK-47 hung from a sling over the man’s shoulder, the muzzle aimed at the Executioner’s midsection.
The man looked Iranian, with dark skin and curly black hair. He wore green BDU pants and black combat boots, but above the trousers legs he was all Persian. A multicolored woven caftan fell past his waistline and was cinched with a wide leather belt. Hanging from the belt was a well-worn and cracked military flap holster, the grip of what appeared to be a 9 mm Tokarev pistol clearly visible.
The Hezbollah hardman walked with a strange sort of “side step” as he approached the Executioner, his right side moving forward ahead of his left. Bolan wondered if the strange gait might not be the result of some past injury as he shifted the .45-caliber wheelgun in his pocket, aiming the stumpy barrel up at the man’s chest. The two continued to walk toward each other.
“Halt there!” the Iranian ordered.
Bolan froze in his tracks, his hands still in his pockets.
“Do you have identification papers?” the man with the Kalashnikov asked in broken French.
Slowly, the Executioner pulled his left hand from the hand-warmer pocket of his overcoat and reached inside the coat. Forgery experts at Stony Man Farm had provided him with an old Soviet passport that had been altered to include his picture and Rotislavsky’s name. He handed it to the man with the rifle.
