The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller Read online

  “Captain, we aren’t sure,” the operator admitted. “At first we thought it was a plutonium-powered satellite from America or Russia, but the configuration is—strange. So was the radiation burst.”

  “Strange how?”

  “It wasn’t there and then it was,” the operator said. “It was as if someone had twisted a fruit open to reveal its pit. Then squeezed the fruit into something unrecognizable.”

  He killed the open line. “Helm, distance?”

  “Two kilometers and we are mutually closing,” replied the young man who sat directly in front of the captain. Perspiration was running from under his cap. His hands shook. Elham laid a hand on his shoulder. The man steadied.

  A short, lean figure had stepped to the captain’s right elbow. He was Nakhoda Sevom Azizi, second-in-command.

  Without turning from the looming shape in the mist, the captain said, “Lieutenant Commander—I want a shore crew in the water in five. If there is a way to seal the object, do so and bring it back. Please command the detachment personally.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The man saluted sharply and left the bridge. If he knew that proximity to the source of the radiation was certainly a death sentence, the forty-year-old Azizi did not show it. Elham had given him the mission not just because he was a supremely competent commander but because he had two brothers and sisters and was unmarried. If the rest of the crew had any chance at all, Azizi’s parents would suffer less than some others.

  In just over four minutes, Azizi and six other men were paddling north in a black inflatable dinghy. The men wore black wetsuits and appeared as a dark smear in the mist. The boat was kicked around in the rough waters, but the men were well trained and held both their bearing and speed.

  “Sir, this is Paria,” a voice came over the headset. It was the sonar chief.

  “Go ahead,” Elham replied.

  “The computer has assembled the pieces in the ice. It’s an old submarine. It appears it was sealed inside and literally pulled open when the floe separated. The satellite images put the breakup concurrent with the radiation spike.”

  “Is it an early American nuclear submarine?” Elham asked. The propaganda value of finding a lost U.S. naval treasure, especially a failed one, would be high.

  “We aren’t certain, Captain,” he said. “The pieces have been too badly compacted by the ice.”

  “Thank you.”

  Elham did not bother relaying the information to Azizi. They would find out soon enough. Now that it was too late, he second-guessed himself: if he had known it was something old, not something new, would he have committed the crew to the mission?

  Yes, he decided. Even in the earliest days of his career, in the eight-year war against Iraq, he always put the security of assets—such as oil platforms—and the capture of any enemy craft over the security of himself and his fellow soldiers. Protecting service personnel was God’s job. Serving the Ayatollah was his. The honor of having this responsibility thrust upon him overwhelmed all other considerations.

  The captain wished he had a visual on the team. That was one of the areas Iranian technology lagged. It was important to field home-made assets, but many of them were little different from the old models on which they were based. Modern technology was not easy to come by, especially in this era of heavy sanctions against trade. Sadly, due to international hatred of his people, even science students were not coming back from Russia and China with the levels of education they received in America and Europe during the days of the Shah.

  Every moment brought the Jamaran nearer to the ice. He could see, now, the jagged edge where a smaller piece had fallen away. The raft was tied to an icy outcropping and the men were standing on a flat shelf; he could see their black shapes moving.

  There were white sparks, just a few, but so brilliant they seemed like fireworks in the dull gray afternoon.

  “Captain, the Geiger counter found the object,” Azizi radioed. “We are resealing the container.”

  “Do you know what it is?” Elham asked.

  There was a brief hesitation. “It appears to be the inner workings of a crude nuclear device.”

  “A bomb?”

  “It would appear to be, but not like anything we’ve seen in briefings. There’s a perfect sphere in a large metal container—I believe the box is lead. The radiation levels are dropping fast.”

  The sparks flashed a moment more, then died. After a moment the blue afterimages faded from the captain’s eyes, leaving the outside world once more pale and hazy.

  “We’re coming in now,” Azizi reported. “Two of the men feel sick.”

  “Understood.” Elham glanced at his watch. “Full stop,” he ordered the helm, then turned to Navsarvan Farshid, who had taken Azizi’s place on the bridge. “Lieutenant, have a recovery team on deck. All medics on hand.”

  The officer saluted and left. The navbanyekom who manned the External Sensor Array in the sonar room reported that radiation levels had returned nearly to normal. The voice of the lieutenant junior grade did not sound relieved. Nor should it. The nearly eight-minute exposure they had taken was no reason to rejoice. He thought back to other personnel who had made this same critical, fatal decision. In 1961, the crew of the Russian K-19 submarine had spent ten minutes repairing the nuclear reactor’s cooling pipes to prevent a thermonuclear explosion and twenty-eight of them perished. Fifty workers accepted “suicide missions” to tend to the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant exactly fifty years later. There were probably others, many others, though that kind of information did not receive wide dissemination.

  And now God has handpicked another crew to join their heroic ranks, the captain thought.

  Although the captain wished he could meet the crew himself, he did not want to leave the bridge. Whatever the object was, it would have to be taken to Bandar Abbas as swiftly as possible—though that might not be possible if enough of the crew were stricken. He turned thoughtfully and went to the nautical chart on the wall behind him. It was an old-style paper chart; an electrical failure during a trial run had convinced him it was unsafe to rely on digital maps.

  There is another consideration, he told himself. An object that hot would have been picked up by the intelligence agencies of at least a dozen nations. Even now, military vessels would be converging here to investigate. Spotting the Jamaran from the air or sea, enemies of the Islamic state would be waiting to intercept her along the way. At best, they would be shadowed; at worst, they would be quarantined or sunk in the open seas. The Russians would not hesitate to sink them for transporting nuclear materials in opposition to maritime law.

  Contacting their home base would be risky, but it had to be done. The cargo had to be offloaded.

  The chart was broken into three dozen sectors, pinned with friendly ports of call and marked with the courses of North Korean, Syrian, and Yemeni vessels. Elham decided there was one place where safe harbor for their cargo might be found.

  Elham wore a key around his neck. He removed it, turned, and inserted it in the console. As the communications officer watched, the captain twisted the key and input a series of numbers into the keypad beside it. This brought up an encryption program through which all typed messages would be run until it was disengaged.

  The captain stood beside the radio operator and dictated a message. It was what the Vezarat-e Ettela’at Jomhuri-ye Eslami-ye Iran—the Ministry of Intelligence and National Security of Iran—called a “double bind”: even if Washington or Tel Aviv or Moscow managed to break the code, they would not know what was meant by the terse message:

  ROGUE STARFISH TO AREA THIRTEEN N

  CHAPTER 2

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  “It’s too early to be thinking.”

  Ryan Kealey was staring at the ceiling when Allison Dearborn touched his forehead. Her fingertips were light and had the desired effect of relaxing his brow.

  Kealey turned and regarded her. He pushed the lump of pillow down so it wasn’
t covering his mouth. He didn’t ask how she knew what he was doing. She’d known him too long—and too well.

  “Is that my—what’s the acronym? BBF?”

  “BFF,” she said. “Best Friends Forever.”

  “Right. Is that my BFF or my shrink talking?”

  The woman appeared wounded, though it was tough to make out details with the hotel drapes drawn and the only light coming from the red-glowing digital clock behind Kealey. He could just make out the slight dip in her eyebrows, felt the disapproving tap of her index finger, which was still on his forehead.

  “It’s the whole me, the amalgamated self.”

  “Oh, ‘amalgamated,’ is it? It’d say it’s too early for twenty-dollar words.”

  “Don’t try to turn this on me, Ryan.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m right here, in bed with you. You’re the one who’s off somewhere. I’m just trying to reel you in. It’s okay to take some down time. You’ve earned it. You deserve it.”

  Her tone wasn’t accusing or critical. Allison wasn’t like that. He surrendered to her concern by smiling.

  “Since you know what I’m doing, you know I can’t help myself.”

  “I know you don’t want to help yourself,” she said. “But I’ve had my say.” She peered over him. “It’s not even six a.m. I’m going back to sleep.”

  Her companion took her finger from his forehead, kissed the tip, then lay back and continued to look at the ceiling . . . and to think. It wasn’t about work, as Allison seemed to think. It was about her.

  Kealey was accustomed to waking in unfamiliar beds—though more often than not they weren’t actually mattresses but cots, sleeping bags, or even piles of scrub tucked against a big rock. They were located in places like South Africa, India, and Iran. The longest he had ever been anywhere was Maine, when he resigned from the CIA. He got a teaching gig, bought a three-story house in Cape Elizabeth, and spent his spare time fixing it up with Katie Donovan. Kealey suspected that when he was lying on his final bed, if he still had all his marbles, he would look back on that period with Katie as his happiest. At least, if he could slide from this world with that thought in his head, he would be content.

  But being an itinerant was a lonely business.

  A couple months earlier, Kealey had reluctantly gone back to work for his former bosses, CIA Director Robert Andrews and Deputy Director Jon Harper. It was a onetime assignment, preventing the destruction of Manhattan, but it had cost him both physically and psychologically. Apart from the pressure of rooting out the imminent plot, Kealey had been partnered with a man in turmoil: an agent who had just lost his daughter in a bombing. Harper’s wife had been badly injured in the same blast. Early in his career, Kealey had learned to push emotional matters to the side, like unwanted asparagus when he was a child. But eventually the “mental vegetables,” as Allison called them, had to be dealt with.

  You can’t feed that kind of psychic damage to the dog under the table, he thought.

  That was one reason he had begun seeing Allison Dearborn. She ran the Agency’s deprogramming division and she also handled what were called HAS—Hardcore Agent Studies. The designation did not mean that the agents were necessarily ruthless killers or so stressed that they were open to being turned by enemy operatives. The symptoms manifested in those individuals were clear and unambiguous: increasing temper at home, deepening suspicion of those around them, withdrawal from previous social activities.

  No, the HAS was designed to find individuals who had seen, caused, or been chin-deep in death and suffering, shouldered responsibility for countdown-clock danger, and showed absolutely no ill effects.

  That suggested a self-anesthetization—emotional shutdown that could, in the middle of a mission, cause an individual to suffer a complete, unannounced meltdown. After her first interview with someone she nicknamed “even-keeled Kealey,” Allison Dearborn felt that he was a textbook case for repression/suppression tendencies.

  So, of course, we became lovers, he thought as he looked over at her dark silhouette. I sure didn’t repress that desire.

  They didn’t act on it until Kealey had resigned from the Agency. Not because they thought the rules were fair—regulations can’t stop most people from doing what they want or need to do; if they had, Kealey would have been a far less effective operative. He and Allison just didn’t want their superiors to suffer any disciplinary blowback. Kealey felt that Harper, an old romantic, might have covered for them if he found out. It wouldn’t have been fair to put the deputy director in that position.

  And here they were. Kealey felt that their sessions, the ones in her office, had helped him to open up. He trusted Allison as a psychologist but he had always found it easier to talk to women. He felt that they actually listened.

  Kealey knew he wouldn’t be going back to sleep. Once his mind turned on, it was like a perpetual motion machine. Maybe that was one of the reasons he’d been such a puzzle to Dr. Dearborn as opposed to Allison. Kealey didn’t think he internalized anything. He just burned it off as thought.

  The hotel’s terrycloth robe lay in a pile on the floor. He scooped it up as he walked by. He shut the bedroom door as he left and made a pouch of coffee in the kitchenette. The curtains weren’t drawn here, and as the smell of strong coffee filled the room, he went to the window. Across Lafayette Square sunrise showed dully on the East Wing of the White House. It had been dark when they arrived on Friday night. They’d stayed in most of Saturday, except for a late stroll to the Off the Record tavern in the hotel—he hadn’t paid the White House any attention until now.

  It was odd how his impression of the President’s home had changed since he first laid adult eyes on it. He had been working on his master’s degree in business from Duke University and was about to enter special forces training—the result of a strange meeting with an even stranger relative, his Uncle Largo. Kealey hadn’t been to Washington since grade school and made a point of spending a week here. Seeing the so-familiar structures, face-to-face; gazing upon the Declaration of Independence and other documents on display at the National Archives, it all had a kind of Disney World quality, everything sterile and looking the way it was supposed to look. But not the White House. Uncle Largo got him a tour and he was surprised to see it wasn’t quite the museum he had been expecting. It had “operative function,” as a CIA white paper once accurately described it. The presidential portraits were there, of course, and it was both thrilling and momentarily surprising to turn and see Gilbert Stuart’s famed portrait of George Washington hanging innocently on a wall—no fanfare and crepe, no special lighting or restrictive ropes. It was a wall hanging. But the White House was also an office building. People were always in a rush, typically in packs. Back then, Kealey couldn’t have defined the cliques but he had sensed them, just as at school where you knew the jocks from the economists from the chemistry majors, the scholarship kids from the moneyed brats, the frat boys from the affirmative action students. After retiring from the Green Berets as Major Kealey and joining the CIA, Kealey wasn’t surprised to find that the White House was not about the famous facade or the celebrated garden or the historic art. It was a place where legislative deals were made, where strategies were hammered out in long, draining sessions, where wars were plotted—typically in shorter, more direct sessions—and impending disasters were studied and, for the most part, averted. It was about unfolding narratives that were not history yet. It was a place where the bottleneck of responsibility rose upward, sometimes at a slow boil like LBJ struggling to enact and enforce civil rights legislation; sometimes rapidly, such as FDR learning about Pearl Harbor as he lunched in the Oval Office study or JFK and his team huddled in the windowless “woodshed,” built where the Truman bowling alley once stood, deciding the fate of civilization during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962.

  The sun-reddened walls and columns at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue paled with each passing moment. Filling the white mug with black coffe
e, Kealey returned to the window. The White House was now its familiar self, surrounded by green with the Washington Monument rising proudly behind it. Kealey could make out the snipers and security personnel on the roof. It was Sunday morning and there were, for the first time he could recall, no protesters at the front gate. Perhaps it was too early in the morning or too late in the summer; perhaps no one cared much about the lame-duck president, David Brenneman; most likely all of the above. The sparse air and ground traffic did nothing to dispel the quiet.

  Yet—

  Native Americans used to talk about the telegraph wires “singing” across the plains. Kealey always felt like that when he was anywhere near the White House, that the spot was singing—or, perhaps more accurately, humming. Countless wires were alive, the hive was quietly humming. The computers and their sophisticated programs were sorting, analyzing, and flagging intel even while the staff slept. Auto-call alerts let them know if they needed to log on to websites from home or come to the office for secure access.

  But there was something the machines didn’t have: instinct, a sense that something was building. It was an elusive quality, a little hum all its own, a buzz in the base of the spine, an alertness behind the eyes.

  Without knowing why, Kealey suddenly felt as if his weekend non-getaway getaway with Allison was ended.

  Rayhan Jafari showed her Office of the Director of National Intelligence ID badge at the West Wing, plopped her handbag and light fall coat with silver trim on the X-ray conveyor belt, went through the metal detector, then collected her belongings and walked down the quiet corridor to the office of the National Security Advisor. She felt the admiring eyes of the three security guards on her as she left the antechamber and headed down the white-walled corridor. As an attractive, twenty-eight-year-old woman, she expected that. As a Muslim woman, she found it unsettling.

  Her high heels soundless on the blue-and-gold carpet, Rayhan declined an offer of help from the young guard at the next metal detector. She knew the way, even though she had only been called to a meeting of the National Security Council one other time in the past seven months. That had to do with communications between the Iranian forty-megawatt thermal heavy-water reactor under construction in Arak and the Ministry of Science in Tehran regarding isotachophoresis. Rayhan checked the translation, making only minor corrections, then explained that isotachophoresis was a component of gel electrophoresis that was primarily used to detect biological agents.