Satan's Spy (The Steve Church saga Book 2) Read online

  They were in the colonel’s office in the Ministry of Defense on Al Fuhaidi Street. An aide was taking notes, and two boys brought tea and sweets that they placed on a large round handcrafted copper table. Steve sat on a sofa on one side. The colonel, wearing a white dish-dasha, a long sleeved robe, under a light black and gold over-garment, sat on the other side in a tan leather chair.

  “I have been told,” the colonel said, leaning back comfortably with his steepled hands in his lap pointing at Steve, “that you were our eyes and ears inside the hotel and that you directed the counterattack. Our government is beholden to you. Oh,” he smiled, “and three of the terrorists were already dead when our special forces went in. You have interesting skills for a businessman,” he paused and added, “How did you know that the bags in the lobby were booby-trapped explosives?”

  Steve took a sip of the sweet tea. “Just a guess. I’m glad I was able to help. Shiites?” he asked, avoiding the question implied by the colonel who certainly didn’t need to know of Steve’s training at a CIA base in North Carolina some years before. “Is there an Iranian hand here?”

  The colonel laughed. “Does a camel give milk? Seventy percent of our population is Shiite, and our northern neighbor is definitely in an expansionist mood. The terrorists communicated with an Iranian navy ship before and during the attack.”

  “This type of problem could be solved by the Rapid Reaction Force if it was based here in Bahrain,” Steve said. “And that’s why I’m here. We, West Gate that is, can handle it all from the conceptual phase to hands-on training.”

  The colonel’s quizzical grin told Steve that he might be moving too fast and he changed gears. “Do you think these terrorists were Bahrainis? Homegrown and trained here?”

  The colonel moved his bulk forward. “Homegrown? Maybe. But definitely trained in Iran. The main actor in this and other terrorist attacks is al-Quds, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ flying squad,” he said slapping his arm rest. “The IRGC uses al Quds as an elite action arm. They are behind Hizballah in Lebanon, and they are responsible for the assassinations of opposition leaders outside Iran. One of the victims yesterday was Ali Karrubi, who has been in open opposition to the current Iranian regime for years and who happened to be in the hotel, not a coincidence.

  “Al-Quds also play an important role in funding and arming the militias in Iraq. It is the vanguard of Iranian imperialism. Ali Mousavi, their intelligence chief, is a snake,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “But you have gained credibility for the project you want to speak to us about. I’ll arrange meetings for you tomorrow. Your timing is impeccable. In the meantime, if you want to visit the gold market in the morning, one of my men will take you. We’ll have lunch and then you can make your proposal.” He paused and, looking in Steve’s eyes said, “None of this would be happening if your government cut the head of the snake.”

  On the way back to a private apartment that the colonel had arranged for him, Steve was thinking about the colonel’s “snake” comment when he received another call from Thérèse’s special assistant.

  “Steve, you’re hard to reach,” she said quietly, a reminder that the head of the National Clandestine Service deserved more courtesy. Uneasy that he was in the back of an official Bahraini Government limousine and that his part of the conversation was probably being taped or at least listened to by the driver, Steve nevertheless felt that he had to take the call. Courtesy.

  Thérèse came on before Steve could reply. “Steve, your name just came across my desk,” she said after a brief greeting and mention that Steve’s father, Marshall, a semi-retired CIA officer, had told her that Steve was in Bahrain. “The Bahrainis are asking for background information on you. I gather you played a role in bringing the hotel attack under control. Congratulations. How do you get yourself in these situations?” she chuckled.

  “Impeccable timing, I guess,” he replied borrowing from the colonel’s comments. “I was a guest in the Panorama Hotel at the time, so I didn’t have a lot of choice. Waiting in my room to get shot is not my style. When I helped the Moroccans a couple of years ago after barely escaping getting killed in Rabat, that wasn’t by choice either. Stuff happens.”

  “I remember,” she said. Steve’s stopping an Islamic cell in Morocco had prompted the CIA to ask for Steve’s help in gathering information on the movement’s leader since Steve had met the jihadist leader when getting his master’s at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Steve had gone beyond his brief. Eventually breaking off the CIA connection out of frustration with an overly controlling headquarters support officer, he had nevertheless continued his part of the operation, which had ended in an underground secret military weapons bunker in Israel.

  “Bahraini Security sounds grateful and impressed and also extremely suspicious,” Thérèse added. “They were really asking if you were one of our deep cover officers. They’re lucky you were there.”

  “If any one suspects me of intelligence activities, they’re badly informed. I’m here only on business,” Steve said speaking directly into the microphones he assumed were in the backrest of the car’s front seats.

  “Don’t worry. Nothing we said will get you in trouble. But I have something to ask you that I would rather discuss with you in person. It involves travel, and I have the green light from your CEO. When can you come to my office? You can also tell me about the nature of your business in Bahrain. I understand you want to create and run a mercenary army for the Gulf emirates?”

  “To be determined. ‘Mercenary’? Where did that come from? If Bahrain wants a force made up of foreigners, I guess that’s up to Bahrain. I’ll come to see you as soon as I get back, two, three days.”

  “I have a plane in Bahrain now. It’s coming back tomorrow night. We’ll make arrangements to get you on the passenger list.”

  Thérèse hung up before he could say no, and Steve slapped the seat beside him in frustration. How could the Bahrainis avoid thinking he was with the CIA when he used CIA aircraft?

  Steve felt irritated he might not have time to finish his business in Bahrain. However, he couldn’t deny that the prospect of another CIA assignment was getting his juices going. Besides, he told himself, his West Gate CEO had already said yes, and his father was apparently aware of the new mission.

  Thérèse was not his boss, but the CIA gave West Gate a substantial amount of business. The agency’s hiring spurt after 9/11 had added bodies; however, a new officer needed at least five years before he could be trusted on the street and another two before he had a track record to show whether he had developed the right skills and instincts. As a result, the experienced operations officers who had been hired by private companies when they left the CIA were being rented back at twice their prior GS salaries, and West Gate and others were profiting. But Steve’s counter terrorist success had placed him in a special category with a membership of one.

  He hadn’t seen Thérèse since her promotion to Director of the National Clandestine Service, and he should have congratulated her. He would try to remember to do the right thing when he did see her. What in the world would suddenly prompt her to call him anyway?

  Having reached his new luxurious address, which was presumably also wired for sound and video, Steve turned his thoughts to the conversation of the night before with Kella, his French girlfriend whom he had met at a diplomatic reception in Paris, an event with unforeseen consequences. A day later, she had witnessed the honor killing of her best friend in Paris, an Algerian girl living with an Islamist father, an event that convinced Kella to join Steve in his CIA-sponsored mission.

  She now worked for the biggest defense contractor in the D.C. area. A former French intelligence officer, she spoke English, French, Arabic, and Tuareg, the Berber dialect of the Sahara, languages that reflected her ancestry. Both Steve and Kella traveled frequently but separately and had spent little time together in the last year. It had become a strained relationship. She had told him that she was getting ready to travel t
o Ft. Huachucha to give a series of talks at the army’s intelligence school. She had also mentioned that her French grandfather in Paris was sick.

  He worried he and Kella were drifting apart. Her wish that he conform to the model of an up and coming executive was not a mystery to him. “The CIA and all the other spy agencies are not the real world,” she had said. “Besides, does anyone in Washington pay attention to this intelligence? Aren’t you risking your life for nothing?”

  He had no good answer. Policy makers used intelligence to support their own points of view, and since intelligence was, by definition, hardly ever precise, interpretation allowed politicians to claim that heavily caveated estimates supported their policies. More to the point, he suspected that Kella was laying the foundation for an exit using her sick grandfather as a pretext. Was she waiting for a marriage proposal from him?

  He smiled at his own naiveté. His mind veered away from an uncomfortable topic to his meeting in Langley. He liked and trusted Thérèse, who had honed her operational skills against Greece’s 17 November gang, but he couldn’t say the same about some of the officers who worked for her. When large numbers of senior officers left the agency, the domino effect had filled midlevel positions with time-servers who had no significant operational experience and who, relishing their new power, became control freaks.

  In spite of Kella’s skepticism that clandestine operations were worth the risk, Steve believed in the CIA mission, stealing other countries’ secrets and taking the lead when diplomacy was ineffective and military action counterproductive. But, due to inconsistent Congressional support, the agency was too frequently in a rebuilding phase, like the Chicago Cubs. The CIA was alternately criticized as either too aggressive, a rogue elephant, or a risk-adverse bunch of wusses.

  Was Thérèse going to ask him to take care of a loose end from his previous CIA mission? Another offer to join the professional ranks of the CIA? Her request to see him urgently made him wary.

  The visit to the gold market in the morning would be a great opportunity to show Kella he didn’t want her to go back to France. Would it be enough?

  2. Tehran: Detention Center for Revolutionary Guard Corps

  Dr. Zoran Qazi climbed out of a deep black hole, more asleep than awake, still trapped in a horrific nightmare filled with pain. For a second, he hoped that the pain was only the lingering memory of a shock so awful it had jolted him awake. What had prompted the torment? As he edged toward consciousness, his senses took inventory of his immediate environment. He lay on a hard floor. The air was damp. A harsh light tried to penetrate his closed eyelids.

  He felt drugged and cold. His hands searched for a cover but only found the clammy surface of his skin. His fingers went to the throbbing ache in his left arm and discovered it was covered with a sticky substance. When he felt the jagged edge of a broken bone piercing the skin, fear and shock woke him completely.

  He sat up but didn’t open his eyes until he turned away from the fluorescent lamp that gave his world a bluish glare. The cell was only slightly longer than his five-foot-nine body length. The metal door had a narrow opening at the bottom that he assumed was for food. He was lying next to a cot attached to the wall. A pot in one corner completed his new world, its odor permeating the cell. He moved to sit on the cot and gasped as his left arm sent a lightning flash of pain to his brain. There was a blanket on the bed, which he draped awkwardly around his shoulders with his good hand. The pain had not been a dream. He ran through recent events to try to understand what he was doing in this cell with his arm broken, his body battered, and his mind possessed by fear.

  * **

  It had started in Hamburg where he was studying nuclear physics on an Iranian Government grant. He had not found the German community particularly welcoming and began to hang out with other foreign students, many of whom were finding social support and friendship at the mosque. Although not religious, Zoran had gone to the mosque occasionally.

  Following graduation, he received word through the Iranian Consulate that he would be assigned to the Natanz Nuclear Center, one of Iran’s uranium enrichment installations, and shortly thereafter he was invited to the home of one of his professors, Dr. Klaus Steltzer. The two had formed a close friendship. Steltzer had said that Zoran would be his son’s age now had he not died in childbirth. More often than not, Zoran would have dinner at Steltzer’s house en famille with the beguiling Lisa, the professor’s daughter.

  In time, Zoran had revealed his pent up anger at the Iranian regime. Although it had been many years since the mullahs had hung his grandfather for taking a role in the failed creation of a Kurdish State, revenge was a matter of honor with no statute of limitations. His father had not been able to strike the blow himself, and before he passed away, he had handed the responsibility to his son reminding him that the murder was still on the family’s books. Zoran had wisely kept his resentment hidden from Iranian authorities, which had recognized, and rewarded, his scholastic achievements and eventually sent him to the University of Hamburg where Zoran was about to become Dr. Zoran Qazi, Ph.D.

  Over several after-dinner sessions, Dr. Steltzer had provided Zoran with the means to get back at the mullahs: report back on the progress being made at Natanz, but without taking undue risks, Steltzer had emphasized. The information would help him in his own research, Steltzer had said, and he could share with Zoran the generous funds that the university was making available for the study. After getting practical experience at Natanz, Zoran could come back to Hamburg where an important position would be waiting for him at the university.

  “When you’re ready, when you have a good grasp of the goals and progress so far, then ask for a few days off and travel out of the country, back here if possible,” Steltzer had told him. “If not then go to Dubai or somewhere else in the Gulf. Let me know after you arrive and I’ll meet you there.” That’s when Zoran understood that the final user of his information would not be either Steltzer or his university. Was Steltzer fronting for the German Government? The more obvious sponsor had to be the Americans, the CIA. He knew that Steltzer had done graduate work at M.I.T. During their infrequent political discussions, he and Steltzer agreed that the current Iranian regime was on a dangerous course that could only lead to the further proliferation of nuclear weapons in the region and to their eventual use. But Zoran’s political horizons were narrowly focused on revenge. He was relieved that he had found a way and was confident that it would be easy.

  After arriving at the Natanz Center, Zoran became emboldened about the mission. Did Steltzer only want information? Wasn’t the eventual goal to somehow interfere with the project? Whatever Steltzer’s real agenda was, reporting on information to which he had direct access seemed insufficient, passive, what his impotent father would have done. He would cross the debt off the family books; he began to look for sabotage opportunities.

  Because a consistent level of power was crucial for the proper function of the centrifuge cascades, he paid a visit to the Tehran offices of Kama Electric, created by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, responsible for the nuclear program, for the express purpose of supplying power to the Natanz Center. He also used a weekend visit to a nearby village famous for its pears to visit the Kama power station, the direct source of electricity for the center. But he didn’t know what to do with his newly acquired knowledge. Sabotaging the power station would require help from one of its employees, impossible in the short run but something to keep in mind.

  At the lab back at Natanz, he used his physical access to the centrifuges to stay late and examine the seals that could provide the vulnerability he was looking for. One night, he was taking a replacement P-2 centrifuge apart when a security guard showed up making his rounds. The guard asked him, “Why are you here? Everyone else is gone.”

  The guard had surprised him. He knew the guards walked around during their watch but it hadn’t been a serious concern. After all, Zoran had the green colored badge giving him access to this part of
the center.

  At first, the guards asked Zoran why was he the only one to stay late at the Centrifuge Center. Zoran argued his zeal, seriousness of purpose and loyalty but failed to impress the Director of Security.

  Later, he was taken to a Republican Guard building in Tehran, where he had met the notorious Ali Mousavi, a senior Al Quds official and, therefore, very influential in the IRGC. Mousavi had first gained favorable notice during the planning of the 1983 attacks on the American Marines and the destruction of the American Embassy in Beirut killing over three hundred fifty. He later was instrumental in the kidnapping of the CIA Beirut Station chief whom he had tortured and decapitated himself. The Americans’ failure to retaliate proved that they were paper tigers, provided fuel to the jihadist fire, and trampolined Mousavi into a career during which he was responsible for more American deaths than any single terrorist group. It was said that he had the trust of the Supreme Leader and that, at an age when most would be retired, he was rumored to be heading higher.

  Unlike the clerics for whom he worked, Mousavi wore a dark suit with a white shirt buttoned to the neck. He was a spare man with a mustache that failed to entirely cover his wet lips. Uncombed graying hair and dandruff on his shoulders gave him the air of a widower who no longer had the benefit of a wife to keep him together, but his gaze was direct and penetrating. Zoran was aware of Mousavi’s reputation, and he didn’t allow himself to be fooled by his physical appearance.

  Mousavi, fiddling with what appeared to be a lighter, motioned the guard to bring Qazi in front of his desk. “Dr. Qazi, the charges against you are extremely serious. This is your chance to tell me exactly what you have been doing and what foreign intelligence service you work for.”

  “Sir, I am here to help my country. What can I do to convince you? I have only spoken the truth.”