The Intelligencer Read online

  “That’s Hamid Azadi. Very senior guy at VEVAK,” Max said, referring to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, the Vezarat-e Ettela’at va Amniat-e Keshvar. “Believed to be their counterintelligence chief.”

  Gesturing to the video, Kate asked, “Agency footage?”

  “Yup. Taped two weeks ago in Dubai. No audio, though. The restaurant was loud and they were too far from the window.”

  “And the other guy?”

  “Luca de Tolomei. Billionaire art dealer. Heard of him?”

  “Yeah,” Kate said, staring at de Tolomei’s profile—a long straight nose, sharp jaw, and steel-gray shoulder-length hair. “Rumor has it he deals on the black market now and then.”

  “Right. So as far as we’re concerned, he’s been considered harmless.”

  “Until…”

  “This afternoon, when an eleven-million-dollar wire transfer from de Tolomei was traced to Azadi’s Liechtenstein account. It set off a red flag at the Agency.”

  “Eleven million,” Kate repeated.

  “I took a look at the route myself,” Max said. “I’ve never seen money washed so many times. The cash toured the islands like a cruise ship. Cyprus, Antigua, the Isle of Man…”

  “So, the question is, what exactly did de Tolomei buy from Azadi, and why?”

  “Bingo. If Azadi wanted to get something nasty to terrorists, a guy like de Tolomei would make a great cutout. A rich Catholic art dealer? He’d be perfect.”

  “But Irangives weapons to Hezbollah and Hamas all the time, along with hundreds of millions of dollars a year—they don’tcharge those guys.”

  “Unless it’s a rogue thing and Azadi’s in business for himself, making a sale to a group Iran doesn’t sponsor. He could easily have squirreled away some nerve gas, and what government employee wouldn’t like a little extra cash?”

  “Maybe, but I have a hard time picturing the bad boy of the Sotheby’s set rubbing shoulders with terrorist thugs,” Kate said. “My guess is de Tolomei’s buying Persian antiquities on the black market. Those deals can run into the tens of millions. Someone almost laid out more than forty for the first Persian mummy ever found.”

  “Almost?”

  “It was fake. Persians didn’t mummify. Maybe Azadi’s connected to an antiquity smuggling ring—or better yet, some counterfeiters. You know, to dupe collectors from the Great Satan.”

  “That could be it,” Slade said, walking into the conference room. “But we have to be sure.”

  He set a tray of cappuccinos on the table. Perfectly swirled foam peaks—lightly dusted with cinnamon—rose impressively from each mug.

  Kate reached for one and took a sip.

  Slade raised an eyebrow.

  She clutched her stomach for a moment, pretending to be queasy, then smiled. “Boss, you’ve outdone yourself.”

  Taking a seat, he leaned back with a deeply dimpled grin.

  Kate turned to Max’s computer screen once more. “What do we have on de Tolomei, other than his friendship with Azadi?”

  “Why do you put it that way?” Slade asked. “These two have never been spotted together before.”

  Kate reached over to Max’s keyboard, struck a key, and the dinner scene began to replay. A moment later, she pointed to the first telltale gesture. “Right there,” she said. “De Tolomei pushes the ashtray toward Azadi before he pulls out his cigarettes.” She paused for a minute as the video continued. “And check that out—de Tolomei stops eating, looks around, and Azadi asks the waiter for something before de Tolomei says anything.” Another pause. “See? The waiter just brought pepper. Azadi didn’t ask for salt—he knew what de Tolomei wanted. They know each other’s habits too well to be strangers.”

  Slade turned to Max. “Tell her what you’ve found in the past hour.”

  “It’s not much,” Max said, as a few images of de Tolomei popped up on the computer screen. “It’s slower going than usual because—well, he’s kinda like that Persian mummy. A fake. I did some digging, and a Luca de Tolomei died in a private loony bin almost two decades ago. His parents never admitted he was there—they pretended he was out of the country—and now they’re dead, too. It looks like our dude assumed that identity around 1991.”

  Looking at Kate, Max added, “Good choice for a legend.”

  She nodded. The best fake identities, or legends, were taken from real people who died quietly or disappeared from home, leaving little trace.

  Max went on. “The guy’s got a palazzo in Rome and a refurbished medieval castle on Capri.”

  “You’re kidding me—a villain living on Capri?” Kate marveled. “Talk about a cliché.”

  “What do you mean?” Max asked.

  Slade cleared his throat.

  Kate recognized the sound. It meant her boss was in the mood to un-cork something from his classical arsenal.

  “Tacitus,” Slade began, referring to a second-century Roman historian, “described Capri as the place where the emperor Tiberius spent his time in secret orgies or idle malevolent thoughts. It was said that bevies of girls and young men, adept in unnatural practices, were culled from all over the empire to perform before him in glades and grottoes.”

  “Like Hef,” Max said. “I’m impressed.”

  “He also forced himself on infants. Made them try to, uh…nurse him.”

  Max wrinkled his nose. “Now that’s some nasty shit.”

  “And had traitors tossed from a cliff, and if they weren’t crushed on the rocks below, he had them thrashed to death with boat hooks.”

  “Definitely time to reshuffle,” Max said thoughtfully. “That one debuts at…number four.”

  He kept a running list of the worst ways people have died. The number one spot, Kate knew, had been untouched for months. Over a Bloody-Mary brunch one Sunday, she’d told him how during the reign of the drink’s namesake—the queen of England before Elizabeth I—Protestant “heretics” were burned at the stake so slowly sometimes, on account of inept executioners using green wood and wet rushes, that one woman gave birth and watched her baby die in the flames before succumbing herself.

  “The past few centuries,” Slade finished, “the lovely isle has remained notorious for behavior that would make the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah blush.”

  “So,”Kate said, getting back to business, “we’ve got a billionaire buying contraband from one of the world’s biggest troublemakers, and we have no idea who he really is?”

  “Nary a clue,” Slade replied. “Which has to change. Max will be working his magic, of course, looking into de Tolomei’s associates, and with you in Europe anyway—”

  “What about our people in Rome?” Kate cut in. “They could break into his palazzo, plant some bugs…”

  “Kate, a billionaire who keeps company with the likes of Azadi will have the best security on the planet,” Slade responded. “Break-ins like that take weeks of surveillance and planning. Who knows if we have that much time. Not to mention the fact that strong-arm tactics may not do the trick here. This is the kind of guy who doesn’t keep all his secrets in little metal boxes.”

  “Oh, I see where this is going,” she said wryly.

  Max’s eyes twinkled. “You don’t use guys in black jumpsuits and night-vision goggles to break into a man’s head. You use a hot chick in heels.”

  Slade flashed one of his trademark split-second grins, then his features dropped back into seriousness. “In the meantime, our people in Rome will use directional mikes on him and make inquiries, but they won’t approach him directly. As good as they are, to a man like de Tolomei they could seem a little obvious. You, on the other hand…”

  TEHRAN, IRAN—3:05A.M.

  At that moment, Hamid Azadi, chief of counterintelligence for VEVAK, was at home alone in north Tehran’s posh Gheitarieh district, humming softly in his calfskin desk chair. It was Azadi’s favorite time of the week, the few minutes he savored with pure, uncut satisfaction. Never on the same day, never at the same hour, but once
a week, without fail, he indulged. And during those treasured minutes, he felt like Sisyphus relaxing at the top of his hill, leaning against his rock, enjoying a thirty-year-old single malt Glenmorangie on ice.

  Azadi unlocked the bottom right drawer of his black wooden desk and pulled it open. It was a file drawer, about two-thirds full. He pushed the files to the far end of the drawer and slipped his letter opener into the crack where the drawer’s face met its false bottom. Made of half-inch-thick black rubber, the panel was flexible, and prying up the edge closest to him, Azadi slipped his hand beneath. From the thin pocket of hidden space, he withdrew a satellite phone. A phone he reserved solely for this special indulgence.

  The power on, the encryption functioning, Azadi dialed.

  A familiar voice answered, and Azadi recited the thirteen digits he knew as well as his own name. His password. The voice asked him a series of questions and Azadi provided the necessary answers, answers that varied with each day of the week.

  “Good. Now, how may I help you this evening, monsieur?”

  “I’d like to check my balance, please,” Azadi said softly.

  “Thirteen million, two hundred thousand U.S. dollars. Will there be anything else?”

  “Not today.”

  The money at the discreet private bank in Liechtenstein was Azadi’s parachute to paradise, to a new life free of the limitations and constant fear of his current one. Decades before, during his final year of university, Azadi had chosen his path into the upper echelons of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security because there were few other options open to an intellectual, ambitious Iranian. Plus, he had to concede, he’d been swept up in a romance with national pride, having watched his countrymen yank the rug from beneath the corrupt Shah and his brutal secret police, along with their bloodsucking imperialist backers. War was raging with Iraq at the time, and when he got his first taste of intelligence work, of striving to outwit that camel’s ass Saddam, he was sure he’d found his calling.

  As the years passed, however, he’d slowly come to loathe the mullahs who ruled his country with steel-tipped whips. They had proven to be far more brutal than the Shah had been, with their constant use of torture, steady stream of assassinations, and plotting of mass murder around the globe. Ultimately Azadi had decided to leave. In truth, he had no choice. For him, time was running out.

  Money was his first requirement. Heaps of it. So when he met Luca de Tolomei years ago and heard the man’s initial proposition, Azadi did not require extensive persuasion. They quickly entered into a highly profitable business relationship, and Azadi’s secret account had grown steadily. Their most recent transaction had been the real coup. A tremendous and unexpected bonanza. He knew the item was valuable but had not anticipated that de Tolomei would offer quite so much—eleven million dollars. Praise Allah for the peculiar art dealer and his bottomless bank accounts.

  At last, Azadi had enough to make his move, and conveniently de Tolomei—now a trusted friend—had sweetened their deal with two perks: several sets of expertly made fake papers with different identities and an appointment with a discreet and top-notch plastic surgeon, from whom he would get not only a new face but a new ethnicity.

  Azadi’s defection had to be undertaken very carefully. The Committee for Secret Operations would send an elite team of assassins for him, and Azadi did not want to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder and beneath his car.

  He was going to move to a small island off the coast of America called Key West, because there, he’d been told, men could kiss in the street and not fear a lashing. And if the mood was right, they could go home with their lover and not risk death by stoning.

  THEMEDITERRANEANSEA—1:16A.M.

  The ship was Russian. Her name wasNadezhda, and she was one of 240 oil-laden vessels slicing through Mediterranean waters that night. TheNadezhda, however, was no ordinary carrier of oil. The 138-meter river-sea tanker was owned by a member of the Russianmafiya, and her oil was a cover for the smuggling of contraband.

  During the 1990s, oil itself had been her contraband. Operating primarily in the Persian Gulf, carrying barrels of crude from the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr to the United Arab Emirates, she’d repeatedly violated the U.N. embargo imposed after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. With the international Maritime Interception Force patrolling the Gulf to enforce that embargo, theNadezhda ’s master had done what all clever smugglers of Iraqi oil did: bribe the Iranian Navy for false documents of origin for the oil. It had been enormously profitable, because Russian-flagged ships were almost never stopped. But then, in early 2000, the MIF boarded another Russian ship doing the exact same thing and delivered samples of her oil to a special lab where biomarkers and gas chromatography tests proved it had come from an Iraqi well. When the MIF decided to confiscate not only the oil but the ship itself, theNadezhda ’s owner had opted out of the business.

  Now she really did carry Iranian oil. Nearly five thousand tons of it. But in two special compartments built into the lowest point of her hull—accessible only to divers—Afghan heroin and Stingers for Hezbollah lay hidden.

  After leaving the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas ten days before, theNadezhda had passed through the Strait of Hormuz and cruised north through the Red Sea to the Suez Canal. From there she had slipped into the Mediterranean the previous evening.

  Upon her foredeck, the young navigation officer paced, unable to sleep. He had never felt so nervous in his life. A storm had hit when they were in the Red Sea, and he’d retched until the very last raindrop had fallen. After loading their barrels of crude in Bandar Abbas, he and three other crewmen had been instructed to carry a mysterious wooden crate to the master’s cabin. The master told them to carry it with extreme caution, as if it contained priceless porcelain…or a nuclear bomb. Then the master had winked. What did that wink mean? Were they really transporting a bomb, or did the master simply enjoy making his crewmen sweat, perhaps to impress his new girlfriend?

  Staring into the night sky, the navigation officer prayed for the moment when they would unload the menacing crate. It would happen soon, he’d been told, long before they reached their destination. There would be an open-sea transfer, and finally he would be able to rest.

  As he continued to gaze up at the stars, theNadezhda ’s navigation officer had no way of knowing that he was looking right into the electronic eyes of a fifty-foot-long billion-dollar bird—an American spy satellite flying 120 miles overhead. Called a KH-12, it was a member of the keyhole class of satellites, whose high-resolution electro-optical cameras collected pictures of a swath of the earth’s surface several hundred miles wide, detecting objects as small as four inches in size.

  Nor did the navigation officer have a way of knowing that the KH-12, cruising along its sun-synchronous orbit, would pass over the very same spot the following night and collect images of his ship off-loading its mysterious crate. For no matter how fast she traveled over the course of the next day, no matter what the weather conditions or time of day, theNadezhda ’s open-sea transfer would not escape the satellite’s prying eyes.

  6

  Admir’d I am of those that hate me most.

  —MACHIAVEL,in Marlowe’sThe Jew of Malta

  LONDON—NIGHT, MAY1593

  The twenty-foot canopied barge glided silently along the Thames. The river was quiet. Most of London was sleeping.

  Just ahead, the Tower. Thick, crenellated stone walls. Smooth but for the arrow slits hewn in. How many eyes, the master wondered, were peering out from those ominous black fissures? And could any of them see his face? He lowered his hat.

  Turning abruptly to the left, the barge slid into a narrow waterway in the middle of Tower Wharf, heading for a set of latticed wooden doors. The feared archway known far and wide as Traitors’ Gate.

  The stench was overwhelming. Garbage and sewage floating downriver tended to collect in the moat and remain to rot. Holding his ornately carved silver pomander to his nose, the master breathed in deepl
y, filling his nostrils with the rich scent of cloves.

  In the murky darkness beneath St. Thomas’s Tower, the barge pulled up to a paved road running parallel to the moat. A stout white-haired man was standing on its edge, with six large wooden crates stacked beside him. The old man nodded at the barge’s master, and the master nodded back. While two of the oarsmen used their paddles and lengths of rope to hold their craft steady, the others labored to transfer the heavy crates, arranging them in a single row beneath the barge’s overhead canopy.

  His arms folded across his chest, the master watched with approval. The whole operation—though effectively illuminated by moonlight—was concealed beneath St. Thomas’s Tower. Even if someone wished to report the arrival and departure of his vessel, he would not find it an easy task; it bore no name, and the oarsmen wore no distinctive livery.

  When the transfer was complete, he began to inspect each crate. Prying open the first, he saw a triple-barreled cannon from the time of Henry VIII.A beauty. He ran a finger along the smooth, cold bronze.

  The second crate contained two swivel guns—the kind typically mounted on warships—the third held gunpowder, and the fourth, bullets of lead. Then finally, in the last two, his favorite products from the White Tower’s Royal Armory: wheel-lock pistols made of walnut, brass, and staghorn. The old guns had undoubtedly been imported from Germany years ago; he could make out town marks for Dresden and Nuremberg on the barrels. He picked one up and with a swift pivot pointed it straight into the face of one of his men. The poor bastard nearly lost his dinner.

  Laughing, the master replaced the gun and reached up to shake hands with the white-haired man. “Until next time.”

  At their master’s nod, the oarsmen backed their vessel out into the river, came about, and continued east on their way to Deptford.