The Ares Decision Read online

  “Injury and exhaustion are probably the number one killers,” she equivocated.

  “But barring that?” he said.

  “I… I think blood loss is the obvious answer, but I haven’t looked directly into it. I’m not a neurologist.”

  “Ah,” he said, gesturing toward the man directly to his right. “Fortunately for us, Yousef here is.”

  Dr. Yousef Zarin was the only person on her team that she hadn’t been able to fit into the categories she’d developed. The men she now thought of as the softies were generally clean shaven and round faced—academics and research scientists who appeared to have been plucked from their cushy university jobs by Omidi right before she arrived. Many seemed as frightened as she was and were prone to dropping things if you walked up behind them too quietly.

  The second category was the believers. They were men with wiry builds and full beards who had less intellectual horsepower than their softy counterparts. They, too, seemed to fear Omidi, but more in the sense of being awestruck by him. When he talked about the rise of Iranian power and the decline of the West, they tended to get a faraway stare that recalled Soviet paintings of farmers.

  Then there was Zarin. He was wiry and wore a rather grand beard, putting himself firmly in the category of believer. On the other hand, he was quite brilliant and, when he thought no one was looking, seemed worried. Clearly softy traits. The final test—his reaction to Omidi—was impossibly enigmatic. He seemed almost dismissive of the man.

  “I’d be interested to hear what Dr. Zarin’s found,” Sarie said.

  He nodded, fixing dark, controlled eyes on her. “I believe that the victims’ blood loss is exaggerated by their profuse sweating and constant motion. Dr. van Keuren is correct that injury or exhaustion is the most likely cause of death, but if we ignore those factors, it will be damage to autonomic brain functions, and not blood loss, that kills them.”

  Sarie realized that her polite smile had been frozen long enough that it was probably starting to look painted on. She tried to relax, but inside she was cursing like her father used to when one of the cows knocked down a fence. If Zarin had already figured that out, what else did he know? What else had he told Omidi?

  “And the issue of making it transportable?” a believer whose name she couldn’t remember said. “Faster onset makes using a human host even more difficult.”

  “I don’t think it should be much of an issue,” Sarie responded. “I’ve never found a parasite that couldn’t be transported with much more primitive equipment than you have access to. But trying to work out a way to do that now isn’t a good use of our time. There’s no telling what sympathetic changes will occur when we start the selective-breeding process, so any transportation procedure we come up with now may not work later.”

  In truth, the likelihood of the modifications they were talking about having any effect on transportability was about zero. But the longer she could keep them from being able to deliver their weapon, the more time she had to carry out her plan to sabotage it.

  71

  Western Iran

  December 3—1051 Hours GMT+3:30

  SEPEHR MOURADIPOUR PEERED THROUGH his scope at the line of men partially obscured by blowing snow. The shallow draw they were traveling along was nearly flat, and the easier terrain had, as anticipated, allowed their formation to tighten.

  He was wearing a white hooded jumpsuit and was partially buried, lying on an inflatable mattress to keep him insulated from the cold. Even his face was streaked with greasy white paint, breaking up its outline and transforming it into just another exposed area of earth and rock.

  The group he was tracking appeared to consist primarily of his own countrymen—followers of Farrokh, according to his information. Traitors and atheists. It would be a pleasure to kill them, but that was just an unplanned bonus.

  He finally found the men he was being paid to take out near the middle of the column. Both were wearing light gray Western ski clothing, the one in front broad shouldered and dark complected, with black hair poking out from beneath a wool hat. His companion was thinner and had fair skin burned red behind ski goggles.

  Mouradipour pressed a button on the side of his rifle, sending a signal that the targets were two hundred meters out. An LED built into his sunglasses flashed seven times in response. His men were ready.

  It took a little longer than expected for the column to cover the distance, but speed was notoriously hard to predict in this kind of terrain and he was confident that his team would make any necessary adjustments without his involvement. He demanded nothing less than perfect discipline from his men and had dug many graves for those who didn’t live up to that standard. The group he was working with now had completed nine missions of this type without a single material error.

  Mouradipour waited until the middle of the column was even with a cliff band that he was using for perspective, then sent out three clicks in quick succession.

  It was over almost before it started.

  His men burst from their buried positions and snipers appeared along the ridge across from him. A few of Farrokh’s men made awkward grabs for their weapons, but most were hung on packs out of reach or were incompatible with the bulky gloves they seemed to favor. In less than five seconds, everyone in the column was on their knees with hands laced on top of their heads.

  Mouradipour snowshoed down the slope and approached the first of the Westerners, ripping his hat off and comparing his face to the photo he’d burned into his memory. The coloring was right, as were the high cheekbones, but the eyes were not the intense blue he’d been expecting. A trick of light? Contacts?

  When he dragged the broad goggles off the second man’s face, Mouradipour was horrified to find the unlined skin of someone in his early thirties.

  “Trap!” he screamed in Persian, clawing for the rifle on his shoulder.

  The intermittent crack of controlled gunfire sounded and his men began crumpling around him. Their prisoners, who had seemed so awkward and exhausted a moment before, dove to the icy ground so as not to block their hidden compatriots’ line of fire and pulled weapons from beneath their jackets.

  Mouradipour had barely managed to get a hand around his rifle when his feet were swept from under him. Before he’d even landed, a thin strand of wire was looped over his head, cutting through the insulated collar of his jumpsuit and tightening around his neck. Every move he made now caused the icy metal to dig a little deeper.

  A lone skier became visible down canyon, moving stiffly through his dead and dying men. The outline was inexplicable—strangely curvaceous and willowy despite heavy clothing. He squinted upward, his confusion growing when the figure stopped in front of him and pushed back a thick hood, revealing the short blond hair and perfect skin of a young woman.

  “Make your phone call,” Randi Russell said, gritting her teeth and adjusting her rifle into a slightly less excruciating position on her shoulder.

  The flight from America crammed into the cargo hold of a C-141B Starlifter, the clandestine crossing of the Iranian border, and nineteen hours tracking these bastards hadn’t done much for her mood.

  Fred Klein had been so enamored with the body armor he’d provided her—waxing rhapsodic about how the genetically modified silk was four times stronger than Kevlar and how it tipped the scales at only ninety-eight pounds including the fake blood packs duct-taped to it.

  In the end, though, her reluctance to stand in front of an Afghan assassin’s bullet wearing something made of the same thing as her lingerie had been entirely justified. The bruise across her back was almost a foot in diameter and radiated over her spine in roughly the color scheme of a Miami sunset.

  “Phone?” Mouradipour said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Randi retrieved a bottle of ibuprofen and shook five into her mouth, swallowing hard before speaking again. “You don’t want to screw with me today, Sepehr. I swear you don’t.”

  He didn’t answer immediatel
y, instead watching the bodies of his men sink into snow melted by the heat of their blood. “And what if I agree to make your call?”

  “Then we’re going to hold you long enough to make sure you didn’t do anything stupid like use some sort of code word to indicate you’d been caught. Then, if everything works out, we’ll let you go.”

  “What assurances do I have?”

  “How’s this: I assure you that if you don’t get on that damn phone in the next five seconds, I’m going to have my friend here cut your head off.”

  The wire around his neck tightened, and after a brief hesitation, he reached slowly for his pocket.

  Randi took a step back and squinted into the distance. All the maps, satellite photos, and coordinates Mouradipour had been working with were elaborate fakes—carefully altered to hide the fact that Jon and Peter were actually a hundred miles to the north. That is, if they hadn’t frozen to death, run into an Iranian border patrol, or been shot in the back of the head by the notoriously unpredictable Farrokh.

  She pulled out her own sat phone and sent Covert-One a notification that Mouradipour’s call was about to go through so they could begin tracking it. Unknown to Klein, Charles Mayfield would be doing the same thing at CIA headquarters—a little independent verification to help her sleep at night.

  Randi turned and skied slowly away, feeling the anger building inside her but also an unfamiliar sense of despair that wasn’t as easy to deal with. Only when the voices of her men had been swallowed up by the wind did she stop and reflect on how much she’d hoped to find nothing out here but snow. How much she’d wanted Klein to be wrong.

  But there was no way to nurse that illusion anymore. In her gut, she knew that call was going to go exactly where he said it would: to a man whose orders she’d risked her life countless times to carry out. To a man she’d respected and admired.

  To Lawrence Drake.

  72

  Western Iran

  December 3—1503 Hours GMT+3:30

  THEY WERE NEARLY ON top of it, but the village was still virtually invisible. Cone-shaped rock formations jutted a hundred feet in the air, many with windows and doors built into them. The more modern buildings looked a thousand years old—crooked one-room dwellings constructed of stone blocks and surrounded by ancient fences designed to corral livestock.

  They skied in from the east, Smith taking a route too steep for the Iranians, most of whom had given up all pretense of guarding him. His momentum took him to the base of a packed-down track that acted as Main Street, and he skated along it. Faces appeared in icy windows and then just as quickly disappeared at the realization that he was a stranger.

  He felt a poke in the small of his back and turned to see that it had come from the man who’d led their seemingly endless expedition through the mountains. They stopped near a set of rough-hewn steps and removed their skis before climbing up to a door that led directly into the cliff. The man went through a complex series of knocks, and a moment later he was being embraced by a bear of a man carrying an AK-47.

  The sensation of heat against his skin was incredibly seductive, and Smith stepped inside, crossing a mishmash of traditional rugs to the fireplace.

  “Is Farrokh here?” he said, pulling off his gloves and holding his hands to the flames. The journey had taken three days—far longer than he’d anticipated—and there was no telling what progress Omidi was making with weaponizing the parasite. Or if he was even bothering. By now, it was possible that he’d smuggled a victim over the U.S. border and the infection had wiped out half the population.

  “Have something to eat.”

  A beautiful young woman in a head scarf appeared a moment later with a plate of Middle Eastern meze and two steaming cups of tea.

  “Look, I don’t have any more time to screw around. I want to see Farrokh. Now.”

  The Iranian took off his outer clothing and flopped onto a pile of colorful pillows by the fire. “Farrokh is a busy man.”

  Without his hat and sunglasses, he looked quite a bit younger than Smith had originally estimated. His eyes reflected not only unusual intelligence, but also a calm sense of power and confidence. Not a man you’d waste on an errand like the one he’d just performed.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” Smith said, silently cursing his own stupidity. “You’re Farrokh.”

  His only reaction was to point to the pillows next to him. “Please, Dr. Smith. It’s been a long journey. Rest.”

  He did as he was told, pulling off his ski clothes and trying to keep his impatience in check. The pace in this part of the world was different, and trying to fight millennia of cultural norms was going to get him nowhere.

  “Our organization must be diffuse so that it will live on if any individual dies. But, to answer your question, yes. I am the one they call Farrokh.”

  Despite his best effort to play the diplomat, Smith couldn’t hide his anger. “Then what the hell have we been doing? I was told you’d been briefed on what’s happening.”

  “Rash action is never advisable,” Farrokh said. “And taking the measure of a man who wants to be my ally is never a waste of time. In fact, it’s why I’m still alive.”

  When Smith spoke again, he’d managed to calm down a bit. “What’s the verdict?”

  “You appear to be a man who should be taken seriously.”

  “So you trust me now?”

  Farrokh laughed and reached for one of the cups of tea, offering it to Smith. “I can count the number of people I trust on one hand, and I don’t anticipate needing an additional finger because of our acquaintanceship.”

  “But you believe that the parasite exists and that your government has it.”

  “Yes, though I fail to see why this is my problem.”

  Despite his attempt at nonchalance, it was clear that he knew exactly why it was his problem.

  “I understand that you don’t much like the U.S., but you have to admit that we’ve been leaving you and your country alone. Do you think that’ll continue if Omidi succeeds in releasing a biological weapon inside our borders?”

  Farrokh shrugged. “America is directly or indirectly responsible for millions of Iranians dead, the reign of a brutal dictator, and frankly the repressive and backward Islamic system we live under now. Perhaps this is simply a balancing of the scales.”

  “No,” Smith said. “You’re smarter than that. It doesn’t matter how many Americans you kill; there will still be one of us left to push a button. And then there won’t be an Iran for you to liberalize.”

  Farrokh nodded thoughtfully. “The ayatollah has become senile and Omidi is insane. They believe that God has delivered this weapon to them and that he will guide their hand as they use it to destroy the enemies of Islam.”

  “I’m not sure it’s going to work out that way.”

  “No. I have come to understand that God rarely takes sides in such matters. The righteous and innocent are as likely—perhaps more likely—to suffer as the wicked. To rely on his intervention is the height of arrogance and stupidity. America has both the power and the will to butcher anyone who shows even mild defiance.”

  Smith tried to shut out the quiet tick of the ancient clock on the wall. It seemed to get louder and louder as their pointless geopolitical debate dragged on.

  “America is a massive stabilizing force in the world, and you know it as well as I do. How many countries with our military and economic power would have shown the same restraint? What would your country do with our arsenal? Hell, what would the Germans do with it?”

  Farrokh sipped his tea for a few moments before taking a step away from philosophy and toward something more concrete. “Do you know where Dr. van Keuren has been taken?”

  “No. Our intelligence-gathering capabilities inside Iran are pretty much a joke.”

  “Ah, so this is to be left up to me too?”

  “It’s your country, and I’m guessing you keep up with these kinds of things.”

  Another shrug. “I hear whi
spers.”

  The words were enigmatic, but the tone wasn’t. Farrokh’s network had undoubtedly been digging into this from the moment Klein’s people first contacted him.

  “Where? Where is she?”

  Farrokh browsed the food on the tray between them, crinkling his nose and finally smearing something unidentifiable on a piece of flatbread. “There has been recent activity at an abandoned research facility in the central part of the country. Also, a number of academics have been called away on government business and have been out of touch with their families ever since. The timing seems more than coincidental.”

  “How heavily protected is it?”

  “It’s underground and the entrance is well guarded.”

  “I don’t know if I can get us air support, but I can sure as hell try.”

  Farrokh frowned and lay back in the pillows. “Do you really think I would coordinate a foreign attack on my own country? I am a reformer, not a traitor.”

  “But—”

  The Iranian held up a hand, and a moment later the man who had let them in appeared in the doorway. This time he looked less cheerful and his weapon was no longer safely shouldered.

  “Teymore here will take you to your quarters. I hope we have an opportunity to speak again soon.”

  73

  Central Iran

  December 3—1912 Hours GMT+3:30

  SARIE VAN KEUREN GUIDED the scalpel carefully as she cut a cross section from the brain on the table in front of her. Its small size made it more difficult to work with, but she was grateful she’d been able to convince Omidi that working with animals would be more productive. The glassed-in room bordering her lab was now full of a bizarre variety of caged monkeys—some lab animals but others appearing to have been snatched from zoos and private owners.

  Each individual cage was covered with cloth draping, something she’d accurately said was necessary to prevent them from dying of injuries sustained trying to get to the people on the other side of the glass. The real reason, though, wasn’t to keep them from seeing her new colleagues, but to keep them from seeing each other—a subtle distinction easily missed by Omidi and his scientific lapdogs.