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“But I need to get dressed. I don’t even have shoes. We—”
Fortunately, his daughter was still small enough to hold in one arm, and he clamped his free hand around his wife’s bicep. The apprehension on her face turned to fear when she felt the force of his grip.
“Kamal, you—”
“Silence!” he whispered as he dragged her toward the stairs.
Light from the courtyard filtered through the windows, providing enough illumination to navigate through the furniture arranged in the entryway. Kennedy had warned them in time. They were going to make it.
The door was suddenly thrown open with enough force to nearly rip it from its hinges. Safavi’s wife screamed as three men ran into their home, shouting in Persian.
A forearm hit him in the face and he held his daughter tight, trying to protect her as he was slammed to the floor.
“No!” he shouted as she was torn away from him.
His wife continued to scream and he turned his face toward her as his hands were secured behind his back. “Don’t hurt her! She doesn’t know anything!”
The man didn’t listen, grinding a knee into her back as she was bound with flex cuffs. Their driver appeared at the end of the hallway but stopped short when he recognized the intruders as being from the embassy’s security team.
Ava was wailing now, her shrieks echoing eerily through the house. Safavi couldn’t breathe with the weight of the man on top of him, but he barely noticed. His wife was sobbing, still having no idea what was happening. He had done this. He was responsible for the terror his wife and child felt.
An arm snaked around Safavi’s neck and he felt himself being dragged backward. Their maid appeared and ran instinctively toward the man holding Ava, but was hit in the side of the head with a pistol butt. She collapsed to the floor and went completely still.
The arm cutting off his air tightened as they exited into a light London rain. Only then did the man holding him speak. “The ayatollah is looking forward to seeing you and your family, Kamal.”
CHAPTER 38
LONDON
ENGLAND
PULL over.”
The traffic was almost nonexistent on the dark London high street. To his right, Rapp could see a narrow alleyway swirling with the blue flash of a police cruiser’s lights.
“Here?” the cabbie said. “But the address you gave me is another six blocks.”
Rapp had decided to take a taxi instead of getting someone from the CIA to pick him up at the airstrip. His goal was to slip in and out of Britain with as little fanfare as possible. The Istanbul operation was still bringing down a fair amount of heat, and the EU’s intelligence community was starting to suspect him in the death of an Islamic -propagandist in Spain two months earlier. Entirely true, but proper protocols hadn’t been followed, so Kennedy was doing everything she could to shift the blame to the Mossad. Its director owed her and he seemed amenable to taking responsibility.
Rapp retrieved a fifty-pound note and held it out for the driver. “I’ll walk the rest of the way.”
The vehicle rolled to a stop near the sidewalk and Rapp got out without looking back. The dark overcoat he’d found on the plane was enough to keep the rain off, but not enough to hold back the damp cold. He flipped up the collar, partially for warmth, but mostly because London was the most videotaped city in the world. Constant adjustments to the angle of his head kept his face in shadow as he moved across the cobblestones.
The uneven surface ended at a street that ran through a posh neighborhood lined with turn-of-the-century buildings. Normally, it would have been quiet at such a late hour, but that night almost every light was on and he could see people standing at their windows looking down into a crowded street.
Rapp turned toward a set of yellow barriers blocking off the area in front of an especially impressive stone building. There were twenty or so civilians talking among themselves near the police line, and he kept his distance, skirting the far edge of the rain-soaked barricade.
“Sir!” a cop shouted, starting toward him with a nightstick in his hand. “This is a restricted area.”
“Shut up.”
The man paused for a moment, confused by Rapp’s reaction, but then started running at him. He got within five yards before one of the two men Rapp was striding toward waved him off.
“Charlie,” Rapp said, keeping his hands in his jacket pockets as he stopped in front of a man wearing an impeccable Burberry trench coat and bowler. Charles Plimpton was one of MI6’s top men, and he reveled in his role as a British spy. When he’d started out, he’d been vaguely competent, but now political aspirations had set in. Apparently, his wife was the second cousin to King Arthur’s maid or something. She felt entitled to a higher station in life.
“I wish I could say that it’s good to see you, Mitch. But whenever you arrive in my country, disaster follows.”
The other man was Ken Barrett, the CIA’s London station chief. He had the more appropriately disheveled look of a man woken in the middle of the night: wrinkled jeans, a hooded parka, and waterproof boots.
