Джеймс Паттерсон - Killer Instinct

Of course, the same was true with me.

A minute later, she reappeared. She was standing in the doorway of her closet, wearing a plush white robe and seemingly nothing else. Gone was her Halo necklace.

“Take your clothes off,” she said.

Only there was nothing sexy about it. There wasn’t even a smile. At least, I’m pretty sure there wasn’t.

I was too busy staring at the gun pointed at me.

Chapter 99

“I’M DEAD serious,” she said, tightening the grip on a Russian-made Makarov with a suppressor attached. “Strip.”

She’d hidden the gun in her closet. Now she wanted to make sure I wasn’t hiding one as well.

“What the hell’s going on?” I asked.

Nothing more, apparently, until I started undressing. Sadira just stood there with the gun aimed at my chest.

Okay, we’ll do it your way. For now…

I removed my sport coat, tossing it on the bed behind me before motioning to my ribs. Look, see? No holster.

Next came my dress shirt. I intentionally fumbled with the buttons.

“Faster,” she said.

I ignored her. “I know who you are. I know who you’ve killed,” I said. “And I’m not the only one who knows.”

“You think you have me all figured out, huh?”

“What more is there to tell?”

“Maybe nothing,” she said. “You’re right, I’ve killed before. I’ll kill again if I have to.” She jabbed the gun toward my shirt. “Faster!”

I stopped fumbling with the buttons. The shirt was off within seconds. Look, see? I’m not wearing a wire…

My belt came next, followed by my pants. Or so it appeared. The zipper came down only halfway. Ever so slightly I shifted my feet, widening my stance.

This had to look natural. The pants had to fall just right.

“That was a nice necklace you had on tonight,” I said. “How did you get your hands on Halo?”

She smirked. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Not a clue, right?”

“Nope.”

“What about my phone?” I asked.

“Your phone?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The one sending a live feed to the van parked outside across the street.”

That’s all it took. I motioned to her dresser and my phone propped up against a jewelry box, the camera lens angled directly on her. Never mind that the camera wasn’t even turned on or, for that matter, no surveillance van was parked across the street. All I needed was a moment’s distraction.

The second her eyes locked on my phone, I let go of my pants. As fast as gravity, I lunged down to my Glock strapped to the side of my right calf. By the time she was looking back at me again, we were now both staring down the wrong end of a gun.

“I don’t know about you,” I said, “but this is some pretty funky foreplay.”

Chapter 100

“DROP IT!” she said.

“That’s not how this works. We either both lower the gun or we don’t.”

“Great, you first.”

She clearly had limited exposure to Mexican standoffs. “Why do you want to kill me?” I asked.

“I don’t,” she said.

“All evidence to the contrary.”

“I just wanted to make sure.”

“Of what?”

“That you weren’t going to kill me,” she said.

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you don’t know the truth.”

“You mean, now that I have a gun pointed at you? That’s when you want to tell me the truth?”

Sadira glanced at my phone propped up against her jewelry box. “That’s not really recording, is it?”

“Nope.”

All the same, she sidestepped over and dropped my phone in her top drawer. Not once did she take her eyes off me.

“Yes, I killed the MIT professor,” she said. “Jahan Darvish.”

“That’s not bad for starters,” I said. “Well, actually it was pretty bad for him. And the way you did it, too. Very kinky but very clever. What else you got for me?”

Sadira squinted, trying to read between the lines. “There was another nuclear physicist. Also an Iranian,” she said.

“What about the third one?”

I was baiting her for intel I didn’t have. She didn’t bite, though. Or, more likely, she was actually telling the truth.

“There is no third one,” she said. “Only those two. And both for the same reason. If you lower your gun, I’ll explain.”

“Again, not how it works,” I said. “Ladies first.”

“On one condition. You need to believe I don’t want to kill you.”

I suddenly did believe that. Still, I couldn’t afford to be wrong. “I’ve never wanted to kill anyone, Sadira. But that hasn’t stopped me when it was necessary.”

“Me neither,” she said. And with that, she knelt and placed her gun on the floor.

I met her halfway. I lowered my arm. But I wasn’t quite ready to let go of my gun. “Okay, I’m listening,” I said.

“Darvish? The other nuclear physicist in London? They weren’t double agents.”

“Who said they were?”

“MI6, for one. Your former employer, for another.”

“How would you know that about me?” I asked. Except I already had more than a hunch.

“Ask me first about Darvish,” she said. “What he was really doing.”

“In other words, the reason why you killed him.”

If she could explain that, I didn’t need to ask about MI6’s informant in London.

“Darvish was doing what my father wouldn’t do,” she said. “Develop Iran’s first nuclear weapon.”

“Who’s your father?”

“You mean, who was my father. Farukh Rostami.”

Okay, that I didn’t see coming.

Rostami had once been Iran’s top nuclear physicist. “You’re kidding me,” I said.

“Do I look like I’m kidding? When my father refused the Shah, the Shah had him killed.”

“It wasn’t the Shah,” I said. “It was the Mossad. The Israelis only claimed it was the Iranian government so they could deny it.”

“No. The Israelis were telling the truth,” she said. “It wasn’t the Mossad.”

It’s not every day that an Iranian takes sides with Israel. In fact, it’s barely any day. “How do you know?” I asked.

“Because my father warned me.”

“He could’ve been wrong. The Israelis were convinced he was leading the Iranian nuclear program. They desperately wanted him dead.”

“Not as desperately as his own government,” she said. “That so-called evidence Iran presented at the UN, the pictures that implicated the Israelis? They were fake.”

“Back to my original question,” I said. “How do you know?”

“The same way I know that Darvish was feeding the CIA bad information while working ever closer to developing the bomb. His allegiance was always to his homeland.” She paused. “Just like mine would appear to be.”

It wasn’t just the pause. It was the words and the way she said them. Just like mine would appear to be.

Sadira Yavari was telling me that she was a double agent of her own. Quite literally. She answered to Iranian intelligence, but she was working on her own, for her own reasons.

“For how long?” I asked. How long had she been working against her own government?

“Since they first came to me after my father’s murder to convince me it was the Mossad,” she said. “Exactly as my father warned me they would. He said the counterintelligence arm would then try to recruit me.”

“And as far as they know, they succeeded.”

“Exactly,” she said. “I’m an Iranian spy.”

Only she wasn’t. Sadira Yavari was an Iranian spy who had gone rogue. Seriously, dangerously, altruistically, full-on Machiavellianly rogue.

I knew there was more to her than met the eye…