Greg Rucka: The last run

"I think you may be overstating things a bit."

"Hyperbole for the sake of rhetoric."

"I thought you wanted my job."

"I thought I did, too." Chace grinned at him. "Then I did it."

"You did it very well, by all accounts."

"I'm not a vulture, Boss, I'm not going to sit on a branch and wait for your time to come to an end. Nicky's more than ready to run the Section, and Lankford's learned all that we can teach him."

She went silent, watching as Crocker frowned at her from across his cluttered desk. Now that the deed was done, Chace was all the more certain it was the right thing for her to do. She had expected a twinge of regret, had been afraid of taking the step, but there was no anxiety in her at all, just the same certainty that had come to her at the base of the climbing wall, the knowledge that this was right.

She was done, and from Crocker's expression, she knew he saw it, too.

"I'll need you to stay on as Head of Section until I can find a new Minder Three," Crocker said, finally. "Once that's done, I'll move you to Mission Planning, promote Lankford and Poole in order. Will that work for you?"

"More than fair. I'm not looking to leave you holding the bag, Boss."

"No, I know you're not."

He checked his watch, pushed himself up from his chair, and Chace took the cue, got to her feet, as well. "You've informed Nicky and Chris?"

"I wanted to talk to you first," Chace said.

"I'll have to tell the DC and C."

"Of course."

Crocker glanced back at his desk, grabbed two of the red folders waiting there, then saw the copy of the signal from Tehran and took that, too, handing it back to Chace. "Keep me posted on this. If Jakarta's got an agent on walkabout, I want to know."

"Will do."

He appraised her for a moment, and Chace thought he looked uncharacteristically sad, his many years revealed, with all the ghosts that haunted them, a number of them ghosts they shared. Men like Brian Butler and Edward Kittering and Tom Wallace, all of them Minders at one point or another, all of them taken before their time.

"You had a good run, Tara," Crocker said.

She thought about Tamsin, how she would ask about her Da, who he was, what had happened to him. It had been less than a year ago that Chace had finally explained to her daughter that his name was Tom, and that he had died before she was born. The inevitable question: how did he die?

Chace had lied, she'd had to. She'd said nothing about Saudi Arabia, or the Wadi as-Sirhan, or how SIS had been willing to sell her life for a political convenience. She'd lied. She'd told Tamsin they would talk about it when she was older, and that all she needed to know is that Tom would have loved her every bit as much as Tara herself did, that Tom Wallace had been a good man, an honorable, brave, and honest man, and that Tara loved him still.

"I finished the race, at least," Chace said to Crocker.

One of the problems Shirazi was now dealing with, certainly, was one of his own making, though he had fought against it at the time. The order to arrest the ten British Embassy workers at the beginning of November had come from on-high-not via the President's office, but rather from the National Security Council, the members of which had all been appointed by the Supreme Leader himself. Such was government in Iran; there was a public face, as embodied by the Office of the President, and then there was the real power, hidden deep and out of sight, controlled by the Supreme Leader and his handpicked cadre of supporters.

Shirazi's place in VEVAK put him deep within the second camp, but his role was as a subordinate, and it had not been an order he could refuse. He'd tried, anyway, fighting to secure a meeting with one of the Council members, where he explained why the idea was, to him, such a bad one.

They all knew how this would end, Shirazi said. It would end with the release of all who are arrested, and the declaration that they are all now persona non grata. It would be for show, nothing more, and the British would have to replace the embassy staff they had lost, and Shirazi and his people would be back where they had started, once again trying to determine who of the new arrivals worked for SIS and who didn't.

We know their people at the embassy, Shirazi said. We have already identified them. We will lose time, time that SIS will capitalize on to strengthen their network.

His argument fell on deaf ears. There were other things afoot, he was told, in particular the Kurdish Hezbollah operations in the north of Iraq, not to mention the situation in Basra, as well as a purchase of heavy weapons from China, all of which required shifting the West's attention for the moment. It had been decided that this was the best way to manage it. Certainly, Shirazi would have no difficulty in identifying any replacements SIS sent into Tehran. Or was he telling them otherwise?

So the British had been arrested, amongst them the man Terry Ricks, who Shirazi had months ago identified as the main player for SIS on the ground. Ricks had been very good, had made things difficult for them, never obvious in what he did, never revealing when or if he knew he was being watched. Some days, the follow teams would have no difficulty at all in keeping eyes on him; others, Ricks would seem to shake his watchers by dint of nothing more than good fortune. It was frustrating, even agonizing, but he was, at least, a known quantity. Shirazi was certain that, with patience and time, the man's secrets would be revealed. They would learn the identity of his agents, they would uncover the extent of the British network, and then they would strike, shutting the whole thing down and putting SIS, once more, out of business in Iran.

As Shirazi had foreseen, Ricks was PNG'ed following his release, and over the next weeks the replacements for the depleted embassy staff had trickled into Iran. At least one of them, if not more, was working for SIS and was Ricks' replacement. But who the man was Shirazi did not know, and he hated that. Not simply that there were spies in his country, on his ground, in his face, but that he knew it and yet had not identified them.

Surveillance had been placed on the new arrivals, but all of them, thus far, seemed to be exactly who they claimed. It would be another month before their routines could be firmly established, mid-January, at least, before he would be able to look at the reports the teams had compiled and try to determine which of the staff wasn't exactly as he appeared. It was, once again, a situation that demanded patience.

But knowing who the British had in Tehran would have made managing the situation with the dead drop in the Park-e Shahr so much easier. Shirazi was in his office on Monday morning, looking at the very surveillance reports in question, when Zahabzeh called from the apartment in Karaj, just west of Tehran, where he and another four trusted men were keeping Hossein out of sight. Zahabzeh's absence from the office had yet to be noticed, and even if it had been, Shirazi knew it would be assumed that he was on assignment, which, in fact, he was. The call, consequently, angered Shirazi; his orders had been for Zahabzeh to wait for contact, not to initiate contact himself, and he found the younger man's impatience annoying.

"What?" Shirazi demanded.

"He's getting anxious," Zahabzeh said. "We hadn't heard from you."

"I don't care if he's wetting himself in fear. This is why you called?"

"We hadn't heard from you. Can you meet me? Taleqani? By the museum?"

"Two hours," Shirazi said. Zahabzeh was waiting for him near what had once been the U.S. Embassy, gazing at one of the many political murals that decorated both sides of the street in the neighborhood. This one was of the Statue of Liberty, her face a skull, standing against a background of the American flag. Further along there was another mural, similar in theme, depicting both the United States and Israel as devils, the Big and Little Satans, attempting to shackle the freedom-loving people of Iran. In case anyone missed the point, there was another section of wall, white letters on baby blue, written in English. DEATH TO U.S.A.