Vince Flynn: Protect And Defend

Each time a new surveillance report arrived from the West Coast, Rapp took the time to read it thoroughly and in the context of his options. After a while a pattern began to emerge. Wanting to see things for himself, Rapp traveled to San Diego on a private plane. He arrived after dark and left before sunrise. From the balcony of a rented condo he spent an entire evening watching the marina where Garret kept his boat. That one night confirmed the opening that Rapp had detected in the surveillance reports.

For several months now, Rapp had imagined killing Garret more than a dozen ways, but only two stood up under scrutiny. When they found out about the trip he was planning with the new boat, everything fell into place. Even after he told Rivera that she would take point, Rapp continued to play the two scenarios in his mind. He thought of killing Garret so often that it almost felt like a memory.

Virtually every time he closed his eyes he pictured himself exactly where he was right now-on the aft swim platform of Stu Garret’s yacht. His low profile would rouse no suspicion. Under a clear moonlit sky he would look no different from a rolled-up tarp. On a night like tonight he would be nearly invisible. All that was left to do was wait for Garret.

The janitor pushed the cart down the hallway at a slow pace that appeared to be the result of either an injured left leg or a lack of enthusiasm for his job. He was wearing faded green coveralls with his security badge clipped to the flap of his left breast pocket. His black hair and beard were shot with gray. Over the last year and a half he had swept, scraped, scrubbed, and mopped virtually every room, hallway, and stairwell in the facility. He was respectful to his superiors, upbeat, and in general, well liked by the other people who supported the important scientific work that was being done.

The name on his security badge was Moshen Norwrasteh. He was sixty-six years old. Born and raised in the southeastern Iranian town of Bam, he had lost his wife, two children, and three grandchildren in a devastating earthquake that had killed over 30,000 people in 2003. Norwrasteh had struggled for years to find work after the quake, and then one day a cousin who worked for the Atomic Energy Organization found him a job at the Isfahan Nuclear facility. At first, his coworkers did not accept him. With unemployment rates so high the competition for any job, even janitor, was extremely intense. The locals whom he worked with were resentful of this outsider taking one of their jobs.

Within a month or two, though, he began to win them over. Norwrasteh had the penchant and the desire to fix almost anything-especially if it was powered by electricity. People brought in their phones, radios, toasters, vacuums-anything with a plug and he would fix it. On the weekends and in the evenings he went to people’s houses to help rewire and update their electrical service. He never accepted money, only a warm meal and some much needed companionship to help fill the void left by the death of his entire family.

Norwrasteh had even been to the home of Ardeshir Hassanpour, the famous Iranian scientist who oversaw the country’s uranium enrichment program. Hassanpour had come to his ramshackle shop on the ground level and asked him if he could drop by his house and fix a few things. Norwrasteh said that he would be honored. After installing a ceiling fan and fixing two broken lamps, he received neither an offer of payment nor a simple thank-you. Sitting down for a warm meal, even with the house servants, seemed out of the question. Norwrasteh remembered leaving the house and thinking to himself that he would feel no empathy for the man when the hammer fell. For the others, though, the ones who had shown him compassion and friendship, he would do everything in his power to make sure they made it out of the facility unharmed.

Moshen Norwrasteh’s real name was Adam Shoshan. He had volunteered for this operation three times before the director general of Mossad and the prime minister finally relented. From the very beginning their greatest reservations lay in the fact that Shoshan himself was volunteering for the mission. The man simply knew too much. He was a senior officer, not some fresh recruit who’d been plucked from the Israeli army.

A twenty-seven-year veteran of one of the world’s most feared and respected intelligence agencies, Shoshan was Mossad’s resident expert on all things Persian. He was fluent in both Farsi and Arabic, and, most important, he had spent the first twenty years of his life living in Iran. Born in Tehran, Shoshan was the son of a wealthy diamond merchant who was very influential in the Persian Jewish community. As the Iranian revolution began to gain momentum Shoshan’s father grew increasingly nervous, and in 1979 he sent his wife and children to live in Vienna with relatives. Once things blew over he planned on bringing the family back. Unfortunately, they never did. Five months after sending his family to safety, Shoshan’s father was accused of espionage and sedition and put on trial. The sham of a legal proceeding lasted less than five minutes. He was denied representation and was not allowed to speak on his own behalf. A guilty verdict was handed down and Shoshan’s father was taken out back and shot in the head.

Adam Shoshan was the only surviving male relative. Against the wishes of his mother, he moved to Israel and enlisted in the army right as things were once again heating up in the region. A new group called Hezbollah was on the rise, and the PLO was asserting itself in the occupied territories and beyond. In 1982 he was on the front lines of the invasion into Southern Lebanon. While he was on foot patrol his military career was cut short when a Hezbollah suicide bomber blew himself up in the middle of Shoshan’s platoon. A hot piece of shrapnel sliced through his left leg and damaged his hamstring beyond repair.

He was still in the hospital when Mossad came calling. It turned out they had had their eye on Shoshan practically from the moment he’d enlisted in the Israeli Defense Forces. Hezbollah was on the rise and Israel ’s top spy agency needed people who could analyze and dissect Iran ’s involvement in the Middle East ’s newest terrorist organization. Shoshan did exactly that for the next two decades. He went from Collection to Political Action and finally Special Operations, where he rose to the number two position. He had been involved in the planning and execution of dozens of assassinations and paramilitary operations, and he had helped recruit and run spies from Tehran to Damascus and beyond.

The idea of sending someone to Iran who was well past their physical prime was not taken seriously. At least not at first. Shoshan had not participated in an actual field operation in almost a decade, and at no point had he done long-term undercover work. With few alternatives, though, and Iran inching closer to becoming a nuclear power, Shoshan’s idea started to look less ridiculous. It was bold, yet simple, and the director general slowly began to see the wisdom of the plan. There was one glaring problem, however. If he was discovered the Iranians would torture him, and contrary to the statements of Amnesty International, torture worked. No matter how tough the individual, a skilled interrogation team always got what they wanted. Shoshan would be operating deep behind enemy lines with almost no backup. It was a huge gamble, but Israel had few choices.

Shoshan rounded the corner with his cart out in front of him. His posture was hunched and submissive but beneath his bushy black and gray eyebrows his eyes were alert, scanning the hall ahead. The signal had been given. Fifteen months of living a lie was about to come to an end one way or another in the next twenty-four hours. Shoshan wouldn’t even allow himself to think about his extraction. The mere thought of seeing his beloved Israel again was enough to entice him into abandoning this underground tomb today and to hell with the mission. He’d come too far for that, though. He needed to see this through to the bloody end. Even if it meant his own bloody end.