Chapter Twenty-Five · Adam's Robe Book 1

Sistan and Baluchestan Province, Iran — Present Day

Katz had known Tariq Bhatti for eleven years, had used him twice, been used by him at least once that he was aware of and probably more that he wasn't, and had never, in all that time, needed to decide whether he trusted the man in any sense that mattered — because he had never before needed Bhatti for something he could not afford to be wrong about.

He needed him now. Seven days remained before whatever happened at Yekta happened, and the honest, unglamorous truth of it was that none of them — not Mossad, not Langley, not any asset Katz had built across four decades of patient relationship-work — had a clean way to put four people inside a wartime Iran that wasn't already watching every airport, every legitimate crossing, every name on every manifest with the specific paranoia of a regime that had just discovered someone was counting its shipments. Bhatti had offered the one thing none of the rest of them could produce: a route across the Baluchestan border that his own service had run assets through for three decades, quiet enough that a four-person team moving light, at night, with local guides he vouched for personally, could be inside Iranian territory by morning and moving north toward the Alborz range before anyone official had reason to look for them.

"I want to be honest with you, Ronen, because I think you'd respect that more than reassurance," Bhatti had said, on the call that arranged it, forty-eight hours ago. "I am doing this because an un-strikeable Iran with nothing left to lose and an unfinished nuclear program is a considerably worse neighbor for Pakistan than the war we currently have, and because I would like, when this is finished, to be a man your service still returns calls from. Both of those are true. Neither of them is friendship. I want you to go in understanding exactly which kind of help this is."

He had believed him. That was the part Katz kept returning to, walking the last kilometer of scrub and broken shale toward the crossing point in the specific bruised dark that came an hour before a desert moonrise, boots finding the trail by feel because a light here was a death sentence for considerably more than the four of them. He had believed him the way he'd believed a hundred assets across forty years, weighing motive against history against the specific texture of a man's voice on a specific call, and he had been wrong often enough in that time to know the weighing was never as scientific as he liked to pretend it was to Leah.

Leah walked point-adjacent beside him, moving with the careful, deliberate quiet of someone who had never done this before and was doing it anyway because there was no version of this operation that worked without the one person alive who could read what they were walking toward. Cho had the rear, comms slung tight against her body, murmuring position checks in a voice pitched to carry four meters and not a centimeter further. The fourth member of their party — a Sayeret veteran named Doron, the same officer who had run the failed intercept under the callsign Heron three weeks ago and had volunteered for this without being asked twice — moved point, reading the ground the way Katz remembered reading it himself, decades ago, before his knees and his service both decided his talents were better spent behind a desk.

The guides Bhatti's people had arranged met them exactly where the map said they would, exactly on schedule, two men who spoke almost nothing and moved like they'd walked this stretch of border a thousand times, and for the first forty minutes across the line Katz allowed himself something dangerously close to relief.

The ambush came at the wadi crossing, the one chokepoint on the entire route where four people were forced into single file between rock walls high enough to blot out what little moonrise had started to offer, and it came with a precision that told Katz everything he needed to know about it in the half-second before the first shot, because men waiting in exactly the right place, at exactly the right hour, for a route this obscure, were not men who had gotten lucky.

Doron went down first, and went down fast, the specific economical violence of trained shooters rather than a border patrol's panicked overreaction, and Katz's whole body was already moving before his mind finished the thought his body had apparently reached first — pulling Leah down behind the wadi's near wall, Cho already returning fire in short, disciplined bursts that bought them perhaps eleven seconds of the kind of confusion that was the only currency any of them had left to spend.

It was not, in the end, a fight they won. It was a fight they survived, which was a different and considerably smaller thing — Cho's return fire and the guides' own sudden, desperate flight up the wadi's north wall buying just enough chaos for Katz to get Leah moving, low and fast, back the way they'd come, while behind them the specific sounds of a professional team finishing what it had come to finish told him, with total and unwanted certainty, that Doron was not coming back out of that wadi with them.

They ran until the desert swallowed the sound of it, and then they kept moving another twenty minutes past that, because stopping felt, for a long time, like a decision none of them trusted themselves to make correctly.

They regrouped in a dry culvert a kilometer short of the border they'd just failed to cross, and it was Cho, checking the radio traffic she'd captured in the eleven seconds of the ambush's opening exchange, who said the thing none of them had wanted to be the first to say.

"They weren't speaking Farsi," she said, quietly, replaying eleven seconds of intercepted chatter through a single earpiece she passed, in turn, to each of them. "They were speaking Urdu."

Katz took the earpiece last, and listened to eleven seconds of a language he understood well enough to know exactly what it meant that men positioned inside Iranian territory, waiting at the one chokepoint on a route only three people alive were supposed to know the shape of, were coordinating in Bhatti's own service's working language rather than the host country's.

He had believed him. He sat with that, in the dark, for exactly as long as it took to stop being useful to keep sitting with it, and then he did the only thing forty years of this work had ever actually taught him to do with a betrayal too large to feel all at once — he folded it down small enough to carry, and kept moving.

"He didn't need to sell us to Nassiri directly," Katz said, finally, to Leah and Cho both, in the flat voice he used for things that cost him considerably more than the voice let on. "He only needed to sell the route. Whether that was a debt he owed someone in Tehran, or a hedge he'd already placed before he ever called me, or simply the oldest lesson in this profession — that a man who trades in everyone's interests eventually trades in yours — I don't yet know, and I find, four days from the deadline we have left, that I no longer have the luxury of caring which."

"Doron," Leah said, very quietly.

"Doron knew exactly what kind of work this was when he volunteered for it a second time." Katz said it gently, and meant every word of the gentleness, and still heard, underneath it, the same flat arithmetic he'd watched Nassiri apply to every loss in this war since Karimi's first warehouse handoff, and hated, distantly, how easily it came to him now. "We are not going to have the space to grieve him properly until this is finished. I am sorry for that. I am considerably more sorry that I am the reason we're four people short of a route into that country instead of a working plan."

Cho was already pulling up the map on a screen dimmed low enough not to bleed light past the culvert's lip, already recalculating, already doing the only thing any of them still knew how to do with seven days and one border crossing burned. "There's a second route," she said. "Longer, rougher, and it costs us most of a day we don't have to spare. But it's one Bhatti never knew about, because I never told him about it, because some very small, very tired part of me apparently stopped fully trusting him about eleven days before the rest of both of you did."

"Then that's the route," Katz said, and stood, and did not look back down the wadi they'd left Doron in, because there was no version of tonight that survived him looking.