Chapter Twenty-Six · Adam's Robe Book 1

Alborz Range, Iran — Present Day

The name Katz gave the man who met them with a covered truck outside Zahedan was one Cho had never heard him use before, in two months of watching him work through names the way other people worked through keys on a ring, and she understood, watching the two of them embrace like brothers rather than shake hands like assets, that this was a relationship considerably older than the operation currently spending it.

"Thirty-one years," Katz said afterward, once they were moving, three of them folded into a cargo space built for produce crates rather than people, jolting north on roads that got progressively worse the further they left the border behind. "I met him when he was smuggling Torah scrolls out of Shiraz for a community that no longer entirely exists. I told myself, at the time, that I was keeping the relationship warm in case it was ever useful. I have spent thirty-one years telling myself a great many working relationships were simply being kept warm." He didn't finish the thought, and Cho didn't ask him to. She had learned, over the last four days, exactly how much a man could carry without wanting help carrying it.

They crossed most of the length of Iran in the belly of that truck and two others like it, swapped at prearranged points Katz navigated from memory rather than any device that could be searched at a checkpoint, and reached the foothills below the Alborz range on the evening of the sixth day, with — by Cho's own increasingly anxious count — considerably less than forty-eight hours left before whatever was scheduled to happen at Yekta happened.

They found the hide site an hour before full dark, a shelf of broken rock two hundred meters above the compound's northern perimeter, screened by scrub pine thick enough to hold shadow and thin enough to let Cho's borrowed optics through, and she spent the first ten minutes simply looking, because looking was the only part of tradecraft nobody could teach faster than it actually took.

Yekta sat in a shallow bowl of mountainside, a footprint considerably larger than the training garrison it had once been, ringed by a perimeter fence still raw enough in places to show fresh-turned earth beneath it — new construction, recent, exactly matching the five weeks of unusual traffic her own analysts had flagged and never fully explained. A central hall dominated the compound's middle ground, its roofline reinforced with the specific flat, deliberate ugliness of concrete poured to survive something considerably worse than weather. Generator noise carried up the slope in a low, constant register she felt in her teeth more than heard. Floodlights marked three sides of the perimeter in overlapping cones; the fourth side, the northern stretch nearest their position, ran dark for a forty-meter gap where a construction crew's equipment still sat parked for the night, work lights off, the section of fence beside it unfinished, strung but not yet live.

"There," Leah said quietly, following the line of Cho's optics without needing to be shown. "The gap in the fence."

"The gap in the fence is the gap every serious security plan leaves on purpose," Cho said, "because it's the one place a man watching monitors expects trouble to come from, which means it's the one stretch getting the most foot patrols per hour rather than the least." She'd already been timing them for six minutes, two guards moving the northern perimeter on a loop that brought them past the unfinished section, paused, moved on, roughly every eleven minutes — long enough for a careful team to move, not long enough for a careless one. "It's also the only gap we have. We work the loop, not the fence."

They worked the loop for forty more minutes, Cho counting patrol intervals against her watch until the pattern stopped feeling like a guess and started feeling like a fact she'd be willing to move on, and when the two guards passed the unfinished section for the fourth time and continued on into the dark beyond it, she gave Katz the small, flat nod that had become, over four days of working without Doron, the only signal any of them still needed.

They moved fast and low across open ground that offered nothing to hide behind except the compound's own construction debris, through the gap where the fence's tension wire had been strung but never charged, past parked equipment that smelled of diesel and cold metal, and into the deeper shadow of an unfinished storage structure forty meters inside the perimeter before the patrol's eleven-minute loop brought the two guards back around.

Cho's pulse was doing something she chose not to examine closely as she pressed her back against raw concrete block and listened to boots pass eight meters away, unhurried, entirely unaware that three people they had no reason to be looking for were now standing inside a compound built specifically to make that impossible. She had run field exercises. She had never, before four days ago, run anything where the exercise's failure mode was real.

"This is the part where you tell me it gets easier," she murmured, once the boots had faded, to Katz rather than to the dark in general.

"It doesn't get easier." He said it without unkindness, checking a sightline toward the central hall with the specific unhurried patience of a man who had done this, or something enough like it, more times than he generally admitted to. "It gets more familiar, which people confuse with easier for exactly long enough to get themselves killed believing it. You are doing precisely what you should be doing right now, which is being afraid and moving anyway. That's the whole skill. There isn't a more advanced version waiting for you further in."

They moved again between patrols, storage structure to generator shed to the base of a scaffold still wrapped around one corner of the central hall's unfinished east wing, and it was Leah, pressed low beside a stack of rebar with a stillness Cho hadn't expected from her, who found them their actual vantage point — a gap in the scaffold's plywood sheeting, thirty meters from the central hall's main doors, offering a sightline into a floodlit staging area where a dozen men in IRGC uniform were still, even at this hour, walking a security perimeter around a wide, empty dais.

"That's it," Leah breathed, barely a sound at all. "That's where it happens."

Cho followed her sightline and understood, looking at the dais and the careful, deliberate empty space around it, exactly why four hundred place settings had never once seemed like an exaggeration. Somewhere beyond the reinforced doors behind it, she was almost certain now, was the object itself, already delivered, already waiting out the last of its own long journey in a building built specifically to make sure nothing and no one interrupted what happened to it next.

"Two days," Katz said quietly, settling in beside them both, already reaching for the optics Cho passed him without being asked. "We hold here. We watch. And we find out, before either of those two days runs out, whether there's still a version of this where we walk out of that building with it instead of simply watching it happen to someone else."