Killer Instinct - James Patterson Page 0,80

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 …

CHAPTER 101

SADIRA WALKED me through it all. Her recruitment. How she seduced a member of the Iranian government and stole files from him revealing the work of Darvish and the other nuclear physicist she tracked down in London. Even the origin of her fake last name, which she used to become a US citizen. Yavari’s had been an ice cream shop in Tehran that her father used to take her to as a child.

The Iranian government had tried to leverage her presumed rage against Israel and the West, and she had them convinced they’d pulled it off. But she had her own motive. A deeply personal one. In the name of her father, Sadira had become a one-woman army to