the rain, the wind, and the rumbling thunder as the storm passed over D.C. He wasn’t going to grieve for the fucking general of Quds. The man had the blood of hundreds of Americans on his hands, and that of thousands, tens of thousands, of other men, women, and children. Nor did he grieve for those close enough to Rajavi’s inner sanctum of evil to be driving along in a convoy in Iraq, on a mission to sow only more discord.
But he was worried, because he knew this meant a response would be coming at a time and place of Iran’s choosing, and he did not feel like his agency was adequately prepared to deal with it.
FORTY-TWO
The news from Baghdad filled Sultan al-Habsi with beaming pride. As he sat at a desk in the residential quarters at the UAE embassy on Hiroshimastrasse in the center of Berlin, his thoughts were on his plans—those already realized, and those still to come.
He considered calling his father right now but he decided to let the old man sleep a couple more hours. He would be told by his aides at the hospital upon wakening, and he would know for certain that his son had prognosticated this just days earlier.
Sultan, even as operational director of the Signals Intelligence Agency, had made tonight happen; he had personally orchestrated the killing of the man responsible for the deaths of both of his brothers.
His plan had involved using the Americans as proxies. He had no way to kill the most well-protected Iranian himself. His own intelligence outfit was struggling in Yemen; they were hardly capable of finding, fixing, and finishing a target as elusive as the commander of Quds Force in Iran.
But Sultan did have a weapon at his disposal. He was a key and respected informant for American intelligence; they relied on him for his knowledge of the region and its actors, and he could begin tailoring his intelligence product in a way that would, over time, place a large red X on the head of General Rajavi.
And this is exactly what he did.
It took five months, but a Quds Force operative in Baghdad spoke a cryptic code over his phone, a code the SIA had deciphered. The man told a compatriot in Tehran that everything was ready for “the visit,” and then it was simply a matter of tracking the aircraft Rajavi always used to make his international flights on the night mentioned in the code.
Killing Rajavi had always been a possibility for the Americans, but in the past they had been leery of fomenting Shia anger to new heights. But when the Europeans relaxed sanctions, the Iranians killed American soldiers in Syria, and there seemed to be no way to stem the tide of a new Iranian ascendancy. The Americans, after listening to the good counsel of al-Habsi, the CIA’s number one ally in the Middle East, decided a blow needed to be struck at the heart of Iranian military intelligence leadership.
And this they did.
It was all going to plan for Sultan, except for the American, Gentry, who had somehow appeared in Venezuela, and then again today here in Berlin. Al-Habsi had no idea what his knowledge was about all this, nor what his relationship was to all this.
Hades had lost another member of his team today attempting to take the former paramilitary operations officer down, and this noise and attention on the periphery of al-Habsi’s operation was now a clear and present danger to the entire scheme.
Al-Habsi had PowerSlave operating, searching for the American, and he hoped like hell he could both (a) get another hit on the man’s whereabouts, and (b) get Hades and his remaining operators there in time to eliminate him.
Otherwise, there was no telling how much trouble the Gray Man might cause.
He successfully pushed this one wrinkle out of his mind, and he thought about his ultimate objective.
He wanted war between the great superpower of America and the evil Shia regime in Iran.
And this would happen only after the next stage of his plan was initiated.
Al-Habsi felt betrayed by the Americans and the Europeans. The Americans talked a good game, diplomatically they pressured Iran to some degree, and they spent a lot of money spying on Iran’s nuclear program, but getting the president to green-light this necessary targeted assassination had been like pulling teeth, and he knew Washington had no plans to escalate pressure on the Shias.
And the Europeans made no pretense but that they were all but allied