Ennis was going to clam up, but instead he took a long swig of his wine and said, “So, the guy who was killed today. Kamran Iravani. We found him a few months ago. We were tailing the leader of one of the Quds Force cells here in town. That was this Mirza joker. Anyway, our cyber team got to work on him, but we didn’t find anything incriminating. Mirza had come from Iran as a sleeper a few years ago. He’d fought in Libya and Yemen and God knows where else; his Quds credentials are legit. But his cell here appears dormant. Our working theory was that he came, recruited his guys, and then they all got jobs at a trucking firm. They liked their lives here in Germany too much to start running around blowing shit up like any self-respecting terrorist would. Mirza’s pissed about it; he’s a true believer, but he’s still here, so we wonder if he’s slowly acclimating to life in the West himself.”
Zoya countered, “Just because you don’t pick up incriminating evidence on phone chatter doesn’t mean they are inactive. They can use burners, Ric.”
“Of course they can. We’re inside their burners.”
“Really?”
Ennis smiled. “You didn’t hear that from me. Anyway, even with ears on them, we haven’t picked up anything.” He shrugged a little. “All this work against Iran . . . Honestly, I don’t get the point.”
“What do you mean?”
“No way Quds would act in Europe right now. The EU has thrown Iran a lifeline by lessening sanctions. Tehran’s not going to fuck that up by blowing up a bus in Berlin.”
“What was Iravani’s connection to Quds Force?”
“Kamran Iravani had no connection to Quds Force. In fact, he played for the other team. He was MeK. You know who they are, right?”
Zoya found the question patronizing. “Of course, I do. Mujahedin-e Khalq. They want to overthrow the government in Tehran.”
“Yeah. They’re the opposite of Quds Force, if you like. Iranians, but anti-regime. Anyway, we were surveilling Mirza and didn’t find what we were looking for, but we realized someone else had installed another back door into his computer and phone. It took our cyber team a few days, but they tracked it back to a server at Humboldt University, and that led us to Iravani. We put a physical team on him. He’s straight-up MeK, goes to meetings and all that. He has associations with known People’s Mujahedin leadership in exile. He was also a hacker. Nothing too sophisticated, mostly off-the-shelf attacks. The guy is basically just a cyberpunk, but he was watching everything Mirza’s cell was doing. He’d cracked into some of their phones, too. No longer; they change out their burners every couple of months.” He added, “And, yeah, Iravani’s dead, so there’s that.”
“How many operatives does Mirza have?”
“We’ve ID’d ten. But, like I said, they all seem to be just regular working stiffs here in the capital.”
Zoya thought this over. “So the only reason you were watching the anti-regime activist Iravani was to find the pro-regime people he was uncovering?”
Ennis nodded, chewed his lobster a moment, and sipped his white wine. He then said, “I guess so. Our client tells us what to do. We don’t always know why.”
Ennis gave her a wink now. “I wouldn’t worry too much about Iran. We’ll be off them in a few days.”
Zoya nodded at this. “You told me when you hired me, the contract with this client was almost complete.”
He nodded. “The client is about to go to the Germans with enough intel to get these bastards pulled into an American black site. The goal is to implicate the Iranians in some sort of impending terrorist act, something bad enough for the entire EU to put the sanctions squeeze back on.”
Zoya thought of something he’d mentioned on the phone earlier. “You said we pulled coverage of Iravani before he was killed. Why?”
“Because we realized we weren’t the only ones on his ass. BfV had a physical and cyber tail on him. They had his shitty apartment miked up, just like we did. We aren’t supposed to be watching foreign nationals in Berlin, so we left our equipment in place and backed away before the federal intelligence service here found out what we were doing. Kind of like what you did with Sasani today.”
“Do you think Shrike was exposed to BfV?”
The waiter appeared and poured more wine, and Zoya could tell Ennis was using the opportunity to weigh his options for answering. When they