The Last Assassin

by Daniel Easterman

Genres: Thrillers; Mystery

Synopsis

In an Iranian suburb, seven men meet a macabre and voluntary death. They choose to die rather than be captured and interrogated, leaving only one mysterious clue to their identities and mission. Seven more immediately take their place, to carry out the task of assassinating seven rulers, including the U.S. President. One thing stands in their way, CIA agent Peter Randall.

Release date: December 4, 2014

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

TEHRAN

Saturday, 15 October 1977

It was cold. A small group of men, all dressed against the October weather, all wearing black, stood about in the empty street, stamping their feet, blowing on their hands, glancing now and then to left and right. They were waiting for something or someone. It was already mid-afternoon, and the pale sun would set in half an hour. No one spoke. The street ran in an absolutely straight north-south line through the northern Tehran suburb of Vanak, three blocks from the glass and concrete palace of the Arya-Sheraton Hotel. Beyond, the sprawl of buildings fell away to the underdeveloped north-west of the city, revealing the flanks of the Elburz foothills, covered in ice and snow. There, far from the howling city, all was quiet, all was a shimmer of frost and mountain mist.

The mountains and a distance of barely sixty miles separated the capital from the shores of the Caspian Sea, the Darya-ye Mazandaran. By boat, a few miles further into that vast expanse of water would bring the traveller across an invisible yet singular barrier, the incessantly patrolled border between Iran and the Soviet Union. To the far north-west lay Russian Azerbaijan, to the north-east, Turkmenistan, with all of Central Asia beyond. Bokhara, Samarkand, Tashkent: names from a golden past of blue domes and slender minarets, of lovely miniatures and even lovelier poetry; today the possessions of a limitless, brooding empire that lay with suffocating weight across the entire northern border of Iran and beyond. Tehran looked north across the most uneasy frontier in the world, the soft underbelly of the Russian giant, a sleeping giant who dreamt always of the warm waters of the south, the oil-rich shores of the Persian Gulf.

A black Mercedes, its dark-tinted windows catching the rays of the sinking sun, entered the street from the direction of Yusefabad and glided to a halt beside the waiting group. The door opened and two men stepped out, dressed, like the others, in black. As they left the car, the men on the pavement did not stand to attention or salute, but their bearing changed completely. The first of the car’s occupants was Masood Heshmat, Special Operations Chief of Internal Security and Action, the most important of the nine branches of SAVAK, the Sazman-e Etela’at va Amniyat-e Keshvar, Iran’s dreaded National Information and Security Organization. Heshmat was directly responsible to SAVAK’s deputy director, the head of ISA, Parviz Sabeti, with whom he worked at the Organization’s headquarters in the notorious Comite building in central Tehran.

A restless man of between thirty-five and forty, Heshmat had a well-deserved reputation for ruthlessness in the interrogation of political suspects. There were two types of pre-trial interrogation for such prisoners under the Shah. The first and the more brutal, known as bazju’i, was carried out by SAVAK in order to extract the maximum of information before the suspect was handed over to military tribunal officials for further questioning prior to his trial. Masood Heshmat was an expert in extracting information. Behind the walls of the Comite or Evin prison, his name had come to symbolize pain beyond imagining – and death in a deserted courtyard at midnight.

His companion was an American called Peter Randall, a CIA field agent who had first arrived in Tehran seven years earlier. As he stepped out of the car after Heshmat, Randall shivered momentarily and glanced briefly to the north, at the white spectre of Mount Damavand rising through mist into a darkening sky. One day, he knew, fleets of helicopters would rise murmuring over that peak and MiG fighters would thunder down from the steppes of Central Asia. It was a nightmare that haunted him even in daylight. For seven years now he had lived with Russia as a next-door neighbour, travelling frequently to the border, where he could see it, smell it, all but touch it, a living presence that none of his superiors in Washington could ever hope to understand with such immediacy. He had learnt to cope with that presence, to put it in the back of his mind where it could not interfere with his efficiency or freeze his actions. But he could not forget it. It was, after all, why he was here in the first place.

Heshmat waited for Randall to join him on the pavement before turning to the man in charge of the group, all of whom were SAVAK professionals trained in the techniques of urban counter-insurgency. He knew each of them personally; they had worked together on numerous occasions and he could rely on them.

‘Is everything ready?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir. Are there any fresh instructions?’

‘No; we go in as planned.’

Heshmat turned and looked at Randall. His quick, furtive eyes seemed to scrape across the American.

Beside him, Randall seemed tall and lean, his gaunt, lined features a sharp contrast to Heshmat’s puffy face and soft, pampered body. Randall’s face was thin, almost ascetic, and his light-blue eyes held secrets in the grey shadows at their edges. Heshmat had seen eyes like those before, in the faces of men, religious subversives he had interrogated night after night in cold, silent cells. He could never remember the names, only the eyes. They were the eyes of a man who would not part with his secrets even under the severest torture. It seemed wrong, even obscene to Heshmat that an intelligence agent should have such eyes.

He knew the American hated him, despised him for what he was, and for what he did. Randall had once accompanied him to Evin to assist in the interrogation of a Marxist accused of printing anti-American pamphlets, a twenty-year-old girl student from Pahlavi University in Shiraz. The American had never gone there with him again. Randall was good. At thirty-five, some said he was the best American agent in Iran. But he did what he had to do because he saw it as his duty, not because he liked it. There lay the difference between the two men. Heshmat found pleasure, absolute pleasure in his job, and he carried out his tasks in such a way as to obtain the optimum personal satisfaction from them. Randall, on the other hand, would never kill unless absolutely necessary, and even then never in cold blood. Calmly, efficiently, yes, and often without anger, but not without a certain passion, a sense of pain. He owed that much to someone whose life he was about to take. He avoided the gun as much as possible, and he rejected torture as a method of extracting information. For those, like Heshmat, who carried out such tasks with pleasure, Randall felt only loathing. Heshmat in his turn despised Randall, but he admired his professional skill and he valued him because, in a world made up of deceit and counter-deceit, he thought he could trust him and he knew that, if need arose, he could betray him.

‘Peter,’ Heshmat asked, ‘are there any instructions you want to give before we leave?’

Randall looked at him, then shook his head. Heshmat nodded and spoke quietly into a radio set he carried in his hand. A second Mercedes, identical to the first and, like it, carrying no registration plates, glided out of a side street and rolled towards them. The group split, six men climbing into the second car, four joining Heshmat and Randall in the lead vehicle. At a signal from Heshmat, their driver started the engine and they moved off into gathering darkness. The two cars headed north briefly, then turned east towards the line of three main arteries that connect the wealthy northern suburbs of Tehran with the deep, troubled heart of the city centre. Using side roads, they moved together rapidly through the Ka’usiyye and Da’udiyye developments into Korush-e Kabir, entering the road just south of Qolhak. Here, they turned north again for about a mile before bearing right down Yakhchal, a country lane that was fast becoming part of the concrete maze of the sprawling city. They passed the German church on their right and the Qolhak German school on their left, outposts of a colonial enterprise that had never got off the ground. Following the bend of the road where it became Amir Hekmat, the cars drew in to the side, their tyres crunching the frosted gravel as they slowed and came to a halt.

No one had spoken throughout the short journey. Each man had sat locked in his own world, the coming operation uppermost in every mind. The American had not wanted to come. He was sick of Heshmat and his methods, sick of the sweat-drenched silences that came when he leaned back, his questioning done. But the Iranian had insisted that Randall’s presence was necessary on this operation.

He had called early that morning at the American’s apartment in Kakh Street, tense and excited, his face unusually drawn and nervous, his eyes gleaming with thoughts that Randall had no wish to penetrate. He hadn’t invited him in, hadn’t wanted him there at all, but Heshmat had come in anyway and sat down without being asked.

‘Peter,’ he had begun, his familiarity deliberate, intended to grate on the American. Since coming to Iran, Randall had lost his habit of instant first names, and with people like Heshmat he preferred to keep things strictly professional and impersonal; Heshmat knew it, but he went on as he had begun. ‘Peter, I think we have a lead on the Ibex murders, maybe the Air Force killings of two years ago as well. It’s all come to light in the course of investigations into the attempt on Ashraf in September.’

The American nodded, interested in spite of his dislike for Heshmat. He was referring to the shootings in May 1975 of two US Air Force colonels and in August 1976 of three American civilians who had been working on the installation of the secret Ibex electronic intelligence system in Iran. Ibex had been sold to the Shah for over five hundred million dollars by the Anaheim-based Rockwell Corporation, in theory to provide border security. But the process of installation had begun to reveal serious problems in the system and before long the Shah had started complaining about Pentagon double-dealing. Richard Helms, the US ambassador, washed his hands of the project, so the CIA, which had already been involved in the original deal, found itself trying to sort out the mess. Randall still had unpleasant memories of the string of events that had followed the August 1976 murders. Over a year later, pressure from Washington to find those responsible was still heavy.

‘I don’t see the connection,’ he said, still standing, his position an emphasis of his guest’s rudeness.

On 13 September that year, gunmen had tried to shoot the Shah’s sister, Princess Ashraf, as she was travelling through Juan-les-Pins in the south of France, en route to her villa at Port Gallice. They had killed a woman friend in the car with her and wounded another man, but her driver had rammed their vehicle and enabled them to make an escape.

‘We think the same group may have been responsible for all three attacks,’ replied Heshmat. ‘Yesterday, we received a report about a house in Qolhak that’s being used by a small group of men in their late twenties. None of them mix well with their neighbours, they come and go at strange hours, and all the signs are that it’s a terrorist cell. The man who gave us the report says he heard two of them talking one day in French.’

‘Your man knows French?’

‘A little. Enough. He followed them to a café where they met a third man. He spoke Persian with them. They talked about America, about Washington – the third man had just come from there. Afterwards, this man left and the other two started talking in French again. One asked the other what he thought of Americans; he just said “they die badly”, nothing more, just that. Then they talked about other matters, nothing important.’

‘But they could have been referring to anything. Plenty of Americans have been killed here. Why single out the killings you mention?’

‘Conjecture, nothing more. If they made an attempt on Ashraf, they must be Feda’iyan-e Khalq, and I already think the Feda’iyan were responsible for the other murders.’

‘So why don’t you come again when you’ve got proof of that? I’m sure you’ll find a way of obtaining your evidence. Just don’t ask me to help, that’s all.’

‘I want you to come with me tonight. We’re raiding the house.’

‘That’s a police job.’

‘Of course. And you know how it will end if I leave it to them.’

Randall knew. Police policy was to surround a terrorist hideout, open fire, and shoot it out with those inside. Nine times out of ten, there were no survivors.

‘Why bring me in at this stage? Until you get a confession that they actually were involved in the killing of Americans, this remains a purely internal matter. Come again when you’ve got your evidence.’

Randall was being deliberately obtuse. The CIA had been deeply involved with Iranian intelligence since the late 1940s and had been directly concerned, together with the FBI, in setting up SAVAK under Teymour Bakhtiar in 1957, after which they had provided a permanent US intelligence mission in Iran. Involvement in so-called ‘internal matters’ was standard procedure.

‘I’m being polite.’ The sarcasm in Heshmat’s tone was not lost on Randall. ‘American deaths have been mentioned already. They’re in the report. I want you to be there, in case something goes wrong, in case mistakes are made. I want you to know I tried to take them alive. You have to be there.’

Randall watched his face, saw the excitement, the craving for action bottled up within him, ready to burst forth. He knew it would be released in the fury of the coming raid, to be replaced by a cold, unfeeling calm in the torture rooms of the Comite. But there was more. The American knew from long and bitter experience the complexities of Iran’s military-security web, the labyrinth of machinations and counter-machinations that reflected and intensified the Machiavellian tangles of Iranian life in general. He knew how everyone involved in security and intelligence watched everyone else, how SAVAK and Military Intelligence, the Rokn-e Do, were in constant conflict, how officials of the Special Bureau, the Daftar-e Vizhe, kept an eye on SAVAK, and how, at the centre of the web, the Shah sat like a spider waiting for prey.

The director of SAVAK, General Nematollah Nasiri, was a former military governor of Tehran who had been official security chief since 1965. The Organization’s ISA had been headed until 1972 by another general, Naser Moqaddem, now head of Rokn-e Do. Randall knew that Heshmat had been a long-time favourite of Moqaddem and suspected that he wanted him to become head of SAVAK. He also knew that, within the intricacies of this web-like power struggle, he himself was being used as a lever within the all-powerful CIA organization in Tehran.

The door of the Mercedes opened and Heshmat stepped out on to the pavement. Far out in the blackness, a dog began to howl; the packs of stray dogs that prowled by night on the fringes of human habitation were moving once again. In spite of himself, Randall shivered.

MECCA

1 April 1979

There is a small ramshackle house of three storeys in the Shi’b al-Mawlid quarter in the north-eastern sector of Mecca, a mere fifty yards from the tiny modern library that stands on the site of the dwelling in which Muhammad was born. This is old Mecca, pinched and crowded on the lower slopes of Abu Qubais, the houses tall and narrow, built of rough bricks and mortar, with windows of latticed brick or wooden shutters, from behind which eyes peer, seeing but unseen. Narrow, dirt-paved alleyways thread their uncertain way between the tottering piles of houses, past shadowed doorways and mysterious openings, losing themselves in their own intricacy. Everywhere, there are wild cats roaming in search of food, oblivious of the human life that surrounds them.

It was long past midnight, and the Shi’b al-Mawlid was dark and silent. In a room on the third floor of the house, twelve men slept while a thirteenth kept watch. The sound of regular breathing filled the room, its rising and falling punctuated from time to time by the sound of a dog barking outside. In the silence, the sound of muffled knocking on the door below seemed to echo alarmingly in the room. In an instant, all twelve men were awake, while the guard opened the door and descended the stairs. Whoever was outside did not knock again. He knew that two taps, furtive and pregnant with alarm, were enough to rouse the inhabitants of the house without alerting the neighbourhood. Upstairs in the darkness, guns were passed from hand to hand.

The guard opened the door on to the street, one hand free to fire if danger threatened. A single word was uttered and a muffled figure slipped inside, closing the heavy wooden door behind him. He turned to the guard and spoke in an urgent whisper.

‘Huwa hadir? Is he here?’

‘Yes, upstairs. Follow me.’

Together, the two men climbed the ancient wooden stairs. When they reached the door of the sleeping chamber, the guard called out, reassuring those inside that all was well. An armed man stepped out of the room, checked that it was so, and motioned the new arrival inside. Someone lit an oil lamp, and the room was filled with a pale yellow light that cast weird shadows across the faces of all present. The twelve men who had been sleeping were already dressed in black robes, awake and ready for action.

The man who had knocked at the door below was dressed in National Guard uniform. He was sweating and his eyes betrayed his fear. Motioned to sit, he lowered himself to the ground and, without waiting for permission, spoke in a hurried, anxious voice.

‘Forgive me for this disturbance, but I had to come. Orders have been given to prepare for a raid on this house. They know we are here and they plan to move in an hour’s time. I was able to slip out without being seen, but if they discover I am missing, they may realize what has happened and come here at once. You must leave tonight. It is no longer safe for you in Mecca.’

Seated facing him was the pilgrim who had arrived in the city by way of the desert over a year ago. His name was Muhammad ibn Abd Allah al-Qahtani, a former student at the Faculty of Islamic Law in Mecca. Like many of those who followed him, he was a member of the Otayba, a Bedouin tribe who grazed their sheep and camels in the region between Mecca and Riyadh, the Saudi capital. Two centuries before, the Otayba had ruled in Qatar on the Gulf, but their period of ascendancy had been brief. More recently, they had been used by King Abd al-Aziz in the task of pacifying the vast Arabian Peninsula, but their influence had again declined after the defeat of a rebellion launched within the tribe. Now the ambitions of many young Otaybi men were centred in this one man, Muhammad ibn Abd Allah.

He was in his mid-twenties, lean-bodied, narrow-faced, with a heavy black beard and piercing grey eyes. He carried a presence, that indefinable thing known as charisma. Sociologists say that charisma is not possessed, only brought to someone by his followers; but there are some people who, by their very appearance and manner, seem to disprove this theory. Muhammad ibn Abd Allah was just such a man. When he spoke, his every word and gesture compelled and impressed. He spoke now.

‘Do they know of me? Have they heard that I am here?’

The soldier shook his head.

‘No, they know only of your brother-in-law. Since his arrest last year, their spies have been eager for news of him. But they know nothing of you, my lord; of that I am certain.’

A grim smile crossed the lips of a man by Muhammad ibn Abd Allah’s side. This was his brother-in-law, Juhaiman ibn Saif al-Otaybi, a man of about thirty-nine, who acted as the outward leader of the group. He had been born around 1940 in the Otaybi settlement of Sajir in Qasim, to the north-west of Riyadh, about ten years after the defeat of the puritanical Ikhwan led by Ibn Humaid. The memory of that defeat still lingered in the region, and Juhaiman had grown up in an atmosphere of rebellion against the House of Saud. In his late teens, he had joined the National Guard, in which he became a corporal in a platoon of Otaybi levies stationed at a base in Qasim. Before long, however, he had rejected life in the army as un-Islamic and gone to Medina to study the religious sciences. In 1976, he had gone to Riyadh as the leader of a small band of zealots and had begun to write fundamentalist pamphlets attacking the Saudi clergy and the Royal Family. His activities had attracted the attention of Prince Na’if’s intelligence service, the mubahith, and, in the summer of 1978, he and ninety-eight of his followers were arrested and imprisoned in Riyadh. Since no clear charges could be brought against them, they had been released after six weeks on the condition that they cease their preaching activities.

What no one outside the group knew or suspected was that Juhaiman was not their true leader, that he himself had given his allegiance several years before to his brother-in-law Muhammad, in whom he recognized the Mahdi, the promised Messiah of Islam, who would proclaim his appearance on earth at the beginning of the fifteenth Islamic century. The time set for that appearance was now only months away.

Muhammad ibn Abd Allah nodded and turned towards Juhaiman.

‘It is as we feared. You must leave immediately for al-Hasa as planned. It is a long journey, but there is much for you to do there, and you must return by the autumn. Take Musallim, Hamad, and the son of Sulayman. The rest go with me to Medina. It is time for me to make a hijra, to abandon my home, just as the Prophet was forced to do in his day. Let us not waste time in farewells. We shall meet again when the summer is past.’

Without pausing, Muhammad ibn Abd Allah rose to his feet. The others rose after him, holding back deferentially until he had reached the door and gone out of the room. Arrangements had already been made in anticipation of such a crisis, and now everyone moved quickly. There was no time to lose. Above all else, Muhammad ibn Abd Allah must not fall into the hands of the enemy.

In complete darkness and total silence, the door of the house opened and one by one the group of black-cloaked men slipped into the narrow street. Barefooted, they moved soundlessly westwards through twisting lanes until they reached the large street that runs from Safa to the north of the city. Here, Juhaiman ibn Saif and his three companions came one at a time to embrace Muhammad ibn Abd Allah before vanishing towards the road that would take them north, then east to Arafat, to begin their long journey to the Gulf. The others turned south to skirt the Great Mosque before taking the northern road to the west of the city that leads to Medina. Like the Prophet, Muhammad ibn Abd Allah would find sanctuary in Medina from those who hunted him. And, like him, he would return before long in triumph.

TEHRAN

10 April 1979

The voice of the muezzin calling worshippers to the evening prayer faded with the light. Overhead, the contrail of a north-bound 707 turned lazily about Mount Damavand and passed over the Elburz range and, below, the lights of Tehran began to twinkle on against the falling dusk. On the streets, headlights flashed and the ubiquitous taxis of the city, little orange and white Peykans, lit their fairy-light arrangements at back and front as they darted at full speed in and out of the jostling streams of traffic. The roar of engines and horns and people calling out directions to passing cabs blotted out every other sound, including the gentle chanting of the call to prayer.

A casual visitor, returning to the city after perhaps a year or two, might have noticed little difference simply by scanning one of the crowded main streets in its heart. He might have been puzzled at the vagueness with which people called at taxis, as if they were no longer sure of the street names. Otherwise, all seemed normal. Boulevard Elizabeth, Ferdowsi, Hafez, and Takht-e Jamshid were all filled with cars, buses, people, and petrol fumes just as they had always been. The traffic was as chaotic as ever, the pedestrians as heedless as always of life and limb. But on closer inspection, significant changes became apparent. There were fewer neon lights, many of the smarter shops and restaurants had closed, old night haunts of the nouveaux riches had disappeared, and shop windows carried few of the imported luxury goods of a year before. On the pavements, there were virtually no European or American faces and none of the smartly dressed young Iranian men and women who had aped the styles of Paris and New York not long before. Such women as were about were accompanied by men, and almost all wore the chador, or at least a dark-coloured headscarf. If the visitor had glanced inside the shops and government buildings, he would have seen to his surprise that photographs of Mohammad Reza Shah or the Empress Farah no longer graced the walls. In their place were prints of an old man wearing the turban and beard of a molla.

This was Tehran 1979, the Tehran of Khomeini and his Revolutionary Guards, the Tehran of the Islamic Revolution. In Tajrish and Shemiran, the villas of the wealthy lay stripped and empty. Many had been turned into offices for the committees responsible for the nation’s teeming poor and homes for the reformation of prostitutes.

The revolution had brought fewer changes in the bazaars and alleyways of impoverished south Tehran. There had been no smart shops to smash, no flaunting of luxury, no villas or small palaces, no women in jeans, skirts, or with modern hairstyles. Life continued as before, only perhaps more intense, more open and more hopeful. In the main bazaar, no thunder of traffic drowned the wailing chant of the muezzin calling believers to the Shah Mosque. ‘Ashhadu anna la ilaha illa ’llah . . .’, ‘I bear witness that there is no god but God . . .’ The muezzin’s liquid Persian accent softened and made musical the harsh Arabic words, turned them mellow and pleasing.

Already men were making their way through the great wooden gate that divides the Shah Mosque precincts from the bazaar. At the gate, as always, were the stalls selling tablets and ringstones of agate, inscribed with verses from the Quran and the Traditions, and the men who will make for you a seal carved out of solid brass, writing backwards with a sharp blade, digging into the soft metal, producing an elegant cartouche of your name in a matter of minutes.

As the light faded and electric bulbs flickered into life throughout the maze of alleyways that makes up the vast bazaar, one of the seal-carvers – a young man of about twenty-five – put down his tools and set off into the mosque, as if to join the evening prayer there. Once inside the outer gate, however, he turned right and exited lower down through a smaller gate, opening into a region deeper inside the bazaar. Moving quickly now, he threaded his way through the bazaarchehs, the small secondary streets of the bazaar, passing with evident familiarity by brightly lit stalls selling bales of cloth. Darker shades and heavier stuffs were more in prominence now as the light, gaily patterned chadors gave way to sombre greys, browns, and, above all, blacks. Moving without hesitation in the direction of the street he sought, the young man turned right again into Naw Ruz lane, then made a sharp left turn into Chehel Tan; several hundred metres further, he veered right once more into a dead-end that took him down towards Ghariban alley. He came out into a maze of residential streets, narrow passageways of mud-brick walls and dark wooden doors, walking steadily until he came at last to a doorway set at the foot of three steep steps. Glancing left and right, he raised his hand and knocked once, paused, twice, paused, once. The door opened, he went in, and it shut again. No one heard the greeting exchanged between him and the doorkeeper as he entered.

Passing along a short vestibule in total darkness, the young man came out into a small courtyard across which he could make out a faintly illuminated opening, leading to a flight of worn stone stairs. The house dated from the mid-nineteenth century, little newer than the city itself. The stairs bent sharply three times, ending on a short landing giving on to an open door outside which earlier arrivals had left their shoes neatly arranged in two rows. From inside came the yellow glow of an oil lamp; like many older houses in the bazaar district, this one had not been wired for electricity. Voices could be heard speaking softly. The new arrival bent to unlace and remove his shoes, ducked as he passed through the low doorway, and squinted as his eyes tried to adjust to the light.

On the carpeted floor around the small room were seated seven men, six of them of about his own age, the seventh much older. The young men were all dressed alike in a simple white cotton garment, a kafan or shroud, the symbol of martyrdom that had been worn during the days of the revolution by rows of men and boys that had walked at the head of demonstrating crowds, their lives and their imminent deaths alike dedicated to God.

The older man, with a grey beard and a full moustache, was also dressed entirely in white, in the long robes of a molla; on his head was wound a small green amameh, the turban that the clergy of Iran had worn for centuries and that had so recently become a symbol of revolution around the world. The colour green indicated his descent from the Prophet.

The new arrival placed his right hand across his breast, bowed, and greeted the