The Natanz Directive Read Online Free PDF

mission, and now I was being asked to clean up his mess.
    The drug dealer’s name was Reza Mahvi. I’d known him back when he worked as a captain in a swank restaurant on New York’s Upper East Side and owned a little piece of a crowded honky-tonk bar in the Village. Reza knew half the politicians in D.C. back then, and the senator from Massachusetts was just one of them. Reza had fixed up dozens of congressmen with expensive women and nearly as many with enough pot and blow to keep them high twenty-four hours a day.
    The last time I’d seen the Iranian, I was undercover in New York, and he was bragging about the women he dated as if half of them were movie stars and the other half were United Nations staffers instead of call girls and political wannabes. I remember his making a federal case about the orange Corvette he drove back then, as if he’d plunked down forty grand in cash for the thing instead of digging himself further and further into debt the way all his Iranian buddies did.
    Yeah, I’d known Reza Mahvi well enough. Did I like him? The truth was, liking him or disliking him wasn’t part of the job back then, even though I’d acted like he was my best buddy every time I went into the club. Reza wasn’t a big enough fish or a ballsy enough player to trade heavy in the hard stuff, but he knew the guys who did. Part of my job for the twenty-seven years I’d spent running black ops was to find them.
    Apparently, somewhere along the line, Reza had relocated to Paris and graduated from drugs and women to extortion and blackmail. The senator from Massachusetts had become one of his favorite targets. But now Reza wanted more than the senator’s money: he wanted the kind of information that only the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was privy to. I didn’t know which of them was more stupid or more careless, the guy doing the blackmailing or the guy with the target on his forehead. I had my opinion, but it didn’t mean much under the circumstances.
    When Mr. Elliot said that Reza Mahvi had to disappear, I knew immediately that the order had come from the highest level. No one had to say another word. I understood completely. Reza and his once benign dog-and-pony show had stepped over the line, and the most important mission of my career was in jeopardy. Wasn’t going to happen.
    I didn’t like carrying a gun in a foreign city, especially with a fake passport in my pocket. I didn’t like using MEK sewer rats for my source information. It also wouldn’t have been my first choice to make the hit on a street as busy as the Rue de Pantin, but I didn’t have the luxury of waiting for Reza to take a midnight stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens.
    The Iranian had taken up residence in a seventeenth-century apartment house within spitting distance of the Seine, but just far enough away to keep the rents reasonable. He was on a month-to-month lease. It was 11:30 P.M. when I cruised down the street the first time. I was driving a beat-up Renault that Davy Johansen assured me could not be traced. It was Thursday night, and I had the windows down. The fragrance off the Seine hinted of an early autumn, my favorite time of year in Paris. Too bad I wouldn’t be around long to enjoy it.
    Lights blazed from a dozen or more windows across the face of the complex. I heard music drifting down from a third-floor balcony, and I saw a half-dozen people with wineglasses in their hands. I made two more passes. Then I toured the parking lot out back and found the space reserved for unit 19, Reza Mahvi’s place. Cars filled half the other spaces, and most were newer models owned by twenty- and thirty-year-olds who probably saw themselves as “upwardly mobile.” Too bad Reza had given up his orange Corvette: it would have stood out like a sore thumb and told all his neighbors that an Iranian pimp lived in unit 19. These days he drove a white 1984 Mercedes