The Last Run Read Free

conceived less than a week before he was murdered in Saudi Arabia.
    Lying in the mud at the base of the climbing wall, pelted with rain and soaked with sweat, Chace came back into herself, her head still ringing. Atop the wall, Minder Two, Nicky Poole, was shouting down at her, asking if she was all right. Chris Lankford, Minder Three, was already on his way down, and the drill sergeant who oversaw the obstacle course was sprinting towards her, telling her not to move for God’s sake, carrying his first-aid kit.
    Chace closed her eyes. She saw again what had been so obvious, so clear to her, as she’d fallen. It wasn’t simply that she’d missed the handhold. It was that her left arm hadn’t been able to fully extend to reach it, locking suddenly with the memory of the pain a man in Uzbekistan had caused her almost three years before. Things had gone wrong in Uzbekistan, and she’d ended up in a basement room at the Ministry of the Interior, where she’d been stripped, beaten, tortured, and nearly raped.
    Now the pain was gone, only exhaustion remaining, and that, too, was being replaced by something else, the sense of a burden being lifted; the flooding relaxation that follows when a struggle has reached its end.
    Three times a year, Paul Crocker sent the Minders back to the School for a refresher course. Three times a year, the Minders would spend two days going over what they already knew, acquainting themselves with new techniques and equipment. Three times a year, they would recertify in weapons and hand-to-hand, in cars and explosives and all other manner of tradecraft. Three times a year, they would run the obstacle course, crawling beneath barbed wire through mud and climbing the wall.
    She couldn’t count the number of times she’d run the course as a recruit. As a Minder, this had been her twenty-ninth.
    This was the first time she had ever fallen.
    With a smile, Tara Chace resolved that it would never happen again.

CHAPTER ONE
IRAN—TEHRAN, MINISTRY OF INTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY (MOIS)
29 NOVEMBER 1803 HOURS (GMT +3.30)
    If it went wrong , it would cost Youness Shirazi his life; and the ways in which it could go wrong were too numerous to count.
    He was alone, for the first time all day, standing at the window and looking past his partial reflection down at Sepah Street, at the Foreign Aliens Office opposite his own. On this side of the city, at this hour, Tehran’s traffic was thin, but still the Foreign Aliens Office was bustling, just as it had been ever since the unrest had begun so many months ago.
    The plan, Shirazi reassured himself, was a good one, certainly the best that he could manage given the current climate, the present moment. Pressure had been building from on-high for months to deliver something, anything that could be presented as a decisive victory; anything that would hurt the enemies of the Revolution, and serve as a propaganda coup, besides. The Americans, the French, the Israelis, or the British—an embarrassment to any of them would do, and as the Americans had little-to-nothing by way of assets on the ground, as the French had been almost thoroughly neutralized in Iran, and as the Israelis were hiding deep in their holes, it only made sense that the British should be the target.
    On the street below, he noted the arrival of the black SUV. Farzan Zahabzeh would be inside, along with their old prisoner. Not that old, Shirazi corrected himself, because if their guest, in his late-fifties, was to be called old, Shirazi himself would be closer to the designation than he cared to admit. He turned from the window, catching his reflection, stopped, gazing at himself. Forty-four, balding, beard and mustache neatly trimmed, his spectacles failing to hide the heavy bags beneath his eyes. He’d managed three hours of sleep last night, up from the hour he’d been averaging the week prior. Insomnia, he reflected, was part of the job.
    But it wasn’t insomnia that had been keeping him up