Free The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller by Andrew Britton Page A

like ambition in a young man. Just not when I’m telling a story. What happened was, there was a mirror lab. That’s what they called backup facilities, and Berlin was smart enough to have them. The backup to Anklam had been built in Denmark. The Nazis always expected to have to finish the work there. They were close. Real close to getting their bomb. So close that they had already worked out a means of getting the finished product out by U-boat.”
    Sally went silent and regarded the monitor.
    “MI6 picked that up by following the trail from Anklam with a Geiger counter,” Sally went on. “Then, with Kealey as a spotter to ID the sub and its departure, the RAF blew the U-246 all to hell and back. Nothing was ever found of it—not even trace radiation. Of course, after the war no one went looking because the files were still classified.”
    While Mason was absorbing what she’d told him, Sally grinned at the camera.
    “Someone find it?” she asked. “I know, you can’t answer. But—jeez. If that’s the case, I only hope it was someone who doesn’t mean us any harm.”
    “Is there any reason you would say that, apart from the obvious?” Mason asked.
    “Mind you, I don’t know this for a fact—no one alive does. But there were rumors about the device. If I were you I’d skip whatever my next meal is to have a look at the debrief files of Professor Paul Dammann.”
    She spelled it for him. Mason brought the file up. “There are a lot of pages here,” he said. “Can you give me a clue where I should start?”
    “Sure,” she said. “Look up ‘steamer trunk.’ ”

CHAPTER 4
    RABAT, MOROCCO
    R abat is a modern-looking port city that spreads in all directions from the wide, busy Ave Mohammed V. Beyond its towering palm trees, on the northern end of the concourse, is a sprawling bazaar.
    Qassam Pakravesh looked like any other bootleg DVD vendor, his wares spread on a blanket between the mountainous, somewhat haphazard piles of shoes being sold by two other young salesmen. But Pakravesh was neither ordinary nor Moroccan. He was a sarhang sovom of the Seph-e Psdrn-e Enqelb-e Eslmi, a lieutenant colonel in the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. He had only arrived in Rabat the day before and, after exchanging currency, immediately purchased both the goods and the spot of the previous bootlegger. He also gave him enough extra to start a new business in any neighboring town of his choice.
    That was what Pakravesh did. Using passports meticulously counterfeited in Tehran and a business credit card from a Venezuelan energy company, Caracaz Oil, that was co-owned by Iranians, the short, mustachioed man received his assignment in a coded post on a website run by the company, went to the location, took over some public spot where he would be seen and known, and waited for further communications on the website. In the last two months he had been to Thailand, where he planted a bomb in a pro–United States bank, killed the editor of an anti-Islamic newspaper in India, assassinated a terrorist leader in Yemen who used Iranian money to kill a rival al Qaida leader, and purchased the specs on a new pipeline in Azerbaijan—in case it ever had to be destroyed. He had been schooled in over a dozen languages and there were few places in the world where he could not fit in easily.
    The trip to Rabat was unusual because it had been ordered quickly—while he was already en route by rail to Tbilisi, Georgia, from Baku, Azerbaijan. He continued on to Kars, Turkey, at the end of the line and caught a flight to Rabat. Flying from Georgia was never a good idea, what with labor strikes and mechanical breakdowns.
    At nine in the morning, Pakravesh received a text message with a series of numbers. They referred to paragraphs, and words within the paragraphs, on the Caracaz Oil website. Because of where he had been sent, the harbor, the Iranian agent knew that the first letters of those words—G-H-O-R-B-A-N-I—spelled