“How the hell can someone leave here without being seen?” he unloaded on the teen-ager working the front desk.
Kim came sprinting when she heard the shouting. “Shay! What’s going on?”
“Your boyfriend….where is he? How can he just disappear without anyone seeing him leave?”
“Shay, you are not making
sense. Are you saying Christian left? He would have
had to go out the front door. The only other exit is through the
women’s locker room---and why the hell does it matter?!”
Shay spun and charged toward the ladies’ locker room without another word.
Luckily, the locker room was
empty---until Kim crashed through the door and demanded to know what
was going on. Shay had barely begun to explain his suspicions
about Christian when Kim damn near tossed a clot. “Are you
out of your freakin’ mind! Every damn time I get serious about
someone you find a way to blow it up. Get out!
Get out of the locker room right now! Get out of my face,
you complete ass! God, I hate you when you are like this.
Stay away from my boyfriend and stay out of my life!” ________________________________
Christian stayed below the speed
limit as he wound his way south from San Francisco to Palo
Alto. His actions in leaving the club were instinctive—the
result of years of training. But now his emotions were
overwhelming that training. The sense of loss that he felt was almost
overwhelming. He couldn’t lose Kim. No way. He
needed to complete his mission before the extraction—if he left at
all. There must be a way to salvage things with Kim.
As for Sadegh Zahedi, the
Undersecretary, there was no time left to get to him.
Instead, he would go straight after the nuclear scientists Zahedi was
co-opting. Arya Sharifi was the key to undermining Zahedi’s
efforts. Sharifi’s parents had left Iran in 1979 as the Shah was
retired by the revolution. Arya was a brilliant child
and enrolled in the nuclear engineering program at Michigan State at
the age of 17.
Though his parents were loyal to
the Shah, Arya rebelled as a youth and was more closely aligned with
the Mullahs who now ran the country. Shortly after
accepting a research position at Stanford’s National Linear
Accelerator, he was recruited by VEVAK, the Iranian Intelligence
Service, to spy for his mother country. He had proven to be an
invaluable asset for Iran within the mile-long building that ran among
the western hills of Palo Alto. He had funneled substantial
information through Zahedi, his handler. He wanted to
return to Michigan State to work with the rare isotope accelerator
currently under construction on the East Lansing campus. Zahedi,
however, wanted Arya and another colleague to return to Tehran and work
directly on the Iranian nuclear program.
Mossad had been tracking Sadegh and
Sharifi for the past year and amassed considerable evidence of their
duplicity. Over the previous months, Christian had
befriended the younger scientist. Realizing that he no
longer had time to turn Sadegh, he was now focused on Sharifi. ________________________________
Kim stormed out of the ladies’
locker room and Shay raced out the back door into the alley. He
spent several minutes searching for someone who might have seen a naked
man, to no avail.
Retreating back into the women’s
locker room, he startled a half-naked lady changing for her
workout. At the sight of Shay barging in through the back
door, the woman screamed bloody murder…and kept screaming. Shay
ran from the locker room and ran headlong into two male members, club
members that is, who grabbed Shay and roughly threw him to the ground.
“You’ve got this all wrong. I’m a cop. I’m Kim’s brother! Get off me.”
“I don’t care who you say you are, you freakin’ pervert. Tell it to the cops when they get here.”
Shay laid his head back on the
floor, closed his eyes, and wondered if this day could get any
worse. Taking a deep breath, he tried to rationalize with the men
who had him pinned to the floor. Eventually they and the
now towel-wrapped woman accepted that it was an unfortunate
occurrence. Since he agreed to leave immediately, they let Shay
up off the ground. Shay beat feet out the front door as
quickly as he could. In his embarrassment, he forgot
Christian’s bag was still in the men’s locker
room. ________________________________
Kim pulled her car over and parked
in an empty spot on the Embarcadero. She was too upset to
keep driving. And she needed to figure out where to
go. She was not going back to Shay’s apartment.
The thought of her brother and what he had said brought the tears
again. She needed to find Christian.
Christian’s phone went unanswered,
and Kim pleaded into voicemail for him to call her.
She needed him---the weight of Shay’s accusations, the impending test
results, and her boyfriend’s strange exit from the club were just too
much for her to handle. As the emotion bubbled to the surface,
she tried to shake it off. She would stay positive and stay
in control. She cursed her brother, cursed the
dreaded disease which threatened her life, and cursed into Christian’s
voice mail when he didn’t answer his phone again.
A few minutes later, when she felt she was more under control, she decided to return to the club. “Shay better be gone when I get back.” _______________________________
As was his habit, Sharifi stopped
at Starbucks after work. Sitting outside in the warm winter
sun, he sipped his latte and smiled as he read the new Sports
Illustrated. He was absorbed in the story of his Spartan’s epic
victory over Stanford in the Rose Bowl, and never noticed the
well-dressed man slip into the chair opposite him.
“Congratulations on the game,
Arya,” Christian/Zacharia said to the startled man. “You must be
having fun talking trash to your colleagues at Stanford.”
“Ah, Zacharia, it’s good to see
you. Yes, I have enjoyed having my Spartans stick it to
these entitled rich kids. 24-20, fantastic game.”
The quiet young man eyed his friend
curiously. “What brings you to Palo Alto on such a beautiful
day? You’re certainly not here to talk about
football.”
“Finish your latte, Arya. We need to find a more private place to talk. I have some things to show you.” ________________________________
When Kim returned to the club, the
chaos that Shay had stirred up was beginning to calm down.
Nonetheless, she got an earful from the girl in the towel and her
favorite male members. She searched the club to make sure that
Christian really was not there, and found his bag in the men’s locker
room.
“Why would he leave his wallet and
keys here,” she muttered as her sense of dread continued to
rise. “Oh, Chris! Please let me know you are alright.”
Kim tried Christian’s phone once
more, and swore when it went into voicemail. “Christian,
Kim. Look, I don’t know what happened, but I am really
worried. I have your gear, wallet, keys. I’ll keep
them with me. Please let me know you are ok. I love
you---more than you know. Let me help you! Whatever you do,
don’t go back to Shay’s!”
