“Do you know if any of the men is named Farhad Alizadeh?” Crocker asked.
“I didn’t get names, but I believe the men are Iranian,” Hamid answered.
“Let’s go visit the mosque.”
Chapter Twelve
One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.
—Euripides
That night the two SEALs sat alone in the rear of the hotel lobby watching a rebroadcast of the Barcelona-Athletico Madrid soccer game on a big-screen TV. Crocker didn’t follow international soccer, but Akil was a fan. He explained that Barcelona was one of the greatest teams in the history of the sport, led by two of the most talented forwards who had ever played the game, Lionel Messi (an Argentine) and Andrés Iniesta (a Spaniard).
Barcelona had just pulled ahead 2 to 1 when Hamid, wearing a gray hoodie and jeans, waved at them from the front desk. They met him out front as a steady rain started to fall, lowering the temperature and producing a relaxing calm.
“Reminds me of summer showers in northern Virginia,” Akil remarked as they climbed into Hamid’s dark green Ford Explorer.
“DZ is gonna meet us there,” said Hamid as he navigated the SUV through dark, narrow streets.
The rain evoked Crocker’s childhood memories—sitting on the back porch at night listening to the owls, exploring the woods behind his parents’ house, catching fireflies with his brother.
The mosque sat in a high-walled compound in a residential part of town. There were two entrances, front and back.
Hamid volunteered to watch the back, while Crocker and Akil joined DZ, who had arrived in a Volkswagen Jetta that was now parked across the street and down the block from the front gate.
Once Hamid was in position, Akil walked to the blue gate and, standing in a pool of light from the lone streetlamp, rang the bell. A short stooped man with a short white beard and a long dark robe appeared looking like he’d just walked out of the Arabian desert. Akil addressed him in Farsi. The old man nodded, looked left and right along the street, then stepped aside and let him in.
Akil returned twenty minutes later to report that the guesthouse stood at the back left corner of the compound. He had walked by the one-story structure and seen through a window three men smoking cigarettes and drinking tea at a table.
“You recognize any of them?” Crocker asked.
“I only saw the sides of their heads.”
“What did you tell the old man at the gate?” Crocker asked.
“I told him I wanted to pray.”
As they sat in the car waiting for the men to leave or others to arrive, the conversation drifted to James Bond movies.
“Who’s your favorite Bond girl?” Akil asked.
“Ursula Andress in Dr. No,” Crocker said. “I was a kid when I first saw her coming out of the water wearing that white bikini. Suddenly a whole world of fantasies opened up to me.”
“I bet.”
“What about the orange bikini Halle Berry wore?” DZ asked.
“Outstanding as well.”
Crocker watched an old dog with sagging tits cross the street and disappear in the shadows next to the walled mosque. The rain had subsided to a gentle spray when he heard Hamid’s voice over the push-pull radio in DZ’s lap. He said, “Four men have just exited the back gate and are getting into a black Ford Ranger.”
Akil leaned over the back of the front seat and said, “That might be them.”
“What do you think?” Crocker asked Hamid over the radio.
“They have suitcases with them. Looks like they’re leaving.”
“Let’s follow,” Crocker said.
They did, in both vehicles—Hamid and Akil in the Explorer, DZ and Crocker in the Jetta—over the rusting iron International Friendship Bridge to the Brazilian border, where they were stopped by four Brazilian Federal Police officers wearing jeans and bulletproof vests who asked to examine their passports, then waved them in. DZ pointed out that they were in Foz do Iguaçu now, which seemed to be a slightly more upscale version of what they’d seen on the Paraguayan side.
They followed a hundred feet behind the Ford Ranger down a two-lane highway through a field of sugarcane. The half moon hung off kilter to their right, peeking through cumulus clouds.
The rain stopped and the wind picked up, whipping the high cane on both sides of the road. Crocker saw the brake lights on the Ranger light up, then the vehicle take a right past what looked like a little farmhouse.
“Where are they going?” he asked.
DZ shook his head. “I don’t know this area.”
The road narrowed and circled behind long, dilapidated, industrial-looking buildings to an unmanned gate. They lost the Ranger in a grove of mature avocado trees. Hamid’s voice over the radio barked, “Cut your lights!”