by Vince Flynn
That was the reason they gave for demanding more and more of his time, but Ashani knew the real reason. It was classic politics. The writing was on the wall, and the leaders were looking to hedge their bets. There was now a consensus that the Americans or their surrogates would attack. A couple of well-placed bombs could bring billions in investments and talent to a catastrophic halt. Unemployment was over twenty percent, and close to half of the country was at or below the poverty line. All of this while sitting on massive reserves of natural gas, oil, and coal. They were in the third decade of their vaunted Islamic revolution and the people were faring no better than they had under the shah. This nuclear gambit was in danger of bankrupting the government, and if Ashani knew anything about the religious zealots, it was that not a single one of them would accept blame. They were now lobbying for his support. Those who had championed the development of nuclear weapons were now telling him that they had always held reservations.
The second reason Ashani had been asked to make the trip was sitting next to him. Very few people made Ashani anxious, but Imad Mukhtar was one of them. The Lebanese-born terrorist was the most ruthless man he had ever met. Cold, calculating, and full of hatred, there was nothing he wouldn’t do for the cause. One of Ashani’s least favorite aspects of his job was dealing with Mukhtar, but there was no avoiding it. As the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon the man had become a crucial part of the broader Iranian strategy.
The third man in the meeting was Ali Farahani. He was in charge of security at the Isfahan nuclear facility, and he did not like visitors from Tehran. Especially these two. Farahani leaned back and put his feet up on the metal desk. He took a long pull from his cigarette and announced, “The Americans do not have the balls to attack us.”
Ashani had subtly warned the Supreme Security Council that Farahani was not up to the job of running security at the nation’s most important facility. His family was very well connected, and as was often the case in Iran, nepotism had played a significant role in his posting. Ashani turned to the master terrorist beside him to see how he would handle the brash confidence of a fleshy bureaucrat.
Mukhtar’s already narrow eyes grew more so, as he studied the silly man across from him. He leaned back and said, “So you don’t think they will attack?”
“No.” Farahani shook his head and scratched his heavy black beard. “They have been mauled in Iraq, a divided country half our size. They do not want to pick a fight with the rising Persian Crescent.”
“And the Jews?”
“Let them come. The new S-300 anti-aircraft missiles from Russia are in place. The Jews will not get within a hundred kilometers of this place.”
Mukhtar glanced sideways at Ashani, who gave him nothing but a blank expression. Turning back to Farahani, Mukhtar said, “I trust those Russian missiles as much as I trust you.”
Farahani paused and then in a reasonable voice asked, “Why do you insult me?”
“Your security doesn’t impress me. I saw half a dozen lapses on my way in, and I haven’t even started my surprise inspection.”
“Inspection?” asked a shocked Farahani as he pulled his feet off his desk. “No one said anything about an inspection.”
“That is why it is a surprise, you imbecile!” Mukhtar stood so fast his chair shot backwards, scraping across the concrete floor.
A nervous Farahani stood as well and after a moment regained enough composure to say, “Under whose authority?”
“The Supreme Council’s,” Mukhtar snapped.
Farahani looked to the head of Intelligence and Security for confirmation. His own brother sat on the council! How could it be that he had failed to inform him?
Ashani nodded and said, “Our friend from Hezbollah specializes in unconventional warfare. He is here to see how vulnerable you are to things other than aerial bombing…”
“A ground assault?” The head of security sounded incredulous. “Impossible.”
Mukhtar started for the door. “We shall see.”
Ashani looked at his watch and kept his disdain for the two men in check. This was going to be a very tedious day.
3
PUERTO GOLFITO, COSTA RICA
The half-mile swim out to the boat took just under twelve minutes. Rapp could have done it in less time, but he was more interested in stealth than speed. He circled around to the bow, only his head above water. A dim light glowed from two of the portholes. The others were all dark. Under the cloudy night sky he was nearly impossible to see. Rapp took off his mask, snorkel, and fins. One by one he stuffed them into his swim bag and tied the bag just beneath the watermark to the anchor line. He then swung around the starboard side, close to the vessel, listening for any hint that Garret or his wife might be up and moving about. When he reached the stern he stopped and peered around the corner to check the swim platform. It was large, fifteen feet across and six feet deep. More importantly, its teak deck was empty.
Rapp had spent a lot of time in and around water over the last fifteen years. In terms of clandestine operations it offered many advantages, stealth being chief among them, but there was one big drawback. Noise traveled great distances and with great clarity on a relatively still night like this. Now, as Rapp listened, the only sound he heard was water lapping up against the sides of the boats and the occasional clanging of a line against the mast of one of the sailboats anchored in the harbor.
He slowly pulled himself out of the water until his upper body was resting on the teak platform. The boat was big enough that he didn’t need to worry about rocking it as he climbed onboard. His chief concern was that some insomniac stargazer on a nearby boat might catch a glimpse of him. He listened intently for several minutes and kept his eye on a sailboat and cruiser anchored several hundred feet closer to shore. Satisfied that no one was watching, he eased himself entirely onto the platform. Staying on his stomach, he rested his head on his forearms and remained motionless.
Rapp had played this one over and over in his mind’s eye for months. He’d envisioned a variety of scenarios where Garret might meet his death—some more satisfying than others. The efficient practitioner in him wanted to play this one safe. Take no risks. Hit him before he even knew what was happening and get it over with. But there was another part of him that desperately wanted to see the fear in Garret’s eyes. The man was a disgusting narcissist who hadn’t lost a wink of sleep over the innocent people he’d had a hand in killing, and the many more who were physically disfigured and emotionally scarred from the blast. Simply putting him out of his misery would be letting him off too easily.
Everything about this operation had to be analyzed with two main objectives in mind. Garret’s wife could not be harmed, and his death needed to look like an accident. With the advances made in forensic science these were no small tasks. Rapp had focused on Garret’s affinity for boating almost from the start. Thousands of people died every year in boating accidents—collision, fire, drowning, electrocution, or simply disappearing were all options.
Each time a new surveillance report arrived from the West Coast, Rapp took the time to read it thoroughly and in the context of his options. After a while a pattern began to emerge. Wanting to see things for himself, Rapp traveled to San Diego on a private plane. He arrived after dark and left before sunrise. From the balcony of a rented condo he spent an entire evening watching the marina where Garret kept his boat. That one night confirmed the opening that Rapp had detected in the surveillance reports.
For several months now, Rapp had imagined killing Garret more than a dozen ways, but only two stood up under scrutiny. When they found out about the trip he was planning with the new boat, everything fell into place. Even after he told Rivera that she would take point, Rapp continued to play the two scenarios in his mind. He thought of killing Garret so often that it almost felt like a memory.
Virtually every time he closed his eyes he pictured himself exactly where he was right now—on the aft swim platform of Stu Garret’s yacht. His low prof
ile would rouse no suspicion. Under a clear moonlit sky he would look no different from a rolled-up tarp. On a night like tonight he would be nearly invisible. All that was left to do was wait for Garret.
4
ISFAHAN NUCLEAR FACILITY, IRAN
The janitor pushed the cart down the hallway at a slow pace that appeared to be the result of either an injured left leg or a lack of enthusiasm for his job. He was wearing faded green coveralls with his security badge clipped to the flap of his left breast pocket. His black hair and beard were shot with gray. Over the last year and a half he had swept, scraped, scrubbed, and mopped virtually every room, hallway, and stairwell in the facility. He was respectful to his superiors, upbeat, and in general, well liked by the other people who supported the important scientific work that was being done.
The name on his security badge was Moshen Norwrasteh. He was sixty-six years old. Born and raised in the southeastern Iranian town of Bam, he had lost his wife, two children, and three grandchildren in a devastating earthquake that had killed over 30,000 people in 2003. Norwrasteh had struggled for years to find work after the quake, and then one day a cousin who worked for the Atomic Energy Organization found him a job at the Isfahan Nuclear facility. At first, his coworkers did not accept him. With unemployment rates so high the competition for any job, even janitor, was extremely intense. The locals whom he worked with were resentful of this outsider taking one of their jobs.
Within a month or two, though, he began to win them over. Norwrasteh had the penchant and the desire to fix almost anything—especially if it was powered by electricity. People brought in their phones, radios, toasters, vacuums—anything with a plug and he would fix it. On the weekends and in the evenings he went to people’s houses to help rewire and update their electrical service. He never accepted money, only a warm meal and some much needed companionship to help fill the void left by the death of his entire family.
Norwrasteh had even been to the home of Ardeshir Hassanpour, the famous Iranian scientist who oversaw the country’s uranium enrichment program. Hassanpour had come to his ramshackle shop on the ground level and asked him if he could drop by his house and fix a few things. Norwrasteh said that he would be honored. After installing a ceiling fan and fixing two broken lamps, he received neither an offer of payment nor a simple thank-you. Sitting down for a warm meal, even with the house servants, seemed out of the question. Norwrasteh remembered leaving the house and thinking to himself that he would feel no empathy for the man when the hammer fell. For the others, though, the ones who had shown him compassion and friendship, he would do everything in his power to make sure they made it out of the facility unharmed.
Moshen Norwrasteh’s real name was Adam Shoshan. He had volunteered for this operation three times before the director general of Mossad and the prime minister finally relented. From the very beginning their greatest reservations lay in the fact that Shoshan himself was volunteering for the mission. The man simply knew too much. He was a senior officer, not some fresh recruit who’d been plucked from the Israeli army.
A twenty-seven-year veteran of one of the world’s most feared and respected intelligence agencies, Shoshan was Mossad’s resident expert on all things Persian. He was fluent in both Farsi and Arabic, and, most important, he had spent the first twenty years of his life living in Iran. Born in Tehran, Shoshan was the son of a wealthy diamond merchant who was very influential in the Persian Jewish community. As the Iranian revolution began to gain momentum Shoshan’s father grew increasingly nervous, and in 1979 he sent his wife and children to live in Vienna with relatives. Once things blew over he planned on bringing the family back. Unfortunately, they never did. Five months after sending his family to safety, Shoshan’s father was accused of espionage and sedition and put on trial. The sham of a legal proceeding lasted less than five minutes. He was denied representation and was not allowed to speak on his own behalf. A guilty verdict was handed down and Shoshan’s father was taken out back and shot in the head.
Adam Shoshan was the only surviving male relative. Against the wishes of his mother, he moved to Israel and enlisted in the army right as things were once again heating up in the region. A new group called Hezbollah was on the rise, and the PLO was asserting itself in the occupied territories and beyond. In 1982 he was on the front lines of the invasion into Southern Lebanon. While he was on foot patrol his military career was cut short when a Hezbollah suicide bomber blew himself up in the middle of Shoshan’s platoon. A hot piece of shrapnel sliced through his left leg and damaged his hamstring beyond repair.
He was still in the hospital when Mossad came calling. It turned out they had had their eye on Shoshan practically from the moment he’d enlisted in the Israeli Defense Forces. Hezbollah was on the rise and Israel’s top spy agency needed people who could analyze and dissect Iran’s involvement in the Middle East’s newest terrorist organization. Shoshan did exactly that for the next two decades. He went from Collection to Political Action and finally Special Operations, where he rose to the number two position. He had been involved in the planning and execution of dozens of assassinations and paramilitary operations, and he had helped recruit and run spies from Tehran to Damascus and beyond.
The idea of sending someone to Iran who was well past their physical prime was not taken seriously. At least not at first. Shoshan had not participated in an actual field operation in almost a decade, and at no point had he done long-term undercover work. With few alternatives, though, and Iran inching closer to becoming a nuclear power, Shoshan’s idea started to look less ridiculous. It was bold, yet simple, and the director general slowly began to see the wisdom of the plan. There was one glaring problem, however. If he was discovered the Iranians would torture him, and contrary to the statements of Amnesty International, torture worked. No matter how tough the individual, a skilled interrogation team always got what they wanted. Shoshan would be operating deep behind enemy lines with almost no backup. It was a huge gamble, but Israel had few choices.
Shoshan rounded the corner with his cart out in front of him. His posture was hunched and submissive but beneath his bushy black and gray eyebrows his eyes were alert, scanning the hall ahead. The signal had been given. Fifteen months of living a lie was about to come to an end one way or another in the next twenty-four hours. Shoshan wouldn’t even allow himself to think about his extraction. The mere thought of seeing his beloved Israel again was enough to entice him into abandoning this underground tomb today and to hell with the mission. He’d come too far for that, though. He needed to see this through to the bloody end. Even if it meant his own bloody end.
Up ahead, a door on the left opened and two men stepped into the hallway. Shoshan glanced at the first man and then the other. The man on the left he recognized instantly. He ran the MOIS or Ministry of Intel and Security. His name was Azad Ashani. The man on the right was a ghost. Someone he had been chasing for nearly a quarter of a century. A man who had killed thousands of Israelis with his reign of terror. Shoshan gripped the handle of the cart tightly in an attempt to control his shock. Could he really be so lucky? Shoshan got control of his nerves and looked up for a second glance. He studied the eye sockets and the forehead, two features that were nearly impossible to change. It was him. Shoshan’s head began to swirl over the bizarre gift he had been given. He had hunted Imad Mukhtar across three continents, coming close only twice, and here they were, face-to-face in the dank hallway of an Iranian nuclear facility on the very day that it was marked for destruction.
“I have not been impressed with your security thus far,” the man on the right said in Farsi.
Shoshan slowed to a near crawl. Ali Farahani, the security chief, joined the two men in the hallway and completely blocked Shoshan’s path. Shoshan nudged his cart toward the wall and took on the most passive posture he could muster, which was not easy, considering every fiber of his body wanted to grab a screwdriver from his cart and jab it through Mukhtar’s eye socket.
“I want to start
with the reactor,” Mukhtar stated in a commanding voice.
Shoshan was shocked by the mere mention of the reactor. Iran had gone to great lengths to make the rest of the world think that it was located at the Natanz site some 120 kilometers away. He knew it was beneath them, but he had never heard anyone in the facility speak of it so openly.
Farahani closed the office door. He had a look of extreme discomfort on his face. “That area of the facility is off-limits to you.”
“Nothing is off-limits to me. If you would like me to call the president, I will do so, and then I will tell him how incompetent you are and I will make sure you get transferred to the Afghan frontier, where you will spend the rest of your career dealing with those savages.”
Farahani hesitated. A defeated look fell across his face as he debated his options. After a moment he relented. “Follow me.”
The three men started down the hallway, walking right past Shoshan, neither man paying him the slightest notice. Shoshan breathed a slight sigh of relief and checked his watch. He was supposed to wait for confirmation before he set things in motion, but how could he refuse this gift? Imad Mukhtar, the man responsible for so many indiscriminate bombings and countless deaths, had walked into a facility he was tasked with destroying. It was an opportunity he could not pass up. Surely, his superiors back in Israel would understand. Shoshan picked up his pace. There was much to be done. Especially if he wanted to catch them in the reactor room.
