The Twelfth Imam

by Joel C. Rosenberg

“Why didn’t I get it?”

  Zalinsky raised his eyebrows. “They don’t give bank jobs to kids with criminal records.”

  The man had thought of everything, and for this David was profoundly grateful. For the first time, he realized just how close his life had come to going off the rails, and it scared him. But for Zalinsky’s intervention, who knew where he would have ended up? Now, however, he had a mission. He had a purpose. He finally knew why he had been born. He had a cause to live for—and to die for.

  And yet, at the very moment he should have felt reassured, he couldn’t help but think of Marseille. Where was she? What was she going to do that summer? She still had two years of high school to go. Was she okay? He still missed her terribly. Did she miss him?

  29

  Arlington, Virginia

  A black sedan pulled up just before dawn.

  “Let’s go.”

  Good morning to you, too, Jack.

  “What about some coffee?” David asked instead, still jet-lagged after a sleepless night on the red-eye from Munich.

  “We don’t have time,” Zalinsky replied with uncharacteristic impatience.

  David shrugged, sighed into the frigid February morning air, and did as he was told. Zalinsky was old and tired and was supposed to have retired long before now. He was not a man to be trifled with. Certainly not today. David stared at the rapidly shrinking Starbucks in the side mirror as the two left Arlington for the George Washington Memorial Parkway, en route to the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia.

  The car was quiet for a few minutes. David looked out at the snowcapped spires of the Georgetown University campus and the ice on the Potomac River and thought about all that had happened in the years since he had been sent to Germany and Pakistan, and some of the bizarre events that had been occurring in the Middle East even in recent days.

  “Did you see that story about the slaughter of all those Christians in Yemen?” David asked.

  Zalinsky did not respond.

  “Some cult leader just walked into a church in Aden, pulled out a machine gun, and killed, like, forty people,” David said, looking across the frozen Potomac. “Guy claimed he was preparing the way for the coming of the Islamic messiah or something.”

  After driving awhile in more silence, David added, “Weren’t a bunch of priests and bishops assassinated in Yemen just before Christmas?”

  Zalinsky still said nothing.

  “That’s weird, isn’t it? I mean, I know it’s not my country of focus, but I’m just saying, you know?”

  Zalinsky wasn’t interested. Instead, he dropped a bomb. “Look, David, I’m pulling you out.”

  “I beg your pardon?” David replied, caught off guard.

  “You heard me,” Zalinsky replied. “I’m reassigning you.”

  David waited for the punch line. It never came.

  “To what?” he asked.

  “You’ll find out in a moment.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Well, for how long?”

  “I really can’t say.”

  David briefly considered the possibility that his handler and mentor was kidding. But that was impossible. The man had never told a joke. Not once in all the years since their first meeting. Not once while David was in college. Not once while David was attending the Agency’s top-secret training facility in rural Virginia known as “the Farm.” Not once—according to six different sources David had “interviewed”—in the thirty-nine years that Zalinsky had worked for the CIA. The man was a walking Bergman film.

  “What about Karachi?” David asked.

  “Forget Karachi.”

  “Jack, you can’t be serious. We’re making progress. We’re getting results.”

  “I know.”

  “Karachi’s working. Somebody’s got to go back.”

  “Somebody will. Just not you.”

  David’s pulse quickened. Zalinsky was off his rocker. If the man wasn’t driving, David would have been severely tempted to grab him by the lapels and make him start talking sense. For the past few years since getting out in the field, David had been given some of the lamest assignments he could possibly have imagined. Assistant to the assistant to the deputy assistant of whatever for an entire year at the new American Embassy in Baghdad. Coffee fetcher for the economic attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. Communications and intelligence liaison in Bahrain for a SEAL team assigned to protect U.S. Navy ships entering and exiting the Persian Gulf. That, at least, had sounded cool on paper, but it was mostly long hours of boredom mixed with still-longer hours of trivia and minutia. David had complained to Zalinsky that this wasn’t what he’d been recruited to do. He was supposed to be hunting Osama bin Laden, not babysitting destroyers and minesweepers.

  Finally Zalinsky had relented and assigned him to a project hunting down al Qaeda operatives. So for the past six months, David had been stationed in Karachi, Pakistan, recruiting young technicians inside Mobilink—Pakistan’s leading cellular telecom—to do a little “side business” with Munich Digital Systems, or MDS, the tech company for which David now ostensibly worked. He paid these kids well. Very well. And discreetly. From time to time he threw little parties in his hotel room. Bought them alcohol. Introduced them to “friendly” women. The kind they were unlikely to meet in their neighborhood mosque. He added a little buzz, a little color, to their otherwise drab lives.

  In return, David asked them to poke around inside Mobilink’s mainframes and ferret out phone numbers and account information of potentially lucrative future clients for his consulting work. The more information they provided, the more business MDS would get, and the more kickbacks he could pay these guys. Or so he told them. Unwittingly, these kids were actually giving him phone numbers and billing data for al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists, couriers, and financiers operating along the Afghan–Pakistan border.

  The Pak technicians had no idea David was an American. They thought he was German. They had no idea he was working for MDS as a cover for his true identity as a CIA operative. They had no idea they were engaged in espionage. They just knew David was a twentysomething, like them. They thought he was a technogeek, like them. And they knew he had access to a lot of cash and was happy to dole it out generously to his friends.

  And so far, so good. Over the last few months, David’s efforts had led to the capture or killing of nine high-value targets. Day by day, David was certain, they were getting closer to bin Laden. The whole operation had been Zalinsky’s idea, and until now, Zalinsky had given David every reason to believe he was thrilled by the results. Why, then, pull the plug now, especially when they were getting so close to their ultimate objective?

  Ten minutes later, the two men arrived at CIA headquarters.

  They cleared perimeter security, parked underground, cleared internal security, and got on the elevator. Zalinsky had still said little—barely even a “good morning” to the guards—and David was getting annoyed. The two were supposed to be having breakfast together, catching up on the news, dishing a little gossip from the field, and gearing up for a grueling day of budget meetings and mind-numbing paperwork. Instead, Zalinsky was threatening to pull David off a project he loved for no apparent reason and then giving him the silent treatment. It seemed unprofessional and unfair.

  But when Zalinsky hit the button for the seventh floor instead of the sixth, David tensed. The Near East Division—their division—was a suite of offices on the sixth floor. The director of central intelligence and the senior staff worked one flight up. David had never been, but he was headed there now.

  The elevator door opened. Zalinsky turned left. David followed close behind. Down the hall, they stepped into a high-tech conference room and were greeted by a balding man in his mid to late fifties who introduced himself as Tom Murray.

  David had never met Murray before, but he had certainly heard of the man. Everyone in the Agency had. The deputy director for operations was a legen
d in the clandestine services. In March 2003, he masterminded the capture in Pakistan of KSM—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—the right-hand man to Osama bin Laden and the architect of the 9/11 attacks. It was Murray, working closely with the British secret services in the summer of 2006, who planned the penetration and dismemberment of an al Qaeda cell in England that was about to hijack ten transatlantic jumbo jets en route from London to the U.S. and commit what one Scotland Yard official had publicly described as “mass murder on an unimaginable scale.” And as far as David could tell, it was Murray who convinced President William Jackson to begin using Predator drones to take out key al Qaeda and Taliban leaders hiding in villages along the Pakistan–Afghan border when intelligence derived from David’s own penetration of Mobilink’s databases proved actionable.

  “Good to finally meet you, Agent Shirazi,” Murray said, shaking David’s hand warmly. “I’ve heard a lot of good things about you. Jack here speaks very highly of you. Please, have a seat.”

  David smiled, thanked the DDO, and took his seat next to an expressionless Zalinsky. There was a knock on the door. Murray hit a button on the arm of his chair, which electronically unlocked the secure entrance. In came an attractive blonde in her late twenties or early thirties, wearing a conservative black suit, a robin’s egg blue silk blouse, black pumps, and a pearl necklace obscured somewhat by the Agency ID dangling from her neck.

  “Sorry I’m late, sir,” she said with a slight European accent David pegged from northern Germany or perhaps Poland. “My flight just got in.”

  “That’s fine, Agent Fischer,” Murray replied. “We’re just getting started. You know Jack Zalinsky.”

  “Yes, good to see you again, Jack,” she said, her smile warm and genuine.

  As the two shook hands, David couldn’t help but notice she was wearing a pale shade of pink nail polish but not a wedding or engagement ring.

  “And this is Agent David Shirazi,” Murray said, “a fellow NOC.”

  The last phrase caught David off guard. He hadn’t taken this woman as a nonofficial cover operative. An analyst, maybe, but undercover work? She was hardly the type to blend into the woodwork. David tried not to show his surprise as he shook her hand and caught for the first time just how blue her eyes were behind her designer glasses.

  “Reza Tabrizi, it’s great to meet you in person,” she said with a friendly wink.

  David froze. Only a handful of people knew his alias. How did she?

  “It’s okay, David,” Murray assured him. “Eva’s a first-rate agent and actually helped develop your cover story with Jack several years ago. She’s been keeping an eye on you ever since.”

  “Is that so?”

  “It is,” she said confidently, setting her leather organizer on the desk, then looking David in the eye and recounting his alias from memory. “Reza Tabrizi. Twenty-five. Your parents were Iranian nationals, both born in Tehran. You, on the other hand, were born and raised in Canada, in a little town just outside of Edmonton, Alberta. Your father worked in the oil sands industry. Your mother ran a little sewing shop. But your parents were killed in a small plane crash just before you graduated high school. No siblings. Few close friends. You’re a computer genius but a bit of a recluse. No Facebook page. No MySpace. No Twitter. After your parents died, you didn’t want to stay in Canada. You decided to come to Germany for college. Got a degree in computer science from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. Now you work for a rapidly growing German company, Munich Digital Systems. They develop and install state-of-the-art software for mobile phones and satellite phone companies. You’re a relatively new but increasingly successful sales rep. The company executives have no idea you’re actually an American. They certainly don’t know you work for the CIA, and they’d fire you immediately if they ever found out.”

  Eva stopped for a moment and asked, “How am I doing?”

  “I’m impressed,” David conceded. “Please, go on.”

  She smiled. “You carry a German passport. You’ve got a Swiss numbered account where we send you funds. You’ve got a storage facility in Munich where you keep weapons, false documents, communications gear, and other essentials. Since August you’ve been working mostly with Mobilink in Pakistan, building up your field experience, working your contacts, establishing your cover, racking up some frequent-flier miles, taking down quite a few bad guys, and probably having a little fun along the way.”

  She paused and raised her eyebrows. “Am I wrong?”

  David suppressed a smile. “No comment.”

  “That’s plenty,” the DDO said. “Please, take a seat, all of you.”

  David wondered when he was going to learn even a fraction as much about Eva Fischer as she’d just rattled off about him, but he guessed this was not exactly the right moment to ask. There were more important issues on the table, like somebody’s crazy idea of taking him off the Karachi initiative just when it was actually bearing fruit. Was that Zalinsky’s doing or Murray’s? And what on earth for?

  30

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Virginia

  “You’re going to Iran,” Murray said.

  The sentence just hung in the air for a few moments.

  David Shirazi stared at Murray in disbelief, then at Zalinsky, and back to Murray. “When?”

  “Seventy-two hours,” Murray said. “Your code name is Zephyr.”

  God of the west wind? They had to be kidding.

  “What’s the mission?”

  “Jack and Eva here will walk you through the specifics,” Murray explained. “But the short version is this: we need you to penetrate the highest levels of the Iranian regime, recruit assets, and deliver solid, actionable intelligence that can help us sink or at least slow down Iran’s nuclear weapons program. We’re currently positioning NOC teams throughout the country ready to sabotage facilities, intercept shipments, you name it. What we don’t have is someone inside giving us hard targets.”

  David tried to process what his boss was saying, but it was such a radical departure from what he had been doing that he couldn’t imagine it working. Sure, his family was Iranian, but he had never set foot in the country. Yes, he spoke Farsi, but so did eighty million other people in the world. What’s more, he’d just spent the last several years studying Pakistani, Afghani, and al Qaeda leaders, organizations, and cultures. He was increasingly an expert in such matters and thus increasingly valuable in an intelligence agency that still hadn’t caught bin Laden all these years after 9/11. As for Iran, he neither understood the first thing about Persian politics nor really much cared.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” David said after a few more moments of reflection. “That’s not what I signed up for.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Murray said, clearly in no mood for a discussion on the topic.

  “Sir, with all due respect, I was recruited to hunt down Osama bin Laden and bring you proof of his death,” David told the Agency’s number-two official with a depth of conviction that surprised even him. “That’s what I was trained for. That’s what I’m finally getting the chance to do. That’s what I want to do. That’s what I was born to do. I’m sure you have your reasons, and I’m grateful that you would consider me, but I’m not interested in changing assignments. You’ve got the wrong guy. It’s just that simple.”

  The look on Tom Murray’s face said it all. The man was not happy. “Agent Shirazi, I really couldn’t care less why you think you were recruited for this Agency,” he explained through gritted teeth. “We bought you. We trained you. We own you. Period. You got it?”

  This was no time to argue, David concluded. “Yes, sir.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” Murray got up, stretched his legs, and walked over to a window overlooking snow-covered woods. “Osama bin Laden is still a serious threat to this country and our allies. Don’t get me wrong—I do want his head on a platter, and this Agency is going to get it done on my watch. But whil
e in public this administration is focused on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the director and I believe the most serious threat to our national security and that of our allies in the Middle East at the moment is Iran. We know the Iranians are rapidly enriching uranium. We know they are planning to use that uranium to build nuclear weapons. We know time is running out. And if we don’t stop the Iranians from building the Islamic Bomb, do you have any idea what’s going to happen?”

  David took a deep breath and glanced at Zalinsky, who was still stone-faced; then he looked back at Murray.

  “Well, Shirazi,” Murray pressed, “do you?”

  David shifted in his seat. “Well, sir, I’d say the mullahs are probably going to try to rebuild the Persian Empire under the cover of a nuclear umbrella,” he ventured. “And I’d guess they’ll try to blackmail the Saudis and the Iraqis to do their bidding.”

  “Or?” Murray asked.

  “Or Iran will try to drive up the price of oil to unheard-of levels and try to bankrupt the West.”

  “Or?”

  “I guess that, uh, well . . . Iran could try to give a small, tactical nuke to al Qaeda or Hezbollah or Hamas or Islamic Jihad or some other terrorist organization who could try to sneak it into Tel Aviv or Haifa and take out an Israeli city.”

  “Or?”

  David didn’t like where this was headed. “Worst-case scenario? Iran could try to launch a barrage of ballistic missiles—fitted with nuclear warheads—over Syria, over Iraq and Jordan, and into the major cities of Israel to ‘wipe the Zionist entity off the face of the earth,’ as they have promised to do for years.”

  Murray nodded but asked one more time, “Or?”

  This time, David drew a blank. “I’m sorry, sir, isn’t that all bad enough?”

  “It is,” Murray said. “But aside from the fact that the creation of the Persian Bomb will force the Arab states into a nuclear arms race so they have the Bomb, too, you’re still missing one catastrophic scenario.”

  “What is that, sir?”