The Twelfth Imam

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  It occurred to David that he wouldn’t have even known the name Najjar Malik or his importance to the Iranian nuclear program if it hadn’t been for Dr. Birjandi—a brilliant octogenarian former Shia Muslim scholar who sometime in the past few years had secretly renounced Islam and become a follower of Jesus. What’s more, according to Birjandi, more than a million Shia Muslims in Iran had converted to Christianity in the past three decades. Many of them had converted after seeing dreams and visions, he said, and more were converting every day. In a strange sort of way, while Najjar Malik’s story was far outside of anything David had ever experienced, it did have a certain logic to it.

  The ultimate proof, perhaps, was in the laptop, and David was eager to see it. Just then, his phone rang. It was not a welcome call. Not at the moment.

  “Hey, I really can’t talk right now,” he told Eva. “I’ll call you back.”

  “Actually, this can’t wait,” Eva said.

  “This really isn’t a good time.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Why? What’s the problem?”

  “It’s your expense reports, Reza. They’re still not in order. The boss wants to talk to you about them before he heads into a budget meeting.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Tell him I’ll call in a few minutes.”

  He hung up the phone and turned to watch a jogger running through the park. He followed the man for a moment and scanned the woods to see if there was anyone else around. For now, they were still alone. But Najjar was right; they couldn’t stay much longer. They had to keep moving or be questioned by the next patrol car that came through the park. But there was something he had to do first.

  “Where is the laptop now?” David asked.

  “In the trunk,” Najjar said.

  “Can I see it?”

  “Do we have a deal?”

  “If you have what you say you have, then yes, we have a deal.”

  They got out of the car, and Najjar opened the trunk. Sure enough, there, wrapped in a motel blanket, were a Sony VAIO laptop, an external hard drive, and a plastic bag filled with DVDs. Najjar powered up the laptop and briefly showed David some of the files and e-mails he’d been describing.

  Thunderstruck by what was in front of him, David told Najjar to gather it all and bring it up to the front passenger seat.

  “I’m going to drive,” he said. “You’re going to read to me.”

  “Where are we going?” Najjar asked.

  “Where’s your family?”

  “In a motel near the airport.”

  “We need to get them, and fast.”

  85

  Dubai, United Arab Emirates

  For Eva’s taste, information wasn’t flowing fast enough.

  It was taking too long for the NSA to transcribe and interpret the intercepted calls and get them to her and Zalinsky. So Eva called her NSA counterpart and insisted she and Jack be able to listen in to any of the intercepted calls in real time, only to be told that such a request couldn’t be made by someone at her level but had to come from at least the CIA’s deputy director for operations.

  Furious, Eva slammed down the phone and drafted a memo to Tom Murray to that effect. She e-mailed it to Zalinsky for his approval, then walked over to his office to follow up, wondering as she walked how exactly they were supposed to fight and win the war on terror with such insane bureaucratic constraints. She knocked on the door and popped her head in as Zalinsky was picking up the phone.

  “Code in,” he said.

  “Is that Zephyr?” she whispered.

  Zalinsky motioned for her to come in quickly and shut the door behind her. But rather than answer the question, he put the call on speakerphone. Zalinsky confirmed Zephyr’s passcode, then cut to the chase.

  “We’ve got a problem,” he told David. “The Iranians have Malik.”

  “No, sir; I’ve got him!”

  “What do you mean you’ve got him?”

  “He’s with me right now.”

  “That’s impossible,” Zalinsky said. “VEVAK forces just stormed Malik’s motel room near the airport.”

  “No, sir,” David said. “I’m telling you, he’s sitting right beside me. We’re driving to the motel now.”

  Zalinsky paused. “Son, can he hear what I’m saying?” he asked quietly.

  “No, sir.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure,” David confirmed.

  “Then listen to me very carefully,” Zalinsky said, getting to his feet. “You’ve got the wrong guy. The VEVAK team tracked Najjar Malik’s cell phone to a motel near the airport. They raided the place a few minutes ago.”

  There was a pause. “Hold on.”

  Eva could hear David asking the person sitting next to him if he had his cell phone with him.

  “No,” they heard the man reply, “I left it at the motel.”

  “Sir,” David said, “we may have a problem.”

  “You’ve got the wrong guy,” Zalinsky said.

  “No, I’ve got Dr. Najjar Malik, all right. I’ve got his passport. I’ve got his father-in-law’s laptop. I’ve got Saddaji’s external hard drive. I’ve got Saddaji’s memos, his e-mails. I’ve even got his backup discs. It’s real, sir. It’s all that we’ve been looking for. But Dr. Malik left his cell phone at the motel. Iranian intelligence must have triangulated the signal and tracked it down. If they just stormed his motel room, then we have another problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They now hold his wife, his daughter, and his mother-in-law.”

  Ayatollah Hosseini picked up the phone.

  He found the Twelfth Imam on the other end of the line.

  “Do you have Malik yet?” the Mahdi demanded to know.

  “No, my Lord,” Hosseini said. “Not yet.”

  “I thought you had him at a motel.”

  “We thought we did, too, my Lord. His cell phone was there, but he was not. We think . . .” Hosseini hesitated.

  “What?”

  “I hesitate to say because we’re still—”

  “It’s okay, Hamid,” the Mahdi said calmly. “Just tell me what you know.”

  “My people think he has defected, my Lord.”

  “What makes you say this?”

  “General Jazini says Dr. Saddaji’s laptop is missing from his apartment. We know that Dr. Malik went to Dr. Saddaji’s office the other night, ostensibly to get his personal effects. But the general thinks Malik might really have gone there to gather evidence of the nuclear program. He may now have what he needs.”

  “To do what?”

  “We don’t know, my Lord. We would just be guessing at this point.”

  “Then guess.”

  “Worst-case scenario?” Hosseini asked. “He could be trying to sell it to the Americans or perhaps the Israelis. We may have to accelerate our attack plans before either can launch a preemptive strike. But for the moment, there is a more urgent matter. We must stop Dr. Malik from getting out of the country.”

  “What do you recommend?”

  “For starters, we need to close the airports, the bus stations, the train stations. We’ll also set up police checkpoints on all the major highways leading in and out of Tehran.”

  “No, that’s a mistake,” the Mahdi said, catching Hosseini off guard. “All that would stop the flow of Iranian pilgrims heading to Mecca to see me revealed to the world. And it would create a negative news story right at the moment when I am receiving excellent worldwide coverage about my imminent arrival. No, you must keep all this quiet. Don’t let the media catch wind of the manhunt or report it in any way.”

  Startled, Hosseini said nothing for a moment.

  But then the Twelfth Imam said one more thing. “Make no mistake: I want you to find Najjar Malik. I want you to find him, and I want you to bring him to me that I may separate the head of this infidel from his neck and rip his heart out of his body.”

  Najjar Malik was rattled.

  “Mr. Tabrizi, tho
se monsters have my family. We have to find them,” he insisted.

  “We‘re doing everything we can,” David promised as he drove. “We’re putting our best people at the CIA on it right now.”

  “I can’t leave without them. You understand that, right? I’m not leaving this country without my family.”

  Najjar didn’t seem to be panicking, but there was no question in David’s mind that his new asset had the weight of the world on his shoulders.

  “I understand,” David assured him, “but for the moment we need to focus. We need to get you someplace safe. You’re no good to your family if you get captured or killed. Do you understand me?”

  Najjar nodded and grew quiet.

  “You guys are on Azadi Road, heading west, correct?” Eva said.

  David was startled to hear her voice. For a moment, he had forgotten that he still had Fischer and Zalinsky on the line and that they were following him via the GPS tracker in his phone.

  “Affirmative,” David said. “We just passed the metro station and should be at Azadi Square in a few minutes.”

  “How’s traffic?” Zalinsky asked.

  “Not good, and getting worse,” David said. “We’re on an eight-lane boulevard. I’m doing ten to twenty kilometers an hour at the moment, but half a klick ahead it’s all brake lights.”

  “We need a plan to get you guys out of there,” Eva said.

  David already had one. “Once I clear through this mess, I’m heading for Safe House Six,” he said, referring to a basement apartment the CIA owned on the outskirts of the city of Karaj, about twenty kilometers west of Tehran, in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains. “We should be there in about an hour.”

  “That’s good,” Zalinsky said. “What then?”

  “If the regime shuts down all the airports, we’ll hunker down at the safe house, upload all the contents of the laptop to you, and wait until things quiet down a bit. But let’s assume for a moment that they keep the airports open.”

  “Why would they do that?” Eva asked.

  “They might not want to stop all these Iranians from being able to get to Mecca to see the Twelfth Imam. That’s a huge deal for this regime.”

  “I think you’re wrong about that,” Eva said.

  “Maybe,” David conceded. “But if by some chance I’m not, I say we use this mass pilgrimage to our advantage.”

  “How?” Zalinsky asked.

  “Send a private plane to Karaj under the guise of a charter flight,” David said. “Report the flight as a group of wealthy pilgrims heading to Mecca to see Imam al-Mahdi. With any luck, we’ll get lost in the exodus. They can’t possibly keep tabs on everybody. State-run radio says they’re expecting another half-million Iranians to leave for Saudi Arabia in the next twenty-four hours.”

  “I don’t have a private plane to send,” Zalinsky said. “I have a CIA special ops team on standby in Bahrain to extract you guys out of a site in the desert.”

  “No, I don’t want to take Dr. Malik into the desert; it’s too risky,” David said. “We need to hire a plane out of Dubai and try to get it to Karaj by tonight before they think twice and really do shut down the airports. It’s our best shot, Jack. It may be our only shot.”

  86

  Suddenly David wondered if they’d even make it to Karaj.

  As they inched toward Azadi Square in the stop-and-go traffic, they saw the flashing lights of police cars ahead of them. More seemed to be coming from every direction, and despite the roar of jumbo jets and cargo planes landing at Mehrabad International Airport, the two men could hear the sirens approaching.

  “We’re only a few blocks from the motel,” Najjar said. “Look, over there, to the left—it’s just a few blocks.”

  “That explains it,” David said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “All the police.”

  “That’s just because of the traffic, all the people trying to go to Mecca, right?”

  “No,” David said, “they’re setting up a roadblock.”

  Najjar stiffened. “Then we need to get off this road.”

  David agreed. They did need to get off the main thoroughfare and avoid the roadblock. The problem was that every side street from here to the square was clogged with hundreds of other drivers trying to find their way around the logjam as well.

  “Is this your car?” David asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, do you own it? Is it registered in your name?”

  “Yes, yes, it’s mine.”

  “We’re going to have to get rid of it.”

  “Why? What for?”

  “The moment a police officer runs these license plates, it’s going to come up with your name. We don’t want to be in the car when that happens.”

  “What do you recommend?”

  “Hold on,” David replied.

  Then, without any more warning, David pulled the steering wheel hard to the right. He darted across two lanes of traffic, triggering a wave of angry drivers honking their horns before he got off Azadi onto a street called Nurshahr and began to head north. Unfortunately, it, too, was practically a parking lot. It wasn’t totally stopped. They were moving, but progress was slow, and David was getting edgy.

  He needed to get Najjar out of Tehran. He was too exposed. They both were. At any moment, David knew, the Iranian police would in all likelihood be issuing an all-points bulletin. Every police station in the city was about to be faxed a wanted poster with Najjar’s face and details, which would be bad enough. But David had other concerns to worry about as well. Under no circumstances could he allow himself to get caught or implicated in Najjar’s extraction from the country. To do either would blow his cover and compromise all the work he’d done. The Twelfth Imam’s inner circle would stop using their new satellite phones. The MDS technical teams would be thrown out of the country. The CIA’s multimillion-dollar effort to penetrate the Iranian regime’s command and control would be ruined. And given that Iran already had the Bomb and a war now seemed both inevitable and imminent, the CIA needed every advantage it could possibly get.

  Suddenly they heard a siren behind them. David cursed as he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the flashing lights about ten cars back. He guessed that a police cruiser had spotted his rapid and reckless exit from Azadi Road and gotten suspicious.

  Najjar, cooler than David would have expected under the circumstances, bowed his head and began to pray. David admired the man’s courage. He was trying to do the right thing for himself, his family, and his country. But already he was paying an enormous price. David couldn’t imagine the grief he and his family were suffering. His wife had almost certainly been captured by his enemies, as had her mother and their baby daughter. Who knew where they were right now? Who knew what kinds of torture they were now being subjected to? Yet Najjar’s initial anxiety seemed to be fading, and the worse things got, the more calm the man became.

  The siren and flashing lights were getting closer. David knew what he had to do. He turned the wheel, jumped the curb, pulled Najjar’s car off the congested street and onto the sidewalk, and hit the accelerator. Najjar’s eyes popped open as he was thrust back against his seat. Pedestrians started screaming and diving out of the way as David plowed through trash cans and mowed over fire hydrants. Every driver on the street was cursing at him. Every horn was honking, but the police cruiser was left in the dust, and David let himself smile. He hadn’t had such fun in a car since training at the Farm.

  The escape, however, was momentary. By the time David reached Qalani Street and took a hard left, another police cruiser was waiting for him and began pursuit.

  David wove in and out of traffic, blowing through one light after another. The traffic on Qalani was not nearly as bad as the other streets they’d been on, but David was steadily losing ground. Najjar was not praying anymore. He was craning his neck to see what was happening behind them and urging David simultaneously to go faster and be more careful.

>   One block passed. Two. Three. The police car was hot on their tail and gaining. But the road ahead was coming to an end. They were coming up to a T. David suggested Najjar grab the door handle and brace for impact.

  “Why?” Najjar asked at the last moment. “What are you going to do?”

  David didn’t answer the question. It was clear he wasn’t going to be able to successfully turn right or left without rolling the car. Instead, he slammed on the brakes and turned the steering wheel hard to the right, sending the car screeching and spinning across four lanes of traffic.

  They were hit twice. The first was by the police cruiser itself since it was too close behind them and the officer hadn’t expected David to slam on the brakes. The second was by a southbound delivery truck that never saw them coming. The air bags inside Najjar’s car exploded upon impact, saving their lives but filling the car with smoke and fumes. But theirs was not the only collision. In less than six seconds, David had triggered a seventeen-car pileup on Azizi Boulevard, shutting down traffic in all directions. Up and down the boulevard David and Najjar could hear the clash of twisted, tangled metal and smell burning rubber and burning engines.

  David quickly unfastened his seat belt. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Are we still alive?”

  “Yeah,” David said, checking his new friend for any signs of serious injuries. “We made it.”

  “Are you insane?”

  “We needed a diversion.”

  “That was a diversion?”

  “It was,” David said. “Now listen, are you okay?”

  “My arms are burning.”

  “That’s from the air bags. You’ll live. Any broken bones?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Check yourself. Check the computer, and stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  David couldn’t get out the driver’s-side door. It had been too badly mangled from the force of being hit by the delivery truck. So he climbed into the backseat, which was littered with shards of broken glass, and kicked out the back passenger-side door. His hands were covered with blood, he felt blood on his face, and his arms were badly burned by the air bags as well. Other than that, he was fine. He jumped out of the car and surveyed the scene. It was a terrible mess in both directions, but he saw what he needed—the police cruiser—and made his way to it as quickly as he could.