I was pumped. On my own, this kind of op would have taken a month. Naturally, the song that came to mind as I was watching the monitors light up was the Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime.” “Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons/Packed up and ready to go/Heard of some grave sites, out by the highway/A place where nobody knows.” Very appropriate.
We had an avalanche of data pouring over the wires and from the cellular towers. Problem was, we couldn’t listen to everything, even if we’d had twice the manpower. Never fear. My mission was top priority. Top priority meant that a thirty-second phone call to a certain three-star general in the Pentagon got us tapped in to the NSA’s supercomputers. There were no machines on the planet better suited to listen to the cacophony of voices we had created and to sift through it all for telltale phrases, keywords, and names. When the NSA’s computers shouted “bingo,” metaphorically speaking of course, an alert would ping on Charlie’s laptops and his men would put it on speaker.
Charlie looked over my shoulder. I had my iPhone in hand and was tweaking the connection between our laptops and the NSA. He appeared mesmerized by the capabilities of my iPhone. “Where can I get one of those?”
“When I get home, I’ll FedEx you a spare.”
“With all the bells and whistles, right?”
“Hell, I’ll even hand deliver it, Charlie.”
“Why do I detect a note of insincerity in your voice, my friend?”
Charlie had plenty of police on his payroll. But Charlie’s connections were paid to turn a blind eye on smuggling things like booze and pot and caviar. They weren’t paid to protect him from the kind of security breaches we were perpetrating at the moment. We figured to have another couple of hours before we attracted the wrong kind of attention, namely from the Vezarat-e Ettela’at Jomhuri-e Eslami, a mouthful of a name for the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and National Security. Very nasty folks who had a license to drive people straight to Evin Prison, no passing Go, no get-out-of-jail-free card, no nothing.
As discreet as we tried to be, we were beaming gigabytes of data into space, an electromagnetic smoke signal begging for attention. Honestly, I was surprised that their security apparatus hadn’t found us already.
Charlie had guards watching from windows in all directions. More stood vigil upstairs. He had men manning a perimeter several square blocks wide. He had a woman on his payroll called Janatta who worked in National Security’s communications center and made more in a month just to keep Charlie informed than most Iranians made in a year.
I sipped absently at tea that had long ago gone cold. The remnants of a sack lunch lay crumpled on the floor next to my chair. It was one o’clock in the afternoon and we’d been hard at it since before daybreak. So far, we’d intercepted hundreds of calls and texts worthy of a second listen. We’d flagged three transmissions that were routed through Iranian government agencies, but in the end they hadn’t amounted to much. We traced four calls between deep-cover MEK agents and police stations in and around the city, but these were clearly guys who were working the system and trying to build viable connections. There was an upside to these false alarms: we were identifying sources, and I would be tapping those sources in the coming days.
We were hunting a traitor. MEK, DDO, or otherwise. It was like searching for a needle in an electronic haystack, but all we needed was one good hit.
“Got something!” The young man sitting at the computer three seats down from me had scars running down the right side of his face, immensely dark eyes, and a black head scarf. He hadn’t said a word all day. Now his hand shot into the air.
“What do we got?” The words had no sooner left my mouth than Charlie’s private cell phone chirped. Everyone who was looking at the kid with the black head scarf and his hand in the air turned to watch Charlie.
“It’s Janatta,” Charlie snapped. As he listened, the corners of his eyes pinched, and his jaw tensed. He snapped the phone closed and jumped to his feet. His voice was calm, but filled with urgency. “Okay, people. We gotta move. There’s a van headed our way, and it’s not a tour bus filled with seniors.”
Too bad. The clones from National Security were on their way, and whatever the kid in the head scarf had spotted was put on hold. The room became a beehive of activity of a completely different kind. I disconnected my iPhone. Men and women snatched headsets off their heads. They unplugged laptops and shoved them into briefcase carriers. Others collected the routers, cables, and shop lights. One jerked on the cable hooked to the satellite dish. The cable tore free and tumbled into the room. The man coiled it around his arm and stowed it in a canvas bag. Everyone folded tables and chairs and pushed them into one jumbled pile. The boxes and crates that had been pushed aside earlier were nudged back into place.
Less than a minute passed, and by the end of it Charlie’s crew had calmly and efficiently erased all signs of anything resembling a counterintel op. Impressive.
“Get moving,” Charlie said to me. “We’re right behind you.”
I went through the numbers: iPhone. Passports. Money. Backpack. Walther.
“See you at the next rendezvous,” I said to him. We’d mapped out three contact points going forward, all buildings that Charlie owned, but none that could be traced to him directly. “Be careful.”
“My middle name,” Charlie said.
“Bad guys in two minutes,” one of his guards called. He held a door at the rear of the building open for me. “All clear.”
I halted in the shadow of the threshold and studied the alley. Nothing but trash and weeds. Trash and weeds I could deal with; going toe-to-toe with a van filled with National Security agents may have been tempting, but I figured I might as well save the bullets.
I ducked into the alley, went a block south at a run, then turned left for the rail yard. I spotted a freight train traveling north toward the city. Perfect.
I had to dash across an open lot and into the yard. I cut between an oil car and a flatbed, made a rather clumsy move in front of the slow-rolling engine, and caught up to the freighter. It was just beginning to pick up speed. I’d always had a fascination with trains, but I hadn’t done the hobo thing since college, when Jimmy Benson and I spent a week riding the rails from New York to L.A. We’d picked up an old Chevy his grandfather was giving him and took another week to drive back. Two of the best weeks of my life.
I imagined Jimmy would be proud to see me sprint alongside a line of boxcars, preparing my leap toward transportation nirvana. The air trembled and the ground shook from the violence of steel wheels grinding against steel rails, and I realized I was grinning. I matched my steps to the gnashing of the wheels, set my sites on a ladder fixed to the side of an empty boxcar, and jumped.
I swung onto the floor of the boxcar and congratulated myself on a nifty bit of improvisation.
One of the keys to success in any black op is flexibility. I was a manic planner, but a plan was merely a common point from which to deviate. Things can go wrong. You plan for that. Enough had already gone wrong over the last seven days, but the endgame of the plan remained the same. It was the details that had evolved.
That’s why Charlie and I had identified rendezvous points throughout the city. The security apparatus in Iran was as thorough as it was brutal, but speed was not its forte. When the opposition has strength and size, stay nimble and fluid. No, that wasn’t exactly the way Sun Tzu had drawn it up in The Art of War, but it was close enough.
I jumped off the train when it passed under the Azadegan Highway overpass and jogged three blocks to the east along Chitgar Avenue. I settled into a more casual walk when I turned onto Hesar Street. I paused out front of a ubiquitous downtown neighborhood market, smelled baking bread and roasted chicken on the air, and realized how long it had been since I’d eaten. I bought coffee from an open-air bakery and found a bench under a flowering ash tree.
I sent a text of my location to Charlie, thought about a quick update to General Rutledge, and decided against it.
What was I going to say? The dogs are on my trail? Like that was some kind of news.
A half hour later, a bread truck pulled up to the curb directly in front of my bench, and one of Charlie’s men glanced out the open door at me. He said something in Farsi, which I took to mean, climb aboard, and that’s what I did. If the bread truck was meant as a diversion, it couldn’t have been more realistic. The scent of freshly baked bread wafted through the cab and nearly made me delirious with hunger. I motioned toward the racks in back, and my driver shrugged as if to say, Help yourself.
I speared two dinner rolls from a plastic bag. They were soft and warm, and I wolfed them down like a man contemplating his last meal. I had two more. These I savored.
We drove deeper into the heart of the city. The streets churned with people. We arrived at the old Mansoor Hotel and parked down the street. The hotel, a broken-down three-story affair on the corner of Laheh and Shrine, was rendezvous number two and our base of operations for the next few hours anyway. I recognized a couple of Charlie’s men loitering by the entrance; I wasn’t keen on how obvious they looked.
Two black Mercedes sedans cruised by and parked in front of the bread truck. Charlie and his bodyguards. Again, way too obvious. I’d have to tell Charlie to dump the Mercedes and find a couple of beat-up Hondas. A moment later, a grizzly bear of a man emerged from the second Mercedes.
He walked up to the passenger side of the bread truck and gave me a tiny nod. I took the nod to mean, Charlie wants to see you. I climbed out of the bread truck and walked to the Mercedes. Charlie sat in the back, a laptop resting on his thighs. I slid in beside him.
“How did the raid go?” I asked.
Charlie tapped on the keyboard. He shrugged. “I was gone by the time they broke in. I’m sure they picked through the merchandise. They always do. Grab a couple of bottles of Canadian whiskey or bag some of the latest electronics. But if that’s the extent of the damage, call us lucky.”
“I wouldn’t count too much on Lady Luck, my friend,” I said. “She might take the day off.”
Charlie turned the laptop in my direction. “Give this a look.”
The screen displayed a fuzzy overhead shot of square buildings squashed together like tenements in Brooklyn. It was an infrared image that was mostly green and black with splotches of yellow, orange, and red that would have made a French Impressionist proud. At the heart of the photo, a yellow-and-orange blossom obscured the largest of the buildings. Charlie tapped the blossom with his index finger.
He explained, “It’s the building you were talking about outside Qom. A school. One of my contacts in Iranian Air Force counterintelligence just provided it. He’ll be hanging from a crane in Vali-e Asr Square if anyone gets wind of it. He didn’t say what it was. Maybe he doesn’t know. But he thought it was important enough to risk his life.”
I studied the image and traced the outline of the bloom with a pen. “When was this taken?”
“Who knows? Not that long, I don’t think. Two months max.” Charlie shrugged. He pointed to the image. “What’re you looking at, Jake? Any idea.”
“This isn’t the heat signature of any school.” I hunted through my iPhone and sent an image via e-mail to Charlie’s computer. When it arrived, he clicked it open and displayed a nearly identical image.
“Looks the same.”
“There’s a damn good reason it looks the same. What you’re looking at there is a North Korean enriched-uranium-processing plant taken six months ago.”
“Which means?”
“Which means there’s more going on inside that school than a bunch of kids sharpening pencils.” This was similar to the information that Chief of Staff Landon Fry had provided me four days back. Now I’d heard it from two different sources.
Charlie clicked back to the first picture. “Here’s what my guy told me. He told me that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad knows there are American recon satellites photographing every square inch of our ill-fated country. No big secret there. And he’s ordered the air force to take measures to camouflage the heat plume.”
Problem was, this IR signature wasn’t conclusive enough to order an attack. Not even close. You don’t destroy a school filled with kids sharpening pencils based on something that could have been altered by a hacker with a couple of months’ worth of Photoshop experience under his belt. I had to verify the source, up close and personal. To do that, I had to get to Qom and get inside the facility, assuming there was a facility.
Now things got tricky. Under ideal circumstances, I wouldn’t even think about undertaking such a thing until I had the MEK traitor out of the way. Until that happened, he or she could very well checkmate every move I made. Under ideal circumstances, that meant working the counterintel until something popped. Too bad these weren’t ideal circumstances.
“We’re going to have to work this thing from two ends, you realize that, don’t you, Charlie?” I said.
He shrugged. “We just hope the counterintel bears fruit before you get a bullet in the head.”
I grasped the door handle. “Let’s get to work.”
Charlie palmed his cell phone and sent a text. Three of his men sprang out of the first Mercedes, laptop bags slung over their shoulders. I hustled out to join them. The raid earlier had cost us hours of precious surveillance time.
The men by the hotel entrance kept in the shadows. They both carried Scorpion submachine guns tucked against their sides. One of them shoulder checked the door and entered. His comrade followed. I was next in line.
I hadn’t taken two steps when the world exploded in a ball of yellow light. A fiery blast knocked me backward six feet. Dust and debris pelted my body. I lay on the ground, stunned, choking, my ears ringing.
Someone grasped me under the arms and dragged me from the hotel. Smoke roiled from the shattered threshold in black waves. One of Charlie’s men staggered out, blood streaming from his ears and gruesome wounds pocking his face, and collapsed. His partner didn’t come out.
“Fucking booby trap,” Charlie shouted.
Someone knew we were coming all right. And that someone had left his calling card.
CHAPTER 16
TEHRAN—DAY 7
Three of Charlie’s men carried me to one of his Mercedes. A searing pain stung the back of my eyes, like a flash of blue fire, but it was nothing compared to the throbbing in my ears. You don’t realize how sensitive the auditory cells of the ears are until you walk into the shock waves of a bomb blast like the one that had just hit us. My world was more or less a blur, but my mind was already calculating. By the sound and the impact of the blast, I was figuring dynamite or plastique. Probably a half-pound satchel bag in any case. Anything more would have brought the roof down on top of us. I was thinking an M2A1 timer, but there were a dozen methods of igniting a satchel charge that were just as simple. Anyone with junior-grade demolitions skill or a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook could put together a satchel charge in about fifteen minutes flat if they had the right shit. No sweat.
The bitter taste in my mouth made me think of sodium nitrate, which made me think of dynamite. Throw in a little nitroglycerine and you’re all set. Touchy stuff. Very touchy stuff. The problem with nitro was the very real possibility of blowing yourself up. I’d seen it before. Obviously, the bomber who’d lured us into his trap had some experience. I would still have put my money on plastique.
Charlie’s guys laid me across the backseat. I rubbed my eyes and blinked until my vision cleared. There wasn’t anything I could do about the pain except put it out of my mind, so that’s what I did.
Charlie leaned over me. I heard him say something so insanely out of place that I couldn’t decide whether to cringe or shake his hand. “It just got personal.”
His voice echoed with the kind of distance and composure that reminded me just how much violence had been a part of Charlie’s life over the years.
I felt like I’d been pummeled from head to toe with a sledgehammer, but I managed to say, “What about y
our guys?”
“One down, and hurt bad. My nephew Azran,” Charlie hissed. “One dead. Lukas. He’s been with me forever.”
Four of Charlie’s bodyguards hustled toward us. They gripped the corners of a blanket with a badly wounded man stretched across the middle. This had to be Azran. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five and reminded me of Charlie in another lifetime.
They lowered him to the ground next to the car, and I heard a painful groan. It was the kind of groan you heard when the life was draining out of a man, and I knew he needed serious attention, and needed it right now.
Two more guards approached with a second blanket, this one dripping with blood. Had to be what was left of the guy who had entered the hotel on the point and taken the brunt of the blast. It was an ugly sight, and I felt a sour mixture of remorse and anger stirring inside me. The anger was winning out. The guy was dead because of me. He was dead because Charlie was repaying a debt, and his men were on the line for it. What did they know about the bond that Charlie and I had formed thirty years ago? What did they care? Nothing.
“Charlie, you have to get him to a hospital, and fast, brother,” I said, nodding at the wounded man. He was clutching the blanket like a man dangling from a tightrope and blood foamed on his lips. I knew the signs, and it wasn’t good. “The explosion tore up his lungs. I’ve seen it before.”
I didn’t really mean a hospital. I knew a hospital was out of the question. Even a hospital in the most democratic nation on earth would raise serious questions when they saw an injury like this. Here in Tehran, with national security a phobia infecting every fabric of society, the alarm would be deafening. But a man like Charlie had to have someone on the payroll, a doctor at a walk-in clinic or rehab center. Violence was an inherent factor in his business. You had to have contingencies.
Azran coughed. Blood flowed from his mouth and ran to his neck. His eyes clenched, and a painful wheeze replaced the coughing. Charlie braced himself against the Mercedes, like he had lost the strength to stand up on his own. Protecting these men was his responsibility. For a split second, he looked old and lost, but the moment passed. He gritted his teeth, and the color returned to his cheeks. His eyes burned like gimlets. He powered up his cell phone and began to dial frantically.
The Natanz Directive Page 16
