The Natanz Directive

by Wayne Simmons

  “I know a place,” he snapped. He ordered Azran loaded into the backseat of one of the Mercedes. “You’re going, too.”

  “No way,” I said definitively. “We can’t risk that. I’m fine.”

  I wasn’t fine. I felt a wave of nausea rolling over me. A cold sweat had broken out on my forehead and was dripping into my eyes. Earlier, I had dismissed Lady Luck as a crutch for the lazy and the wicked, but the truth was that she had been faithful to me over the last week and never more than two minutes ago. A couple more steps, and it would have been me lying under a blanket next to Lukas, making a widow of my wife and leaving three kids fatherless. Or it could just as easily have been me squirming on the ground, throat scorched, lungs shredded like popped balloons.

  “Have a couple of your boys take me to the safe house,” I managed to say. “And make sure the safe house has a decent liquor cabinet and a hot shower.”

  “You look like shit, my friend.” There wasn’t an ounce of sympathy in his voice. The anguish and the anger had drained from his face. All that remained was a stoic mask. For a split second, our gazes met, but I didn’t see even a hint of resentment in his eyes. I wouldn’t have blamed him had there been.

  Charlie shouted orders to three of his men as the wail of sirens harkened in the distance. Then he climbed into the Mercedes next to his nephew, and the car leaped away from the curb. We were only a matter of seconds behind him. But when Charlie’s ride reached the intersection, they turned south. The Mercedes carrying me went straight for two more blocks before swinging into a neighborhood filled with brick cottages. You couldn’t call the pain in my head a headache; it was more like an internal train wreck. I didn’t know whether to be sick or to put a bullet in my head. Instead, I curled up on the black leather of the backseat. I faded in and out as we rolled through the city.

  I sensed the Mercedes slowing. I opened my eyes as it turned and plunged into a garage beneath a three-story building. Might have been an apartment house. Maybe a small hotel. The door scrolled closed, entombing us in darkness before a weak fluorescent light flickered from the ceiling. The guards hustled out. One opened my door and helped me up a short flight of stairs, across a carpeted foyer, and up a second flight of stairs, which seemed to go on forever. My knees felt weak. My eyes blurred.

  I sensed a door being opened, but that was the last I remembered.

  I came to on a surprisingly comfortable bed. I don’t know what I’d been expecting; maybe a broken-down couch in a flophouse. I was light-headed, but I could feel the crisp white sheets and smell the fabric softener. Odd, what hits you first. What hit me second was that the nausea was gone. Okay, good start.

  The room was dark, but the air, like the sheets, was remarkably clean. Something pressed across my face. I jerked my hand toward it. Then relaxed. There was a plastic tube lying across my upper lip. My fingers traced the shape of a cannula clipped under my nostrils. I followed the tubing to a green oxygen bottle on the nightstand. Night’s purple glow outlined the dark curtains over the windows. And then the question: how long had I been here? I calculated. The bombing has occurred in midafternoon, around 1:30 P.M. I couldn’t see a clock, but it had to be late evening, given the light.

  In a span of two seconds, I self-diagnosed. Heart rate: fifty-eight. Decent. Lungs: not great; in fact, they hurt like hell. Obviously, the bomb blast had caused some damage. Flex index: 82 percent. Better than expected. Headache: throbbing, but better.

  I groped the bedsheets and found my pistol tucked under the covers by my right side. I felt the pockets of my trousers. Thankfully, my iPhone was still there. Then a moment of panic: my coat, my passports, my money, and my backpack. Where were they?

  I tried to sit up. A nightlight along the baseboard silhouetted a man slouching in a chair beside me. Charlie Amadi.

  “It’s all right here,” Charlie said. He had read my reaction and hit it dead on. “The whole works. And I have to say, you’ve got a few toys in your pack that could make me a serious fortune.”

  “I thought you’d already made a serious fortune,” I managed to say.

  “Well, true. But a man can always find room for another serious fortune,” he admitted. “How you doing?”

  “Better. And yourself?”

  Charlie kept quiet for a moment, as if an avalanche of emotion lay a little too close to the surface. Charlie was not the kind of man who benefited from a show of emotion. Or at least that was the prevailing thinking. Finally, he said, “Azran will make it. Just barely. Lukas had a wife and four kids. How fucked is that?”

  “You’ll take care of them.” The words just came out, just one of those statements that really had no place in the room at that moment.

  Charlie could have said, How obvious is that, you stupid son of a bitch. I would have understood. He didn’t. Instead, he said, “I’ll miss him,” and bit down on the words.

  “Yeah.” Obviously my empathetic skills were not as highly tuned as they might have been. I changed the subject. “What time is it?”

  Charlie raised his left arm. The gold band of his Rolex glittered on his wrist. “Eleven twenty-six.” He lowered his arm. “I had a doctor check you out. You suffered a concussion. Maybe some lung damage.”

  “Tell the doc thanks.” I took a long whiff of the oxygen. It was soothing and cool. I sat up, stripped off the oxygen tube, and detached the pulse monitor. I swung my legs off the bed. Back to business. “Listen, I know you lost a good man today. And I know you nearly lost your nephew. I feel responsible. Hell, I am responsible. But the only way we can make it even a little bit right is by finding out who planted that bomb, Charlie? Someone knew we were headed there. They had time to plan. Hate to even think it, my good friend, but it had to be an inside job.”

  “Thought of that already.”

  “Who picked the hotel?”

  “I picked the hotel, Jake. Who the hell you think picked the hotel?” Charlie snapped. He squeezed off a quick breath, looking for a semblance of control. “I want the rat who planted the bomb as bad as you. Worse.”

  “Problem is,” I replied, my voice measured and low, “we can’t run out the clock playing cat and mouse with this guy. We don’t have time.”

  “I’m not arguing,” Charlie said. “What’s the plan?”

  “The plan is that I go forward with the mission. Get to Qom and uncover whatever the hell is going on there. Have your guys made the pickup at the border?”

  “All secured. We choppered it back,” Charlie said. “Now what?”

  “We keep the counterop up and running while I’m making a target of myself. If our guy wants to stop me, the maggot will have to crawl out from under his rock. He does that, well…”

  “You squash the shit out of him. Unless I get to him first.”

  “On the same page with that,” I said.

  “Good.” Charlie’s shoulders might have been sagging, and the weariness on his face was visible even in the dim gloom of the room, but he wasn’t defeated. He might have taken a hit today, but someone was going to pay. If I didn’t see to it, he would. Charlie stood up and made for the door. He paused, with his hand on the knob. “Put the oxygen back on, Jake. Get some rest. I got men all around this place. We start first light.”

  “First light,” I said.

  After he left, I shook out four Tylenol from a small jar on the nightstand and washed them down with water from a plastic pitcher. I replaced the cannula in my nose, laid my head back on the pillow, and savored the cool stream of pure oxygen. I still had a throbbing headache, but I was too exhausted to worry about it. I closed my eyes.

  Two hours later, I woke up again when I felt my iPhone vibrating in my pocket. I dug it out and checked the time: 0218 local. There was a message alert from General Tom Rutledge: Call ASAP.

  I sat up, removed the cannula, and shut off the oxygen. I poured myself a glass of ice water from a carafe on the nightstand. I took the glass, got out of bed, and padded across the darkened room to the window. I peeked throu
gh the curtain. My room was on the second floor. The building sat on a hill overlooking a sprawling carpet of city lights. I had no idea where I was, but I calculated a ten- or twelve-minute drive from the scene of the hotel explosion. Meaningless at the moment. I studied the street. Seven cars. No people.

  I stood there for three minutes, sipping the water and trying to ease the tension in my shoulders and back.

  My thoughts drifted. For ten seconds I was back home with Cathy. We were in the backyard. I could almost smell the barbecue. I blinked and saw Leila’s face. Blinked again and steered my thoughts back to the most important thing in my world at the moment: the mission. Stay focused on the mission or you’ll never barbecue another steak as long as you live, Jake.

  I clicked on the iPhone to call Rutledge. The time in Washington, D.C. was 1724 hours. Knowing Rutledge, he was probably having the same fantasy as I was about a steak on the grill, while another fifteen-hour-day kept him locked away in a sterile office inside the Pentagon.

  I speed dialed his number. He answered on the second ring.

  “Damn, man,” Tom said. “Your communication skills could give a man an ulcer if he gave it half a chance. I was getting worried.”

  “You had every right to be.” I told him about the hotel bomb and kept it very short.

  “Where are you now?” His voice had that even, almost indifferent tone that came with a full résumé in dealing with catastrophes.

  I massaged an ache in my neck. I wasn’t giving out that kind of information to anyone. Trace the call if you like, but don’t expect any favors, even from a friend. “Out of harms’ way.”

  “I need you at a hundred percent, and you don’t sound like a hundred percent to me,” he said in the same annoyingly unsympathetic voice.

  Truthfully, I didn’t care much for the comment, but I was also too numb to put up much of a fight. “Personally, I like being all beat to shit.”

  “Okay. Okay. I guess I deserve that.” I could almost see Tom shaking his head. “You’re the one dodging bullets, and I’m the one feeling the heat.”

  “Heat from where?”

  “Our friend in Virginia thinks you’re freezing him out,” the general admitted.

  “Hell yes I’m freezing him out,” I said directly. “If you have a better handle on the trust level at this point, let me know.”

  “I don’t imagine you’re trusting anyone right about now.”

  I ignored this. “What do you have for me?”

  General Rutledge grunted. Well, at least he didn’t say, Same old Jake. I was getting pretty tired of that one. Instead, he said, “First of all, we’ve been tailing Sami Karimi, Kouros Moradi, and Ora Drago. That much you know. What you don’t know is that all three of them disappeared twenty-four hours ago.”

  “Disappeared?” Karimi had been my MEK contact in Paris, Moradi and Drago in Amsterdam. “What the hell?”

  “We found them again,” Rutledge said, as if he hadn’t even heard my comment. “Or the NSA did. They got a sniff from all the telephone traffic you’ve been forwarding. And guess what? All three are in Tehran.”

  “When did they get here?”

  “Yesterday,” Tom said. “So the question is, why now? And why all three of them? Me? I’m not big on the coincidence angle.”

  “It’s no coincidence,” I said. “They know why I’m here. They know that my op will do a helluva lot more than embarrass Mahmoud Ahmadinejad if it succeeds. Best case, I get enough intel to put the hooks into his government. That happens, and the MEK better be here to grab the reins.”

  “So they’re consolidating resources,” Tom said. “I’ll bet they’ve got guys slipping back into the country from all over Europe.”

  “Count on it,” I replied. “You can also count on the fact that there’s not one in a hundred of them who isn’t a cutthroat. Tried and true. And it would be a pretty safe bet that one of them is a traitor. That bomb was no coincidence.”

  “You’re a master of the understatement,” the general replied. Then he cleared his throat. “Listen, I know you’ve been running on all cylinders for the last week, but you should know, audio traffic between the Iranian High Command in Tehran and the Parchin military complex has slowed to a trickle.”

  Parchin. Iran’s primary weapons-development facility. Damn. Not good news. “Means they’re up to something.”

  “Means the clock’s ticking.” The general sounded like a man about to slug out the last laps of a marathon. “Give me an update tomorrow.”

  “Roger that.”

  The connection ended.

  My communication with Mr. Elliot was less overt: Headed for 1-bravo in short order. Package in hand.

  “One-bravo” referred to Qom. “Short order” meant within hours. “Package in hand” told him the Russian shipment had been received. I pressed the Send button. I took more Tylenol, drank another glass of water, and lay back on the bed again, waiting.

  I made a bet with myself. Sixty seconds max before I received a reply. Let’s see if the old man was on his game. I was ashamed of myself when my phone vibrated thirty-four seconds later. On his game? Yeah, I guess he is. The reply read: Codes times three encrypted.

  I opened the encrypted e-mail. The first set of codes opened the packages. The second set of codes armed them. The third activated the self-destruct mechanism. Normally, I would have memorized the codes in a single reading and deleted the message. But a concussion can play tricks on the memory, so I saved the e-mail and put my head back against the pillow.

  I didn’t intend to sleep. My intent was to rest my eyes for a few minutes and then review all the documentation I had on the Iranian city of Qom. A few minutes turned into a few hours, because the next thing I knew it was 0440 and someone was knocking lightly on my door. I didn’t panic. Didn’t move a muscle. Well, except for my fingers wrapping around the Walther’s pebbled grip.

  A young Persian woman tiptoed into the room. She was carrying a tray. I heard her whispering, “Sir. Sorry to wake you. Mr. Amadi’s orders. I have breakfast.”

  I smelled coffee and scrambled eggs. Okay, maybe I could ease up on the Walther. Of course, I didn’t. I looked at her through squinting eyes, actually nodded my head, and said, “You’re an angel. Thanks.”

  Actually, she did look a bit like an angel, especially when she smiled, and I felt better, knowing my powers of fantasy were still intact. I watched her turn, her feet moving soundlessly across the floor, and was slightly disappointed when the door closed behind her.

  Eat, Jake. Turn off the imagination and eat. That’s what I did. I devoured everything on my plate and drank every drop of coffee. In fact, I was contemplating seconds when Charlie and two of his men entered the room.

  He glanced at my empty plate, nodding. “You’re better. Good. Let’s get out of here. You’ve got ten minutes. Trim your beard, but not your mustache. It’s just starting to come in. We brought you clothes. You need to start looking the part.”

  One of his men dropped a duffel bag on a chair, and Charlie pointed to the bathroom. “Ten minutes.”

  “Thanks for the grub,” I said, swinging my legs off the bed and snaring the duffel bag. I stopped at the bathroom door. “I need more coffee, if you can manage it.”

  I found everything I needed in the duffel bag. I started with the shaving gear. My mustache and beard weren’t particularly impressive after nine days, but they were enough to change my appearance slightly. I showered. Two minutes of scalding hot and a minute of icy cold. I felt almost human as I pulled on cotton drawstring pants and a loose-fitting pullover shirt.

  I found my jacket hanging over the back of a chair out in the main room. I checked the pockets out of habit and hoped I wasn’t insulting Charlie by doing so.

  “Everything there?” he asked with a perfect dash of sarcasm.

  Of course it was all there: money, passports, iPhone. I swung my backpack over my shoulder and said, “Road trip.”

  It was still dark when we went down the stairs—m
e on my own power this time—and out into the cool of the early morning. To the west, dawn’s first light dashed the horizon with a tawny glimmer. I’d lost eight hours.

  Charlie and I climbed into the back of a dust-covered Honda, and I was glad to see that Charlie had read my mind about the Mercedes. “Nice ride,” I said with a crooked smile.

  “Thought you’d approve,” he replied, as his driver pulled away from the curb. “We have one stop to make.”

  “The MEK’s on the move, Charlie,” I said. I told him about my European contacts—Karimi, Moradi, and Drago—returning to Tehran over the last few days.

  Charlie didn’t look surprised. “Their boss knows you’re up to something big, and he’s lining up his chess pieces. Two to one you’ll be hearing from him.”

  So, Yousef Bagheri, the head of the MEK, wanted a sit-down. This was actually good. I couldn’t divorce myself completely from the MEK. At some point, I’d need Bagheri.

  “He wants to talk, he does it on my terms.”

  “Couldn’t agree more,” Charlie said.

  “Can you put the word out to him?”

  Charlie nodded. “Done.”

  We drove toward the Amir Abad neighborhood, near the heart of Tehran, and parked at one end of a pedestrian mall in the business district. Charlie’s guards were already in position. They loitered in a coffee shop, on a bench outside a clothing store, on the roofs. A dozen sets of eyes watching the area like crows around a cornfield.

  Charlie led me to a shop that sold small electronics and appliances. A clerk ushered us behind a counter crowded with digital cameras and cell phones and into the stockroom.

  Charlie’s Internet team was there in full force. They had already set up their laptops and had hacked in to the telephone system. A satellite cable lay ready for my iPhone connection to NSA.