“How’s it look, Amur?” Charlie asked a short, stubby man with round glasses, a rumpled gray suit, and a bow tie that would have made Charlie Chaplin proud.
“We’ve added some deflectors. It might give us an extra couple of hours before security gets wind of us again,” he said. His English was educated and precise. “And we’ve got taps on the one hundred twenty or so MEK lines that caught our attention yesterday, some computers, some handheld devices. So we won’t be blasting the airways like we were yesterday. That should make us a little less conspicuous.”
“Good,” I said. “We need to start separating friend from foe. Can you do that?”
“We already are,” a voice at the far computer said. The voice belonged to the young man with the black head scarf. “I hit on an unfriendly yesterday just before security shut us down. I’ve been tracking him and his contacts ever since. The list of friendlies is longer.”
“I guess we can take some solace in that,” I said, without expecting anyone to appreciate my sarcasm.
“What do you think? Do we put the word out to the friendlies?” Charlie said to me.
“Damn right. We’re looking for intel. Let’s see what these guys know,” I said. Then I looked at the men manning the computers. They were all watching me. “But it’s got to be done quietly, gentlemen. Secure channels. Untraceable e-mails. The works.”
I plugged the iPhone into the computer aligning the satellite cable and tapped in to my NSA source.
Once we had the connection, I downloaded the NSA’s files that we already had in the pipeline, then uploaded what Charlie’s men had gleaned overnight. My priority was getting counterintel on Karimi, Moradi, and Drago. One of them might be the traitor. I hated to think so, but you never knew. And if they weren’t, fine. At least I could cross them off my shit list.
I went straight for the coffee. There was a huge pot sitting on a side table alongside a half-empty box of baklava and date-filled maamoul. I ate four more Tylenol and washed it down with black coffee. My ears had finally stopped ringing. My headache had quieted to a near-tolerable throbbing.
I followed the proceedings, reading every piece of information and siphoning off what I deemed important. It was midmorning when Charlie pulled me aside. I followed him into the alley out back of the mall. He lit a black cigarette, offered me the pack, and wasn’t offended when I refused.
I knew Charlie had news and said, “You talked with Bagheri, didn’t you?”
“He wants you to meet someone,” Charlie said without preamble. “You’ve heard of Professor James Fouraz.”
My eyes nearly closed in concentration. I could feel my jaw jutting forward. “Fouraz? Guy died in prison, didn’t he?”
James Fouraz was a nuclear physicist and former professor of quantum mechanics at Tehran University. Until a couple of years earlier, he had been one of the country’s loudest critics of Ahmadinejad’s nuclear program. Then he’d dropped out of sight. Dropping out of sight in Iran usually meant dead.
“Not quite,” Charlie said. “They slapped him in jail for nearly a year.”
“Evin?”
“Where else?” Evin Prison was the kind of place where women went for exposing their heads in public and men went for talking politics over coffee. It was world famous for torture at the highest level. “Apparently they released him after he signed some papers promising to behave himself, but he’s been collecting information on their nuclear weapons program ever since.”
My ears perked up like a dog’s. “And Bagheri wants me to meet him. Huh!” Something this juicy drops in your lap, your first instinct is to give it the sniff test. I said, “Could be a setup,” but I wasn’t looking at Charlie when I said it.
He answered anyway. “You think?”
“How would you feel if you’d spent a year in Evin Prison with a broomstick up your ass? Would you come out of there swearing revenge, or would you come out of there praying for a way to get the government off your back? Make a trade? Me for him.”
Charlie shrugged. “You know more about Fouraz than I do. What do you think?”
“I think the guy probably knows things about The Twelver’s nuclear weapons program that even the mullahs don’t know,” I said without hesitation. “Set it up, Charlie. Just us and them.”
Charlie nodded. He got out his cell phone and sent a text. I waited a few minutes, and when we didn’t get a reply right away, I sent a coded message to Mr. Elliot. I asked him for a secure read on one Professor James Fouraz and tagged him with the code name The Wizard.
Mr. Elliot came back to me exactly seventeen minutes later and didn’t mince words. His message read: The Wizard checks out. Work him to the max.
Oh, that’s the plan, Mr. E. That’s very definitely the plan.
I worked our surveillance until midafternoon. A little after two, Charlie tapped my arm. “Bagheri’s in.”
“When?”
“Forty-five minutes.”
“Good. But we name the place, Charlie, not them.”
“Already done.” Charlie nodded. “Kheyrabad. It’s a little village south of the city. My men are already on the way.”
After I unplugged my iPhone from the satellite cable, I sent another message to Mr. Elliot: Off to see The Wizard.
The surveillance op at the back of the electronics store broke down in ten minutes flat. It was once again just an ordinary stockroom for a place selling digital cameras and dishwashers.
“The place is called Mad Khan’s Coffee House. One of my less successful investments,” Charlie said as we drove south on the Saidi Highway in a loose convoy of three vehicles, a mint-condition Chevy SUV leading, a less conspicuous Toyota hatchback in the rear, and our Honda keeping pace in the middle. Every vehicle carried at least two automatic weapons. Every man had a sidearm. Charlie didn’t mess around.
As for me, my Walther remained tucked in my shoulder harness. Charlie carried a Beretta .380 holstered inside his jacket. The rolling armament might have saved us from an ambush like the one I’d survived in Amsterdam, but I knew damn well that we were dead meat if the ball breakers from Iran’s National Security forces were waiting for us around the next corner. Worse yet if it was the black beards from the Revolutionary Guards.
The late-afternoon sun shrouded the hills of Tehran to our north. We entered a flat, desolate landscape that reminded me of the American Southwest. We passed a wrecking yard filled with rusted cars and entered a forlorn neighborhood of squat, dust-colored buildings. I couldn’t see Charlie’s men anywhere, and I was glad. No use making a show of things. And in all likelihood, Yousef Bagheri had his own eyes and ears in the neighborhood. He was, after all, the head of the MEK, and he had survived as an enemy of the state for nearly thirty years.
Our driver parked the Honda in a small lot next to the coffee shop, while the SUV and the Toyota went in opposite directions. Five other cars were parked in the lot, and I used three seconds to study them. Dim light spilled from the windows, and the marquee above the door read MAD KHAN’S COFFEE HOUSE.
Charlie’s cell phone chimed, and he looked at the message appearing on the screen. “We’re good,” he said.
He and I went inside. The air was warm and smelled of strong coffee and scented tobacco.
To the right, five men sat around a hookah, sucking on the mouthpieces, blowing smoke, gossiping in low voices. Two were dressed in long robes. The other three wore Western clothes. When they weren’t talking, they were texting. What the hell had the world come to? Two couples, both middle-aged, and drinking from stubby, widemouthed coffee mugs, sat at tables near the window. On the left, a pair of men in dark sport coats sat opposite each other in a booth.
One faced the door. Round face. Dark complexion. Thick mustache. Heavy gold chain peeking from the open collar of a striped shirt. Eyes that took in everything. Fiftyish.
“Yousef Bagheri,” Charlie whispered.
Bagheri saw us, gave a nod, and mumbled to his table companion. The other man turned toward us. He
was older—in his earlier sixties if not more—grayer, and far more weather-beaten. Clean-shaven. Deep creases alongside his mouth and down the center of his brow. It wasn’t hard to guess that this was Professor James Fouraz.
Charlie exchanged a brief nod with the MEK man as we approached. We stopped in front of the table, and introductions were made in low, cautious voices. Charlie used the name on my French passport, calling me Richard Moreau.
Persians are big on shaking hands, and I obliged both men. I kept it formal. “Professor Fouraz. Mr. Bagheri. Good to meet you both.”
“Are you armed, Mr. Moreau?” Bagheri asked.
If a man asks, you tell him. “Walther.” I gave him a peek under my jacket. I nodded to Charlie. “Beretta. We’re not expecting to use them. Mind if we sit?”
“Of course,” Bagheri said. I eased in next to him. I wanted a clear view of the door, just like he did. Bagheri was a hefty, muscular man and his power was as evident as his caution. I approved.
Charlie settled beside Fouraz, but the old man looked only at me, his eyes unblinking.
“You’re American,” Fouraz said in English.
“Does it matter who or what I am? I understand you have information that I need.” I pulled an envelope from my pocket and laid it on the table. Ten grand in euros.
Fouraz pushed the envelope back with a trembling, clawlike hand. His fingers were gnarled, and his knuckles were misshapen. The fingernails were missing from his index and middle fingers.
“This is not about money.” He lifted his hand and straightened his fingers as best he could. “I’m doing this to keep Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from doing to my country what he’s done to me.”
A convincing answer. I took the envelope and slid it back into my coat pocket. “No insult intended, Professor,” I said to the man.
Fouraz dropped his hands to his lap. He lifted a square manila envelope that he struggled to open. He dumped a stack of photographs onto the table and pulled one free. It showed a convoy of cargo trucks. “That’s a shipment of yellow cake uranium for the processing plant in Qom.”
I said, “Looks like trucks to me.”
Fouraz didn’t bother to respond to that. He shared more photos. One was of a flatbed trailer with a cylindrical object as long as a telephone pole and as wide as a garbage can. “This is the upper stage of a Sejil-2 ballistic missile.”
His comment plucked at my nerves. The Sejil-2 could reach Israel, all of the Middle East, and most of Europe. Fit it with a nuke and it’s hello Armageddon.
“What’s the yield of one of these Sejil-2 warheads?” I asked.
“Twenty kilotons. The Hiroshima bomb was sixteen kilotons,” Fouraz answered somberly. “And sixty thousand people perished immediately. To comprehend the destruction, draw a circle with a radius of one and a half kilometers over any city and imagine that area flattened to ash and rubble.”
I glanced across the table at Charlie; the color had been bleached from his face, and he was shaking his head like a dying man wishing he’d said I love you to his kids more often. “Where and when was this photo taken?” I asked the professor.
“On the highway to Natanz. Six days ago.”
“Who took it?”
“Enemies of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his murderous plans,” was how he answered.
Bagheri leaned toward me. “It’s a race. You against Ahmadinejad. He wins, and the world loses.”
CHAPTER 17
TEHRAN—DAY 8
I used my iPhone to replicate the photos Professor James Fouraz had given me and stored them in a file marked “Recipes.” I e-mailed the file in full to one of a half-dozen untraceable e-mail addresses that only Mr. Elliot had access to. The photos provided exactly the kind of pieces I needed to fill in the puzzle of Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program: shipments of yellow cake uranium to Qom and the delivery of a long-range ballistic missile to Natanz. Huge. That’s what intel was: first you unearth the puzzle pieces, then you put the pieces together so the naysayers don’t have a leg to stand on when the bombs start to drop.
The clock ticking in my head just got a little faster. The photos were priceless, but they had to be substantiated. Time for boots on the ground in Qom and Natanz.
“Anything else?” I asked. Professor Fouraz had already written his death warrant. He wasn’t going to hold anything back now. I could see it on his face.
“An audio link,” he said. He held up a BlackBerry Curve, a generation old but still powerful. “Everything I know on one tape. If you could share an e-mail address, please.”
Now it was time for a demonstration of good faith on my part. I gave him another of my untraceable e-mail addresses and then my assurance. “Only two people have access to it. Me and a man who’ll know exactly what to do with it.”
“It cannot be made public until the professor is safely out of the country,” Yousef Bagheri said, pinning me with his dark eyes.
“You have my word.”
“And mine,” Charlie said. I was glad he chimed in. I could see that the MEK chief respected Charlie. They had probably done business a hundred times. When you’re a renegade trying to fund an outlaw political organization, you naturally do business with a renegade who has the connections to do so.
Professor Fouraz collected his photos. “I should have more soon,” he said. “People are coming out of the woodwork.”
“Very good,” I replied.
Yousef Bagheri placed his hands on the table. “If there is nothing else, then I’ll ask you to keep me abreast of your plans, Mr. Moreau.”
“I’d like nothing better. Only one small problem, Mr. Bagheri.” Now it was my time to pin him with my eyes. He held them without blinking as I described the evidence suggesting a traitor in his operation. I gave him credit for that. I could also see his teeth grinding and the worry lines stretching out around his eyes.
“We’re working it twenty-four/seven from our end.” I tipped my head in Charlie’s direction. “I want you working it twenty-four/seven on your end.”
Bagheri grimaced. It was like someone had just sucker punched him. Eventually, he made a brisk gesture that might have been taken for a nod. “I won’t sleep till he’s found.”
He reached out his hand to me. I shook it. Not that I was dying to shake the man’s hand, but I had learned one thing in my years of running black ops: never alienate a potential ally, and never make an enemy unless it helps your cause.
I shook the professor’s for the same reason. It wasn’t about gratitude. I would use him until he had nothing left to give. And then I’d push to the edge and squeeze him one last time just to be sure he didn’t have anything left to give.
I slid out of the booth, and Charlie followed. “Be in touch,” he said to the MEK boss. He gave Fouraz a respectful nod. And then we were gone.
Charlie and I returned to Tehran and bunked in a new safe house in the Pamenar district, where the mix of old European architecture and corner markets gave you a feeling of prosperity that might or might not have been reality. Our rooms were on the second floor of an apartment house that looked like it had been transported from Paris. I half expected to see the Seine rolling slowly past when I pushed aside the curtain and glanced out. Instead, I saw an empty street that should have been alive with couples strolling hand-in-hand and street café’s serving espressos and lattes.
One of Charlie’s guys had left food and bottled water on the table. I cracked the water and drank half of it down. The food could wait.
I took out my iPhone. First, I sent Mr. Elliot a text: Lazy day river, two-on-two. “Lazy day river” was code for the Yahoo e-mail account that I’d shipped Professor Fouraz’s pictures to. “Two-on-two” told him to look for a second e-mail with the audio link that Fouraz had forwarded. Then I sent the entire package on to General Tom Rutledge as well, with a note that read: Visiting day tomorrow.
The general would fast track the photos with the CIA’s nuclear assessment team, and they would see exactly the same thing that I saw
. Great stuff, but not enough to justify a military attack, no matter how smart the bombs or precise the strike. They would need two things: the exact status of the activities taking place in Qom and Natanz and specific attack coordinates that allowed for the most surgical strikes possible. Piece of cake.
I carried my food over to Charlie’s room, and we ate in silence.
The one thing Charlie’s guys had provided for him that they hadn’t thought to give me was a bottle of brandy. He filled two glasses with two-finger measures, and we made a silent toast.
Charlie rolled the brandy around his glass and then held it under his nose. “Ah,” he said, his first word in twenty minutes. Then he drank. I wasn’t quite so sophisticated in my approach, but that did nothing to diminish my appreciation for the drink as the warmth of it spread in my stomach.
“So?” he said after another minute. “What’s the plan?”
My first instinct was to keep everything close to my chest. The closer, the less messy, and things had gotten plenty messy over the last week or so. On the other hand, I still needed Charlie, and so far he’d been there at every turn. I’d asked him for his trust, and he’d delivered.
“Visiting day tomorrow.” Same as my message to Rutledge.
“Qom,” he said simply.
“No choice.” I gave him a brief outline of my plans to infiltrate a facility that, by all evidence, was hidden beneath a high school housing a thousand students.
“A school. That’s as fucked as it gets.” He unwound from his chair and stood up. He padded across the room to a teapot resting on top of a hot plate. He poured two cups. He handed one to me and said, “Let’s talk strategy.”
“Qom is southwest some ninety miles. We set up shop outside the city.”
“I’ve got a place,” Charlie said.
“I go in a couple of hours after dark. Not so late as to pique anyone’s interest, but not before things have settled down at the school.” I glanced at Charlie. “You’re my backup.”
“Let’s get a map in here.” Charlie buzzed one of the guys in his crew and told him to bring in a computer. “With a plug-in,” I heard him say.
The Natanz Directive Page 18
