The Natanz Directive

by Wayne Simmons

  Charlie put the photographs up on the screen. The first batch showed unmarked semi-trailers escorted by unmarked SUVs. All the men wore sunglasses and most weren’t particularly discreet about hiding their weapons: MP5 submachine guns, Beretta auto-shotguns, and the ubiquitous AK-47s.

  There had been times when I ran three or four ops at a time. I could have been circling the wagons on an arms-smuggling ring in Mexico and targeting a band of Chinese heroin dealers in Washington, D.C., while working the Iranian cartel in Florida and a trafficking operation out of Bangkok. The bottom line was always intel. Gather it, package it, send it off to Mr. Elliot to analyze and act upon. It wasn’t my job to figure it all out, but figuring it all out more or less came with the territory. Figuring it out helped me plan my next move. Figuring it out kept me alive.

  That’s what I was doing now—staying alive, completing the mission.

  “Knowing what we know now about Qom, it has to work this way,” I said. I was really talking to myself, even though Charlie had settled in next to me on the couch. I jabbed a finger at the big rigs in the photos. “The trailers carry enriched-uranium ingots made in Qom. Once the ingots arrive in Natanz, they’re fabricated into warheads.”

  I had transmitted the photos from the enrichment facility in Qom to General Rutledge and Mr. Elliot the moment we landed in Kashan, but I hadn’t heard back from either of them yet. I knew it would take some time. I had handed them intel no one had ever seen before; they were probably creaming all over themselves trying to figure out what to do with it.

  Charlie clicked to the next group of photos. This batch depicted a convoy of panel trucks, again escorted by unmarked SUVs. It came with an audio link. “Let’s hear what the good professor has to say about these.”

  He clicked the link. I recognized Professor Fouraz’s voice, and it didn’t take a guy trained in voice recognition to hear the strain. He was saying, “These trucks are on their way to Natanz. That I know for sure.”

  “And the payload?” I asked, as if he were sitting across from us.

  “From everything I have been able to find out, they’re hauling special tanks containing deuterium. Collected in the heavy-water facility at Arak.”

  I waited for more, but the audio link had closed.

  “That’s deducing a lot from a couple of panel trucks,” I said. Deuterium was a hydrogen isotope used to slow neutrons inside nuclear reactors: a good thing. More ominously, it was used to boost the yield of a nuclear bomb.

  I clicked to a third series of pictures. These showed long cylindrical objects lashed to flatbed trailers and covered with acres of some reflective material. The shapes were identical to the one Fouraz had shown me yesterday. Sejil-2 ballistic missiles. Had to be.

  But instead of speculating, I clicked a second audio link. In this one, the professor’s voice was more clipped, more urgent. “These are casings for Sejil-2 ballistic missiles.” Bingo. “Twenty-one such missiles were delivered this month to the underground facility in Natanz.”

  I shook my head, though it wasn’t surprise I was feeling. “Ahmadinejad is fielding a strike force, Charlie.”

  “You need to get in there,” he said. His cell phone rang. He came to his feet and put the phone to his ear. He spoke Farsi to whoever the caller was, and I sensed some annoyance in his voice. When he was done, he snapped the phone closed like a man who had spent too much time away from his business. He said, “I’ve got a problem with a shipment of Toyota car parts.”

  He turned on his heels and left me alone in the room. Good. I needed the privacy. I checked my iPhone. There was a call tag from General Rutledge marked “urgent alert.” I guess pretty much everything was going to be urgent from here on out. I activated a secure video uplink. The general wore his gray camouflage uniform, and I could heard engines rumbling in the background.

  He jumped right into the call. “Excellent intel. I won’t ask how you got it.”

  “Your guys see it the way I did?”

  “Roger that.” In other words, proof positive that Ahmadinejad was manufacturing enriched uranium at a rate that far exceeded his domestic, commercial needs. “The son of a bitch finally did it. He’s got nukes. We’re going public with it.”

  He didn’t mean “public” in the conventional sense. He meant that the information would be going to fellow intelligence groups in Israel, England, France, and probably a half-dozen other nations.

  “There’s more,” I said. I told him about the deuterium, the enriched uranium, and a battery of twenty-one missiles that apparently had arrived in Natanz over the last month.

  Rutledge squinted. I sensed his mind wrestling with the implications.

  “Okay,” he said. I heard the profundity in that one word and calculated the intensity in his gesture. Conclusion? He was about to hit me with another round of fun and games. Just what I needed. “The Iranians need more than enriched uranium to make viable weapons worth mounting on a Sejil-2 missile. You know that. They have yet to build a working bomb because they’re not going to waste the time or money making a weapon they can’t deploy.”

  This was all open-source information. You could hear it on FOX News. I waited for the twist. Tom said, “One bottleneck in fielding a credible strike force is collecting enough precision electronics needed to arm and fuse the ballistic nuclear warheads.”

  “I’m with you,” I said, meaning, Get to it, my friend. The clock’s ticking.

  The general reached off the screen to touch an unseen button. “Which brings me to him. Take a look.”

  A jumble of colored pixels replaced Tom’s image. The pixel resolution coalesced and sharpened into a photograph of a man standing next to an airline ticket counter. I recognized Atash Morshed, the online banker from Amsterdam responsible for laundering Iranian drug money and funneling it back into their weapons program.

  “The photo you’re looking at was taken at the Beijing airport six days ago. It took that long for the computers to put two and two together.”

  “That’s why I’m so fond of computers,” I said with razor-sharp sarcasm.

  “Then you’ll appreciate this,” Tom said. “See his briefcase? Our agents in China have hard and fast evidence that our Amsterdam friend was in town, shopping product.”

  He didn’t need to say that Morshed was shopping for special microelectronic circuit boards. The very type needed for finalizing the nukes. It was obvious.

  “Our friend’s face wasn’t a priority fit until we finally got it on a fast track. Our guys in China made the connection the same day.”

  “Good work.” I meant it.

  “Our online banker has made a fortune laundering money and smuggling drugs using Iran as a conduit. At some point you have to pay the piper.”

  “So it doesn’t take much to speculate that Ahmadinejad finally called in his marker and sent our friend on an errand to buy the components.”

  Tom nodded. “We need verification.”

  “You think he’s in Iran,” I said. I meant Morshed.

  “The timing fits. And if he’s in Iran with circuit boards meant for those Sejil-2s…”

  “Then Natanz is probably on his itinerary,” I said. “High stakes.”

  “The highest.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt for me to have a picture of those circuit boards. Can you make that happen?”

  “I’ll send a close-up with the model number.”

  I stared at his face. “There’s something else. What is it?”

  “Our friend in Virginia isn’t happy. You’ve cut him out.”

  “I’m not going there. He’s compromised. Or someone on his team is.” My voice could not have been calmer. “I’m more concerned about our friend on Pennsylvania Avenue.” I was talking about Landon Fry, the president’s chief of staff. “He jump ship yet?”

  “He and I are having a face-to-face later today. A full update.”

  I shook my head. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  I hung up. “Politicians.” The wor
d came out more like a hiss. And why not. Snakes, every one of them.

  I had no sooner disconnected the call with General Rutledge than my iPhone flashed two message prompts. The first was from Tom and contained a stock photo of the Chinese circuit board in question, listed as model number 378-98NB574. The Chinese didn’t mess around. The 378 was a ten-layer board so thin and light that you would expect it to crumple in a stiff breeze. They were protected with some sort of laminate material that I didn’t recognize and resistant to temperatures up to five hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The boards were ten-by-six, which meant Atash Morshed would need a small suitcase or a decent-size briefcase to transport them. This struck me as important. It meant that the product could travel from Beijing to Natanz and never leave his sight.

  But maintaining anonymity in Natanz was not as easy as it might have been in a larger city. Natanz, for all its notoriety, wasn’t much more than a collection of settlements a half hour southeast of Kashan, and an hour northwest of Esfahan. It lay at the junction off Highway 7, and no more than forty thousand people called the place home. The Karkas Mountains formed a rugged, ten-thousand-foot background to the town and its collection of shrines and ruins. Besides the nuclear facility tucked in the mountains south of town, the one thing the people of Natanz liked to brag about was the inauspicious fact that Darius III was murdered there. I couldn’t find a historian who agreed with them, but why put a damper on their one claim to fame.

  I heard a brief knock on the door, and Charlie peeked his head in. He had what looked like a diplomatic pouch in his hand.

  “A courier from MEK chief Yousef Bagheri just dropped this off,” he said, placing the unopened pouch in my hand. “It looks like Professor Fouraz came through for us.”

  I realized I was holding my breath as I broke the seal on the pouch, which suggested a reliance on an outside source that made me very uncomfortable. There were three pieces of documentation inside. The first was a single sheet of typing paper with six numbers laid out in a series of three written on it: 43-6-120. A short note read: Natanz entry code.

  The next thing the pouch revealed was an employee ID badge for the Natanz nuclear facility in the name of Avan Javaherian, complete with a magnetic strip and a photo: mine. Just as long as no one asked me to pronounce Avan Javaherian …

  Charlie was right. The professor had come through. I let my breath out. At least this time I wouldn’t be stowing away in the back of a semi loaded with concrete pipes and hoping the guards were too lazy to search them.

  The last thing in the pouch was a delivery manifest for roofing tiles. I showed it to Charlie. “Leave it to me,” he said, just as my phone rang. “I’ll give you some privacy.”

  “Five minutes,” I said. When the door closed, I picked up. It was Mr. Elliot.

  “Your cover’s all set,” he said. His call was twelve minutes late, which was an eternity for my longtime case officer. I thought of chiding him, but detected a minor strain in his voice that convinced me otherwise. “I’ve arranged for you to join a group of Canadian archaeologists on their way to visit the Natanz ruins. But you’ve got to bus it. Their bus will be in Kashan in forty-five minutes. They’ve got a short stop at the Āghā Bozorg Mosque. That’s where you get onboard.”

  “Nice,” I said.

  “What’s not so nice is that, unlike Qom, security in Natanz is obvious and omnipresent, my friend. Cloak and dagger will only get you so far.”

  I told him about the security code and the employee ID, and a minute bit of tension drained from his voice. He said, “Okay. Good progress so far. Push, but don’t press, right?”

  I smiled. I hadn’t heard that one in years. “Good advice,” I told him.

  By the time I signed off, both Charlie and Jeri were back in the room. Jeri updated me on the lures she and our counterintelligence team were laying for the twenty-six remaining candidates for traitor-of-the-year honors. “We’re using physical rendezvous points tomorrow night that we’ll be monitoring, all in central Tehran. I’m using every spare man we have.”

  “We’ll have him within two days,” I said confidently. Then I told them my plans for entering Natanz posing as a French archaeologist.

  “I like it,” Charlie said.

  “But that doesn’t account for my delivery into the Natanz facility, and it doesn’t account for my other suitcase, Charlie.”

  “Jeri’s taken care of that,” he said, glancing her way.

  Jeri used the computer to pull up a street map of Natanz and the access roads leading to the nuclear facility. She pointed to a warehouse district north of town and traced a route to a railroad siding. “Here. Look for a white pickup truck. A Daihatsu. Your luggage is already onboard.”

  She forwarded the map to my cell phone and said, “Now if you just looked a little more French and a little more like an archaeologist.”

  “And you’re traveling too light. Looks suspicious,” Charlie said. He went to the closet and came back with a rolling carry-on. He stood the carry-on in front of me. “It’s got some extra clothes of mine and some toiletries. Nothing you can’t pitch if necessary.”

  “And there’s one thing missing,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “If I know my Canadian counterparts as well as I think I do, I imagine they might get thirsty on the long road to Natanz. Helping them out might be the neighborly thing to do, don’t you think?”

  Jeri grinned; she had an amazing smile. Charlie waltzed over to the room’s liquor cabinet—an impressive collection of imported spirits that reminded me that Charlie had his hands in every possible form of contraband—and returned with a bottle of Knob Creek bourbon.

  “Perfect.” I packed the bottle in the carry-on and zipped it closed.

  “One more thing,” he said, nodding to Jeri. “Show him.”

  Jeri reached into her jacket pocket and withdrew a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife in a thin leather sheath. “A little added firepower,” she said.

  “Apparently,” Charlie said, “an MI6 agent used this to settle a gambling debt. Said it once belonged to a British commando from World War Two. As the story goes, it drew plenty of Nazi blood over the course of the war. Sounds like a lot of value-added bullshit to me.”

  I inspected the blade. It was sturdy, razor sharp, and perfectly designed for close-quarters combat. I fastened the knife and sheath around the inside of my left ankle, tucked it inside my sock, and hid it beneath the pant cuff. “Let’s hope I don’t need it.”

  Charlie drove me to the Āghā Bozorg Mosque. I presented my Canadian passport to the archaeological group’s minder, a woman from the Ministry of Tourism and certainly a part-timer with National Security. The head of the group was a balding, stooped man who introduced himself as Dr. Jeffrey Carlyle from the University of Manitoba. He was clearly suspicious of the latecomer to his entourage and asked too many questions too quickly.

  “Thanks for having me onboard,” was pretty much all I said as the minder herded all twenty-three of us—college professors, students, and a couple of amateurs—onto a very comfortable tourist bus.

  I sat near the back. Dr. Carlyle took a seat across the aisle, where his game of stink eye continued. I didn’t mind. I was more interested in the mounting evidence identifying the doctor as a day drinker: red nose, ravaged skin, spiderweb eyes.

  Halfway to Natanz, I retrieved my carry-on from the overhead rack and unzipped the bag; I made sure our minder wasn’t looking. The bottle of Knob Creek bourbon lay swaddled in T-shirts, and I made sure Carlyle got a glimpse of it.

  “If you should get a little thirsty.” I gave him a nod. Not too subtle.

  The doctor’s gaze warmed. I guess he was easily impressed. He cleared his throat and whispered, “Splendid. Just the thing to cut the dust.”

  Suddenly I was Dr. Carlyle’s best friend, and we chatted Iranian history until our bus pulled into a roundabout out front of a modest, three-story hotel situated near the edge of town and just off the main road.

  We
checked in and were issued old-fashioned brass keys to a string of rooms on the second floor. Just before dinner, there was a rough knock on my door. It was Dr. Carlyle, all decked out in a tweed suit that fit his ruddy complex to a tee. He had a glass bottle in his hand that had once contained premade green tea and the brilliant idea of using the bottle to transport Knob Creek whiskey to dinner. I acted like a man who would never have conceived such a clever idea, and together we congregated with the rest of our group in the hotel’s cramped, but tasteful restaurant.

  “The only decent place for dinner in all Natanz,” our minder told us, as if the town was a disgrace to Iranian cuisine.

  There were eight or ten other tables in the restaurant, all occupied, and all by foreigners from places far and wide: Russia, Germany, Japan, Sweden, France. As it turned out, Dr. Carlyle was not the only one who had arrived at dinner with a glass tea bottle in hand, and he was not the only one freshening drinks with the bottles’ mysterious potions. After an hour, I understood why. The food was terrible. Some Knob Creek made it almost edible.

  Dessert was being served when I saw him. He was passing through the lobby, a tall, rounded man with a trimmed beard and thick eyebrows. Atash Morshed, the online banker from Amsterdam. I nearly dropped my drink. Impossible. I took in details as fast as my mind would record them. Expensive suit and fancy shirt, but no tie, an omission that gave him an unkempt look. His eyes moved too quickly for a tourist. He looked too exhausted for a successful businessman.

  He carried a large briefcase. The briefcase was identical to the one in the photo from the airport in Beijing. The briefcase was chained to his wrist. He stopped at the front desk and made a telephone call. His gaze skimmed the room and reached into the restaurant, hopscotching from person to person in suspicion. He exuded nervous tension like a rank smell, at least for someone with my experience. And my experience was giving very good odds that the Chinese circuit boards were in the briefcase.