The Natanz Directive

by Wayne Simmons

  “But we need those addresses,” I heard Mr. Elliot say. He was talking about the launch sites. “Hate to put such a fine point on it.”

  “Wish I had a back-up plan to Bluebird, but I’m playing all the cards I’ve got right at the moment. He promised me the addresses the minute they’re finalized, and he’s probably one of the guy’s finalizing them,” I said.

  I saw their reflection in the flat surface of the silver platter. Two men. It was a flash that came and went in an instant, but I knew they were wrong for the bazaar. I yanked the silver platter from the rack and turned into the orange flash of an exploding gun barrel. I had enough time to decide that my attackers were less than fifteen feet behind me, and that they wouldn’t waste a bullet on a head shot. Bad odds. No, a chest shot would give them three or four inches on either side of the sternum, and I’d still be dead.

  I wrenched the platter around and took the bullet full force. It blew me backward into the shop display. Silverware and copperware flew in every direction. A second bullet missed by inches, but only because I was tumbling backward and hit the floor in a heap of platters and pitchers and teacups.

  I was acutely aware of the noise—the roar of a third shot, a cacophony of screaming and shouting, the clatter of metal—but I turned all my attention to the one chance I had for escape. I rolled to my left, lifted a hammered copper plate in my right hand, and launched it like a Frisbee in the direction of the two men. Now I saw them. Dressed in black from head to foot, as if they’d just jumped off motorcycles. One wore a stocking hat. His gun was still smoking. The other was shouting and throwing a stunned woman with shopping bags in each hand out of the way.

  The flying plate was enough to cause a hitch in their steps, enough for me to spring to my feet and dash to the back of the silver shop. I knew from my experience with the herb-and-spice shop not an hour earlier that there were loading platforms out back. I felt bad pushing aside the shop owner, but she was standing between me and the back door. Her scream told me she was more angry than hurt, which meant she might take it out on the two men pursuing me. Probably not.

  I threw open the door. The platform was a narrow block of concrete. I took two long strides and jumped. I landed on an asphalt lane between a van and a pickup truck and three men with crates in their arms. I heard the door slam behind me and shouting. I glanced back as I raced along the lane, dodging delivery trucks. The man in the stocking cap was talking into a walkie-talkie. I didn’t bother to reach for my Walther. A firefight was not something I would survive. I ran until the lane made a slight dogleg left, used a panel truck to shield me from my pursuers, and leaped onto the nearest loading platform. A door led back inside the bazaar and into an electronics store mobbed with customers. The store opened onto a corridor that was wall-to-wall people.

  I eased into the crowd. I worked my way toward the middle of the aisle, where the traffic flow was a little steadier. If only I hadn’t been taller than everyone else.

  Fifty paces farther on, the corridor forked. I took the right fork into a long, narrow food court. I’d been in the Grand Bazaar only once before, and that had been two decades earlier. All I remembered for sure was that there were a dozen entrances and exits. Find one, and I’d be home free. Maybe.

  I had the strangest thought as I carved my way through hordes of patient shoppers. Who knew I was going to be in the bazaar at exactly that moment? General Navid, General Navid’s cousin, and the guy in the van. Charlie and Jeri. Bagheri and Moradi. No one else. It was an unlikely group. Allies, one and all, right? Apparently not.

  I needed time to think, and Leila came to mind at that exact moment. She’d given me a key to her place. I hated using it. I wasn’t sure I had a choice.

  I saw the entrance up ahead. In the second-to-last booth before the entrance was a man roasting beef-and-vegetable kabobs over an open fire pit. I took the memory stick Navid had given me from my pocket. I slid up to the fire pit as the man was waiting on a group of three women and tossed the stick into the flames.

  I hailed the first taxi that I saw. I handed him enough rials to get me halfway across town and gave him an address on Jalilabad Street, close but not too close to Leila Petrosian’s market. I circled the block and entered the alley behind her place. Her car was not there, so I used the key she had given me to open the back door.

  I eased the door closed. I called her name. “Leila. You here? Hey, it’s Jake?”

  I didn’t need Rahim—clerk, protector, and jealous suitor—rushing in with a gun or a knife or the police in tow. “It’s me, Jake,” I said again, and moved from the entrance into the lounge that Leila used to introduce her customers to illegal contraband, which was her primary source of revenue. I could feel Leila in the room just by looking at the simple, classy way she’d arranged the velvet love seat and the leather chairs and the soft light spilling from perfectly placed wall sconces.

  I went to the bar and poured single-malt scotch into a cocktail glass. The heat of the liquor exploding in my stomach wasn’t quite enough to take the edge off the encounter in the bazaar, but it helped. I carried the glass to the love seat and settled in. I took a second sip and closed my eyes. I wrestled the temptation of a quick nap. Sleep and food had not been much of a priority over the last twelve days, and I felt the nerve endings in my arms and legs twitching.

  Keep your mind on business, Jake. Figure it out. Who knew you were going to be at the bazaar at exactly that moment? I kept coming back to Bagheri and Moradi. They were MEK. Everyone they knew and trusted was MEK. Believing that there was a traitor among them stung. You naturally tried to talk yourself out of believing it could actually be true. You confided in people, never thinking the people in your confidence would betray you. Yeah, well, somebody did.

  I didn’t know Bagheri’s hierarchy. I didn’t know his top lieutenants, and that was a mistake. I did know Moradi’s. Ora Drago was his second-in-command in Amsterdam and a rising star in the MEK upper echelon. Why would he kick away everything he’d worked for by pulling a Benedict Arnold? Didn’t make much sense, but stranger things had happened.

  I was about to call Jeri to find out how our surveillance op was shaping up—I wanted her to give special attention to Ora Drago—when my iPhone chimed. The number on the screen belonged to Professor James Fouraz.

  I sat straight up and nearly spilled my drink. If it actually was Fouraz, he would never risk calling unless he’d come across information that couldn’t wait. The other option was that he’d come across information he didn’t care to share with anyone but me. Including Bagheri. An option I didn’t want to consider was that the Revolutionary Guard or National Security had discovered the professor’s duplicity, and now they were trying to get a fix on my location.

  I activated the GPS-drone app on my phone and answered after the fifth ring. The voice-recognition app was already up and running, so I said, “ID?”

  “It’s Fouraz.”

  I didn’t need the voice-recognition app. I knew his voice. Too bad he’d used his real name. Damn! “No more names. Do you hear?”

  “Yes. Sorry.”

  “And your phone?”

  “Prepaid. It goes in the trash after this call.” he said. The stress level in his voice was like a 7.0 on the Richter scale. I heard a slow, deep breath and realized he was thinking about how to convey his message. “The dance has started. Three days ago. I just heard.”

  I got it. He was telling me that Ahmadinejad had started to deploy the Sejil-2 missiles from Natanz. That explained the seven missiles I couldn’t account for during my unauthorized tour inside the facility. “How?”

  “Wearing the most beautiful gowns you’ve ever seen.” So they’d camouflaged the missile transporters and slipped them in with routine truck convoys; this was a guess, but an educated one. Did that also mean that the launch locations had been surveyed and prepped? I had to find out, so I said, “Does that mean the ballroom locations have been chosen.”

  “Not necessarily,” Fouraz said. “The
y’ll make that decision as late in the day as possible.”

  He was right about that. All we could do was to get a full satellite scan up and running, and I knew that had already been done. “Do what you can to get me that list, will you?”

  “I’m using every resource I have,” he said.

  He severed the connection. I stared down at the phone for a good five seconds before putting in a videoconference call to General Rutledge. The local time was 8:42 P.M.; it was seven hours earlier in D.C.

  From the shoulders up, it looked like the general had donned his dress uniform. I could see three silver stars glittering on each shoulder. He said, “Got your latest. Nasty. I’m on my way for a sit-down with Socrates.” He meant White House Chief of Staff Fry.

  “Good. Because I’ve got more. It’s gotten worse.” I told Rutledge in the most cryptic way about the deployment of the Sejil-2 missiles.

  Rutledge’s eyes shifted like the news had pushed him off-balance. “You sure? No one has seen a thing on our end. There’s been no suspicious movement. Nada.”

  “Then I suggest they go back and review the history books.” I hoped that he understood that I meant every standard truck convoy that had gone out of Natanz in the last three days. I could hear the agitation in my voice and decided this was a pretty damn good time for it. “Not the best time in the world to start underestimating a bunch of lowlifes who have been pulling our chain for three decades.”

  “Agree,” he said. “On it.”

  I guess that was Tom’s way of saying, I’ll take boots-on-the-ground intel over eyes-in-the-sky any day, but I just need a reminder every once in a while. Fine. I’m your guy, Tom.

  I saved him the trouble of asking about the launch sites by saying, “No word from Bluebird yet, but I didn’t expect it.”

  “No, it’ll be a game-time decision.” My old friend glanced off camera. I could see the set of his jaw and the tension stretching the worry lines around his eyes. He looked back at me. “Any news on your subterranean friend?” He was talking about our traitor.

  “Yeah. He’s close.” I didn’t tell him about the incident at the Grand Bazaar. The guy had enough on his mind. “But we’ve got a few tricks up our sleeve on this end, too.”

  “Stay frosty, my friend.”

  “Roger that.”

  He closed the connection. I stared at the iPhone screen. I had heard the frustration in Tom’s voice. Nervous. That wasn’t like him, but then he’d put all his eggs in one basket, and I just happened to be that basket. I knew one thing: black ops was an inexact science. You could plan, but the only thing you could count on was the plan’s changing. You could force intel only so far. If you pushed too hard, the whole operation could go south in the blink of an eye. The mission was 90 percent in the bag. But it was the last 10 percent that could spell the difference between life and death for some kid in Tel Aviv.

  I heard footfalls on the other side of the door. In less than a second I judged their weight and consistency and decided they belonged to a woman. Leila. I put a hand on the grip of my Walther nonetheless.

  The door opened. It was her. I tried to figure out a way not to scare her to death. “Leila. It’s Jake,” I said quickly.

  Her breath caught deep in her throat, and she jumped. A hand covered her mouth. Okay, so I wasn’t very successful. “Jake. My God. You’re all right.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t think it was wise to call. I needed a place, and…”

  “It’s all right.” She managed a breathless laugh, and it may have been the most magical sound I’d ever heard.

  I pushed the Walther back down in its holster and came to my feet. I pointed to my drink. “I sort of helped myself.”

  I came around the couch, and she fell into my arms. We stayed that way for five very satisfying seconds. Then she held me at arm’s length and shook her head. “You look like hell.”

  I ran a hand over my three-day-old beard and realized she was probably right. “And here I am in the company of the one woman in Tehran whose opinion I actually give a damn about. Buy you a drink?”

  “You found the scotch. Good,” she said. “Make mine a rum and Coke, will you?”

  Fixing a lady a drink. Now there was some normalcy that felt comforting, and I took my time doing it. We clicked our glasses.

  “You’re on the run,” she said. “You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  “I had a little encounter at the bazaar. You’ll probably read about it in the paper tomorrow.”

  “No, we won’t,” she said, a harsh reminder of the censorship that ruled the media in Tehran. She set her glass on the bar.

  She unzipped her abaya, shrugged it off her shoulders, and let it fall around her ankles. It was an innocent gesture so fleetingly erotic that a part of me wouldn’t have minded a bit if she hadn’t stopped with the abaya or the blue pantsuit she wore underneath.

  Leila caught me looking and smiled. Then she picked up her glass again and shook her head. “You set the rules, Jake. Not me.”

  “That was dumb, wasn’t it?” I was kidding. Well, maybe only half kidding.

  We carried our drinks to the love seat. Leila had the kind of discerning gaze that suggested a woman with the ability to read minds; she had always been successful in reading mine. “So, should I be packing my bags and heading as far into the mountains as my broken-down Toyota will take me?” She was dead serious. “I don’t fancy being turned into a pillar of radioactive salt.”

  I reached out and touched her face. Touched her hair. I said, “If Ahmadinejad pulls the trigger first, it won’t matter how far up in the mountains you are, Leila. But if we shoot before he does, then Tehran will be the safest place you can be.”

  “A lot of ‘ifs’ and ‘buts,’ Jake,” she said.

  “Don’t I know it. But listen, I’m…”

  My iPhone chimed before I could tell her that I was doing everything in my power to make certain she was safe right where she was. It was a text-message alert from Charlie. It read: If you’re not dead, call. Priority one.

  “Charlie Amadi,” I said to Leila and rang his number.

  He answered after a single ring, saying, “I think we’ve got our addresses.” The missile sites! Excellent. General Navid had come through. “But Bluebird refuses to send them electronically.”

  “Smart. If his people are monitoring him the way he thinks they are, they’d know before we did, and the addresses would be changed in a matter of minutes,” I said. “How’s Bluebird communicating?”

  “Memory stick. It’s been picked up now. We’ve got a rendezvous set. Honcho is sending a couple of his guys to pick you up. Where the hell are you?”

  I wanted to protest using Yousef Bagheri’s men for the pickup, but I didn’t have a chance. Not a second after Charlie finished his question, a voice boomed from a loudspeaker hidden behind the bar. It was Rahim, Leila’s eyes and ears at the front of the shop. He was shouting in Farsi. “Leila. Police. Revolutionary Guards. Front and back.”

  Leila was on her feet even before I was because I was still translating. My first reaction was to reach for my gun. “Your gun won’t help. The Revolutionary Guards travel in packs. Very large packs.” She grabbed me by the arm. “This way!”

  “Trouble!” I shouted into the phone. “I’ll get back to you.”

  I hung up, and Leila grasped my hand. She pulled me to the door at the front of the lounge. The door led to the same hall I had come down the first day I’d been here. This time, we scurried in the opposite direction. A door halfway along the hall opened onto a large storage closet. Leila flung it open, crouched down, and started pushing aside crates filled with canned fruit. I knelt down next to her and helped. When the crates were out of the way, Leila peeled a square section of linoleum off the floor. Below was a square section of hinged wood with a handle embedded in the surface. A trapdoor.

  Leila grabbed the handle and raised the door, her face glistening with perspiration. There was a meter-wide hole in the concrete beneath
the door. The hole dropped to a tunnel three meters below. Handholds had been molded into the concrete.

  We heard banging at the other end of the hall and shouting.

  “Quickly, Jake,” Leila said. She pointed to the tunnel. “It leads to a storage room at the end of the alley.”

  I lowered myself into the hole. I reached up and kissed her lips. “I won’t forget this.”

  I dropped into the tunnel and heard the trapdoor close above me.

  CHAPTER 26

  TEHRAN—DAY 11

  Darkness swallowed me.

  I reached into my pocket for my iPhone. In the pitch black, the screen’s light had the power of a single candle. The tunnel ran straight out in front of me, rough concrete that looked as if it had been poured in haste many years ago. Condensation dripped from the ceiling. A dank, musty smell weighted the air.

  I didn’t wait for my eyes to adjust. I fell into a low crouch and followed the light. My feet scraped along the floor, and my lower back took the brunt of the punishment. I tried to envision the distance from the market to the alley.

  Lengths of rebar curled along the walls and ceiling, like the exhumed bones of corpses buried long ago. A fine glaze of dust ran out ahead of me. I saw no sign of footprints or any other evidence that the tunnel had been used recently.

  I counted my steps, as abbreviated as my stride might have been. My vision improved.

  At thirty paces, the passage made a right turn. I stopped and listened for five seconds, but the only sound was the drumming of my heart. Seventy-two beats per minute. A little high, but not bad.

  I peeked around the corner and gazed into total darkness; a buried coffin didn’t have a thing on this tunnel. I switched on my iPhone and pressed ahead. Another thirty-five paces, and I felt a slight incline beneath my feet.

  I switched off the iPhone and listened. This time I heard the murmur of conversation wafting from somewhere above. I felt my way to the top of the incline. The murmur grew in volume. I could just make out the distant chatter of men and women speaking Farsi. It sounded like the casual talk you’d hear in a shop or a café.