The Last Man in Tehran

by Mark Henshaw

  Ebtekar turned to his other work until he heard the first of his assistants arrive in the outer office. He picked up the telephone. “Get me the travel office. I need to travel to Qom in the morning.”

  I had hoped you would decide otherwise, Gavi, but I knew that you likely could not. I could not in your place, he thought. One last operation. I hope you are watching.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  35,000 feet above the Atlantic

  The British Airways Airbus A380 was the quietest plane Kyra had ever known. It was a monstrous thing, double decks the full length of the fuselage, four engines below the wings, and the business-class seats offered enough luxury that she imagined the first-class lounge must be fit for a king. The flight home technically wasn’t long enough to qualify for anything better than coach, so Barron must have waived regulations or told someone to look the other way when booking her seat. Perhaps she’d earned it, but she thought that just walking out of Evin Prison had been reward enough. Unlike Sam Todd, she was going home.

  The interview in London with Sir Ewan and his people had been unpleasant. Kathy and Jon had been in the room for moral support, and the spymaster and his immediate subordinates had been perfectly polite in that cultured way that all British seemed to master . . . but she was sure that underneath, there was a suspicion that this American girl had somehow gotten their asset killed. Kyra had answered every question they’d put to her, hiding nothing and offering her recollections in excruciating detail, but she doubted that the interviewers were truly satisfied. She could not judge them for that. The situation reversed, she or Clark Barron would have picked apart whatever British agent had sat before them without mercy or hesitation.

  She had traveled with Jon and Kathy to Heathrow in one of London’s famed black cabs and parted ways there. None of them had been free to discuss the reasons for their coming and going and so there had been little to talk about.

  She looked out the window starboard side and watched the Atlantic shoreline pass under the aircraft. The pilot announced that they would be landing at Dulles only a few minutes later than the 2:00 p.m. scheduled arrival. The caffeine pills would help with the jet lag and her town house in Leesburg was only twenty minutes from the airport. Barron had ordered her to go home and Kyra could take a day to rest if she wanted it. She was inclined to obey. She didn’t know what she could do back at headquarters.

  She didn’t sleep on the flight. There was still a mole, or a pack of them, at Langley. Fallon was still the leading candidate for that. He’d certainly gotten Sam Todd killed and a man willing to cover up something like that for his own benefit suggested he was willing to break any other rules. Still, the puzzle had embedded itself in her mind and refused to let her go. Why would Fallon help Mossad?

  Money? It was the most likely answer but also the easiest for Rhodes and his FBI team to track down, and they’d found nothing.

  Revenge? For what? Who had wronged Fallon? No one that she could see. His career had stalled after Todd’s disappearance. Was that enough to drive a man to commit treason? Even if it was, it didn’t explain why he would choose Mossad as his partner in that particular crime.

  Ideology? The man was a narcissist. He had no religious ties to Israel, and his loyalties, as far as she could detect, were to himself alone and perhaps a few of his close friends, and she wondered how far that stretched in a scrum like Fallon was in now.

  Ego? She could believe that, but most of the spies in the game for that reason started early in their careers and Fallon was far along. Had he been engaging in treason all along and only now had made his mistakes? It was possible, she supposed, but this line of inquiry only led her back to the first question. Why help Mossad? It seemed an unlikely choice. Perhaps the answer was more psychologically complex than she could fathom, but it felt wrong to her. And why would others join in if the whole point of the exercise was to gratify one man’s ego. If there was a pack of moles at play, surely they were in this for something more than Fallon’s personal pleasure, and all of the other reasons reared up again with all of their complications. The pieces refused to come together neatly in her mind in any way that she could arrange them.

  She saw another plane in the distance flying in the opposite direction, a long contrail stretching out behind it. She pulled out her cell phone, connected it to the Airbus’s Wi-Fi network, launched a flight-tracker app, and pointed it at the aircraft. The phone ingested the data and reported that the transport in the distance was a United flight, had just taken off from Dulles, and was bound for London, the city she had just left.

  She shut off her phone and stared at the eastbound plane. Going the other way, she thought.

  Is the mole helping Mossad?

  Or is Mossad helping the mole?

  Her thoughts tumbled around in her mind faster, the bits of data piecing themselves together again, moving and turning in different ways.

  The mole had picked the Banshee Reeks site. Why? For the reason she’d thought? Just so Fallon could have an easy cover for action? Maybe, but Fallon had access to some of the leaked intel that had been recovered in the package, which guaranteed he would be the logical suspect if the intel was recovered.

  No, not if, she realized. When.

  Money, ego, ideology, revenge? She had let herself become trapped by that model, seventy years of counterintelligence cases telling her what the boundaries were, what the motivations of a mole had to be. Now, perhaps, there might be a new reason to add to the list.

  It took her another minute to rearrange the pieces in her mind, to turn them over and fit them together in different ways. They came together and the solution to it all became painfully clear.

  The Airbus touched down ten minutes later. It took a half hour to evacuate the massive plane and Kyra rushed through Dulles, pulling her carry-on behind her, and then almost breaking out into an open run when she got outside. Her truck was in the parking deck to the west, a half-mile walk from the drop-off zone. She threw her case in the back, clambered in, and made her way down and out onto the airport road as fast as she could manage. It took another five minutes to get onto the Dulles access road. Langley was twenty miles to the east. Kyra opened up on the accelerator.

  Qom, Iran

  78 miles southwest of Tehran

  The tractor trailer was older than the guards who waved it through the checkpoint, paint stripped in lines from its body by a thousand scrapes, other bits eaten away in small bits by rust that had started in on the metal underneath. The battered machine spewed black smog as the driver shifted gears with a leathery hand, and it rolled forward, crawling toward the old factory entrance. The trailer it pulled behind was heavy, more weight than he could remember hauling in years. The man behind the wheel had been ordered not to look inside, which had been no temptation anyway. He had stopped caring long ago about what he was hauling on any given day, and once he realized that he would be carrying this particular load to a military facility, he knew that ignorance was a better course anyway.

  The sentries grimaced and held their breath until the breeze cleared the black fog from the air. Guarding a rusting old warehouse, their duty was now made worse by the fact that they now got to breathe pollution, and they muttered curses at whoever had approved entry for the moving smokestack.

  That man was in the car behind, an armored black Mercedes S600. Mahmoud Akhundi had not wanted the vehicle. Too ostentatious, too obvious, he’d told the president. He had not wanted this job either, securing the RTGs for Iran’s future use, but he’d had no more choice about that than he had about the car and the security guards. Men doing work like this needed to move about quietly and a vehicle fit for the supreme leader himself could draw the attention of armed drones in the sky, not to mention spies on the sidewalks. The president had ignored both protests. Mossad was on a rampage, the head of the nuclear program had been gunned down on a public street, and so the president refused to let him decline the security. The murder of the director of Iran’s nuclear program had
enraged the mullahs, but the supreme leader was playing the calm philosopher, refusing to lambaste Israel in public at the behest of the MOIS director. Silence is the beginning of all security, Ebtekar had told him.

  As though silence could make the Israelis forget about Haifa, Akhundi thought. Or make them believe that we have only peaceful intentions. The only people who still believed that were the same breed of useful pacifist idiots whom Saddam Hussein had once used as stage props as he tried to stop the US from coming for him. The Israelis were not idiots and they were most definitely not pacifists. How many of his country’s nuclear sites had they bombed over the years? Akhundi tried to remember. Khormabad in 2010. Bidganeh in 2011, Isfahan, the same month. Fordo in 2001, Parchin the year after. How many scientists had the Mossad killed over the years? He knew the names. Some of them had been friends. He had seduced one man’s wife and Mossad had murdered the cuckold a week later, saving Akhundi from an unpleasant argument. He was sorry the man was gone, though less so about the timing of his demise.

  The cargo ramp had been installed inside the building to keep the American satellites from seeing the construction. It was long and winding, built to let trucks like that one make its way deep underground by traveling down in a wide spiral. The cargo truck would need ten minutes of one long, slow, and steady turn to reach the lowest level and Akhundi had no desire to crawl behind it. There was a more comfortable way down at his disposal.

  Akhundi unlocked the seat belt before the car stopped and he opened his own door before his driver or any of his armed escorts could do it for him. The security force said nothing, just stepped quickly to take up their positions around him as he walked. One of the guards offered him a hardhat, red with a blue stripe around the circumference. He put it on without argument.

  “Not that way, sir.” The leader of his security escort pointed him a different way.

  “We are not going down by the elevator?” He pointed to the complex adjacent to the warehouse. It was an industrial office park, no longer new but not old enough for the facade to have started crumbling as much as it appeared to have done. Perhaps it was better not to fix the place up. The security force, cameras, and fences kept it clean of graffiti and enough wild cats roamed the perimeter to keep the rodents out; but a facility kept too clean and repaired in this part of the city would have drawn notice. And the main building was only two stories but had an elevator cabin on the roof. That had been a design mistake. Some American intelligence analyst staring at a satellite photo might ask why a two-story building needed an elevator, and it would not take long to conclude that the elevator was not for travel up, but down—six stories in this case.

  “Orders from the minister. The perimeter is secure, but we don’t want to risk you going outside. The investigation team on Kish recovered evidence from the warehouse of snipers. So, the stairs, if you would, sir.”

  Akhundi frowned but didn’t argue the point. They walked to the stairwell, the bodyguards checking it first. Two men took the lead, the rest following Akhundi inside. The first sublevel was all pipes and pumps, the industrial systems needed to heat, cool, and pump water throughout the facility. Placing the infrastructure on that level also masked the heat signatures from below from satellites and planes and drones and whatever else the West sent over Iran every day. The second sublevel was the central control room, where visitors would soon be able to watch the production of uranium fuel rods below through tall glass panels on sublevel three.

  The fourth sublevel was three stories high, and housed the only facility of its kind in the Islamic world, a separation factory where scientists would extract plutonium from the used fuel rods brought from the heavy-water reactor at Arak. They would only be able to extract ten kilograms of plutonium each year from the waste, twelve in a very good year, but Akhundi was a patient man. Western surveillance had turned nuclear proliferation programs into the work of decades.

  The fifth sublevel was home to the metallurgy department and the most advanced machine shop in Iran, though the equipment was now sitting idle. Amiri—Allah protect his soul—had had to procure all of the equipment at Akhundi’s request because the Europeans had not been allowed to sell any of it to his companies directly. Sanctions, so sorry, was the answer Akhundi had heard for years. But the Europeans’ strict adherence to the law was only skin deep. They’d even sold the equipment at a discount in return for prompt payment.

  Akhundi looked at the three large crates in the middle of the room. The middle crate was open and empty. It had not been his decision to crack open the first radioisotope thermoelectric generator and extract the strontium inside. He was still trying to determine who had given that order. The supreme leader and the president had both denied any involvement. Assuming they were being truthful, that left very few possibilities, none of whom Akhundi was anxious to confront. Those were men so powerful that his own political connections would offer him precious little protection.

  The sixth sublevel was the loading dock.

  The crew chief and several of his workers were milling around the area, waiting for the truck’s arrival. He saw one man standing alone on the dock. The workers seemed to be avoiding him, whether out of fear or some other reason, he couldn’t tell. He approached the man, who sensed his arrival and turned.

  “Salâm, Mahmoud. How are you?” Ebtekar asked.

  “I’m doing very well, sir. I was not told you would be here.”

  “I felt it necessary to come and see things for myself after recent events. Are the RTGs here?”

  “They are,” Akhundi confirmed.

  “And the rest of this new cargo?”

  “Off-the-books parts for one of the new reactors at Bushehr.”

  “Ah,” Ebtekar replied. “I will be finished with my own inspection here once the truck is unloaded, and I will be returning to Tehran within an hour afterward. You will notify me at my office when the RTGs have been secured at the new site.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They stood in silence until the tractor trailer finally arrived. It had taken fifteen minutes to make the trip down the spiral ramp. The driver had taken his time, not for the sake of the truck, which could have scraped every concrete barrier on the spiral and looked none the worse for it. He had seen the security and assumed that, whatever he was hauling, the buyer wanted it to arrive intact.

  Shipshape and Bristol fashion, Akhundi thought, repeating an old phrase he’d heard during his student years in London. He appreciated the driver’s caution. Not all men were so careful.

  The truck rolled to a stop smoother than Akhundi had imagined and the cargo crew broke up their loose formation and swarmed around the back. The driver stayed in the cab, another order he’d been given before starting this assignment.

  They disconnected the trailer in less than a minute and the crew chief ordered the truck driver to swing wide and make his way back up the ramp. The gears crunched, the truck moved again, spewing its smog, and there was no breeze here to clear it out. Akhundi smelled it and wondered whether the cloud wasn’t more poisonous than anything the truck driver had just delivered.

  The truck rolled up the ramp out of Akhundi’s line of sight, and only then did the crew open the trailer. The crew chief climbed inside and disappeared for several minutes, the beam of light from his torch all that Akhundi could see.

  “Any problems?” Akhundi asked as the chief finally clambered out.

  “I am not certain, sir.”

  “What is it? Is something broken? Stolen?” Akhundi asked, his voice rising. It was not uncommon for smaller pieces of equipment to go missing, but to have this happen before the intelligence director was embarrassing. It was all smuggled in to begin with, so it was very easy for any of these workers to steal something to sell to one of the smugglers passing through Kish for sale on a black market in some other country. He would have to order the Quds Force to retrace the entire shipment and start interrogations—

  “No, sir, that is not the problem,” the crew chief
corrected him. “The opposite, in fact. We were expecting a total of seventeen. The shipment that arrived this morning carried one crate more than expected, but all of them were part of the larger manifest, so we thought it had simply been shipped out early because space was available. But now, with the number we just received, we have an extra.”

  “An extra crate?” Akhundi twisted his head and looked around the cargo dock. There were dozens of wooden and metal boxes stacked everywhere. “Which one?”

  “I don’t know,” the crew chief admitted. He had never been diligent in tracking the paperwork and now his carelessness had finally caught up with him. “We’ll have to unload these and then compare everything against the manifests.”

  “It will not appear on the manifests,” Ebtekar announced.

  “Sir?” Akhundi asked.

  “The extra crate is here on my order,” Ebtekar said. “I will explain everything to you shortly. But preparing the RTGs is your first priority. Get to it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I will meet you upstairs. Report to me when the RTGs are ready for transport.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Khoda hafez, gentlemen.”

  “Good-bye, sir. I will see you shortly.”

  Ebtekar took the elevator up. Akhundi went upstairs to the central control room and spent two minutes talking with the facility director to ensure that there would be no serious delays. He was tired of all this maneuvering, if he was honest with himself. His influence over these men, his power to give orders, derived entirely from the fact that he was the supreme leader’s lackey, and he hated that fact. All of the trappings of his position were a charade. No one respected him, not even the man to whom he answered. They kept him because he was useful and gave them plausible deniability. Once those facts were no longer true, he was sure that his fall from grace would be impressive, if not fatal.