“A bloody headshrinker,” she said disgustedly. “Let’s get to it. What do you want?”
“Who do you get your information from?”
“You want names?”
“Names and where they work.”
“Get their names from Azari. He set up the network, and he made promises to them.”
“Do these people know that you are a woman?”
She dropped the cigarette from suddenly numb fingers and stared at me with big eyes. “No,” she whispered.
“How do you get your information?”
“Dead drops.”
I tried to keep a straight face. If that was true, she had only Azari’s word that there even was a network. Nor could she verify any of the names Azari gave Grafton. Anyone could service drops, including the MOIS.
“We practice good security,” she said, almost as if she were trying to sell me. Or herself.
I rubbed my face with my hands to restore circulation. I was up to my eyeballs in it this time. There was absolutely no doubt in my criminal mind that the Iranian government controlled Rostram and Azari and the flow of information to the West. I would have bet my life on that. Then it occurred to me that I probably already had.
“Go home,” I said and waved my hand in dismissal.
“Don’t you want to set up another meet?”
“I’ll find you if I do.”
“But you don’t-”
“Get the hell outta here.”
She started to say something else, thought better of it and left. I watched her go.
Well, she had the stride right, anyway. She walked like a guy.
I went straight to the embassy, crawled into my soundproof booth and called Jake Grafton. “Rostram is a woman,” I told him when we finally got connected and the crypto gear had timed in. “Not only that, she doesn’t know who supplies the information she transmits to Azari. She picks it up from dead drops.”
“Oh, great,” Grafton said disgustedly. “Does she know she’s working for the Iranian government?”
“I doubt it. She thinks she’s doing a noble thing.”
“Who is she, anyway?”
“She refused to give a name. She says she’s twenty-five and studied under Azari at Oxford. She’s maybe five-five, dark hair, trim, boyish figure. How many of those girls could there be?”
“I’ll get you a name.”
“What’s my next move?”
“If you’re up for it, find out who is servicing the dead drops. Use the guys in country.”
“Okay. What then?”
“I’ll think of something, Tommy.”
I called Jake Grafton back twelve hours later, in the middle of my workday.
“I talked to the Brits,” he said. “They think her name might be Davar Ghobadi. If so, her father is the president and CEO of a big construction company that is building a lot of Ahmadinejad’s hardened factories and launch sites. Her uncle is Habib Sultani, the minister of defense.”
“So she’s somebody.”
“With a capital S,” he said. “She was also a math wizard at Oxford. One of the British profs said a brain like hers comes along once in a generation.”
“If I hang around her, the powers that be are going to get antsy.”
“The Iranians have gone to a lot of trouble to sell us some lies,” Grafton said. “The only possible reason to do that is to hide the truth, whatever that is. Let’s see how far they can be pushed.”
“Truth is rare, these days,” I remarked.
“Priced that way, too,” the admiral observed.
The booming of thunder woke Davar Ghobadi in the middle of the night. Her room was in the attic, tucked up here under the eaves. The room was chilly, and she could hear the rain drumming on the eaves of the old house quite plainly.
Too plainly. She opened her eyes and, as lightning flashed, saw that her window was open. The curtains were dancing in the breeze coming though the opening.
She threw back the blanket, got out of her small bed and walked past her desk and the big table covered with her father’s blueprints to the window. Hadn’t she shut it before she went to bed?
She paused a moment in the darkness, listening to the wind and rain in the trees and looking out at the neighborhood, which was composed of monstrous old houses on big lots on the hills on the north side of Tehran. In the early part of the century rich people and foreigners had built these houses, trying to escape the noise and traffic of the city center. They had succeeded. This neighborhood was an oasis in a third-world sea.
Davar shivered, then pulled the window closed.
She turned-and a gloved hand was clapped over her mouth as she was seized roughly.
Panic swelled, and she tried to struggle against the overwhelming strength that imprisoned her. She could taste the leather of the glove on the hand over her mouth. Recovering from her momentary terror, she ceased struggling… and felt the pressure of the hand over her mouth lessen.
“I didn’t think you were a screamer.” A male voice, whispering in English. American English.
She recognized the voice. It was that spy, Carmellini.
She saw him in a lightning flash, dressed all in black, towering above her, a shadowy, damp presence, his strength still immobilizing her.
Now the hand over her mouth came away.
“Is there anyone else on this floor?”
“No.”
“Can we be overheard?”
“I don’t think so.”
He released her from his grasp and retreated, a dark shape in a darker room. When the lightning flashed and the thunder boomed again, she saw that he had taken off the black hood that covered his head, and he was smiling.
“Sorry to drop in on you like this, but getting a date in this town is just impossible.”
Finding the Ghobadi house in the toniest neighborhood of Tehran with the help of a GPS hadn’t been difficult. Deciding which room to enter had been dicier, and I finally settled on the attic. My night vision goggles, which used both starlight and infrared, helped ensure I wasn’t going to stumble onto a guard in the yard or climb through a window onto an occupied bed.
She was wearing only shorts and a T-shirt, and Muslim or not, she didn’t seem embarrassed by my presence. I remarked on that as she lit a cigarette and puffed nervously.
“I had a boyfriend,” she told me by way of explanation. “When I was in England. He was from Oklahoma.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I should have married him.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“My mother was ill. When I got my degree, I came home to take care of her. She died last year.”
While she was talking, I was scoping out the room, which was large. Apparently she had most of the attic, or all of it. Large tables held blueprints. I looked them over with my penlight while she told me about mullahs, life in Iran and the life she had had in England.
“What are these?”
“Construction projects my father’s company is building.”
“Why do you have them?”
“I check the math for him. Sometimes his engineers make mistakes.”
“And you don’t?”
“Not with numbers.”
“May I photograph these?” I asked.
“If you wish,” she said. She seemed to have no problem betraying the mullahs.
She segued right into politics and nuclear weapons while I rigged blankets over the windows, the one I had entered and another on the opposite side of the room, then turned on every light in the place.
Old-time spies used Minox cameras, but my agency had gone digital. I got out my Sony Cyber-shot, which was perfect for this use; just lay the document flat, focus and click.
“Are you married?” she asked.
I shot her a glance. She was trying to look nonchalant, and failing. “This year all the foreign spies are single.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“I’m temporarily between,” I muttered
as I repositioned blueprints.
“In England I had many boyfriends,” she said and slowly peeled off the T-shirt.
Uh-oh! It wasn’t enough I was in a Muslim woman’s bedroom photographing state secrets; now she was stripping down to her birthday suit.
I stopped taking pictures and took the memory card out of the camera. Meanwhile Davar was removing the shorts. Well, she was a woman, all right.
I dug in my backpack and got out the satellite burst transmitter. Somehow I managed to get the camera card in it, got the thing turned on and stuck it outside on the window ledge, all the while watching Davar pose on the back of a chair. I wasn’t nervous-I was terrified.
“Do you Iranians still stone sex fiends to death?” I asked her.
“You can kiss me if you wish,” she said and arched her back to display her breasts better.
“Tell me about this guy from Oklahoma.” I checked my watch. Another sixty seconds or so on the burst transmitter, which would erase the camera card after the transmission, then I was out of here.
“He wanted me to marry him.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I had to return to Iran. I’ve told you that.”
“Write him a letter,” I said as I went around the room turning off lights. “Tell him you changed your mind. Women have the right, you know.” When the place was as dark as it was going to get, I pulled on my backpack.
I ran into her in front of the window. She wrapped her arms around me.
I thought, What the heck? and gave her a long kiss. Her lips and tongue tasted delicious. She pressed her naked body against me.
“Write him a letter,” I said huskily, pushing her away.
I pulled the blanket down and pulled on my night vision goggles. No one in sight. I retrieved the burst transmitter from the window ledge, then eased out the window and felt for the handholds I had used to climb up.
Davar Ghobadi stood at the window until Tommy Carmellini reached the ground and disappeared into the night. One instant he was there, then he was gone, swallowed by the darkness.
She went back to bed, but sleep wouldn’t come.
Her thoughts were still tumbling about-Tommy Carmellini, Iran, mullahs, nuclear weapons, Ghasem, Azari-when she finally drifted off to sleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ghasem’s uncle Habib Sultani was a harried man. His afternoon interview with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not go well. The president had just publicly reissued his call for the dissolution of Israel, peacefully or violently, which had boosted his and Iran’s status in the Muslim world to giddy new heights, as he had intended, and had caused temblors to once again rock Western capitals. Today Ahmadinejad was suffused with enthusiasm over reports of his speech from Arabia, Syria, Libya, Yemen and certain quarters in Palestine, Jordan, Egypt and Pakistan. His face seemed to glow.
“We play a dangerous game,” Sultani said bluntly to the exultant president when they were alone. “The Israelis and Americans know about our missiles. They know of their capabilities and their location. They know the design and location of the reactors to the precise inch. They could destroy the reactors and all our nuclear facilities aboveground with impunity, as they did the Syrian reactor. Our antiaircraft defenses are no better than the Syrians’.”
Ahmadinejad did not appreciate hearing the bald truth. He was a man who believed firmly in Allah and himself, although there were some who privately said that the order was reversed. “The Americans are great cowards,” he declared, and not for the first time. “They have announced to the world that they do not believe we have a weapons program. Yet they know that we are enriching uranium, and they know that an attack will release large quantities of radioactivity. They fret about poisoning the earth and wring their hands like old women.”
“The possibility of radioactive contamination didn’t stop the Israelis,” Sultani noted.
“Ah, yes, the Jews,” Ahmadinejad said. “Infidels without scruples.”
The irony of Ahmadinejad’s comment did not escape Sultani, who had yet to observe a scruple in the president of Iran.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke as if God were whispering in his ear. “The godless Americans will do nothing-nothing-and they will not provide assistance to the Israelis. Without American airborne tanker assets, Iran is out of range of Israeli bombers.”
Once again Sultani was left to contemplate the carnage caused by the incompetence of the American CIA, which had agreed with the publicly issued National Intelligence Estimate that said Iran had discontinued its nuclear weapons program. He knew that the separation of weapons-grade plutonium from enriched uranium had never stopped-in fact, the man in charge of that effort worked for him. He also knew that the nation possessed enough plutonium to manufacture twelve bombs, and that the stockpile was growing at several kilos per month. Never, he thought, in the history of the world had a foreign intelligence estimate been seized upon with such glee.
What he didn’t know was that Ahmadinejad and Hazra al-Rashid had been playing two hands at once. Perfectly willing to have the world believe they were manufacturing nuclear weapons, they had used the Azari connection to let the world think they were several years away from operational warheads, when in reality Iran was much closer.
“We have tricked those fools,” Ahmadinejad had chortled.
Or they have tricked us, Sultani thought then, although he didn’t make that remark aloud.
Now, this afternoon, he advised the president that his attempt to get an assessment of how the Americans’ latest electronic magic was performed had failed. “The American fighters refused to take the bait,” he said in summation.
“We must put more pressure on the Russians,” Ahmadinejad said. “Those liars! The promises they made, the lies they told… They know the Americans’ secrets and are not sharing with us.”
Back in his roost at the Defense Ministry, Sultani rubbed his chin and tried to envision how Iran could gain access to one of the Americans’ magic boxes, which he knew were in their frontline warplanes, those carrier jets that flew boldly up and down the Persian Gulf with impunity. We could always shoot one down, he thought. Or arrange a midair collision, so that one crashes and we are first to gain access to the wreckage. He thought about the crash of the F-18. The pieces of the airplane were still out there in the Strait of Hormuz, which was deep, with swift tidal currents-and, of course, it had crashed beyond the territorial limits. If there was a magic black box somewhere on the floor of that strait, Iran lacked the technology to find it. No, that box was beyond reach, although there were plenty of others.
The real issue, he well knew, was the vulnerability of Iran’s nuclear program to a conventional air attack. The Iranians had spent over twenty billion dollars moving the entire weapons program underground. Entire underground cities had been created to house the enrichment facilities, the manufacture of neutron generators, the bomb plant itself and the missile factories. Only the reactors were still aboveground: unfortunately, they could not be moved. Everything else, including the spent fuel that was being enriched, was buried deep in bombproof tunnels bored into solid granite. Or built under the city of Tehran itself.
The real question, Sultani decided, was when the enemies’ window of opportunity would close. At what point would an attack be futile, pointless, unable to stop Iran’s march to the bomb?
He removed the files holding the plans for the tunnels and the overview of the program from a safe behind his desk and spread them out so that he could study them. The conversion of uranium from yellowcake, a solid, into a gas, uranium hexafluoride (UF6), was proceeding nicely at Isfahan. This was a major industrial operation, and it took place underground. But if the facility were attacked with conventional weapons, would the underground factory be able to sustain operations? This required a calculation of how much damage the bombs might inflict on the hardened site. Of course, any breach of the tanks containing the radioactive gas would cause serious contamination. Perhaps the entire cavern would be unusable.
Certainly the radiation would kill everyone there.
Still, the off-site stockpile of UF6 was adequate and growing by the day. That stockpile was held in four locations, all inside tunnels carved into mountains.
The next step in the process was to raise the concentration of the U-235 isotope in the UF6 from its natural level of.7 percent to between 3 percent and 5 percent by the use of centrifuges. The product the centrifuges produced was called low-enriched uranium, or LEU. The cascade centrifuges at Natanz were 160 feet underground. This process took approximately 70 percent of the time and effort necessary to get to the final product, which was highly enriched uranium, HEU, containing weapons-grade concentrations of over 90 percent U-235.
Of course, even if Natanz was destroyed, Iran also had a laser enrichment facility and a heavy water facility, all hardened.
The detonator and warhead factories were also deeply underground.
All these facilities were protected by Russian S-300 antiaircraft systems, which fired the SA-20 surface-to-air missile at attacking planes. In Syria, this system failed to detect the inbound Israeli bombers.
Habib Sultani carefully studied the LEU and HEU production levels.
Finally he sighed and began arranging the materials back in his file.
Two weeks, he decided. In two weeks Iran would have enough HEU to manufacture twelve warheads. Regardless of what happened after that, bomb assembly could continue deep within the earth. If the Israelis or Americans attacked before that, they would of course do some damage, release some radioactivity, and delay the production of U-235. However, Sultani concluded, the time when they could shut down the program with conventional weapons had already passed.
There was nothing short of nuclear war that the Israelis and Americans could do to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.
Twelve nuclear warheads, mounted on missiles hidden in deep tunnels in solid granite mountains. The missiles could be run out of their tunnels and fired in minutes.
Twelve warheads should satisfy Ahmadinejad, Sultani thought.
Callie was in bed Saturday night when Jake heard his doorbell ring. He padded to the front door and peered through the peephole. Sal Molina was standing there.
The Disciple Page 9
