THE INCREMENT

by David Ignatius

  Mehdi wished his visitor good health and bid him take a seat. He inquired what had brought such a senior figure to this humble outpost of the far-flung realms of intelligence.

  “I have a new assignment,” said Al-Majnoun. He took off his sunglasses as he spoke, revealing the eyes. The surgeon had botched his work around the edges, leaving little lines where the skin had been cut and drawn and the stitches sewed.

  “What is that assignment, General? I am sure that I am at your service.” The interrogator didn’t know how to address his guest, so he chose a high military rank.

  “I have been asked to look at penetration of the program.” Al-Majnoun did not have to say the nuclear weapons program. That much was understood.

  “Why, General? Is there reason to be concerned?”

  Al-Majnoun stroked his lower lip. It was tight, like the rest of his face. It was impossible to be sure whether these creased lips had been chapped from the wind and sun, or cut by the surgeon’s knife. He spoke in a voice that was thin and reedy, from high in the throat rather than deep down.

  “Information is like the dust in the wind, Brother Inspector. We do not know where it is blowing. What we have is more like a feeling. Sometimes we know that a door is open, even if we do not see it or feel it. We sense a rustle of wind. Or there is a little flutter at a curtain. Or we hear a creak in the floor that should not be sounding. We sense it before we know it. Perhaps this is the same.”

  “But is there a leak?”

  Mehdi nervously fingered the hairs of his goatee between his thumb and forefinger. He feared that he was going to be blamed for something.

  Al-Majnoun laughed. It sounded more like a cough, heavy with phlegm. “Not a leak, my friend. More like an opening through which a leak might pass.”

  Mehdi nodded, but he didn’t understand. He wanted to show that he was doing his job, so that he wouldn’t be blamed later if something went wrong.

  “We are always vigilant, General. I had a boy in here today, from the research center in Jamaran. Very sensitive work. I took him through his paces. We do that every day, sir. Every day, I assure you. A tight, serious boy, this one was. Studied in Germany.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Al-Majnoun, nodding.

  Mehdi continued on, thinking that Al-Majnoun was praising his work in general.

  “This one gave the right answers. He did not lie. That is the best test. I think. One lie, and there will be others. But this one told me the truth.”

  “Yes, I know,” repeated the Lebanese. This time Mehdi realized that he was referring specifically to the young physicist who had visited that afternoon. “I want to make sure that the boy’s case is handled…properly.”

  “I keep the file open, General. I wait for the lie. But I am also opening another file, and another. That is the way for us, isn’t it? We must suspect everyone. But we must watch and wait for the case to play itself out, or else we have nothing. Isn’t that right?”

  Al-Majnoun didn’t answer Mehdi Esfahani’s question. He put his sunglasses back on the bridge of his man-made nose, rose from his chair, and walked out of the room.

  7

  WASHINGTON

  Harry Pappas got a call in early August from the chief of the Information Operations Center. He supervised the agency’s public website, and he was cleared for the Dr. Ali special-access program. Pappas was at Bethany Beach with his wife and daughter, taking a few days of vacation and trying to forget how screwed up everything was. When he went walking along the beach at night, he heard his son’s voice in the waves—a hollow imaginary echo like the sound of the sea in a seashell. But he was glad of it. He worried sometimes now that he might forget what Alex had sounded like.

  “I think your Iranian friend is back,” said the chief of the Information Operations Center.

  “How’s that?” Pappas held his breath for a moment.

  “We just got another message over the transom from Iran,” continued the IOC chief. “We ran traces. It’s from a sheet-metal factory in Shiraz, routed via a server in Turkey, but that’s chaff. The size of this message is larger, but the tags look similar. This guy is good.”

  “Sweet,” said Pappas. “God is Great.”

  He had been worried that Dr. Ali was dead. He hadn’t resumed communication after fifteen days as Pappas had requested, and he remained silent for the next thirty days. Pappas had been like an uptight parent waiting for a child to return home. What had gone wrong? They had spooked him. They had made a mistake without realizing it. The return message had scared him off. Or worse, he had been discovered. But now he was back.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Get it out of the system, right now. Give it a scrub. I’ll be back in Washington tonight.”

  “What’s the rush? I thought you were on vacation.”

  “We won’t get another chance like this. If it’s our man, we need to reel him in quick.”

  Pappas drove the Jeep Cherokee back to Washington that afternoon. He apologized to his wife, but she was almost relieved. Harry was lost when they were alone. He had been away for a full year, in 2004, when he was in Baghdad. Now he was away even when he was at home. She had her own life. She taught at an elementary school in Fairfax. She spent her days around children, which helped take her mind off her dead son. She was going to yoga classes, and she had joined a book group where they drank wine and the divorced women talked about their sex lives. And she had her daughter Louise—“Lulu”—though the girl had become withdrawn since her brother died, as if she blamed the parents.

  Harry said he would be back that weekend to pick Andrea up. She said that would be wonderful, but she knew she would be getting a ride home with friends.

  Harry went straight to the office. He blew into the main entrance, past the guards and the electronic entry gates. There was a warning sign in C Corridor, FOREIGN LIAISON IN AREA, and he saw a group of visitors he guessed were Malaysian or Indonesian, tidy little men in black suits. He bowled past them, up the ramp way into Persia House. His secretary had already left for the day, but the luminous, cherubic face of Hussein watched over the entry room. He went into his office, closed the door, and logged on to his secure computer.

  When the new message came up, Pappas drank it down like a shot of whiskey. The message was in English, written in a kind of business code, as if the sender were discussing a commercial transaction. It began with an apology.

  We are sorry. We received your message about sheet-metal orders, but we could not respond as you requested. Also, we do not like Hotmail anymore. We worry that our business competitors may be curious. We will use our own system. We will share an email account. The address is iranmetalworks@gmail.com. The password is “ebaga4X9.” Do not send messages to or from this account. Write messages, and save them, and we will look in the “saved messages” space. We are sorry that we cannot meet with you. It is not good business. You do not know this market, but we know. Do not contact us in any other way. We will arrange the business, not you. We cannot travel to other markets. We are very sorry, but it is not wise.

  The message continued with some sentences in Persian. Pappas showed the text to an Iranian-American woman who had been cleared for the SAP. She said after an hour’s study that they were lines from Ferdowsi, perhaps the most famous poet in Iranian history. The translation read as follows:

  He said, “Is it good or ill these signs portend?

  When will my earthly life come to an end?

  Who will come after me? Say who will own

  This royal diadem, and belt, and throne.

  Reveal this mystery, and do not lie—

  Tell me this secret or prepare to die.”

  The email also contained a technical document. That was the prize. That was what changed everything.

  Pappas waited for Tony Reddo and Adam Schwartz to analyze the details. They were seated at the little conference table in his airless office, studying the paper and trading quick technical comments that Harry didn’t underst
and. He tried to read the cable traffic from Dubai, but he couldn’t concentrate. Finally Schwartz spoke up.

  “This is a big deal,” he said. “In fact, if it’s what we think it is, it’s a really big deal.”

  “So what is it, goddammit? Don’t play with me, boys.”

  “Do you know what a neutron generator is?” asked Reddo.

  “It’s something that generates neutrons,” said Harry in exasperation. “That means no, I don’t know what it means.”

  “A neutron generator is one of the ways you trigger a nuclear weapon.”

  “Well, holy shit! That’s what this is about?”

  Schwartz and Reddo both nodded.

  “This is a lab report,” said Schwartz, the MIT whiz kid who worked for Arthur Fox. “It describes a test in which the researchers tried to make a neutron generator perform at the level needed to produce fission in the core of a nuclear bomb. But it malfunctioned.”

  “Malfunctioned?”

  “Yes. It didn’t work. This neutron generator is sort of like a fancy spark plug. They used to call its predecessor a ‘zipper,’ back in the Manhattan Project. Don’t ask me why. It’s sort of complicated: It starts with explosives, which create energy that heats up a wafer of deuterium. Ionizes it, to be precise. The explosion accelerates this ionized deuterium so it bombards a target of tritium, and it produces a whole lot of neutrons. And the neutrons create a runaway chain reaction in the plutonium core of the bomb. And then, boom! If you follow me.”

  “I don’t have any fucking idea what you’re talking about, but so what? I take it this thing—whatever it is—would produce a nuclear explosion. If it worked.”

  “Correct,” said Reddo. “This is one of the technical puzzles in building an actual nuclear weapon. In the test this message described, the neutron pulse fizzled. It would not have been able to start a proper chain reaction. But that isn’t the point: this document says the Iranians are building a triggering device. An initial test failed, but presumably more are planned.”

  “Are they close?”

  “I don’t know. From this document, there’s no way to know how serious the technical problems are, so we can’t really evaluate the message that’s being sent. If they keep trying it this way, they’ll keep failing. But they won’t, presumably.”

  “It’s pretty fucking scary, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.” Reddo and Schwartz spoke the words in unison.

  Pappas closed his eyes and tried to take in what he had just heard. This was the red flag—no, more than that, it was the wailing siren. If the message was true, the Iranians had restarted their covert weapons program. They had done some basic work on these problems through 2003, but then stopped. Or at least, that was what the agency had believed until about thirty seconds ago. Dr. Ali’s message described a failure. But if they solved the trigger problem and assembled enough fissionable material, they could test a nuclear weapon. And if they did that, then the whole world would be turned upside down.

  Pappas summoned the members of his special-access program. He gathered them with a sense of foreboding. It wasn’t that he wanted to keep the intelligence to himself. He just knew that this was a piece of information that would carve its own course, like a flash flood, once it was let loose.

  The Dr. Ali SAP group met the next day. Fox had returned the previous night from his vacation house on Nantucket. He was tanned and relaxed. His face didn’t have Harry’s perpetual look of sleeplessness; he was innocent, in that way. He didn’t know the worst that life could do to someone. That was what made him talk like a tough guy; he had never really had to be very strong himself.

  “We should go to the White House.” Those were Fox’s first words when they were seated in the conference room.

  “For sure,” said Harry. “But not yet. We just got the damned message.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” said Fox. “This is an Iranian declaration of war.”

  “No it’s not. It’s a document we have barely had time to analyze. To the extent we understand the message, it’s telling us that they fucked something up. The White House doesn’t even know about Dr. Ali. Let’s not pull people’s chains downtown until we’re sure what we have here.”

  “You don’t seem to understand, Harry. This is the breakout. They are back in the weaponization business. They’re working on the trigger for a bomb. They’re almost ready to test. That’s the message. Nothing else matters. We need to take this to the White House, today. If you won’t, I will. And the director will back me up. He wants it briefed to the national security adviser this afternoon.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I already asked him. Not to go behind your back. But I thought the admiral should be informed.” The director was a navy four-star, still serving in uniform. He liked to do things by the book, but in his job at the CIA, he wasn’t sure what the book was.

  “You’re right,” said Harry. As much as he disliked Fox, he knew that he was correct. This wasn’t something to sit on. But he was worried just the same. Once something went downtown, you couldn’t control it anymore. It took on a life of its own.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said, ‘You’re right.’ Let’s go up to the seventh floor and see the director. And we’ll go downtown this afternoon, just like you wanted.”

  Fox didn’t look happy in triumph. He was peeved that Harry would be coming along to the White House.

  8

  WASHINGTON

  The White House, curiously, was one of those places that reminded a visitor what Washington used to be, before the layers of institutional deception had hardened and the staffs had expanded like replicating zombies in Night of the Living Dead. The West Wing was so small it didn’t fit many people, for one thing. The president and his top aides were all jammed together in adjacent offices, so that they couldn’t escape each other’s company. And you realized, once inside the Secret Service cordon, that the president of the United States was just a politician, surrounded by courtiers and glad-handers and people seeking favors. He was as prone to making stupid decisions as any other politician, maybe more so. The real secret about the White House was that it was so ordinary—mediocrity on steroids.

  The West Wing lobby was like the sitting room outside a governor’s office—and not a very big state, either. A secretary manned a desk to the right of the door; sofas and easy chairs were arrayed at the three other corners of the room. Primping on the upholstery were cabinet secretaries, presidential chums from back home, conniving lobbyists, and shopworn members of Congress—all waiting to see the president and his top aides. The walls were decorated with old paintings—cowboys and Indians and landscapes of a frontier nation; Washington crossing the Delaware, that founding myth of American determination. If you added a spittoon and the smell of stale cigars, you would be back in Lincoln’s White House.

  Intelligence briefers didn’t enter through the main lobby, though. They usually took the side door on the ground floor, which opened onto the little street between the West Wing and the Old Executive Office Building. They would arrive by car from Langley, or on foot from the intelligence community’s hush-hush office on F Street. Often they would descend to the Situation Room and other hidden bunkers crammed with electronics. The CIA emissaries in this respect were part of a different White House, one that had no connection with spittoons and cigars but was a product of the imperial superstate that had emerged after 1945. They were the side-door boys, unaccountable to the politicians and petitioners camped out in the West Wing lobby.

  They arrived just before 7:00 p.m. The director was wearing his summer dress navy uniform. Starched white, accented by the gold of his admirals’ stars and the multicolored battle ribbons. He always looked more comfortable in his uniform, like an actor in his proper costume. Fox and Pappas followed along behind in their business suits, the former sleek and well tailored, the latter creased and baggy.

  The president was hosting a cocktail reception that evening in the Yellow
Parlor upstairs for a few members of Congress and their spouses. He hated that sort of socializing, it was said, but they were desperate for votes. The plan was for the agency team to brief the national security adviser, Stewart Appleman, and then, if he decided it was appropriate, to summon the president.

  The director climbed the stairs from the ground-floor entrance, followed by Fox and then Pappas; upstairs they took a left down the narrow corridor toward Appleman’s office. The NSC intelligence liaison was waiting there, and the visitors could barely fit in the anteroom. Eventually the door opened and the adviser peered out of his corner office. He was an uncannily youthful man, for all the secrets he had digested over a thirty-year career as a national security bureaucrat. He dressed in the tidy, timeless look of a Brooks Brothers lifer, still wearing the same style of penny loafers and button-down shirts that he had in prep school.

  “Can we do this here?” asked Appleman, motioning to his inner office. The last sunlight of the late summer afternoon was filtering through his windows. The room was the bland color of eggshells, decorated with nautical paintings and the inevitable tableaux of the Old West. Appleman stood at his door deferentially, waiting for them to enter. He was so polite, even the president tended to treat him dismissively, barking out his last name as if he were a house servant.