“We are worried about you,” said Sir David. He had just finished his Dover sole and his second glass of Puligny-Montrachet, and was waiting for his cheese.
“Not about you personally, of course,” he continued, “and not even about the agency, although we do wonder sometimes whether perhaps you are losing a step. No, we are worried about the administration. They are becoming, shall we say, accident-prone. They remind me of a gyroscope that has been knocked off-balance and begins to wobble, more and more. September 11, well, bad luck. Pick yourself up, get on with it. Iraq, terrible mess. God-awful mess, actually. But such is the nature of life. Make mistakes. Try to fix them. Suck it up. Get on with it. But this natural process of regeneration does not seem to be happening in your fair land at present. Not only was the previous administration a disappointment, but the new one seems likely to be equally so, and perhaps the next after that. This worries us. It worries the prime minister. He isn’t sure what to do.”
Harry was silent, staring at the lamb chop bones on his plate.
Sir David looked over the top of his glasses, into Harry’s eyes. “Am I overdramatizing?”
“No,” said Harry. “Things are bad. I can’t really blame them on Iraq. We all made mistakes. We should have seen it coming. We shouldn’t have gone in…” His voice trailed off.
There was an awkward silence. Harry was looking away from the table, trying to keep his composure.
“Harry lost his son in Iraq,” said Winkler.
“Yes. I’d heard that. I am terribly sorry, Harry. For you this is not a discussion in the abstract. Forgive me. We’ll talk about something less unpleasant.”
Harry shook his head. “We are in a hell of a mess, David. It’s true. We do need to talk about it. I need to talk about it, more than most people. I just don’t know what the answers are.”
“You and Adrian were discussing Iran, I gather.”
“We have started a joint operation. Adrian can give you the details, perhaps in a place that is less…noisy.”
“Well, I’m jolly glad that we can be of help. That is our role in life. We are the pilot fish, who live to nibble the bacteria off the great shark. And perhaps to perform other services from time to time.”
“Give me a break, David. You have a station in Tehran and we don’t. And from what Adrian tells me, you’re actually using it.”
“Perhaps so. But you see, it’s Iran that worries me most of all, Harry. That’s a place where your mistakes might become truly consequential. Iraq’s a mess, true enough, but that’s their problem, isn’t it? Bloody difficult. But from our perspective, well, Saddam is gone and the Iraqi military is destroyed. So you might say, what’s all the fuss about, really? Not the ideal outcome, certainly. A bit untidy, to be sure. But we’ll all survive.”
Plumb paused, took a sip of his wine, and continued to speak in a lower voice.
“Whereas Iran, you see, is a different matter altogether. You start a war with Iran, Harry, and it will take us all thirty years to dig out from the rubble. Number 10 is nervous. Terrified, actually. You’re not going to start a war with Iran, are you?”
Harry wasn’t sure how to answer the question. “I don’t know,” he said after a moment. “I hope not. But I don’t know. This White House, as you say, is wobbly. You can’t be sure which way it’s going to spin.”
The cheese trolley arrived. Sir David asked for four different kinds, arrayed on his plate in ascending order of sharpness of flavor. A ripe Camembert, then a chèvre dusted with pepper, then a sharp Irish cheddar, finally a fat wedge of Stilton. A look of contentment momentarily softened his face as he contemplated his cheese, but then the frown returned.
“You see, Harry, we really can’t afford another American mistake. It’s too damned costly for us. We travel along in your wake like the faithful little brother, helping you pick up the debris after your misadventures. But I’m not sure how much longer we would be prepared to do that. The ‘special relationship’ is not good for our health, you see.”
Plumb paused and sampled the Camembert, which was oozing onto the plate. He went on to the chèvre, and then the cheddar, while Harry pondered what to say.
“They’re building a bomb,” Harry said eventually. “We have it out of Iran. They’re working on a trigger. That’s what Adrian and I were discussing. That’s why I’m here.”
“Yes, yes,” said Sir David. “I’ve heard about that. The director phoned me last night. But even if it’s true, let me pose the impolite question: So what? Everyone wants a bomb these days, but we haven’t gone to war to stop them. Chinese, Indians, Pakis, North Koreans, for goodness’ sake. They all have their bombs, and mirabile dictu, none of them seems at all inclined to use them. But in this case, people in the White House seem to think that military action may be necessary. Or so we have been led to believe by our, forgive the term, ‘spies.’ But you’re a man whose judgment I trust. Seasoned, tempered by life. So I put it to you: Is America going to war again? It’s rather important to us.”
Harry shook his head. He felt mildly disloyal, even having this conversation. The Brits did their best to make you forget that they were a foreign nation, feeding you lamb chops and fine wines and a little pudding, and would you mind please telling your innermost secrets to your dear, innocent cousins.
“I can’t answer,” said Harry, “because I don’t know. There’s a group around the president that wants a confrontation with Iran. There’s another group that doesn’t. There’s the Congress, which is sick of war but listens to the Israelis. And the Israelis keep saying we have to strike Iran before it’s too late. And there’s the president, who is so battered you wonder how he can stand up straight. You tell me how all those pieces fit together, and I’ll tell you whether we’re going to war with Iran.”
Sir David had finished his cheese by now, and was polishing off the last of the Gevrey-Chambertin he had ordered for Harry and Adrian to go with their lamb chops. The dining room was beginning to empty out. He wasn’t in a rush. He looked out to the green of the park and then back toward Harry, his eyes twinkling with that mischievous look that had marked him as an operator from the days he was a schoolboy. He was getting to the point, in his own eccentric way.
“Time,” he said. “That’s really the issue, isn’t it?”
“I don’t follow you,” said Harry.
“I had an economics professor at Cambridge. He was an Italian. Piero something. Ancient man, when I encountered him. He had devoted his life—wasted it, most people thought—to proving that Ricardo’s Labor Theory of Value was correct. What a folly! An economist who has been dead for nearly two hundred years, whose theories are held in disrepute by all right-thinking people, but never mind. That was this fellow Piero’s life’s work, which he distilled in a little monograph called The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. Fancy that. What he did was to build a model in which ‘capital’ was actually labor—‘dated labor,’ he called it. And that was his point. It was time that added value to the products of human labor. Pick a bunch of grapes off a vine, even in Pomerol, and they’re practically worthless. But press them and ferment the juice and put it in bottles and lay them down for a few years…by God, now you have an investment. See what I mean? Capital is time.”
Harry was wondering whether the SIS chief had perhaps had a bit too much to drink when Plumb wheeled on him suddenly and clasped his hand.
“Do not make the mistake of thinking that this is a short clock, Harry. You are not running out of time. The Iranians are not about to detonate a bomb. They have not built a heavy-water reactor. They do not have plutonium. They don’t have a working trigger. Oh yes, I know all about the new panic, but it is misplaced, my boy. We have more time than your skittish friends in the White House seem to think. Perhaps even more than you think. The essence of wisdom here is to avoid acting rashly, in the belief that you are running out of time. You are not. I assure you.”
Harry was taken aback by the intensity of what Plumb had s
aid, and the oddity of it.
“You’re telling this to the wrong person, Sir David. I am a career intelligence officer who is running a CIA division. I don’t make policy. I don’t have much influence with the people who do make policy. If you want to influence whether America goes to war against Iran, you’re talking to the wrong guy.”
Plumb took his napkin from his lap, folded it carefully, and placed it atop the table. He pulled his chair back from the table, preparing to leave. Adrian Winkler did the same.
“I’m not at all sure of that, Harry,” said Plumb. “Actually, I rather think you are the ‘right’ guy. You just don’t know it yet.”
11
DAMASCUS/TEHRAN
The Crazy One traveled to Damascus for the weekend. Nobody dared to ask him why, and he wouldn’t have given an answer, even if they had. But the truth was that he was bored. He had requested a private jet from the president’s office, and flown alone from Mehrabad to Al-Mazzah military airport outside Damascus. He arrived as a shadow person, without a passport or any other trail.
A black sedan brought him to the new Four Seasons Hotel, where a suite had been booked for a Mr. Nawaz. The hotel was told that he was a Pakistani businessman working in Iran on sensitive business. The security man who had accompanied him spoke a few hushed words to the desk clerk, and a suite on the top floor, the presidential floor, had been cleared for him, and the usual check-in arrangements were waived.
And now Al-Majnoun was sitting on his balcony, smoking a hubbly-bubbly pipe laced with opium. He looked toward the old tombs across the way; they were being restored as part of the manic refurbishment of Damascus, cranes over the centuries-old stone crypts and passages, scaffolding surrounding the sacred burial ground. He puffed hard on the pipe and looked again, and he could see the jinns hovering anxiously over the tombs, their rest disturbed. They were alight, ghosts in the air, jittering to and fro. Could he hear them crying? No, he was not that stoned, but he would put another gummy wad of opium in the pipe until he could hear them talk.
It was a pleasure to be in this Arab city. That was all the Crazy One really knew. He was not a Persian. His adopted country’s nuances and rituals were not his own. Even its religion embarrassed him. Iranian Shiism was so noisy and overdramatic—pilgrims weeping sentimentally at the mere mention of Hussein, and clanging their chains so histrionically on Ashura day. This was more like the professional wrestling matches he watched on satellite television than real religion. Where was the austerity, the purity of the desert? These Persians were city people with gloves on their hands. How could they touch God? Their culture was so ingrown, it was as if everyone had grown up listening to the same bedtime stories and could finish them all by memory. Whereas for Al-Majnoun, the Crazy One, everything was invented and everything was new.
“Mr. Nawaz” had meetings in Damascus. Important people came to see him, and brought him letters from other important people. He sent emissaries and sometimes, under armed guard in cars with blackened windows that didn’t open even to the Syrian moukhabarat, he went to visit others. He had to be very careful where he went. The Israelis would want to kill him, of course, if they knew he was alive and traveling about, and so would the Americans. Some of the Syrian intelligence barons might want to kill him, along with the Fatah Palestinians and the Nejdi Saudis and the Dubai Emiratis. He had killed their people, or so it was said, and so they would want to kill him in revenge. His protection was that he was a non-person. The world officially thought that he was dead, killed twenty-five years ago by the Israelis, and the Israelis were never wrong. Rumors persisted, but that was always the case in this conspiratorial world. So the man survived, year by year, and the longer he lived the more the myth of invulnerability grew up around him, among the handful of people who knew the truth.
Power was not what you did, but what people believed you did. That was the essence of Al-Majnoun’s authority. People who worked with him in Tehran truly believed he was the Crazy One. They thought that if he looked at them cross-eyed, they might end up dead. When he walked into a room in one of the security ministries, people pulled back and opened a path to give him a wide berth. When he took off his sunglasses, they didn’t look at his eyes. They were afraid.
And so they did what he wanted, or what they thought he wanted. They called him “General,” or “Emir,” and tried please him because they were frightened of him. A few Iranian intelligence officers who had seen the movie Pulp Fiction called him “Mr. Wolfe” because they imagined that he was in some way like the mysterious character played by Harvey Keitel who cleans up after other people have made a mess. But outside the circle closest to the Leader, people knew little about him, except that it was prudent to do what he asked. And inside that circle, more like a black box really, it was impossible to know what anyone actually did or thought. And so Al-Majnoun was carried forward, and powerfully, by the motion of his own reputation.
He spent only a long weekend in Damascus. He had run out of opium, for one thing. And he’d had his booster shot of Arabism. Someone sent a woman up to him at the Four Seasons, a beautiful blond girl from Minsk who couldn’t have been more than twenty. She looked like a model. He made her take off all her clothes and then gave her a deck of cards and told her to play solitaire on the bed, while he watched. She thought she was supposed to do something erotic, so she touched herself and moaned. But he just wanted to watch her play cards. The next morning he flew back to Tehran on his private jet.
Al-Majnoun visited Mehdi Esfahani when he returned to Iran. He didn’t want to see him at his office again. Indeed, he rarely visited the same building twice, even in the secure environs of Tehran. It was a mistake to be predictable, in what you said or where you went. He was thinking about another round of plastic surgery for that reason—not that he needed it, or even could tolerate another reassembly of his tissue. There was so little original skin left to work with. But still, it would upset people like this ridiculous Mehdi with his goatee if he couldn’t be sure if he was looking at the same man, or someone pretending to be him, or someone altogether different.
The Crazy One summoned Mehdi to the Revolutionary Guard compound in the northeast sector of the city. He had an office there, which he had used years ago and then left empty, padlocked against intruders. He had hideaways like that across the city, his own network of safe houses.
Mehdi knocked on the door. A muffled voice inside commanded him to enter. The room was so dark it was impossible at first to see Al-Majnoun, hunched over his desk at the far end. The interrogator stepped forward, walking toward the play of shadows he thought must be the form of the man who had summoned him. As he got closer, Al-Majnoun lit a match, illuminating his head in a flickering half-light. His sunglasses were off, and the low light seemed to catch every scar on the Lebanese man’s face. Al-Majnoun touched the glowing match to the top of his pipe and sucked down on it hard. The smoke disappeared into his lungs.
“You have a problem,” said Al-Majnoun, his voice rough from the smoke.
“What is it, General? I am sure that it is nothing I have done.” He was so frightened, the poor man. He didn’t know why he had been called to this remote location in a part of the Pasdaran headquarters he had never seen before.
“Of course it is not your fault,” rasped Al-Majnoun. “Don’t be a fool.”
“What is the problem then, General? Tell me so that I can help you solve it. I am at your service, always.”
“A document from the program has gone missing,” said the Lebanese. “It concerns some of the tests that have been done at Tohid Electric Company. That is one the companies you are supposed to watch. That is bad.”
“Bad.” Mehdi coughed. They would blame him. Tohid was indeed one of several covert installations that came under his review. It was his fault.
“Very bad.”
“Was the document taken from the files of Tohid?”
“We do not know. Perhaps so, perhaps not. Do not make any assumptions in such a sensitive ca
se.”
“Of course not, my general. What was the document about? If you can tell me.”
“Of course I can tell you. That is why I have summoned you. It describes test results for the triggering device for the unit. In the project. Tohid has been having problems with these tests. We do not know why.”
“Do we have the…document?” Mehdi was confused.
“No. We only know that someone was looking for it. And may have found it. All I can tell you is the general area of experimentation. That is enough for you to begin.”
Al-Majnoun handed Mehdi Esfahani a black folder. The Iranian intelligence officer touched it warily.
“I want you to be like a cat, Mr. Mehdi, a fat cat with your whiskers and your little beard,” said Al-Majnoun. “Move carefully and quietly. Do not imagine that you have friends, or that you know what is true. This case may be nothing, or something. We do not want to frighten people, if that is unnecessary. The revolution never makes mistakes. The Leader’s authority depends on that. So if there has been a mistake, it must be handled with great care. Do you understand? Ask questions, but carefully.”
“Yes, General. Of course.”
“As you make your inquiries, keep me informed. But nothing in writing, min fadluk. And I want no one else to be briefed on the investigation. That is an order, from the very highest level. The authority of the revolution rests on our ability to see our way through this darkness. Am I clear, Brother Inspector?”
Mehdi bowed his head. How had this catastrophe befallen him?
“Nothing in writing,” he repeated. “I will brief you alone.”
“I am always watching, you know. Do not make the mistake of others, who thought they knew, but did not.”
“I understand, General. I do not knock on doors that are closed.”
THE INCREMENT Page 10
