THE INCREMENT

by David Ignatius

  Azadi was feeling almost relaxed now. The taxi crossed Afriqa Boulevard, and a few moments later they were at the Nigerian embassy. Azadi knew it because he had worked there as a translator, before he went to Holland. He had been reporting for the Ministry of Intelligence, of course, not that the Nigerians had any real secrets to steal. But it was enough to get Azadi his permission to travel abroad. He gave the driver a few tomans and began walking south, back toward Foroozan Street, approaching the apartment from the other direction. He wasn’t so scared now. They weren’t here. They knew nothing about him. The British were powerful. They were devious and vile, as every Iranian knew, but they were the clever ones. How could someone be in danger if he was in the hands of the Little Satan?

  Azadi entered a modern apartment building, next to another new one that was still under construction. Everything was being rebuilt in this part of town. Iranians living abroad were sending money home to buy apartments for their parents or their cousins, or just to sit empty. The English must have played that game to get their safe house. They had found an Iranian businessman in Geneva or Frankfurt and had him fill out the paperwork, and wire money to the right bank accounts in Dubai. It was just another “hot” apartment, bought quasi-legally as an investment. The exiles were convinced the mullahs could not last much longer, so they speculated in real estate. They didn’t care about politics, these rich exiles. That was the problem. They would never pry power loose from the street urchins of South Tehran who filled the ranks of the Basij and the Pasdaran. The good people were always too soft.

  Azadi rang the bell of an apartment on the third floor and waited.

  The Englishman opened the door a crack. He called himself Simon Hughes, but Azadi knew that must be a false name. Why did they bother? He could call himself “John Bull,” and that would be fine. He had red hair and a big belly, and big glasses that shielded his eyes. It must be a disguise. That was what these spies did. They changed costumes like they were in a Hollywood movie. “Simon Hughes” didn’t say a word until they were in the salon and he had turned up the radio. He began by repeating the time of the next scheduled meeting, in Doha in three months. Why hadn’t they stuck to that plan? Something must be wrong.

  “We are looking for someone,” said the Englishman. He sounded so serious, but he wasn’t very old. He was in his early thirties, probably no older than Azadi himself. He spoke good Persian. The British did that right. Were they all spies, all the people who graduated from the schools of Oriental studies at Oxford and London? Was that their secret?

  “Who are you looking for?” asked Azadi. “Can you give me a name?”

  “No,” said the Englishman. “But the person we want may be looking for you. That’s how you will know him. Or her, possibly.”

  Azadi was confused, and also worried. “Why will he be looking for me? Please? Does he know who I am?” There was a tremor in his voice.

  “No, he doesn’t know who you are. Not at all. But he will be expressing an interest in your scientific specialty. He will be asking about nuclear physics, X-ray physics. That is how you will know who he is. It is possible that he works at the Tehran Nuclear Research Center, or she. It is likely that he is a scientist, like you. If you learn of such a request, I want you to make note of the name and send it to me as soon as possible. And then I want you to forget it.”

  Azadi nodded. He was really frightened now. He was putting his head into the mouth of the lion if this person worked at the TNRC. That was the place of “no one knows.”

  The Englishman had some other requests. Had there been visits from foreign scientists to the lab at Tehran University where Azadi worked? Any new shipments of materials from the West, or new requests for suppliers of scientific equipment? They were always asking about that. You would have thought these British were selling laboratory equipment, from all their commercial requests. The Iranians had a saying: “The British have a hand in everything.” That was why people feared them, and loved them secretly, too. They were the puppet masters. They had their hands on the strings. How could the puppet not love the puppet master?

  The Englishman went over the communications protocol one last time. Then he said goodbye and Azadi walked out the door and down into the sheltering chaos of the streets.

  A week passed. The rains came, and they broke through the shell of smog covering Tehran. Azadi tried to concentrate in his lab, but he was nervous. He left work early the day the rain stopped, and went up to Darband, to walk in the hills north of the city. He took something with him, a copy of an official message he had received on the Internet. He didn’t want to look at it in the lab, where others might see him—or simply see his face after he had read it.

  The drive to Darband was slow, up the steep streets near the shah’s old palace. The taxi dropped him near the top, where the trails began. It took an hour of hiking to escape the juice peddlers and knots of tourists and feel free of the city and its tightness. Up here, the women began to let their scarves fall loose, showing their hair. If they were young and daring, they found a hideaway off the main path and took their bras off, too, so that their boyfriends could touch their breasts under the cloak of their manteau. That was the orb of freedom, the soft whiteness of a woman’s bosom, to be touched and kissed. Azadi had brought his girlfriends up here, the adventurous ones. He had been a spy of love then, risking everything for a touch of flesh. Was it a version of that same excitement that he felt when he went to his meeting with Simon Hughes? Was that why he did it? There were easier ways to find a secret life.

  Azadi climbed another steep trail until he was certain that he was alone. He turned back and looked down the hillside. Building after building, mile after mile; dreams and lies behind every door. How was he any different? Lies were the fuel on which this city ran; everyone had something to hide. He was in a crowd of liars, millions of them. That was his protection. Why would they look for him, when everyone had a secret?

  Azadi took out the email message he had printed from his computer. He unfolded the piece of paper carefully. He read it twice. It was a research request, addressed to his department, seeking information about recent literature in the field of X-ray physics. It was sent by a scientist named Dr. Karim Molavi at the Tohid Electrical Company. Azadi thought he had heard of that company. It was owned by the Pasdaran. Did he remember that? Who was Dr. Karim Molavi? The sickness was beginning to rise in his stomach again.

  He knew what to do. His anxiety made him smart. He had brought with him the communications device the Englishman had given him after their first meeting, and now he typed the details of the message. The name, the email address, the workplace at Tohid Electrical Company. He pushed a button and it was gone. It had never existed. He tore up the printed copy of the Internet message and was going to throw it away, but he thought, No, they will find the pieces. He would take it home and burn the paper with a lighter, and throw the ashes down the toilet. He wished he could escape in the same way, flush himself back to the Netherlands, or London, or maybe just to Doha.

  Now he would quit. If Azadi was looking for somebody, that somebody was also looking for him. He would skip the next meeting with the British in Qatar, and refuse to answer any more of their communications. And never, ever meet them again inside Iran. He would disappear back into the anonymity of his laboratory at Tehran University. He would go to Friday prayers and bow so low he would make a callus on his forehead.

  Azadi began walking back down the trail. His steps were heavy. It was one thing to be above the city of lies, here at Darband, but it was another to descend back toward its belly.

  Azadi tried to calm himself that night by reading one of his favorite books. It was an Iranian novel called My Uncle Napoleon that had been written in the mid-1970s, around the time he was born. It was about an irascible old man who was convinced that the British controlled every aspect of Iranian life. The lead character, “Dear Uncle Napoleon,” took that name because he identified so passionately with the French emperor’s hatred
of the British. The only real British person Dear Uncle actually encountered in the novel was the bossy wife of an Indian businessman, but never mind. Like most Iranians of the time, Dear Uncle assumed that the British and their agents were everywhere. The Americans were not yet the Great Satan when the book was written. They were wicked, but in a phantasmagorical way. Dear Uncle’s friend Asadollah was always admonishing his chums about the importance of “going to San Francisco,” which was his euphemism for having sex. If you couldn’t make it to San Francisco, Asadollah would say, you should at least try for Los Angeles.

  Dear Uncle Napoleon was crazy, or maybe not. He said the things people believed, but were too polite to say out loud. The British were wicked; they were the cause of every bad thing; their agents were omnipresent. Every Iranian believed that. The book became a wildly popular Iranian television series during the 1970s. The ayatollahs had tried to ban it—it satirized the mullahs of Iran, in addition to obsessing about the British—but they gave up. It was like trying to ban laughter.

  Azadi liked to read My Uncle Napoleon because it covered his trail. It showed that he despised the British and their spies, like every other Iranian. He carried the book with him to the laboratory sometimes and read it during lunch, laughing aloud at the funny parts. But it wasn’t just that. Though it was a farcical comic novel, it reinforced his sense that there really was a foreign hand that steered Iran’s destiny—and that by assisting it in secret, he was making the only rational choice. He fell asleep that night with the book open on his bed.

  14

  WASHINGTON/LONDON

  Harry Pappas got the news from Tehran in a back-channel message from Adrian Winkler. The cable was tentative, cautious, almost stinting. “We may have a useful lead in Tehran,” Winkler wrote. “Can you perhaps pay us another visit soon, so that we can make some plans?” May, perhaps, some. These were words for a diplomatic reception. Harry suspected that Winkler had delayed a day or two before sending the message so that he could think about what to do and make a few inquiries of his own. Harry couldn’t really be angry. He would have done the same thing.

  Harry cabled back that he would be in London in forty-eight hours. Things were moving quickly in Washington. “Dr. Ali” had responded to the tasking message left in the “iranmetalworks” Gmail drop box. He didn’t have any information about an alternative plutonium program, or the heavy-water reactor. Those projects must be in a different compartment, if they existed at all. But he had provided the date of the test of the neutron generator, three months before. And he had specified the location, a research complex at Parchin, twenty miles southeast of Tehran.

  The confirmation of the test site was enough for Arthur Fox and the planners in the Situation Room. Now they had coordinates to feed into the topographical mapping system for a cruise missile strike. Centcom was informed; the ships of the Fifth Fleet on patrol in the Persian Gulf added Parchin to their target set.

  “Dr. Ali” had added a final note to his response. “Please be careful. The risk for your business now is very small, but for my business, it is very great.”

  Harry tried to talk to Fox about what that might mean. “The risk for your business now is very small.” Was that part of his message? The Iranians were trying to make a bomb, but they weren’t doing very well at it. They were having technical difficulties. Perhaps the counter-proliferation analysts at the CPD and the policy planners on the NSC staff were missing the point. The Iranians weren’t on the verge of anything, except more failure.

  Fox was dismissive of Harry’s speculation. “You’re looking for a way to avoid confrontation,” he said.

  “What’s wrong with avoiding confrontation?”

  Fox rolled his eyes, as if the aging case officer just didn’t get it, which made Harry angry. Usually he let conversations like this go; they were pointless. But not this time.

  “Hey, Arthur, if you hadn’t noticed, we don’t have enough troops to fight the wars we’ve already got in that part of the world. But that’s not your department, is it? You start them; let other people finish up.”

  Fox just snorted. He had the cards he needed. Harry could wring his hands all he liked, but it wouldn’t make any difference. Power flowed to the people who were prepared to be decisive, not to the worriers and nitpickers. Even Harry knew that he lacked the information to challenge Fox. He couldn’t be sure what “Dr. Ali” meant—and the real meaning of his information about the Iranian nuclear program—without knowing who he was. And on that front, so far as Fox could tell, Harry had made no progress whatsoever.

  Harry went to see the director and get his approval for another trip to London. It was an awkward meeting. The director remained a military man at heart. He had filled his seventh-floor office with navy bric-a-brac from his previous commands. Little models of subs and cruisers, awards and decorations, even his diploma from the Naval Academy. Perhaps he kept them around to ward off the bad vibes of the agency. Harry felt sorry for him, beached here at Langley like a four-star whale. As a military officer, the director appreciated an orderly chain of command. He didn’t like conflict among his subordinates. And as much as he valued the help of MI6, he wasn’t eager to share his most precious secrets with another intelligence service. But Harry wouldn’t let go.

  “I think London has a positive ID on our man,” Harry explained. “We shouldn’t do anything big until we chase this down. Right now we’re making policy based on bits of intelligence, and we aren’t even sure what those bits mean or where they come from.”

  The director nodded wearily. It wasn’t as if he didn’t understand the dangers. “What’s your alternative, Harry?” he asked. “The White House wants to move.”

  “Find our source. Debrief him, outside the country if we can. Do the normal things. Polygraph him, train him, give him covert communications. This could be the agency’s best asset since Penkovsky. But first we have to find him. SIS has a lead. That gives us a chance.”

  “But we don’t have time.”

  “Of course we have time. Unless I’m missing something, Dr. Ali is telling us we have lots of time. His boys are messing up. That’s what these messages say, if you turn them upside down and shake them. We are rushing into this for no good reason. We should work this case, instead of acting on impulse.”

  “Arthur Fox and his friends have another idea about what to do with your boy,” said the director.

  “Great,” Harry muttered. “What is it?” Fox hadn’t told him about another plan, but then, he wouldn’t.

  “Task him to look for more things we can make public, when we go to the United Nations.”

  “When we attack Iran, you mean? Or announce an embargo? That’s crazy, based on what we have.”

  The director shrugged. That was what Appleman and the president were talking about. They wanted to build enough of a case that they could get at least a fig leaf of international support if they decided to strike.

  Harry had a sense of vertigo. He had been here before, sitting in this office with a previous CIA director who had wanted to play ball with the White House. People assumed that the United States had the goods when it made a presentation at the United Nations. Even after everything that had happened, that was still true. Young men and women pledged to risk their lives when their leaders said they had proof the nation was threatened.

  We have to stop them now, Dad, before they get the big one. His own son Alex had said that, before he deployed to Kuwait at the start of OIF. That was what Alex had always called it, the official name, “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Harry had known in his gut that it was a lie. He was playing along, like everyone else in NE Division, because they all understood that nothing could stop the march to war. But Harry knew it was bullshit. He would be an old man in a wheelchair before the Iraqis got close to building a nuclear weapon. He hadn’t said that to his son at the time. And he couldn’t say it now.

  “Give me a little more time, Admiral,” said Harry. “I’ll be back from London by this weekend.�
�� It wasn’t a request, but a statement. “Please don’t tell Arthur about the trip. And don’t let him send any more messages to Tehran until I get back. Please protect me. You’re all I’ve got.”

  “As long as I can, Harry. But there is a clock ticking downtown. It’s going to take a lot of juice to turn the damn thing off. And don’t play any games with your British friends. They may speak the same language, but they don’t salute the same flag. Don’t forget that, or you’ll get in a kind of trouble I can’t help you with.”

  Harry went into his daughter’s room that night to say goodbye. He would be on the plane for London the next evening when she got home from school, and he had always made a habit of giving his children a farewell kiss before going anywhere on assignment. He was superstitious that way, never sure which trip might be the last one. He expected that his daughter would be clipped and sullen with him, the way she usually was these days, but tonight was different. Lulu’s face was illuminated in the glow of her laptop computer when he opened her door, listening to her music and visiting the Facebook sites of her friends, probably, but she closed the lid and put the computer aside when he came into the room.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said brightly.

  “I have to go away for a few days,” said Harry. “I wanted to give you a goodbye kiss.”