THE INCREMENT

by David Ignatius

  Karim Molavi was waiting in a pleasant sitting room when Harry and Adrian arrived. He was drinking a cup of tea and reading a copy of the latest issue of Scientific American, which had been left on a coffee table with other scientific periodicals. He was alone in the room. Jackie and her crew had gone somewhere else in the villa, to sleep or eat or practice their marksmanship.

  Adrian peered through a keyhole into the room where Molavi was sitting and opined that the Iranian appeared to be content. They had agreed that Harry would do the initial debriefing alone. Behind Molavi, through a large plate-glass window, were the mountain peaks that buffered him from his homeland.

  Harry Pappas entered the room. He took his first look at the man who until this moment had only been an email address. Molavi was bigger and younger than he had expected. He had a dark, handsome face, with a dominant nose and thick black hair. He had the bearing of an intellectual; confident, reserved, composed. The mystery was why he had risked everything to reach out.

  “My name is Harry,” he began. “I work for the Central Intelligence Agency. I received the messages that you sent to us. I’m responsible for your case, in our government. It is an honor for me to meet you at last in person.”

  He extended his hand to Molavi, who shook it softly, almost like a caress.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Molavi. He spoke English in a soft and measured voice.

  “Are you happy? Do you have everything you need?”

  “Oh yes, sir. The people who came to rescue me were like a dream. I thought that only happened in movies. They were English, I think.”

  “Yes. The British are working with us. We moved heaven and earth to find you and get you out, once you contacted us.”

  “I do not know what to say, sir. You came to me from so far away, and picked me up as if you were a great bird and I was your chick.”

  “Well, you’re here now, son. And we need to talk.”

  Harry hadn’t planned to call him “son,” but it slipped out, and it seemed right.

  “Yes, sir. Of course.”

  “Are you ready? Would you like to eat something first?”

  “Oh no, sir. They gave me breakfast. It was very good.”

  “Don’t call me sir,” said Harry, smiling. “I am here as your friend and adviser, not your boss. You can walk away anytime you are uncomfortable.”

  “I am quite comfortable, sir. And where would I go? Please, I am not stupid. I am ready for your questions.”

  Harry began with the basics, as intelligence officers always do. Full name, parents’ names, addresses, close relations, workplaces and addresses, foreign travels. He ran it like a doctor’s checkup; taking the inventory of a life, item by item. He wanted to assemble the collateral that could be checked against available records and databases—not simply to establish Molavi’s bona fides, but to provide a context for understanding him and what he wanted.

  Harry was of the old school, in that respect. He believed that the essence of handling an agent was understanding what he wanted out of the transaction, and then attempting to give it to him, or at least the appearance of it. Something in the way Molavi spoke about his family history caught Harry’s attention, and it was here that he made his first foray.

  “Tell me about your father,” said Harry.

  “What is there to tell? He was a great man who never achieved what he deserved. He despised the shah. He believed in the revolution. But when he saw what it became, he despised the revolution, too. Iran is full of people like my father, who were unlucky.”

  Harry studied the young man. “He was never honored for his service, I take it.”

  “No. They gave him a pension, and free medical care because he had been tortured by Savak. But he was a professor of literature. He believed in the imagination. What use did they have for him?”

  “You honor him,” said Harry softly.

  “What? I’m sorry.”

  “You honor him, Karim. By who you are and what you do. Especially by having the courage to be here today.”

  The Iranian lowered his head. Harry could not tell whether there were tears in his eyes, but he suspected that it was so. Harry took one more step. In the manuals of tradecraft, what he was doing was known as establishing “rapport,” but that instrumental term did not begin to encompass the art of establishing a clandestine relationship.

  “I had a son who would be almost your age now,” said Harry. His voice was now so soft that it could barely be heard. Molavi had to lean toward the older man.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He died. In Iraq. He was a good boy. I grieve for him every day.”

  “I am sorry, sir.”

  “I mention my son for a reason. If he were alive today, I would want him to be as brave as you are. I would want him to have the same conviction as you, that there are larger interests than what your government tells you to do. I wish that I had taught my son better that his country’s leaders do not define what is true and right. If I had done that, he might be alive today. That is why I know that your father would be proud of you. I can see it with a father’s eyes.”

  “Thank you,” said Molavi. He had listened very carefully, and he knew that the American spy was speaking to him from a deep chamber of the heart, which had many echoes.

  Harry grasped the young man’s shoulder and held it, the way he once had held Alex’s.

  “Now, come sit here next to me,” said Harry, “and let’s talk about your work in the nuclear program.”

  Adrian strolled down the marble hall of the villa. He knew he should be listening to Harry’s debriefing, but Harry could do the work by himself. And he had another concern. He had seen Jackie turn into a room off the main corridor when he and Harry first arrived, and now he wanted to find her. His heart was racing. It was like the feeling he used to get when he wanted a cigarette and couldn’t find one, back when he smoked. To call it desire was being polite. It was an addiction.

  He stuck his head in one door. It was an exercise room. Hakim was lifting weights; Marwan was doing crunches on a rubber mat. One of Hakim’s Bhangra CDs was playing, the percussive sound of the drum marking the beat against the high wail of the singer. They didn’t notice Adrian. They were in their zone; warriors at rest. Adrian went farther down the hall and opened the door on a vacant library lined with empty shelves.

  The last door on the corridor was open a crack. He peered in and saw Jackie reclining languidly on a couch. She had showered and changed, and was dressed in sweatpants and a blue cashmere sweater. Her hair was not quite dry, and long blond ringlets were circling her neck. She was listening to music on her iPod, so she didn’t notice Adrian at first. As he tiptoed into the room she looked up at him and smiled.

  “Lock the door,” she said.

  Adrian secured the lock and walked back toward the couch. She had risen. The sweatpants were hanging low, below her navel, drooping almost to her crotch. As she took a step toward him, her breasts moved under the blue sweater like a swell upon the water. She shook her hair and the droplets of water came off her in a fine mist.

  “God, woman, you are a sight,” he said.

  “I was waiting for you, darling. I was afraid you would be too busy to see me.”

  “I am too busy to see you,” he said, taking her in his arms and whispering in her ear. “But not too busy to fuck you.”

  He pulled at the loose terry cloth fabric of the sweatpants, which fell to the floor. Her flanks were as taut as those of the fine horse she had ridden around the Serpentine in Hyde Park. He cracked her across the bottom with his open palm. She felt the sting, and smiled so that you could see her perfect white teeth.

  “You want it like that?”

  “Like what?” Adrian’s voice had a tremble of anticipation.

  “Take off your trousers, my darling, and you’ll find out. Don’t disappoint Jackie, or she will be very angry.”

  Harry worked patiently through the morning with Molavi. He was building his dossier. He
asked first for a list of the experiments and research tasks Molavi had conducted, and then a list of all other research projects he had heard about. As he logged each answer in a spiral notebook, Harry would ask whether that particular piece of research had been successful. Had the equipment worked properly? Was anyone suspicious? He recalled Kamal Atwan’s list of questions and tried to touch all those bases.

  When this inventory was done, Harry asked for a list of locations where nuclear weapons work was done in Iran—all the places Molavi had ever visited, and the additional places he might have heard about. That was the most important information Molavi possessed, and Harry wanted to get it out in their first hours, in case they had to break off the meeting for some reason. Molavi mentioned only six locations. Harry knew about five of them. The sixth was new. It was in Mashad, near the eastern border with Turkmenistan.

  “Why was it there?” asked Harry.

  “I don’t know. Far from Israel, maybe?”

  Harry said they would come back to Mashad later. He wanted to know when Karim had gone to work at Tohid, and what that laboratory had been doing in the years when the weaponization work had supposedly stopped in 2003.

  “It never stopped, really. The program stopped, but the work continued. I did the same things after the official termination that I did before.”

  “Why did you send us your first message?”

  “To wake you up, sir. You had gone to sleep.”

  “Sorry, that’s not a good enough explanation.”

  “Because I was angry. The regime was destroying everyone I cared about. My father, my cousin, me. I had to do something. Otherwise, Mr. Harry, I would die.”

  “Okay, but still not good enough. Revenge may have been a reason, but you’re not just about that. There was something else.”

  Molavi searched his mind. He had never fully analyzed his motives until now. He had acted on instinct and compulsion, rather than a rational plan. But what was it that had made him take the risks, without asking for anything in return?

  “I was ashamed,” answered the Iranian. “I could not live with myself if I didn’t do something. So I acted. That probably sounds crazy.”

  “No,” said Harry. “It sounds like the truth.”

  It was lunchtime. Harry’s stomach was growling, and he knew that Molavi could use a break before they cycled back over the details. Harry stepped outside into the hall and looked for Adrian in the anteroom, next to the room they were using for the debriefing. Jeremy, the young British officer who had accompanied the boat out of Iran, was sitting at a computer, his earphones on to monitor the conversation in the other room.

  “Where’s Adrian?” asked Harry.

  “He stepped out. Busy with something else, I guess.”

  Harry could guess what that was, but he didn’t intend to discuss it with the junior officer with the earphones dangling around his neck, and probably not with Adrian, either.

  “We need some lunch,” said Harry. “Hot, and good.”

  “It’s all ready,” said Jeremy.

  “With some cold drinks. No booze, just Cokes. And some coffee. And some ice cream, if there is any.”

  They ate a lunch of steak and chips, with a dessert of Häagen-Dazs Chocolate Chocolate Chip that the duty officer had somehow found in Ashgabat. Molavi relaxed as they ate. He talked about his school days in Germany. Harry asked if he wanted to take a walk before going back to work, but Molavi said no. He asked to use the toilet, and came out with his hair neatly combed. He was fastidious that way. Harry worried about only one thing. Molavi was decompressing so quickly that it would be difficult to get him to go back in, if they decided that was necessary.

  Harry began again. What scientific instruments did Tohid use? Where were they obtained? How were they serviced? Did people come from overseas to work on the equipment, or were they Iranians? Had Molavi ever seen any of the maintenance records, and could he get access to them? Did the Iranians question their suppliers? Were they suspicious? Did they compare one company with another?

  The young Iranian apologized. He didn’t have many answers, and didn’t think he could get much more information now, at least at Tohid. He was under suspicion. They had already begun limiting the flow of information to him, or at least he thought they had.

  “The test results you sent us from the neutron generator,” pressed Harry. “Where did you get those?”

  “From the Central Laboratory. I go there to do some of my research. It is a closed site. We are accompanied in and out.”

  “How did you take the material out?”

  “I sent it to myself, in the computer system, from one secret account to another. It’s not so difficult if you know how. That is the advantage I had. None of the Pasdaran security people are clever enough to track the scientists. They have to trust us. They have no choice. Until they decide that they do not trust us.”

  “The neutron trigger experiments that were described in those test results, were they considered successes or failures?”

  “Failures,” answered the Iranian.

  “And what was the response of your colleagues to those failures?”

  “To try again. You know the expression, ‘If at first you don’t succeed…’”

  “‘Try, try again,’” said Harry, completing the old saw. “But they kept failing, isn’t that right? The tests were failing before the lab report you sent, and they have continued to fail since then. Is that right?”

  Molavi nodded. His erect posture had eased. He was slumping a little in the chair now.

  “And were they suspicious, that the experiments kept failing?”

  Molavi paused, as if he understood the importance of the ground they were touching now. “Yes. They began to worry.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because that was one of the subjects they asked about when they interrogated me. The interrogator talked about trains going in the wrong direction, and equipment being unreliable. He wouldn’t say any more. They aren’t sure, you see. But I know that he was worried about it.”

  Harry rose from his chair and walked to the window. He needed to think a moment. There was a dusting of early snow at the very top of the mountain range that stood so starkly before them. The impression was of a fringe of white hair, atop a creased and pitted face. How far away was Iran? Twenty miles, fifty miles? Harry walked back to his chair. Molavi was sitting attentively, waiting to begin again. He was a good boy. It was not easy for Harry to think that he might have to send him back across those mountains again.

  “So, Dr. Molavi, here is my question,” said Harry, leaning in toward the young man. His bulk was a shield, and also a prod. “Suppose that someone decided that the work in your laboratory was unreliable. Would they have an option—to go to another facility, let’s say, to conduct similar experiments?”

  “Oh yes. I think so. That was one of the principles of the program. ‘Robust and redundant.’ They said that in English, because there are not good words for those ideas in Farsi.”

  “And where would they do this redundant research, if they decided that the first track at Tohid wasn’t working right? Do you know?”

  “In my area of neutron research? At Mashad, I believe. That was the parallel site.”

  “How do you know? Did you ever go there?”

  “Oh yes, of course. I was sent there for two months, back before 2003, when the official program was still going. I had a second cousin there, from my mother’s family. I lived with them. But then they decided that the main research would be at Tohid, and Mashad would just be a backup. But that’s where they would go. They have equipment there. Everything. It’s called Ardebil Research Establishment.”

  “And they have confidence in this facility in Mashad—that it has not been penetrated or manipulated by us?”

  “Oh yes. Why not? It is very secret. There were only a few of us who went there. My best friend from high school is still there, I think.”

  “Your best friend?” Harry was
trying to contain his enthusiasm, but he was not entirely successful. “Your best friend from high school works at the neutron research facility in Mashad? A person who would do you a favor, if you asked. Is that right?”

  “Yes, certainly. His name is Reza. He doesn’t like the big bosses very much, either. Nobody does.”

  “Sweet Jesus.” Harry shook his head.

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Nothing,” said Harry. “Let’s take a break. I need to think.”

  He walked out of the room with a buzz he couldn’t have explained. It was like a logic cloud coming together, all the disparate shapes fitting together into something that didn’t have words yet, but felt like an idea; a plan, even. But to make it real, he would need help in a hurry from someone he did not fully trust.

  30

  ASHGABAT, TURKMENISTAN

  Harry eventually found Adrian Winkler. He was out walking with Jackie in the garden on the other side of the villa. He was whispering something in her ear, and she was giving him a little paddle on the fanny. Adrian had a flushed look on his face. Harry hoped it was from sex, rather than from drinking. Jackie pulled back from her boss as Harry approached. She was in control of him. Every gesture and movement said that.

  “How’s it going, old boy? Is the young Iranian doctor all that we dreamed about? Worth the effort? Do tell.”

  “Don’t give me the ‘old boy’ stuff, thank you very much,” Harry barked. “We need to talk, right now. So tell Miss Moneypenny to get lost for a while. Eh what?”

  Adrian shrugged. He looked back at Jackie and gave her a wink, and walked inside with Harry. He really didn’t give a shit. That was the measure of his debauchery, that he didn’t care whether his friend Harry knew that he had been fucking his brains out with a woman who was nominally his subordinate.